JoshMc

I've been working through Shoenberg's Preliminary Exercises in Counterpoint, diligently mimicking all the exercise examples in each chapter, until I came to the last example in chapter 10. It's a canon in 3 voices with the 2nd voice starting a 7th below the 1st and the 3rd starting a 4th below. Apparently, he considered this combination strenuous enough that he suggested it as something to be avoided altogether and the example he gave for it looked like such a mess that I decided to take up the challenge and see if I could do better. To make matters worse, his example modulates through 3 other keys and is a perpetual canon, so I also made sure to include those aspects, you know, just to make the whole thing utterly impossible. The result, I think, turned out better than his example but, after the better part of today working on it, is also quite a mess.I guess I'm posting this as a challenge of sorts. I didn't consider aesthetic value when working it out, only Schoenberg's rules for counterpoint, so it's terrible as music. I even got sloppier as I went on and more accepting of errors due to mental exhaustion. Anyway, I counted 25 errors (give or take depending on how strict one is) and I'm a bit curious to see if anyone, who wants to waste a day, can complete the task with fewer.I marked out my errors with slurs and Xs. Crazy Shoenberg Counterpoint Exercise

I'm not sure if this will apply to many people here since the vast majority of this site's users have not and may never commission a work in the first place but I'm still curious about general thoughts on using Creative Commons licenses. For works that are written without a commission to begin with, there seems to be hardly any issue in using this type of license at all (assuming the composer is more interested in wide distribution that squeezing every cent out of a work) but commissioned work is a whole different story. If someone is willing to pay a composer to write a piece for them then they obviously want to make that money back somehow. Is this realistically possible if the composer insists on using a Creative Commons license? Is it only possible with some of the CC licenses? None of them? Does this depend on the work? For instance, there's a big difference between an opera commission and a commission from a string trio. So I guess my question boils down to: does using a CC license essentially destroy your ability to obtain commissions?

I sorta refrain from giving these things more descriptive names as I generally don't go into them trying to convey a specific idea or emotion, I just run with whatever starts happening. Giving it a name after the fact feels, to me, a bit disingenuous, like tripping in a graceful manner then claiming that I meant to do that. Besides, I'm not looking to market these in any way. Part of the reason I use such a silly name is out of fear that people would think this was something I really labored over or take particularly seriously. The piece is definitely finished though. Your description is interesting to me, by the way. I wasn't expecting to convey anything comic but I can totally see where you got that from. Thanks for the comment.

This is the first piece I've written for strings, specifically violin and cello. It's just a little sketch to get my feet wet and try out some things. Mainly, I wanted to play around with changing time signatures. I thought it came out nice enough to share and get some feedback on anyway.PS. If someone knows of a way to notate a gradual shift from staccato to legato I would be grateful. Doodle No 1

Sort of a personal experiment. I write these short pieces in about a day and call them doodles so that no one can mistakenly take them too seriously. It's mostly just to try out ideas. I figure there's no sense in trashing the results.Anyway, this is my first attempt at uploading something here so go easy on me. Doodle No 15 'Indifferent Twinkle'

Major and minor cadences in two voices. There's nothing about modulations yet and he makes a point of saying that modes aren't useful in an earlier chapter.

Is the Gieseler book available in English as well? I have the Persichetti book but haven't gotten too far into it yet so I can't say much about how good it is. I've only read good reviews of it and I believe it covers ideas spanning the first half of the 20th century.

The chapter I'm on is explaining how to make the key obvious with only one or two voices. Both of the examples I uploaded are supposed to concretely show the key of C major. I understand how the key is obvious, but I don't understand why you need both voices in the two voice example to make the key clear. It's bothering me because he listed a few two voice examples and then said something like, "Some lines define the key so clearly by themselves that a second voice is unnecessary," but the examples he gives for that aren't any clearer than any one line from the two voice examples. I can see the key being expressed, I just feel like I'm missing something because he makes a point to differentiate the two sets of examples.

This is probably a long shot but I've been trying to figure out section 83 of this book for what feels like forever. I can't wrap my head around why the single voice examples given express the key by themselves while examples given in the previous section require two voices to do the same. I mean, I can see why the key is pretty clear from the single voice examples, I just don't see why it isn't clear with any voice by itself in the two voice examples. For anyone not familiar with the book, I can attach one example of each and maybe that will be enough to help one of you to help me. one voice.pdf two voices.pdf

Anyone know a good site that has a comprehensive list of extended techniques, preferably with the notation too, for orchestral instruments? I've checked a couple sites so far and they seem incomplete. For instance, two of them didn't list flutter tonguing. Also, Wikipedia lists some stuff but I get the impression that it's missing a lot.

This isn't necessarily true, brand name can be incredibly important. People get used to a company, service, or web site having a specific name and, when it suddenly changes, they get confused. You can't necessarily change it right back either, because then you're throwing off anyone who was attracted to it after the initial change. You start going back and forth and people start thinking that this isn't a stable place that's worth putting time into and they disappear. That also doesn't get into the technical side of web site traffic. For instance, getting partners to link to your site or getting a good rank on Google, that can be very difficult to maintain when your domain name changes.

Personally, the name almost stopped me from joining this site. I didn't feel I was young enough, in age, to consider myself a "young composer" but I certainly wasn't experienced enough in the classical arena to really offer any knowledge (and I wasn't really looking to teach anyway). I just wanted a place where I could talk about composition and share ideas with other people and, initially, the impression I got from the title suggested that I should look elsewhere for that. Then I realized there weren't any forums just like that, or they're well hidden, so I gave this a shot. Given this, I think a name change would be fine, maybe even helpful, as long as you could make the switch without breaking tons of links and connections to the site.

I remember using this site a looong time ago and found it helpful. I don't know if it's helpful in retrospect, but it might get you going. This is really broad though, it would help to know where you're coming from or specific areas that you want to know about. Oh yeah, Jamey Aebersold's play-along series of books/CDs is a pretty popular resource for learning jazz improv.

Hah, I like that. That's taking the coercion aspect of notation to the extreme.

I always take expression notation to be a sort of relative thing so wouldn't writing ppp on a very high note, even if it's impossible to play that soft and still be audible, be perfectly valid? I would imagine the performer taking it as, "Play this high note as soft as humanly possible," without concern for whether an exact amount of force is being used. It's like arguing over whether someone is playing ppp or pppp, how can you really tell? Of course, my assumptions are totally off if it's just not possible to play a high note without playing particularly loud on the clarinet.