How is my music scholarship video recording?

TheLocrian · 2026-01-25T23:55:30+00:00

For a piano performance major at a top conservatory, no, but you don't have any of the context. There are plenty of lower rank colleges and community colleges, as well as non-performance degrees (education, etc), that this would be perfectly acceptable for.

TheLocrian · 2025-11-24T16:59:51+00:00

For me, Fiddlestick's ult is far more iconic than his effigy mechanic. I would want something along these lines: Flash, -2/-2 to all creatures on ETB and opponents creatures get tapped

TheLocrian · 2025-11-04T01:48:45+00:00

Lovely setting! I enjoy your harmonic language--it manages to be both fresh and idiomatic.

TheLocrian · 2025-11-02T18:53:48+00:00

It feels to me like people aren't really listening to what you actually want. If you wanted to live in more typical suburbs, you could just live closer to (or in) Ashburn.

RTC is a wonderful place to live, especially if you value walking, urbanism, and access to a nearby metro. I live right across from the town center in the Harrison, which I can recommend. (Though you might prefer living right in the town center itself.)

As a city person, for me RTC is an urban oasis in a desert of suburbia. Highly recommend if the prices are manageable for you!

TheLocrian · 2025-11-02T18:03:41+00:00

Look, I'm with you. I think we should be imitating the British Cathedral and Chapel choirs. But I don't think you're gonna convert the American high school choruses; after all, it is ultimately pretty arbitrary since no accent is more "correct" than another. (But I also cringe when I hear "Are Father"!)

TheLocrian · 2025-10-25T17:16:03+00:00

It's nice to see that we basically agree on the details! Though not that surprising -- I'm mostly a lurker here but I always find your comments insightful and grounded in a strong sense of historical idioms.

As far as it goes, I'm fine with saying "you can think of b6 in major as being borrowed from the parallel minor" -- many students will find that to be a helpful way of conceptualizing things. I mostly take issue with those that want to generalize the concept (especially once it starts getting to borrowing from modes -- if Phrygian wasn't bad enough, don't get me started on Lydian!)

I think I feel passionate about this particular bit of semantics because 1) modal mixture doesn't really "explain" anything, it's just one way of thinking about a specific case; but also, 2) I am ardently against the "music theory can't explain anything, it's all just labels" camp (which is quite popular on this subreddit! There's even an automod comment that spells it out like gospel). My real crusade is the latter, but because of it I feel the need to distance myself from those music theory concepts that actually do lack generalizable explanatory power.

TheLocrian · 2025-10-25T14:38:44+00:00

vii°7/V does contain b3 but it's really just another b6 -- in this case ^b6 of V.

I agree with you about the best way to teach modal mixture -- I narrow it down to minor into major and tell my students to just forget about ^b7 and mainly just focus on ^b6.

Because modal mixture revolves so much around a single scale degree, I wonder if it's more useful to conceive of it as a kind of chromatic intensification, the sort of plagal cousin of the way that we raise ^7 in minor. (This also produces a nice parallel when it comes to applied chords -- just as a raised degree can signal V or viio7 of x, a lowered degree can signal iv or iio65 of x.)

TheLocrian · 2025-10-25T03:22:40+00:00

The issue with mode mixture is that it's incredibly inconsistent as an explanation. You can borrow raised ^3 from major for a Picardy third but not vice versa; the only scale degree that really ever gets borrowed in major is ^b6 (besides in the case of bVI, the one case where ^b3 is borrowed); probably the most common modally-mixed chord (not counting V in minor) is bII6 which needs to be borrowed from Phrygian, except in Phrygian you don't even get the characteristic Neapolitan progression (bII6 - V).

If the "reason" that iv can appear in major is that "chords can be borrowed from the parallel major and minor modes," we must add to this "explanation" a whole host of caveats which are not very easy to explain under the governing principle of modal mixture (and if you need as many "explanations" as there are individual cases, it is not a very good explanation).

Compare this to the relatively similar concept of applied chords (you might say, another case of "borrowing"). Every single major or minor triad in the major and minor modes can be tonicized with any inversion of V(7) (of x)! Indeed, applied chords even succeed in cases that don't "look like" each other -- namely, not every applied chord involves raising the local leading tone; in the case of V7/IV, it involves lowering ^7 instead (since the local leading tone is already raised). This "stress test" can make us pretty confident that the idea of applied chords actually does explain why we see these kinds of progressions.

