Chord of the Month- May

I love this one and I have used it a lot. E flat, G and B major hinged at the 10th. Their parallel minors are in the chord as well.




Very busy, probably won't post again until school is out mid June.

April Chord of the Month

My band kids struggled valiantly with my "complex" piece. They could have pulled it off if I had given it to them months ago, but my energy and creativity didn't get going in time. So, I pulled that one and in a matter of days produced an upbeat, skippy little march for them, using a ninth chord as the thematic harmony.




Unfortunately the effort has undermined my condition, and now I am fading out too early in the day and too early in the week. I have the band concert in one month almost exactly to the day. Somehow I will have to drag myself over the finish line. It wouldn't be so bad if it were possible to recover enough in my "vacation" time.




I am surrounded by noise, stress, disorder, strife, incompetence, frustration, decay, immaturity, idiocy, unreality, and cluelessness. In other words, SNAFU. Perhaps it is the fate of the aging to see clearly all those things that you have seen repeated in the past, while knowing full well that trying to tell anybody or warn them is completely pointless, like trying to warn opossums to stay out of the road in the spring. Wisdom is something you aquire because you didn't have it the first time you needed it. There sure are a lot of first-timers out there!

Root movement thoughts

Mostly to clarify my own thoughts-




Most of the music I have written is in a kind of pan-modality, sometimes having sections in distinct modes and other times modifying the "scale" as I go for melodic or harmonic purposes. I use various tetrachords or trichords in the step order to segue from one modal structure to another. This usually involves a shift in the root of the perceived tonal center.




Since a fifth is a fourth inverted, a third and a sixth, etc. it seems reasonable that the only root movements possible are within a tritone. So, I can shift a half or full step, a minor third, major third, or perfect fourth.




The fourth is basically my dominant function, so I try and steer clear of that one except when I am winding up a section that needs some sort of cadential close. It's also boring and predictable. A half step move upward (flat second degree) has an almost equally boring subdominant feel. The interval of a second is so overused in most pop music that I use it sparingly.




That pretty much leaves root movement by a major or minor third as the remaining points of interest. They are fairly easy to elide in and out of. Octatonic scales are the easiest, they have great 3rd relations (not the kind from Arkansas). I am using these methods again in the school band piece, where they seem like they would work well, but I am reminded why I made my last orchestral work my octatonic blow-out and then decided to try something else. My first new piece post-school needs to be something much more radical. I have an idea but I'm still turning it over in my head.

Chord of the Month- March 2016

I have used this chord before, now I am making use of it again in, of all things, a piece for a mixed middle and high school chamber ensemble. This is my "angry" chord, basically a restacked Eb #11 to use a crude description. It has a pent-up energy that can be released easily enough by resolving dissonant tones either up or down, the structure leaves places to fill in melodic motion. It rewards a driving rhythmic treatment, best using an irregular or compound meter of different pulse lengths. So far that has been 2/4 + 3/4, and 2/4 + 2/4 + 3/4.


I am taking something of a risk placing music of this sort in front of 8th through 12th graders, I know. Yet the little group I have this year has already proven that they can be much more than the sum of their parts, we have already performed a suite from Monteverdi's Orfeo using a harpsichord continuo. The challenge has been to focus them on the music and away from the usual adolescent immaturity and drama which that cohort is so prone to.


I have to pull my punches so much in the writing that it has been frustrating and slowed me down, since I am trying to balance what will be musically effective with what is technically possible. It's like writing for choir in that sense, pretty disciplined stuff. But as I like to say, who wants to do the easy things? Besides, this will be a good sketch for a longer piece for standard high school band, which I might be able to interest some publisher in. As my teaching phase draws to its close and my physical condition devolves, I have little choice but to go off the cliff and try to make my living by composing, finally.

Chord of the Month- February 2016

I like this one., three major chords, in the same inversion, in three major keys a major third apart. I've used it in many different contexts and pitch re-orderings. I'm a long way with being done with this type of polytonal harmony.

Fifteenth century fractals

Pardon the little joke at the end of this video.




Late Medieval to early Renaissance music yielded an efflorescence of brilliant process compositions. Ockeghem's Missa Prolationis intrigues me because of its relation to the modern concept of fractal mathematics. The example above is a nice taste of it, you watch the augmentation and diminution of the lines as they go by.




When my spare time permits at some point, I will make a thorough examination of this score. I am curious to know where Ockeghem distorted or altered the process, producing variants in the lines, and for what reasons. From what I can see at a glance, there are lots of instances to look at. Alas the score available from IMSLP is all in C clefs, which don't bother me in limited cases but, their exclusive use in the score is annoying.




Counterpoint is process/system composing, so the parameters of the system are crucially important. Where and why you 'tweak' your system to preserve some other element- rhythm, duration, musicality, adherence to formal design etc. etc. is where the artistry interacts with the science. It's like chess in that respect, it's all math and pattern except for the unpredictable human element. Computers may beat people, but they don't do it in elegant or interesting ways.




The real achievement in this work is not that it is designed and carried out in such a disciplined way, which is astonishing actually, but that he still made beauty out of it. There are lots of fractal canons and fugues people have composed and posted online. I have heard quite a few but found none that I felt aspired to a high artistic level. Ockeghem was native to prolational music, so his instincts were in line with the technique. It wasn't contrived for him.




I make some use of techniques like this in other ways, consistent with a modern aesthetic. I still have a lot to understand about this piece.

Chord of the Month January 2016

What's this? A perfect fifth? Why that sound?




This interval needs no introduction for anyone who knows about the physics of music. It is the pitch ratio of 1:3, the second overtone above a fundamental. The first overtone, double the frequency of the fundamental, is musically the same note: an octave. So, the 1:3 ratio produces the first tone which is musically different from the fundamental.




Pythagoras with his monochord demonstrated this relationship in the ? century B.C. It is highly doubtful that he was the first to recognize the overtone series and its ratios. Some writings about overtones exist in old Indian and Arabic manuscripts. Anyone who played a stringed instrument with any insight understands how to use harmonics, as well as anyone who ever played a flute or blew a trumpet.




Pythagoras gave us our first scientific description of the overtone series.. The same ratios exist in any waveform, whether sound or electromagnetic. The color spectrum is the overtone series of light. The interval of a fifth is secreted-or not- in almost every sound that I have ever heard, except, ironically, the human voice, which is Music's most sublime mystery.




The folk music of the entire world springs from this interval, from didgeridoos to bagpipe drones and fiddles. The fifth gave rise to Medieval organum, which was the seed of polyphony and the modern Western tonal system, which has come to dominate the music of the entire planet. The fifth is such a strong sound that it has to be avoided as often, or more often, than it is used. Its appearance in music is like a track on which the train must run.




Aside from being my favorite interval, I can't think of a more basic, versatile, or essential sound. I certainly love lush complex harmonies, no doubt about that. This sound (or sonority, or verticality, etc.)is still the simplest, most powerful and pervasive in music.




By the way, did you know it is possible to derive the tones on a monochord in reverse? Total symmetry.