Chalkwriter

To me the simplest solution is to use metronome marks (you'll need one at the beginning in order for this to work). I would do it like so: Turn the next measure into a 5/4 bar. Take your old metronome mark and multiply it by 1.5 (so if the old quarter note = 60 then the new one would = 90). Add the new metronome mark above your 5/4 bar. With this, the new quarter notes should be the same speed as the old triplet quarter notes. If this wasn't what you meant, you could adapt this; simply make the time sig the number of beats you want, and multiply the old speed by the ratio you want (so, in this case, I think you wanted the new speed to be 3 quarter notes for every 2 in the old speed, so 3/2 = 1.5). If you don't have a metronome mark at the beginning, I'd suggest you add one anyway just to help with clarity in sections like this. Hope this helps!

To expand on this, while parallel voice-leading can very occasionally work (see for example Tavener: God Is With Us), it is almost always used as an effect and not to produce a full choral sound (which I think you're striving for). More complicated voice-leading often makes the writing sound both fuller and more interesting; the so-called "rules of voice-leading" (i.e. no parallel 5ths or 8ves, double the root of the chord etc.) exist because they help produce a good sound in practice. Hope this helps!

My advice would be to, instead of finding a book, just analyse tone poems that already exist. Look at the program separately and see how the composer interprets it. Time the length of each section (and the whole piece) to see how long the episodes are. Analyse how good the program itself is (there should be contrasting events but with some linking theme/breaks between sections to establish the different stories). Look at how the composer interprets the program through e.g. harmony, texture, rhythm. Style is really up to how the composer interprets the text (and the text the composer chooses), so is therefore up to you to determine what you do. My suggestions for analysis are: Respighi - Roman Trilogy (all three of them are excellent; Respighi wrote the program separately for each one so a good exercise would be to see how you would interpret it before you hear his version). Sibelius - Lemminkäinen Suite/En Saga/Tapiola etc. (each "episode" is often a self-contained piece, if you want to see a different approach to the tone poem. Achieves a lot with little). R. Strauss - Alpensinfonie/Ein Heldenleben/Also Sprach Zarathrustra/Till Eulenspiegel etc. (Strauss writes seriously long and complex pieces of music, which might not be what you're looking for, but the linking of motifs and structural rigour in particular are worth observing). Smetana - Vltava (part of his Má Vlast cycle. A good example of how one theme can link very disparate scenes) I'm sorry if this isn't helpful, but I genuinely think you will learn more about this sort of thing from analysing scores rather than finding a book on it (I also highly doubt there is an accessible non-academic book on the subject).

1. It depends what you want; 1) implies the note is lengthened by an indeterminate amount, where as 3) clearly shows the C should be held for two beats (to me 2) looks ugly and confusing). Both 1) and 3) are perfectly acceptable notations, however. 2. Use 1); in my opinion 2) looks ungainly (not to mention most scores I've checked use notation 1))

The YC wiki seems to have been dead for over a year now, and I would like to clean it up and try and get some life into it. Unfortunately, I can't create an account in it (only admins can do that), meaning I can't edit anything, let alone properly clean it up. Is there a way that I could get an account on it? I think that after a bit of editing, it would make a handy resource/reference for people on this site.