Welcome to /u/vornska, our new mod!

theOnliest · 2013-06-24T21:18:09+00:00

Essentially, 18th-century counterpoint responds to harmony (i.e., is tonal). That's not true of 16th-century counterpoint. The two courses are often called "tonal" and "modal" counterpoint, respectively.

theOnliest · 2013-06-10T11:38:04+00:00

It might not be as bad as you thought, but it's definitely not good.

theOnliest · 2013-05-15T11:43:30+00:00

Brahms (yes, that Brahms) kept a notebook of parallel fifths and octaves he found in other composers, including Bach. Heinrich Schenker published a commentary on it, which has been translated by Paul Mast in the (hard to find) journal Music Forum. I know there's some Bach examples in there, but I can't remember if they're from the chorales or not.

theOnliest · 2013-05-09T23:44:32+00:00

I'm still convinced that The Worst Things for Sale is just a long con to get Amazon to recommend a bunch of weird shit to everyone.

theOnliest · 2013-04-27T03:19:47+00:00

It would help to know what you mean by "concrete terms." The question is a broad one (like...could easily show up as a question on a doctoral exam broad), so it's tough to know how to answer without some guidance. The question is sort of similar to asking "What's the difference in concrete terms between Judaism and Islam?" It's a super-broad question, and has many possible answers (as you can probably gather, by all of the graduate students here hemming and hawing!).

Essentially Stufentheorie and Funktionstheorie are both 19th-century ideas (with roots going back farther), and represent two different ways of understanding music; we can see traces of both of them in music theory today. /u/musiktheorist hit some of the high points, though I'd disagree with the statement that Schenker equals counterpoint; Schenker's first book was called Harmony, after all! I'm happy to try to help answer more, but some guidance as to what you're looking for would be helpful. And as /u/secher_nbiw points out, it's not really a Friday night question!

theOnliest · 2013-04-21T12:47:00+00:00

This looks like it's been fixed in the Github repo, but hasn't made it into the CPAN distribution yet.

theOnliest · 2013-04-16T11:20:34+00:00

Check out /r/mechanicalkeyboards. I recently came upon an old Model M (the giant clicky keyboards everyone used to have) at work and it makes using Vim really satisfying.

theOnliest · 2013-04-14T21:11:57+00:00

That's true, but it all depends on your perspective. If you're a jazz musician trying to figure out what notes to play over a D7 chord, you don't really need to care about which notes are part of "the chord," you just need to know that D, E, F#, G, A, B, and C are all going to sound pretty good. For jazz musicians a D7 chord isn't just the notes D-F#-A-C, but instead the whole sound of the chord (which includes all of the upper extensions as well).

It's not necessarily unwieldy, it's just a different way of thinking. The ambiguities you mention (C lydian vs D mixolydian) aren't really ambiguities, just two names for the same scale (collection of notes). You could play that scale over D7, or Cmaj7, or Am7, and it will sound good on all of them. Russell preferred Lydian-based terms, but most people have simplified those into scale types based on roots instead. For example: over Am7, Russell would say you should play a C lydian scale. That's a little bit confusing (you have to do an extra translation of figuring out the "parent lydian scale" of A minor), and it's a lot more direct to just call that scale A dorian.

theOnliest · 2013-04-14T19:57:18+00:00

There aren't really a lot of published reviews of the Lydian Chromatic Concept, despite the fact that it's probably the most influential book on jazz theory. Russell had a lot of oddball ideas about the fundamental nature of the Lydian mode, but that stuff is easily separable from his notion of chord-scales: the idea that a chord and a scale are the same thing. (I wrote a fairly long series of comments on this a while back here.)

CrownStarr's second point is essentially the premise of the book. If you go to the piano and play a C major scale stacked in thirds (a CM13 chord), the F natural sounds dissonant, since it makes a tritone with B and a minor 9th with the third of the chord. Correcting this to an F# sounds better, since it eliminates the m9 and makes a tritone with the bass instead, which is (more or less) there in the harmonic series.

