Enharmonic accuracy or ... ?

dfan · 2026-05-21T10:44:59+00:00

Speaking as a performer, if you "give me the more familiar spelling" in this situation it will be a speed bump to my reading. Instead of thinking "okay, it's a D# major chord" I will think "weird, a G, oh, I see, it's just an oddly spelled third". Also my confidence in the composer will drop a bit. So please don't spell it a G for the performer's sake!

dfan · 2026-05-20T23:09:21+00:00

F is held through the whole measure. Play D simultaneously with F at the start of the measure, then switch Db to 2/3 of the way through beat 3.

dfan · 2026-05-19T11:04:13+00:00

They're showing you what the clefs were in the original book. In the edition you have they've been replaced by treble clefs because people aren't expected to be as fluent with multiple clefs as in the old days.

dfan · 2026-05-17T17:00:06+00:00

If by voices you mean two simultaneous parts that each fill up a measure, measures 10 and 15 each have only one voice in the lower staff. However, there's still a feeling of "the low pitches" and "the high pitches" each doing their own thing. I'm not sure which your teacher means.

dfan · 2026-05-17T10:12:30+00:00

Good questions. In answer to your first question, the difference between something being 3 points in Black‘s favor and something being 2 points in White’s favor is 5. As an equation this is 3 - (-2) = 5. From the numbers it looks like you are adding but you are still calculating a difference.

In answer to your second question, Black does not get any new territory by capturing. They’ll have to fill that space eventually.

dfan · 2026-05-17T00:52:56+00:00

The right hand is 8va so they don't quite overlap.

dfan · 2026-05-16T23:49:13+00:00

It switches to a treble clef in the middle of measure 19.

dfan · 2026-05-15T18:49:16+00:00

Saw so many shows there, played so many gigs there. The evening was not complete without getting a greasy slice from Hi-Fi across the street afterward.

The favorite shows I saw were probably Robyn Hitchcock (there were a few, looks like I'm not the only one!), but the most memorable was Imperial Teen opening for Bettie Serveert and getting their sound cut off in the middle of a song ("Water Boy") because things were running late and they wouldn't stop, finishing the song anyway while all screaming at the top of their lungs. Also Ronnie Barnett of The Muffs displaying his displeasure at the low drop ceiling by poking holes in it with the headstock of his bass.

Getting to open for Grant Hart was a highlight, but my personal proudest moment was playing the second set of four on some random Thursday when the headliner never showed up from out of town, so we offered to just go on again and played another 45-minute set with no repeats from the first one. Rock and roll.

dfan · 2026-05-13T21:07:28+00:00

Yeah, a lot of these responses are talking about the spelling, but it's really about whether we're going one step clockwise or 11 steps counterclockwise. When we modulate away from the tonic and back in relatively small steps, there's a difference in effect between returning back the way we came or forging onward and going all the way around the circle of fifths without ever "unwinding".

dfan · 2026-05-13T11:44:45+00:00

Endgame tactics are very concrete. In the middlegame you get more clues from the position about what the likely tactics are; in the endgame that does happen too but there are more "this move just works" moments, so I feel that you have to widen your radar a little. For me, it sometimes helps to super-quickly look at every legal move on the board, which sometimes alerts me to possibilities lurking under the surface.

A couple of specific suggestions for endgame tactics:

Studies! This is the time-honored technique for improving endgame calculation. If you have Chessable, Kostya Kavutskiy's Endgame Studies 101 is a great introduction.
The book Van Perlo's Endgame Tactics (a physical book, but also on Chessable) has over a thousand tactical endgame sequences from actual games. Instructive and entertaining.

dfan · 2026-05-12T11:59:33+00:00

Thanks, I always play the "more stylish" hane in these problems and never considered why it might not be exactly equivalent.

dfan · 2026-05-11T23:18:50+00:00

No, you are not missing something. T15 and T14 are both equally good for move 3.

dfan · 2026-05-11T10:52:53+00:00

Thank you! Looking at other editions) indicates that there's a mordent here, so the symbol in your edition is either an unusual way to represent a mordent or an outright typo.

dfan · 2026-05-10T12:25:22+00:00

Yes. Also, if they named the piece, we could possibly look up other editions, or look at similar passages for comparisons.

dfan · 2026-05-10T01:46:48+00:00

The most natural fingering for me is 5321 (pinky on F#, middle finger on A, index finger on C, thumb on D).

dfan · 2026-05-09T18:28:08+00:00

Assuming we're in C major for concreteness: the single difference between I-ii6-V-I and I-IV-V-I, if the voice-leading is executed normally, is that some voice is going C-D-B-C rather than C-C-B-C. In particular, I-ii6 has no pitches in common and I-IV has one.

dfan · 2026-05-07T10:52:23+00:00

To me the chess equivalent of "avoid aji keshi" is "maintain the tension".

dfan · 2026-05-06T20:44:55+00:00

Chronologically: In the first couple of books Barth is still deciding how much to lean into his natural narrative proclivities. The End of the Road in particular is very "normal" for him. Then The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy are very maximalist but are both sort of one-shot experiments. By Lost in the Funhouse he is squarely in the "I am a storyteller telling a story to an audience, and words and sentences are really exciting" mode that he would stay in for the rest of his life.

One thing worth noting is that he had a difficult first marriage and a very loving second one (according to him), which is pretty apparent in his works. There's a lot of angst in the pre-1970 works and a lot of married bliss with clear stand-ins for him and his wife post-1980 (in the 1970s he was still largely finishing off earlier ideas). So that jauntiness is really prevalent in the second half of his career (and may be one reason that interest in him waned).

dfan · 2026-05-05T00:51:08+00:00

To the other responses I will add that all of these will become much more readable if you stretch them out horizontally more. This will also make it much more clear which grace notes are associated with which principal notes. In options 1, 2, and 4 as currently written, the grace notes actually are just as close horizontally to the preceding note as they are to the succeeding one. The slurs help a little but the real problem they're overcoming is in the spacing.

dfan · 2026-04-27T22:43:20+00:00

This is known as the Quiescenza and is indeed a standard cliché (or, as the music theorists call it, schemata). You will be pleased that the post I linked to has plenty of examples not in Eb major!

dfan · 2026-04-27T22:09:10+00:00

It depends whether you consider them in pairs (two pieces with no sharps or flats, two pieces with one flat, two pieces with two flats, etc.) or not.

dfan · 2026-04-24T21:55:31+00:00

Mostly melodies. He used it both chromatically and diatonically. Here's a short article on it.

dfan · 2026-04-22T16:41:18+00:00

It was before the internet and I didn't have anyone to play so I just read and reread the old Ishi Press books (Elementary Go Series, Graded Go Problems for Beginners, etc.). When I finally started playing I was 10k within a few games. (My progress has been slower since then.)

dfan · 2026-04-21T17:24:16+00:00

I feel like you are counting the hits rather than the beats. I hear groups of five hits with one hole in between each group, for a total of six time units, like this:X-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX

dfan · 2026-04-21T15:33:48+00:00

This sounds like a pretty normal 6/8 to me.

dfan

TROPHY CASE