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.

I've always wondered how non-guitarists write for guitar. It's difficult enough when you actually play the instrument well let alone without understanding chord shapes or reach limitations. I guess the suggestion of picking up a really cheap guitar and just fingering the chords would be best. Keep in mind that any difficulty you may have with doing that will probably be almost non-existent for a guitarist though. Beginners have a hard enough time placing their fingers in an open C major position let alone being able to judge which barre chords are realistically playable. Also keep in mind how many different places along the neck that the same things can be played. If you want a specific tone, you might want to specify which position the performer should be playing in too as you get a much different sound playing open strings, for instance, than you get from playing on the 5th fret. Oh, and another thing.. Guitarists tend to leave non-essential pitches out of chords when they're playing chords and melodies at the same time. There just aren't enough fingers to do it all and it sounds pretty muddy if you start playing 6 pitches at once.

Akoustik Piano I picked this up a while ago and have never even thought about using anything else. It's at the top of your price range but it sounds great and gives you four nice pianos ranging from an upright to a concert grand. You can also control just about everything (all the pedals and whatnot through CC). I used the piano that comes in the NN19 for Reason before this and there's no comparison. The only downside I could see, for you, is that it may take up too much space. I'm not sure how much the EWQL piano takes up but this one comes on four DVDs.

Well, I certainly appreciate the information I've been able to gather from this thread and I hope that's enough incentive for people like Gardener to keep contributing explanations. This is probably the most efficient argument for why the score should be written in just this fashion. Consequently, this also sounds like it would be an amazing exercise for anyone with entirely too many resources at their disposal. Just for kicks, how about some specifics from the score? For instance, why not use bar lines in this piece? My assumption is that it's to take some focus off the overall rhythm and makes the piece more about the textures or harmonies by themselves. Does the removal of bar lines really create that much more of a free flowing impression on the performer than just labeling the piece rubato?

I understand that this is all the parts and not what each individual would be looking at. You seem to be implying that each individual part would look different in every way imaginable from what it looks like on the full score. This is why I pointed out just a couple measures of one instrument, because it seems safe to assume that this individual player would see something similar for just those few measures for just their instrument. That part alone is quite difficult for me to read and I assume, maybe falsely, that the same is true for most people. If I'm completely off and the viola score, by itself, would look so ridiculously different from the viola part on the full score that it would be fully understandable to even the most inexperienced sight-reader then the conversation is over. Or, if I'm mistaken and most people would be able to sight-read these individual parts in their sleep, then I guess that ends the conversation as well. Either way, unless I'm reading you wrong, you don't have to be so condescending about it. Now, if I'm not so far off in my assumptions, then my point is, why does this have to be written out in such a complicated manner? Do we really need triplets nestled inside of triplets with a few dotted 32nd note rests strewn about the same area or could this have been done in a simpler fashion and still achieved the same effect?

The score wasn't his. I've checked out his scores and, while he uses some unique notation, he seems to keep things pretty easy to understand. That's kind of my point too. His music certainly isn't simple, but he doesn't need to use complicated notation to accomplish this.

What's the point then? I know that's an impossible question to sum up in one sentence or even one paragraph but it's meant to be somewhat rhetorical. I mean, I can understand leaving the blank space but follow just the viola line for instance, even just the bit of it on page 3. Was that the easiest way to write out this part? Unless you have a masters in music performance yourself, I'm guessing there's a good chance that 90% of the symbols written, in just that short section, you would have to look up. If there was truly no other way to represent the desired sound, that's fine, but it seems awfully unlikely to be the case to me. PS. 90% is an exaggeration, before anyone jumps down my throat about that.

So I came across a young composer that I really liked the other day (Christopher Cerrone if anyone's interested) and decided that maybe he knew some other up-and-coming composers that would be worth a listen. I checked out the first person he listed under his links and came to this score. I listened to the MP3 and it was okay, but I couldn't make heads or tails out of the actual score. I admit, I spend very little time looking at other people's sheet music but this is probably one of the most confusing bits of music I've ever seen. I can't help but wonder, was there really no other way to write this out? Was this truly the most effective and efficient way to let the performer know what they should play? There's a quote about Schoenberg that I can only paraphrase and I can't actually remember who said it but it goes something like, "Schoenberg was more interested in the notes on the page than the actual music." I get the feeling that this is the case with a lot of well-educated composers, especially those with avant-garde leanings. There's something to be said for making up new notations for a new technique but sometimes it appears that composers expect someone to learn an entirely new language just to play their music when they could have accomplished something nearly identical by using more common notation. I dunno, I thought this whole idea might make a good topic.

I don't get why you would need that site to copyright your work when you can just fill out the form and send it to the federal copyright office. Maybe I'm missing something, but I would only get a copyright from a site that ends in .gov. LOL, well put.

I think you have to bend a lot for film writing since there's so much collaboration, more-so than most genres, that goes into the final product. That being said, I don't know why you would come across so many directors that want new, modern sounds. If anything, film seems to be a place where you can revel in tonality and romantic orchestration without fear of judgment.