I sometimes forget that there are people who think of music theory as “boring”. Are you one of them?
Think about a child first learning to sound out words, not able to string together a sentence. That’s what I hear when a person just starts learning to sing or play some notes without understanding how one might relate to another.
The idea of music being “in a key” can be troublesome. One of the biggest hurdles I see students of music come up against is the presence of “different keys” in a piece “in a key”. Frankly, I can see their point!
It might be better to think in terms of what Dmitri Tymoczko calls “macro-harmonies” in A Geometry of Music.
“Instead of mindlessly extracting—data points for statistical analysis, Clio intelligently adapts its attention to key aspects… —just like you and I do.”
If this is truly “just like you and I do,” then the study of music should at some level be a honing of “intelligently adapting [oneself] to focus on the aspects most critical to the mood.” Perhaps I could make this more explicit in my own teaching. (June 11, 2011)
These were my initial thoughts in response to first reading about Clio from a blog post about how a computer might model the way we listen to music.
I just finished reading Matthew Brown’s Explaining Tonality: Schenkerian Theory and Beyond and wanted to take note of some observations.
Some of the most important ideas I learned while studying with Gregory Proctor involved the power of voice leading. I also became intrigued with the careful explanation for every single pitch in a piece as graphically analyzed by my colleague David Tomasacci. These ideas have been a central pursuit in my own compositions over the past two or three years. One further impetus for a careful interest in voice leading was described by Brown.
Via the twittersphere:
@fEARnoMUSIC: Hey composers! Please don’t put bowings in unless you have played the instrument you are bowing for for at least 30 years. Thx! Mwah! Luv u!
So, is it really so bad for composers to mark bowings?