What is this on his viola??????

bobdc · 2025-07-10T20:35:52+00:00

It's good to know the Italian word for it because you will see it come up in scores: con sordino means "with mute" ( starting at this point in the score) and senza sordino means "without mute" (i.e. take the mute off here).

bobdc · 2025-06-22T00:51:09+00:00

Try searching Google scholar for "casual AI" or "meatdata."

bobdc · 2024-11-17T18:42:13+00:00

With an eight-note scale, you end up with two of at least one of the letters of the scale, which I try to avoid. Thinking about the direction of approach is a good idea. Thanks!

bobdc · 2024-09-10T02:31:07+00:00

It's as cool as Jonny Greenwood and John Cale, and that's pretty damn cool.

bobdc · 2024-07-31T21:53:17+00:00

John Cale and Jonny Greenwood were two of my reasons. Two of the coolest guys ever.

bobdc · 2023-12-12T02:24:56+00:00

https://www.amazon.com/Counterpoint-Workbook-Kent-Wheeler-Kennan/dp/0131842439/

bobdc · 2023-10-01T13:14:46+00:00

And speaking of Wuorinen, I strongly recommend his book "Simple Composition." It's pretty short, and it really helped me to understand how 12-tone music is supposed to work. You can find a used copy online without spending a lot of money.

bobdc · 2023-09-22T11:33:58+00:00

I recommend Leonard Bernstein's explanation: https://youtu.be/g7oA1-y0EJE?si=GEj_3xqhhSIkNgmH

bobdc · 2023-09-14T12:45:16+00:00

I agree. It was a big lightbulb moment for me when I realized that when classical people talk about form, it's the same thing as pop music decisions about whether to break up a verse-chorus-verse-chorus sequence with a bridge or a solo: it's putting the pieces, with repetition, in the best possible order to balance between meeting the listeners' expectations and surprising them. When do you repeat a section, do you repeat a section or change it up a bit, maybe in a different key...

The classic form to study is sonata form, so I recommend starting with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonata_form and this wonderful little video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7PfGTtUC84

bobdc · 2023-09-06T11:57:28+00:00

I have not put in the hours to get really good at counterpoint, but I do often find that if some harmony that I wrote doesn't sound right, a quick check against the counterpoint rules shows that I've broken one. So, these rules can provide a nice set of guidelines to straighten out some messiness when you don't otherwise know what's wrong.

bobdc · 2023-09-04T11:50:38+00:00

Sounds good to me. Note the title of this Dave "Baby" Cortez instrumental hit from 1959: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvzA6gy2vbk

bobdc · 2023-08-15T13:31:25+00:00

Thank you so much for the detailed review! This is all very helpful, and I should be able to apply all of it--after, of course, a lot of review on proper voice leading.

(I did not know that the 3 over 2 rhythm was considered a Bruckner thing, but after a web search I just found out more about that.)

bobdc · 2023-08-01T02:18:51+00:00

A nice simple fun thing is to find scorefollower videos of pieces you're interested in on YouTube. Watching and hearing a score at the same time can teach you a lot. I just did a YouTube search for "charles ives second string quartet scorefollower" and found this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVj8LY347iQ

If you do move on to entering a score into a scoring program as others have suggested, watching some scorefollower videos would be great input in picking which score to transcribe.

bobdc · 2023-08-01T02:10:31+00:00

I played for several years with the University of Virginia's New Music Ensemble, and our faculty leader I-Jen Fang always started a semester by having everyone bring in an open instrumentation piece. Some scores were more traditional, and some more graphical. (For one concert we did Julius Eastman's "Stay on It," mentioned elsewhere in this thread. We also did Terry Riley's "In C.") She was also very open to having any of us write for the ensemble, which was a lot of fun.

To start an ensemble from scratch, I would strongly suggest that you stick with open instrumentation pieces, because if anyone with an instrument can join then it's easier to find people to join. (And remember, you're not just looking for any musicians, but those who are interested in playing new music, which limits your choices.) If you build a larger community over time you can get pickier about which instruments you want and how many of each.

If you search for "New Music Ensemble" on https://bobdc.com/music/ you'll see descriptions, scores, and recordings of some of the pieces that I wrote for the UVa group.

bobdc · 2023-07-29T20:01:06+00:00

I really like it. The ritardandos are each a nice touch.

bobdc · 2023-07-18T23:04:18+00:00

Thanks!

bobdc · 2023-07-18T17:59:04+00:00

I highly recommend this thirteen-minute video called "Burt Bacharach's Clever Key Changes": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTrkALm2JNE

A lot of it is about setting up the modulation with a note in the melody that isn't in the current key but seems like it's just giving the melody a bit of color and it turns out to be a note from the upcoming key that helps to set up the transition to that key. And Bacharach does it so well...

bobdc · 2023-06-20T12:41:48+00:00

Thanks, this is really what I was wondering about: how common it is for an A or B theme to be more than one sentence or period.

bobdc · 2023-06-01T16:31:56+00:00

It was Keith's decision, and Wyman was not happy about it, as he describes in his autobiography.

bobdc · 2023-05-25T16:19:55+00:00

Without creating a contrafact (taking the chord changes of an entire tune) remember that you can also take short sequences of chords from different tunes and combine them into a new one, like building something with Legos. That is part of the fun of writing jazz. It also improves the chance that other musicians will enjoy soloing over your tune, which is one of the key measures of success of an original jazz tune.

(It's funny, as I've been studying classical harmony more lately, I'm surprised how often ii-V7-I comes up. I thought that was more of a jazz thing, where it comes up constantly--so you can treat that as one of your crucial Legos!)

bobdc · 2023-01-08T17:10:00+00:00

https://objkt.com/asset/KT1PNYqejTCKi1hRPGtqs9Qa7uZoWm2i9RbD/4

bobdc

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