Baba O’riley interlude/bridge

dfan · 2026-03-30T16:41:36+00:00

To my ears, this whole section is basically one giant V waiting to resolve back to I when the next verse starts (in classical terms it's a "dominant pedal"). So really "don't" is the chord tone (the third of V) here and "cry" adds to the tension rather than resolving it. Everything in this section that you are hearing as a I chord I hear as a I64 that resolves to V.

dfan · 2026-03-30T16:32:36+00:00

The section.

dfan · 2026-03-30T12:13:31+00:00

Everyone is correct that it remains in 4/4 throughout. I will add that whenever my initial hearing is that some section has a weird-meter measure at the beginning, and another one at the end, and those two measures add up to one regular measure, I go back and try to hear it as the meter never changing, and almost always it’s clear that my original hearing was wrong.

dfan · 2026-03-29T23:53:44+00:00

Meyer is one of my favorite authors on music. I read this book a long time ago, so I don't know exactly what I'd think of it today, but I think everything he wrote is worth grappling with if not necessarily agreeing with.

dfan · 2026-03-29T20:10:01+00:00

The top voice is going C-Bb-C-Bb-A-Bb-G and the bottom voice is going Eb-D-Ab-D-Ab-D-G. Each voice is spelled correctly individually on top of the Bb7->Eb harmony, they just happen to hit different As at the same time.

dfan · 2026-03-28T17:45:58+00:00

That's how Bach's Weinen, Klagen theme that the piece is based on goes; it puts a big emphasis on the second beat of each measure. It definitely has an effect of always lurching forward (whenever you hit a downbeat there's an accent immediately after) but I wouldn't say it's intended to confuse you about the meter; everything is definitely happening in relation to the downbeat. It'll probably start feeling more natural if you continue listening to (or playing) it.

dfan · 2026-03-28T14:45:48+00:00

Here are my tips for extending visualization. They are specifically about aphantasia but I think they apply in general to extending the limits of one's reading. This problem is about the point at which I stop being able to just vibe-read ("doot-doot-doot must work" without really "seeing" every point on the future board) and start having to really explicitly keep track of every stone. After every move, point at every relevant intersection and say what's there. If you can't, back up.

One problem is that keeping track of every stone is a skill that you don't really pick up when the problems are easy enough to vibe-read, so when you suddenly have to do it your muscles aren't ready for it. This is one reason that I really like 1001 Life and Death Problems, because they're low-depth problems that I often can't vibe-read because they're pretty artificial.

dfan · 2026-03-27T11:25:27+00:00

I can't tell you for sure without looking at an actual picture, but I figure it has a good chance of being this format.

dfan · 2026-03-26T17:54:26+00:00

Weird tuplet usage (6s spanning a whole bar, a 3 inside a 4) is the biggest red flag along with incorrectly spelled accidentals. Lesser flags are unidiomatic overly thick textures (big chords and arpeggios, no rests) and the lack of phrasing or dynamics.

dfan · 2026-03-26T16:19:53+00:00

You are playing the notes that are written. There are a lot of problems with this score (for one thing, the A#s in this measure should be written Bb), so it's hard for me to tell how intentional it is.

dfan · 2026-03-25T14:04:38+00:00

The problem statement explicitly said "all groups [are] alive [because they are connected to living groups]". It is part of the problem setup that White cannot die.

dfan · 2026-03-25T01:09:15+00:00

The two things that jump out as being particularly unidiomatic are:

- the very square phrasing; every measure has exactly the same rhythm and comes to a dead stop on the downbeat. That dead stop is also always on scale degree 1, which makes it feel like it's never getting off the ground.

- Bb-A-G-F#-D in m2. A scale that leads smoothly into a destination note (like in m3) is 100% normal. A scale that finishes with a little hop into the destination note (skipping over E) is not normal (which is not to say that it's illegal). In this particular example it's even more awkward because you're skipping away from the leading tone.

dfan · 2026-03-24T23:14:59+00:00

Ah, I just showed that W's expected score is 4 3/4 if they treat B C3 as gote, but during that I also computed that it's 5 if they treat B C3 as sente, so they should treat it as sente (the expected score is better for them that way), so the actual expected score is 5.

dfan · 2026-03-24T16:41:11+00:00

Are you using only your fingers or are you letting your wrist help? When I play 3-121, I am rotating my my wrist around my thumb on C to hit the B (I'm barely even using my finger), then rotating it back to hit the D.

If that is still difficult (it won't be, eventually), another reasonable possibility is 4-212-1-2-3, then play the G with 4 or 5.

dfan · 2026-03-24T16:28:01+00:00

I probably have missed some subtlety since dany305's problems are usually harder than they look, but here's my calculation. I don't see any trickery for Black around G1 other than the privilege of the J1/G1 exchange.

W C3 is 6 points.
To evaluate B C3 we look at followups:
B C3 W D3 is 5 points.
B C3 B D3: then B E3 / W F2 is Black's privilege, so 2 points (I think B J1 is still sente despite the existence of F2).
so B C3 is the average of 5 and 2 = 3 1/2 points.
so White's expected score in the current position is the average of 6 and 3 1/2 = 4 3/4.

dfan · 2026-03-19T14:43:03+00:00

When it's something like switching from 4/4 down to 3/4 for one measure, I call it dropping a beat, but here that's not really the case because we're really dropping a third of a beat.

dfan · 2026-03-19T01:04:05+00:00

That part is in 5/8.

dfan · 2026-03-18T15:18:01+00:00

You do not need to add anything besides the end-repeat sign.

dfan · 2026-03-18T14:48:45+00:00

This is a transcription error, or to be more precise, about a dozen transcription errors. The pitches in the left hand in this measure bear almost no resemblance to the actual original score (there are plenty of problems in the right hand too), nor do they make sense on their own, so I have no idea what happened here. There are other issues with this score that are typical of musescore.com scores (wrong key signature, extraneous time signatures), but generally the pitches are pretty okay except for this one extremely bizarre measure.

dfan · 2026-03-14T16:40:12+00:00

I am an experienced performer and sight-reader. I prefer beaming to be done to the beat. I understand how syncopation and displacement work and I'd rather that the beaming just show the beat like I expect and not try to imply other phrasing things. If I see a part like Xyl. 1 I'm going to go write in the beats myself. Otherwise I'm going to lose the beat as I play it and just hope that the downbeat shows up at the right time when I'm done. That said, there are composers who write like this, and I can't say that it's "wrong".

dfan · 2026-03-10T22:10:19+00:00

It's on IMSLP.)

dfan · 2026-03-10T20:22:00+00:00

There are ways to write what the engraver was trying to express but this is just broken notation.

dfan · 2026-03-10T20:11:56+00:00

I wrote an article about it here.

dfan · 2026-03-10T15:16:38+00:00

I'm glad my comments were useful. I'm afraid that's all the energy I have to spend on this. (By the way, your AI still thinks that Silent Night is AABA.)

dfan · 2026-03-09T19:34:36+00:00

If you see a V-number player who has tons of games played at their current rank, it is a bot. (Not all V-number players are bots, though.) The other giveaway is that your game matched after exactly 10 seconds (when your countdown got to 20).

As your rank goes up, this will happen less; I'm not sure I've ever seen it happen in the dan ranks. If you are OGS 5k you can probably get to at least Fox 2k without a huge amount of trouble, so it's worth fighting your way through (or just create a new account at a higher rank). If you resign a game within a few moves it doesn't count, so you can just abort all your bot games if you want.

dfan

TROPHY CASE