The Harmony Note Book

Hatikvah (Traditional)

2008-07-27T16:02:00.001-04:00

This is a choral arrangement of Hatikvah I wrote for my a cappella group, Techiya. It's mostly a reharmonization. I think I'm starting to have a style to them. It's homophonic, generally, and I generally go for complex harmonies rather than simple ones. If the last four bars sound like Grainger, by the way... Well, let's just say I have learned the importance of the b7 in major. (:

Listen to Hatikvah (right-click to download)

Carinhoso (Pixinguinha)

2008-07-22T05:04:00.002-04:00

This was made as a present to someone wonderful. (: You can find more information on this song here, since I also made an arrangement of it for a flute quintet (where, following Classical convention, "flute quintet" denotes a clarinet quartet -- three soprano clarinets and a bass -- with an added flute). The present version, however, consists of me singing all of the parts, and I actually wrote notes on paper this time instead of just improvising it like Basic Blues, so it sounds much better. Also, it has words in Portuguese! It's a bit annoying that my singing range and my whistling range are incompatible in this song, but it doesn't actually hurt anything. All of it was sung (or whistled) directly as you hear it in the recording, except, like in Basic Jazz, for the bass notes, which were kicked down an octave, and the bass drum, which was kicked down two octaves. There is one run in the bass that kept getting really distorted when transposed, so that run was recorded a fourth higher than it ended up instead of an octave.

Listen to Carinhoso (right-click to download)

Basic Blues

2008-07-22T00:32:00.000-04:00

I named the album this is in (well, in the ID tag, not in real life) "Alkaline Jazz", because I suck. Basic Blues is just that. It won't take a proton, but it is basic. It's a 12-bar blues, because I figured that would be the easiest thing to put together. A couple of hours later, possibly less than one, actually, out came this piece of crap. I clearly wasn't listening too well to the metronome (Garage Band is cool like that and has a metronome) on the cymbal at the end there, but I figured that being totally off-tempo then rushing to catch up gives the piece, uh, authenticity. Consider this a demo of a cool thing you can do using a recording program and a microphone (my Mac is cool like that and comes with both). By the way, the bass is my voice down an octave, and the bass drum is my voice down two. Everything else is totally acoustic.

Listen to Basic Blues (right-click to download)

Grace

2008-07-11T03:37:00.001-04:00

Full Band

The Birkat Hamazon, the grace after meals, has a very fun traditional melody (which apparently dates to 80 years ago or so), so I decided to set it for band. On Shabbat and festivals, the Birkat Hamazon is preceded by Psalm 126, labeled (like many others in that section of the Tanach) "Shir Hamaalot", or "Song of Ascents", where the meaning of "ascents", according to my JPS Jewish Study Bible, is unclear and possibly refers to steps of the temple or something similar. Here, then, I have set this Song of Ascents for wind orchestra, with an attempt to emulate, to some extent, Percy Grainger. The Birkat proper will follow.

Listen to Grace - I - Song of Ascents (right-click to download)

Irish Tune

2008-06-25T16:59:00.002-04:00

I have before me the score to Percy Grainger's vocal setting of the Irish Tune from County Derry, set in 1902, and published in 1912, the same year as a songwriter first published some words he had written earlier with the same tune, the words being named "Danny Boy". Apparently, the song is not so Irish:

http://www.standingstones.com/dannyboy.html

That's a very interesting explanation of the history of this song known by Americans everywhere as Danny Boy and connected to Ireland, and it attempts to explain why it's so completely uncharacteristic of Irish music at the time it was collected. But say what you will about Percy Grainger and his personal beliefs and habits, this is a frickin' masterful setting, and I really want to learn how to write like this. Here's one version played by a string orchestra. It's exactly the same as the choral version I'm looking at, except it's played by strings instead of voices (the voices actually do some cool stuff with humming and vowels, but that's not the relevant point), and the first half of the second time through the melody is up an octave.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7w9vVGnxvA

Anyway, Grainger is awesome -- he's very particular about writing directions in English. No "cresc." or "dim." Instead, you find "louden lots" and "slow off lots" and "much to the fore" and "accompanyingly". I just thought that was exceedingly cute. The point of this is that I actually want to learn to write like he does and compose a similar setting for other music, namely a particular melody for Shir Hamaalot. The tune's apparently by a P. Minkowsky. I can't tell when this recording is from, but the cantor in it died in 1933, so it's got that beautiful grainy sound you get from old music.

