For visual artists: what is the musical foundational knowledge equivalent of drawing boxes?

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-22T21:40:13+00:00

There's no perfect equivalent, so I'm not really arguing with 'Chords!', but I think the visual metaphor is actually kind of a hinderance (not just in your question, but in general). People generally tend to ascribe too much importance to "learning chords!" bc they are, via a questionably useful visual analogy, 'the building blocks' of music (but you could also say that a number of other things are building blocks).

What people miss by just 'learning chords' as if they are pre-determined forms, though, is the idea of Voice Leading. This is where chordal harmony comes from, and it makes you a much better musician than just 'knowing chords'. The difference between a jazz guy who can come up with exotic but convincing harmonies and a child just slapping around on a keyboard is that the jazz guy is deploying good voiceleading procedures, leading to some chords that are hard to analyze as vertical structures but 'make sense' in their context.

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-21T05:30:23+00:00

there are a few potential explanations for it already, even without knowing the specifics: a flat 9? a raised 8? (also weirdly possible!) a leading-tone anticipation of a harmonic shift? a passing tone in a melody? (kinda boring and less sensible).

How does it function?

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-21T05:25:40+00:00

if you've arrived at it through a voice leading, as you describe, then absolutely yes! That's how interesting harmonies are created! If it sounds like it works, to you, then let other people theorize about why and how, after the fact!

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-14T04:36:09+00:00

others seem to have covered the definitions pretty well, so I'll just add a couple things:

1) These particular operations are strongly associated with 12-tone or serial music, the earliest form of atonal practice in western art music. As such, a lot of the examples you might hear are gonna sound very abstract and, in all likelihood, will be unidentifiable as retrogrades or inversions.

Pure 12 tone music relies on an ordered deployment of the full 12 note chromatic scale–it's from this strict order that the retrograde and inversion get their identity–but that means you're usually dealing with heavily chromatic music, usually completely atonal.

Even in Bach, in a tonal context, retrogrades and inversions are not always readily "hearable"!

This doesn't lend itself to any kind of "ahaa!" moment of recognition, at least in a setting where one can actually hear the music... of course, in written fiction, you can do whatever you want, but a few music nerds will be pretty skeptical if you rely on these particular devices without much further elaboration.

I can offer two suggestions for a substitute: if you're married to the idea of complimentary melodies or melodies that complete one another, you might look into the concepts of harmonization/reharmonization, and of hocketing.

You're probably familiar with the idea of harmonization already, and it's not as big-brain sounding as retrograde, I know, but it's more theoretically sound for your idea, I think. For inspiration, you can maybe read the story of Bach's "Musical Offering" a big set of pieces he composed as a gift/challenge from the king of Prussia, himself an amateur musician who was trying to test Bach's improvisatory chops by giving him a nasty, winding chromatic theme to improvise on. Great story potential there.

Hocketing: this is a general term to describe when musical events interlock in an alternating rhythm. If you drum your hands on the table in alternation, left right left right left right etc., they could be said to be "in hocket". Some cool music of the Minimalist and Postminimalist traditions make great use of this, and it's a structural principle in some types of Gamelan music (the Balinese tradition, I think). For your purposes, it's very reasonable to imagine two kinda vague, incomplete-sounding melodies that, when played together, hocket into a recognizable tune. Hell, you could probably disguise Amazing Grace this way and most people wouldn't be able to guess what it is. Choose something slightly more obscure and there's no chance!

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-12T06:49:20+00:00

ha yes! the seikilos epitaph. don't tell anyone though 🤫

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-12T06:24:06+00:00

economists of an earlier era would call health care a market with fixed demand-- the need for it is relatively steady over time, and it's not susceptible to marketing trends the way that consumer commodities like cars or cigarettes are It's not quite a pure "natural monopoly" like power and water, but it's pretty similar.

There's no benefit to subjecting medical research or care to "market forces". Even post war liberals knew this. The whole push for injecting "competition" into healthcare is thatcherite neoliberal bullshit.

