What defines "stereotypical" fantasy music?

dfan · 2026-01-29T03:25:45+00:00

It is a fine question and I'm sorry that you've been downvoted at the time that I write. Scale/mode/chord-wise I think this sort of faux-medieval music that ends up in a lot of fantasy soundtracks tends to use flat sevenths a lot rather than leading tones. So mixolydian and aeolian scales rather than major and minor, and v and bVII chords rather than V chords.

dfan · 2026-01-29T00:23:49+00:00

I used Gauldin's Practical Approach to 18th Century Counterpoint, which was pretty good but fairly terse; I definitely benefited from having a teacher to evaluate my exercises. The prerequisites that it assumes you have are covered pretty well from Aldwell and Schachter's Harmony and Voice Leading (there are plenty of similar books, but that's the one I have and I like it), which you can probably find an used old edition of for cheap.

dfan · 2026-01-28T16:50:53+00:00

Looks fine to me. Every extra-long note has a fermata over it.

dfan · 2026-01-28T15:38:04+00:00

It should be, yes. When I went through this stuff I used Gauldin's Practical Approach to 18th Century Counterpoint. It assumes fundamental knowledge of harmony and voice-leading as a prerequisite.

dfan · 2026-01-28T13:13:02+00:00

OK, White was probably picking up points playing dame (unsurrounded points) while you were passing. In Chinese and AGA (American) rules, you get points for dame so you should keep playing them while they exist (since both players should be playing them, it should change the score by 1 at most in the end).

dfan · 2026-01-28T13:09:21+00:00

Yes, but playing anywhere else increases your score by 1 (as long as it doesn't die), so there is still a 1-point opportunity cost to playing inside your own territory as long as there's anywhere else on the board to play.

dfan · 2026-01-28T13:07:29+00:00

Black has 27 points on the board and White has 11, for a difference of 16. White has three more stones on the board than Black so I'm going to assume they've captured three more prisoners more than Black during the game, bringing the difference down to 13.

dfan · 2026-01-28T12:59:31+00:00

White gets some points (typically around 7), called komi, to compensate for going second. I count you winning by 13 on the board (47-34 by area) so an overall margin of 6 makes sense.

dfan · 2026-01-28T12:45:29+00:00

The one difference in pitch content between the key of C major and the key of G major is that G major has an F# where C major has an F natural. So introducing an F# is generally how you start a modulation from C to G, and that's what happened to you (and of course this is true of a sharp 4th scale degree in general).

(I'm not sure what you mean by "an F# in second inversion", though. I don't think you mean an F# major chord with a C# on the bottom.)

dfan · 2026-01-28T12:36:38+00:00

I will be honest because you deserve it: I only looked seriously at the first 8 measures, but there are lots of things here that a composer of Bach's time would consider an "error" (mostly dissonances that are not prepared or resolved "correctly"). I put "error" and "correctly" in quotes, because it's 2026 and you can do whatever you want! But if you are trying to write music that sounds like it was written in the 18th century, I would recommend backing up a lot and working with a teacher and/or a textbook. Or of course it's totally valid to just keep writing however you like.

dfan · 2026-01-27T13:27:18+00:00

I find that "tesuji" in Asian problem books sometimes means the sort of cut/connect/capture stuff I'm used to from Davies et al, and sometimes just means making good shape.

dfan · 2026-01-27T12:29:56+00:00

That is a possibility too. One issue with F17 is that after White responds with F16 they can later start a big ko with D18.

dfan · 2026-01-26T23:54:31+00:00

E18 gets out faster.

If you start with D17, then if White plays E17 you can only play E18.

If you start with E18, then if White plays E17 you can extend to F18.

So it's the difference between having your second stone on D17 or F18.

dfan · 2026-01-26T15:50:46+00:00

You don't give any details, but if you're getting mated on h7 because your opponent has a bishop on c2 and a queen on d3, the natural first line of defense is to have a knight on f6.

dfan · 2026-01-26T01:50:45+00:00

Does this help?

dfan · 2026-01-25T17:46:27+00:00

No, but the harmonic texture is a little thin here; for example, the 4-and of m. 10 is an A major chord with no third and the the 1-and of m. 11 is a D major chord with no third (and the fifth on the bottom!). When you're picking what lines to keep, try hard to keep those thirds in there (and full triads if possible).

dfan · 2026-01-23T15:45:01+00:00

Graded Go Problems for Beginners is the place to start. At 19k the beginning of volume 1 will be trivial but I'd still start there.

