Home › pellegrin42 › Comments
Due to changing needs and technologies, the SMT Executive Board has decided to retire SMT Discuss (effective Nov. 9, 2021). Posts will be preserved for archival purposes, but new posts and replies are no longer permitted.
pellegrin42
About
- Username
- pellegrin42
- Joined
- Visits
- 93
- Last Active
- Roles
- Guest
- First Name
- Rich
- Last Name
- Pellegrin
- Affliation or Location
- University of Missouri
Comments
-
Ruth Crawford Seeger's String Quartet (IV) is a great example of a palindromic work employing additional procedures that combine to create a strong formal division at the midpoint. However, the densest moments occur 1/4 and 3/4 of the way through, …
-
Interesting question, Mark. Rachmaninoff felt that every piece should have a single climactic moment. These climaxes are typically very easy to identify in his music. They occur at various points in his pieces, and there are many instances of cli…
-
Jason - awesome idea! For jazz theory, The Jazz Theory Book by Mark Levine is widely used and has been around since 1993. It is written in an informal style. I also recommend Dariusz Terefenko's Jazz Study: From Basic to Advanced Study, which is …
-
Dear Alex, I don't know if this counts as occurring "in the wild," but something similar occurs at the turnaround of my composition "Epilogue," which you can hear below (turnarounds occur at 2:30, 6:10, and 8:35). The changes in this part of the t…
-
Stephen, It will definitely be on your jazz improvisation, arranging, theory, or aural skills tests! And, in my opinion, the huge body of jazz theory treatises spanning 50+ years is a significant piece of the history of Western music theory, and sho…
-
No doubt there are some sonorities that cannot be accounted for by chord/scale theory. Chord/scale theory is only one piece of the puzzle. Many jazz musicians, theorists, and composers feel that chord/scale theory is pedagogically overemphasized, …
-
I'm a little behind in this thread, so let me here just respond to Dimitar's first comment to me. Waters and Tymoczko in various places refer to the asending form of melodic minor as the acoustic collection, due to the overtone series. The first 1…
-
Lisa Margulis's On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind is accessible to undergrads and addresses some of these issues. Have fun with the class!
-
"Jazz people often claim that it is they who started using genuine melodic minor on a regular basis, but let them hear some Bach music first." That’s an intriguing statement—most jazz pianists I know and study are obsessed with Bach! But you do fin…
-
Carson -- You're a very inquisitive person, which is terrific. But if you're going to ask all these questions on SMT Discuss, I suggest you work on resolving your false composer vs. theorist dichotomy! Nicolas's comment is brilliant. Unfortunatel…
-
In response to Jesse (previous post), who wrote: I'm not a fan of 1.1 / 1.2 / 1.3 / 1.4 etc. because two separate duple subidivions / metric levels are conflated into one decimal location. If sixteenth-note triplets are suddenly employed, is what …
-
I agree with Robert, Brent, and Keith—2.3, 4.1, etc. is easy to grasp. Zero-indexing does of course have a certain elegance though. For example, in a measure of 4/4, 8th notes occur at 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, etc. Starting at zero makes sense in that the …
-
This discussion, especially Conor's point about music in some sense being necessarily linear, reminds me of Judith Lochhead's essay on "Spiral Morphing" in Anna Clyne's 2004 composition "Choke" (Reconceiving Structure in Linear Music, chapter 8). O…
-
Interesting question, Aaron. I'm curious though why you are looking into jazz for this paper. As a jazz theorist I certainly encourage you to explore the subject, but extended tertian chords of all types were common in Western classical music by t…
-
As an addendum to my initial remark about the momentum of ascending chromatic basslines, check out mm. 81-83 of the fugue. Here we have an eight-note chromatic ascent tonicizing III, IV, V, and then vi! (This ascent itself begins by building on th…
-
The inverse of my comment above may also be worth considering. A descending chromatic line in an upper voice produces tonicization of the submediant in minor, but not in major. Because the chordal seventh of the secondary dominant falls chromatica…
-
I wonder if tonicization of the submediant is more common in the major mode because of the satisfying chromatic bassline that's possible when approaching from V; i.e., V, V6/5 of vi, vi. Or IV, V6/5 of V, V, V6/5 of vi, vi.
-
Thanks Tim! Check out the recent special issue of Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy, "Engaging Students through Jazz." The articles are written in "blessay" (blog/essay) format (as you of course know from your contribution to volume 2), …
-
Very interesting observations. I also prefer a "discovery-based" pedagogical approach and have seen a similar shift occur. For me, the discovery-based approach to new theoretical concepts is part of training students to use their critical facultie…
-
Thanks for the response! I certainly agree that the statement you (apparently) quote, "an appoggiatura is a tone which is approached by a step and left by a leap," is overly general, as it omits the weak form of this structure, the échappée. I als…
SMT Discuss Manager: smtdiscuss@societymusictheory.org