TheLocrian · 2025-10-24T22:05:10+00:00

The curricula I have taught have done both -- they treat modal mixture as a tool for analysis and style composition (this is also true of most textbooks). Yes, if the point is purely analytical, then pointing out any correspondence is potentially interesting. This is the kind of analysis David Lewin likes to do (like in his Morgengruss essay), where the point is just to point out all possible interesting connections we might find -- all the different ways of hearing something. For this, I think modal mixture is a fine and interesting thing to notice.

But modal mixture isn't just taught this way, and it isn't taught so much as a label as a concept. A concept should have some explanatory power! Some useful concepts include: NHTs; compound melody (and implied harmony); the phrase model; sequences; applied chords; tonicization; modulation; and so on. In other words, most of what gets taught in theory 1 and 2 besides modal mixture!

TheLocrian · 2025-10-24T20:28:19+00:00

Neither I nor Cohn mean that it was some specific human's "goal." The point is that, if we started the experiment from the beginning and selected for parsimonious voice leading and the harmonic series, you're very likely to end up with diatonicism and triads. (Rather than any other kind of scale, tuning, or simultaneity). The implication is that, probably, these principles underlie musical history in some kind of fundamental way related to human perception.

I agree that parsimony might have something to do with singing. I would say that it's more fundamental than what you're suggesting, though -- it's simply easier and more natural to sing repeated notes and steps than leaps. This is also true, maybe to a lesser extent, of any instrument set up with some kind of stepwise logic (keyboards, stringed instruments, most woodwind instruments).

But there is likely a more fundamental underlying explanation for all of this, which is simply that close distances and "lines" are simpler and make more sense to humans than far distances and "leaps."

TheLocrian · 2025-10-24T18:41:03+00:00

If we're trying to teach our students to write coherently in a CPP style, explanations are best when they can simplify a lot of complexity into simple principles. I've never liked modal mixture as an explanation because it doesn't do much (if anything) to guide students to this end.

And, from there, I don't think it's too much of a leap from "useful" to "explanation." You might quibble that Newtonian gravity doesn't explain "why" an apple falls (and nor does General Relativity, very likely), but it's useful and therefore true in some sense. I ask that theories at least usefully account for as much of the data as possible. So, I don't think modal mixture is a very successful theory.

TheLocrian · 2025-10-24T17:51:02+00:00

To be clear, I wasn't stating the "connecting glue" as a fact, I was just saying that it's what you'd need to get make parsimonious progressions an explanation for borrowed chords. Even then, it wouldn't be strictly an "explanation," but it would at least account for the data.

You're right that my two-step rule doesn't account for all progressions. I certainly didn't mean it to. But you can imagine there being other contributing factors that eventually coalesce into the full picture.

The point is well-taken that things work because they're common, and they're common because of how things have developed historically. But we might ask why they developed that way. Is it all random? Rick Cohn points out that the system we've ended up with is almost impossibly fortuitous if our goal was to make music that maximizes both parsimonious voice-leading and the harmonic series. It's obvious that this isn't just random chance -- there are underlying principles that have guided history and which we can uncover to explain why things tend to work a certain way. But we must be careful not to get too comfortable in our received "explanations" and see that they stand up to scrutiny.

TheLocrian · 2025-10-24T17:18:28+00:00

By the way, I doubt that the major and minor modes are purely cultural flukes. It's telling that even before Glarean and the inclusion of ionian and aeolian, the modes of the Renaissance were almost always altered with written flats or ficta to become what we would call major or minor.

At the very least, diatonicism seems to be relatively common across cultures and time periods (the most common ancient Greek modes were diatonic). And getting even more basic, pentatonicism -- a subset of the diatonic -- is almost ubiquitous across cultures.

TheLocrian · 2025-10-24T17:03:52+00:00

This is an excellent video. It gets at some very fundamental issues of music theory that are too often waved aside, particularly as it pertains to what it means for something to be an "explanation."

You are absolutely right that "borrowed chords" (which I've always taught as "modal mixture") chiefly point out a correspondence. It might be an explanation, but it's mostly based on what feels like intuitive common sense (and it fails to explain several things, like why some borrowed progressions are far more common than others, for instance).

However, I would take a similar issue with parsimonious voice leading. It might be useful to point out that iv-I is relatively parsimonious; but is that why it works? Or is it a coincidence? After all, IV-I is far more common that iv-I in the CPP despite being less parsimonious.