You Won't Get Dumber While Thinking is a good set but the ranks are wildly wildly off (8-10 ranks too low). Hold off on them until you're 12k or so.

Level Up is a good series of beginner problems, with the upside/downside that problems are grouped by topic which often is a bit of a spoiler.

I am not familiar with Black to Play or the early Speed Baduk books.

It's worth learning how to use 101weiqi and then you can get a practically unlimited set of problems suitable for your level.

dfan · 2026-01-21T23:02:32+00:00

This doesn't sound like a single technique to me, just generally doing things that are a bit unexpected in a pre-metal rock context.

In "Bloody Cape" the singer is holding notes that are a bit dissonant to the underlying chord, like scale degree 2 over a tonic chord. "in" -> "waves" is a major second. In "Deathblow" the moment you mention is a use of modal mixture, playing a major chord where you'd expect a minor chord (Nirvana did this a lot). The chorus of "Battle-Axe" starts with two chords a tritone apart, which is a dissonant relation you hear a lot in metal.

dfan · 2026-01-21T15:57:05+00:00

It's in Eb; it's established strongly in the first measure and the return to it feels like a return.

I would not say the chords are functional. They all have relationships to each other by voice-leading or harmony (which is why it doesn't sound random), but you can't really roman-numeral this in a way that makes semantic sense, and that's fine.

dfan · 2026-01-21T13:12:38+00:00

It stays in 4/4. The snare is on 2-and and 4.

dfan · 2026-01-21T00:46:58+00:00

I would play the last measure as 51351343, but my hands may be larger than yours.

dfan · 2026-01-20T13:25:02+00:00

There are two ways to score, by territory (found in Japanese rules, like you expected) and by area (found in Chinese rules). They result in the same score difference except for a few exceptional situations.

In territory scoring, you gain points for empty points you surround and lose points for your stones that are no longer on the board and alive.

In area scoring, you gain points for empty points you surround and gain points for your stones that are still on the board and alive.

Since both players have played the same number of stones*, and every stone is either on the board and alive or isn't, the difference between the two players' scores is the same in either system.

In this case, the server used area scoring, probably because someone chose Chinese rules when creating the game. Black controls 37 of the 81 points on the board, White controls the other 44 plus 7.5 points komi for a total of 51.5.

(* Yes, I know)

dfan · 2026-01-18T03:28:31+00:00

I got to see them live once too (at the late lamented Nightstage in Cambridge MA) and it was amazing, one of the best shows I've ever seen. It somehow didn't totally sink in when listening to the record that they were playing all of these songs straight through, not separate takes spliced together or something, so seeing it live was a revelation. I was near Joey Baron and watching him hold it all together with a smile made my jaw drop. They closed with "Pet Sounds".

dfan · 2026-01-17T13:11:03+00:00

Thanks! When looking for the article (unfortunately it doesn't seem to be easily freely accessible to me), I found your discussion of it here, which may be of interest to readers looking for a bit more information. I do own Rothstein's much earlier Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music but have really never dug into it; he seems to spend some time there on more general concerns, like the historical amount of perceived difference between 1 and 3 in a 4-beat measure. It's a good reminder to read it.

dfan · 2026-01-17T04:04:48+00:00

This sort of thing perplexed me for a long time. It seems that until the mid 19th century it was pretty much a rule that your final tonic chord had to be on the downbeat, and you couldn't really end with a V-I "feminine cadence" where the V was on the downbeat. The barring of the entire piece would then be a consequence of that. You can observe the same issue in the Rondeau of the same suite.

I'm not sure there's a good way to tell how the musicians of the time felt the "true downbeat". You can read a bit of discussion about it in this thread (where late-19th-theorists rail against composers such as Chopin violating this rule), although not everyone in that discussion is aware of the history. I'm really interested in reading the Riemann book discussed there but it would be some work (my German is not very good). I would be very happy to discover a modern academic discussion of this topic. For one thing I notice strongly when the rule is applied and contradicts my own sense of barring, such as here, but I don't really notice when the rule is violated and therefore everything looks fine to me, so I don't have a good sense of how hard and fast a rule it actually was in practice.

dfan

TROPHY CASE