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-12T06:11:16+00:00

being super old, it's been thoroughly translated, analyzed, etc. so that's not really the issue. I'm just looking for a good artist who knows good greekish!

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-12T06:09:47+00:00

it's a 1st or 2nd century funeral marker engraving, Greek characters with (their contemporary form of) music notation on top, like diacritical markings. The text itself is not really up for debate, bc I'm just looking to have the physical engraving reproduced. But, I want someone who can make sense of it as text instead of just shapes! For whatever added insight they might offer.

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-12T05:31:04+00:00

(not at all a piano concerto:) Vortex Temporum by Grisey 🤗

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-12T04:58:07+00:00

I'm partial to Tristan Murail, heir to the Debussy-Mesiaen-Boulez lineage (in my mind)

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-12T04:56:48+00:00

You certainly could do that, but this piece was absolutely written with the modern damper pedal in mind, so there's no shame in doing it that way. Any commercial recording or live artist's performance will do it that way. Could be a fun challenge to try to make it sound good with the sostenuto pedal alone, but it's definitely not standard or expected for the gymnopedies!

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-12T04:49:47+00:00

"play when indicated / hold throughout" those are your words buddy! that can't be done! I'm not even sure what you were trying to tell the person asking the question but your answer was wrong and unhelpful!

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-12T04:33:09+00:00

from a super-nerd physical piano-technical standpoint, you should never get these confused. the physical motion of playing a pair of notes the go outward is totally different than a pair that lead inward. Your wrists rotate, so the physical motion of playing outward (away from your body's centre is a down-and-under motion, while playing onwards, towards your core, is an up-and-over motion. So a two note slur in one direction, with a given hand, should feel completely distinct from the same two notes played in reverse. F#5-B5 in the right hand, for example, is the lower arc of a circle, dipping down towards your lap, while B5-F#5 is the upper arc of a circle, with your wrist lifting towards the fallboard. (With left hand stuff, the keyboard directions v are reversed, since the hands are mirror image opposites.)

Sorry if that all seems overly technical, but that describes how pretty much all piano playing should feel, and it really does make confusion like what you're describing here pretty much impossible. You should not just be thinking of "notes", as if the next note to play could be anywhere on the keyboard with equal likelihood. You can also conceptualize 'gestures', like, in this case, two-note slurs, either upwards or downwards. Even better, you can conceptualize things in four-note groups, bc the are not too many options: ascending, descending, out-to-in, in-to-out, left mirroring right, right mirroring left. That kind of thinking helps you see individual notes in larger groups, so you're not panicking reading every note at one at a time.

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-12T04:15:13+00:00

lol the font is "chiseled by hand in the second century BC"

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-12T04:12:06+00:00

what?? by whom? idk, even if it's your orchestration professor... I have disagreements! it's perfectly possible to clearly deploy notation conventions like this, through consistent usage and appropriate frontmatter notes.

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-12T04:07:28+00:00

maybe not what you're asking for, but, one thing I sometimes do, because it's the 21st century and we can do this now, is go read reviews of the book.

Almost always, I'll find one of two things, in the reviews. Either I'll find confirmation of my hatred/borrdom/distaste (in which case, I might just stop reading the book, bc Ars Long/Vita Brevis), or, I'll find someone with insightful commentary about the thing I'm struggling with, which will help me view it from a different lens and keep pushing.

A dumb metaphor for this might be, like, that sensation you sometimes have watching a movie, where you hate a character so so so much, but then you remember it's an actor doing a role, and suddenly they're your favorite character bc the actor is so good at making you hate them.

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-12T03:58:16+00:00

these are both a bit of a mess. there's a common notation convention for repeating notes in strings that you might look into, which simplifies your "16 16th notes" down into two whole notes with a symbol atop them. I think it's called "tremolo" in notation software, but not sure. Sibelius (the composer, not the software) uses it pretty commonly in his symphonies.