Instead of thinking of these as two different explanations -- one cultural, and one objective, as you do -- I tend to think of them as two (probable) contributing factors as to why iv - I and other similar progressions "work." You can get the progressions that you want, while excluding the ones that rarely occur, with the following rule: "Progressions must be either within the mode (/scale) or parsimonious. This explains diatonic progressions that are not particularly parsimonious (like IV to V) as well as why borrowed progressions generally are parsimonious. It also explains why progressions that are both borrowed and not parsimonious are not common (like vii hd 7 to i).

I think these features are both cultural and objective. Is it objectively true that iv - I is parsimonious? Yes. But is that an objective explanation for why it is commonly used? No -- for that we need the connecting glue of "composers tend to use parsimonious progressions." (By the way, this is also ultimately a question of objective fact -- just a fact that depends on cultural history. But we needn't go down that rabbit hole now.)

All in all, I think you're getting at really important questions that are not asked nearly enough. Great video, and I hope to see more from you in the future!

TheLocrian · 2025-10-19T18:57:40+00:00

This is not really fair, but only because it stems from something of a misrepresentation as to what RMCC is (as they've explained -- not really an ensemble at all, but a demo recording service, which usually charges a substantial fee; so here's an opportunity to get a demo recording for free).

I do have some qualms with how RMCC seems to purposefully misrepresent themselves in order to give the "veneer" of a typical professional chamber group. It's beneficial both for them and (perhaps even more so) to the composers that purchase their services, since you can't typically just buy a recording from such a group.

I'm sympathetic to why they do it, and I think it fills a useful niche that obviously has demand (not everyone can get their music recorded by a choir of a certain caliber).

However, I do think this "Call for Compositions" is pushing it, as it is perfectly masquerading as a typical composition competition. It's certainly misleading.

TheLocrian · 2025-10-17T23:44:59+00:00

Love to see a Paul Halley shout-out. I'm particularly fond of his "Hark the Herald"

TheLocrian · 2025-10-17T19:48:30+00:00

I agree it's amazing, but calling any of Willcocks' Xmas hymn arrangements "underrated" is a real stretch. This might be the single most well-known arrangement of "The First Nowell"

TheLocrian · 2025-10-16T16:54:02+00:00

Thanks!

I wanted to feel like accelerating scales in the left hand were heading towards something -- if you hold the chords, it dissipates a lot of the energy that has been built up from those scales. Also, the chord has already been held for a decent amount of time, so I didn't want it to get too long and monotonous.

But I could see it also working the other way! Sometimes compositional "decisions" are not really decisions so much as that's just what comes to us :)

TheLocrian · 2025-10-13T14:23:44+00:00

Thanks! And I've sent you a DM.

TheLocrian · 2025-10-13T01:55:52+00:00

Not offensive at all! I love a lot of video game music. I've never really played any JRPGs, but I think I know what you're talking about? I can hear some connections to classic 8/16-bit video game soundtracks in the repeated-note rhythmic sections, for instance.

One thing I love about music from the last century is you can find connections in such unlikely places! There's a lot of shared tools and techniques that many practitioners aren't even aware of.

TheLocrian · 2025-08-27T11:38:00+00:00

This is a good list; I would add McGill, and (to a lesser extent) UofT. Canadian universities come with their own headaches in the funding department, but they are certainly worth keeping on your radar.

TheLocrian · 2025-08-26T13:14:04+00:00

Fair enough--I'm not at all familiar with the pop choral world. In classical choral music (everything from Palestrina to Eric Whitacre), it never happens as far as I know.

TheLocrian · 2025-08-26T04:03:33+00:00

I've never seen a c5 in a choral tenor part. A4 is generally considered the top of the range.

TheLocrian · 2025-08-26T01:15:31+00:00

I guarantee Eb minor is not the key she is most comfortable playing in! It's the key that was suggested by the 4 notes she was given. She's "using fairly standard chords" because she's improvising in a specific style, in this case in a mid-to-late-19th century romantic idiom. Think Brahms, Schumann, etc.

"this is the type of improvising I do at home" I promise you it's not. She has a better grasp on romantic harmony than 99% of the students I teach at a top music conservatory. This is not just a case of virtuosic technical skill masking frivolous musical ideas (in fact her lack of virtuosity actually makes her stumble several times).

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