In my last blog post, I identified the gestures that compose the Latter-Day Saint hymn “Father in Heaven, We Do Believe.” Today I’ll show how these gestures are elaborated and how all these elements work in concert to make the arrival on “we receive” so striking.
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Harmony in “Father in Heaven, We Do Believe,” Part 1
I recently explained how Classical musicians understood harmony in terms of characteristic gestures. For my first demonstration of this gestural approach to harmony, I present the Latter-Day Saint hymn “Father in Heaven, We Do Believe.”
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Learning Harmony as Gestures
Lately I’ve been studying how the Italian and French masters taught harmony and counterpoint. It’s fascinating. They didn’t analyze chords or study Byzantine diagrams. They learned to perform complete textures from a single musical line.
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On Debussy and how some contrasts have more than meet the ear
Last week we looked at “Brouillards” from Debussy’s second book of Preludes. In this performance by Krystian Zimerman, you can hear Debussy’s interesting use of juxtaposition, which is the subject of this post . . . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhdXnMHqsEU
Continue readingMusic Theory for the Twenty-first Century
(I wrote this blog post during the SOPA/PIPA internet blackout, and, WordPress being out, I couldn’t post it till later. Along with millions of others, I oppose those bills.) On Tuesday, I presented a paper at BYU’s composition seminar about James Tenney and the theoretical system he developed. Without getting into its specifics (which manage […]
Continue readingAttitudes, Thought Processes, and Their Resultant Ideas
I was partially surprised by how surprised I was by this realization. I’d taken Intro to English Language. I’m aware of the hypothesis that how we talk about things shapes what we talk about. Yet up until this point, I had never thought of compositional process as having such a strong effect on compositional thought. But I suppose as Admiral Kirk said, “Well, now you have something new to think about.”
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