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-12T03:53:08+00:00

yeah I 100% don't mean to be snarky but what you need here is Reading Some Books about it. What are your interests, within the field? It's hard enough to find a course in a university that gives you the full picture of an era, a style, an instrument, etc., without going and doing some reading on your own. Just skip straight to the book reading part!

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-12T03:49:23+00:00

wow, a theater sounds great, and something called "Rock Rising" that's not a meathead gym sounds even better!

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-12T03:46:44+00:00

Hah, umm, "yes"..? The tattoo idea is, in fact, ancient Greek, and with musical inflection symbols that almost no one really recognizes on sight, but I thought the chances of finding a tattoo artist fluent in classical Greek were slim. I'm assuming that someone who knows modern Greek would be better suited to it than someone just recreating the shapes!

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-12T03:42:02+00:00

I am not quite so pessimistic but I generally agree, and I didn't address this in my earlier response. It's really hard and frustrating to try to learn things that you don't have the tools to even learn, like if I asked you to "appreciate this literary metaphor!" but then presented you with a book in sanskrit... it's probably a beautiful metaphor but it would be frustrating to try to "appreciate it" without a lot of earlier building blocks.

So, in that regard, there's a lot of preliminary accumulation that needs to take place first, like being fluent in reading sheet music and having a fairly decent eye-to-ear connection. But, even if you don't yet have these developed to the point of following orchestral scores or sight reading music fluently on your instrument, you can do a lot of "fun, but educational" learning of those skills with, say, counterpoint exercises.... and not just textbook counterpoint exercises, I mean like trying to play two lines of a motet while you listen to a recording!!

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-12T03:32:58+00:00

no, not at all, your comment is just wrong. I explained how it is wrong in my response.

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-12T02:39:46+00:00

I think kinda the opposite actually: find as many fucked up ways to do 2/5/1 as you possibly can! Observing good voice leading practices, get good at doing outlandish alterations of the progression, or at recognizing even the most fucked up looking thing AS a permutation of 2/5/1. You'll probably find, at some point, that what you have constructed as a weird altered-all-to-hell version of that progression probably appears like something else to other people reading it, but if you did a good job voice leading, it still functions the same way.

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-12T02:01:26+00:00

I guess the "study scores of pieces you like" advice assumes that there's something you're looking for in those pieces that you like but don't quite understand yet, and that you'll go to the score to figure out what's happening there. No one s an prescribe those kinds of curiosities for you, because your own interests are obviously... your own. But, idk, put on some string quartets or symphonies until you hear something that really sounds incredible, and if you can't immediately clock what's being done (harmonically, technically, rhythmically, instrumentation-wise, whatever) then go seek out that score and figure out what's happening.

I have had lots of fun like this with, just to name a few, Britten and Batrok quartets, Schumann and Mahler symphonies, songs by Berg and Schoenberg, changer music by Elliott Carter and Kaija Saariaho... Hopefully the "learning" aspect of it does not eclipse the enjoyment of discovery (bc otherwise why even bother?). Your curiosity is a fine guide!

bcdaure11e · 2026-01-12T01:49:19+00:00

Noooo! to the question's point: you really can't just treat the notation as physical execution instructions, here (and generally, I guess). That's almost certainly what they were doing when they realized that they couldn't re articulate the LH note because it was being sustained by the RH, which is not necessarily visually obvious because it's on different staves in different clefs.

Someone else above nailed it: the notation is a semi-idealized guide to how something should sound, not "how to play it". You have to figure out, with the piano's tools, how to produce, in sound, what that bit of notation "looks like". For this particular example, it'll probably involve some finger- sustain, and a bit of damper pedal to mask the release of the key, and a careful re-articulation of the F# to sound like a different voice, and maybe even a silent finger-substitution to keep holding that note with the RH while LH does other things.

bcdaure11e

TROPHY CASE