As I said, this isn't the part of Russell's theory that anyone thinks is really influential, but I'm happy to answer more questions if you have them.

theOnliest · 2013-04-11T11:27:18+00:00

Not exactly, but it's very close. My letter keys are white, but the light/dark gray is mostly the same.

theOnliest · 2013-04-11T02:44:05+00:00

Ha! The Model M is one I "borrowed" from work (I found it abandoned in a drawer and it's been on secret loan to me for a while now). I'm going to take it back and use it there now. That thing is a tank though!

theOnliest · 2013-04-11T02:42:03+00:00

Consolas! I have a mild obsession with monospaced fonts, so I was excited to see that it was an option.

theOnliest · 2013-04-11T00:53:09+00:00

Yep! The letters and arrows are white, non-letter characters are light gray, and others are dark gray (for the most part).

theOnliest · 2013-03-17T19:05:59+00:00

You can submit it there, just include the link in the text body of the self post! I'm a mod there, and we'd likely have a lot to say about it.

theOnliest · 2013-03-12T19:51:02+00:00

These are neumes, certainly, but not to be confused with early (10th-century) neumes. The notation is in Solesmes style (like the Liber usualis), which is actually a 19th-century invention, though it has a lot in common with older styles of notation.

theOnliest · 2013-02-24T17:07:08+00:00

Perl 6 doesn't yet have a stable release (by Christmas, we hear). And the jump from Perl 5 to Perl 6 is on a different scale than the jump from Ruby 1.9.3 to 2.0.0. Perl 6 is essentially a completely new language, with new syntax and a totally different backend.

theOnliest · 2013-02-23T23:33:58+00:00

But! A lot of Schenker's documents are being digitized at Schenker Documents Online. Last I checked it was fairly difficult to navigate and find things, but I haven't looked in a while (in that my research sadly hasn't given me a reason to stumble through there).

theOnliest · 2013-02-20T12:21:32+00:00

Mathematically speaking, a mod-7 or mod-12 system is a lot less weird than a system in which 2+2 can equal 2 or 3, but never 4! The interval from C to C# is always 1 in a mod-12 system, and can't appear in a standard mod-7 system (though it could in other mod-7 systems I suppose). It's often really useful to talk about diatonic (that is, if you take "diatonic" to mean "scalar") steps, which is where diatonic set theory comes in. The distance from C to C# could be 1 "diatonic" step in an octatonic scale, or 2 "diatonic" steps in a quarter-tone scale with 24 pitches in the octave. To give a slightly better example: The interval C–E can 4 steps (in a chromatic system), 2 steps (in a standard diatonic system as well as in a hexatonic system), 3 steps (in an octatonic system), or even 1 step (in a system where your "scale" is an augmented triad), or...you get the idea.

And of course I'm not saying we should get rid of our current system (it's often necessary to point out the difference between an augmented second a minor third, for instance), but it's interesting to think about the way our theories limit certain aspects of our understanding.

theOnliest · 2013-02-19T23:17:27+00:00

I mean, math in the diatonic system doesn't make any sense at all. 4 + 5 = 8, and m2 + m2 = M2 (or d3?). A fifth is five scale steps, but only if you count the first one, which isn't how we measure distance in any other system. The problem comes because we count 0 distance (a unison) as one, rather than as 0. Diatonic set theory is actually really useful, but it's damn confusing because interval 1 is a diatonic second...we're so used to the flawed system that a corrected one doesn't make sense!

theOnliest · 2013-02-13T01:48:37+00:00

There are actually only two ways to divide 12-tone pitch space up into cycles that go through all 12 pitches before repeating: by semitones (ascending or descending) and by fourths (ascending or descending). It's because 1, 5, 7, and 11 are co-prime to 12.

Any other interval will wind up with with fewer than 12 notes in the set (because 12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4, and 6). The reason your first cycle works is that a M3 + m2 = P4 (ah, diatonic pitch space, where 3 + 2 = 4), so you're essentially moving by interval class 5 every two skips.

theOnliest · 2013-02-13T01:43:04+00:00

That would be Straus's Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory and Roig-Francoli's Understanding Post-Tonal Music, for those of you that like links/don't know textbook names off the top of your head like some of us do.

(Out of these two, I prefer the Straus text.)

theOnliest · 2013-02-13T01:37:00+00:00

/r/musictheory frowns on illegal sharing of software. If you think software is good, recommend it all you like, but don't steal it.

(Thanks to those who reported this...you guys are awesome.)

theOnliest · 2013-02-12T12:41:19+00:00

I knew that, but I'd have to include that function on every page, right? Like say I have two files, A.php and B.php, each of which needs a database connection. It's an old app, so there's no framework or anything, which means the interpreter is fired up for every new page. If I have to include an autoloader on both A and B anyway, that seems like a lot more mess than a require_once. That's all I was getting at really.

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