http://www.chazzanut.com/rosenblatt/rosenblatt-notes.html

The eventual goal here is to compose a wind orchestra setting for the entire Birkat haMazon, the Jewish grace after meals, and while the Shir Hamaalot is not exactly part of the Birkat itself, it's sung before it, as part of the ritual, on Shabbat. The real challenge will be to make the chanting in the body of the Birkat playable by an ensemble and not boring. The Birkat haMazon is a rather long series of blessings, about six to seven minutes in total, mostly split between chanting and very upbeat major melodies with motifs that repeat throughout. Apparently this is generally due to Mordecai Kaplan in the 1920's (http://jewsbychoice.org/2007/10/25/jewish-ritual-on-the-rise-in-america/), though there's one section in there that's often sung to a tune very different from the rest of it -- it's got a minor mode, unlike the rest of it, and sequences, which suggests a more modern Israeli style. You can see the Pesach version in the Harmoniot shel Pesach:

http://web.mit.edu/braunst/www/Harmoniot.pdf

Anyway, I'll post when it's completed, if ever. The Shir Hamaalot will be first, and separate; to make the analogy even further, and this isn't exactly out of emulation but because it's just working this way, it will be like Grainger's publication for band, with Irish Tune from County Derry and Shepherd's Hey (a much faster and upbeat tune) on the same sheet of paper, like a B-side, if you will. I also want to learn how to write like he writes his fast music, but that's for later. (:

Oro y Tomates

2008-03-28T03:27:00.002-04:00

2 trumpets (in C), horn, trombone

My brother asked me to write a brass quartet, STAT, and to make it sound Spanish. So I did it. I tried to also make it sound a little Jewish, so you can actually pick out some Jewish notes in there (if you think you've heard that snippet before in synagogue, well, you have). Oh, and the first measure is (seriously) based on Jungle Hijinx! from Donkey Kong Country, or whatever the actual name of the song is. The inspiration really went no further than the rhythm of the first measure, but it's what it is. But there's some neat stuff in there; it's a fun piece.

Listen to Oro y Tomates (right-click to download)

Suite of the Undead

2008-02-11T22:45:00.000-05:00

2 trumpets, 2 horns, trombone, euphonium, tuba

The 2008 entry to the BCMW contest. The idea of a march of the undead had been floating in my head for a LONG time, and I had a little tune for it, so I figured that this time, this time, I'd actually write it, and it ended up as the second movement in the suite. The requirements were somewhat different -- many movements, 13-15 minutes total, rather than three movements of around 5 minutes each -- and I, uh, well, it's too long by about a minute and a half, but I imagine it could be sped up. Oh, the creatures mentioned in the piece are Exile/Avernum-style undead -- a zombie is supposed to be a magically reanimated corpse that can be killed in a few hits (a few WEAK hits) rather than a horrible-virus-infected supermutant that zombifies on contact, though I suppose a lich may be powerful enough to do that. Or a zombie dragon (GAH, FF5!). Oh, cool note: LOTS OF SPECIAL EFFECTS! You can't really hear all of them faithfully, but the horns will do some, uh, surprising things. (: And there's some rather creative orchestration at times, with trombone down in the pedal range, euphonium an octave higher in the low range, and tuba an octave higher than the euphonium, playing fairly high. High tuba is generally underexplored, I think. At least by me.

Listen to Suite of the Undead - I - Awakening: The Lich (right-click to download)
Listen to Suite of the Undead - II - March of the Zombies (right-click to download)
Listen to Suite of the Undead - III - The Vampire's Lullaby (right-click to download)
Listen to Suite of the Undead - IV - The Werewolves' Hunt (right-click to download)
Listen to Suite of the Undead - V - Ghostly Lament (right-click to download)
Listen to Suite of the Undead - VI - Finale: The Lich (right-click to download)

The Three-Body Problem

2008-01-29T20:23:00.000-05:00

Whenever I read harmony books I get ticked off at the sophomoric explanations of harmonic phenomena that are ever present. I should correct that and use the past tense, actually, because the harmony books in which I find these tend to be older, apparently before the concept of observation was developed. Hindemith, in particular, talks about combination tones and their overtones to discuss consonance, and I find that rather silly. He also says that intervals have roots.

What is the root of a given interval? For the major third, for instance, it's the bottom member; for the minor sixth, its inversion, the top member. How does he know? See, I disagree with him, because one would have to consider the interval in a vacuum to identify a root, and an interval is never in a vacuum! I hold that context is critical, and that the tonal center forms a third note around which the two notes of the interval gravitate. When trying to figure out the "meaning" of an interval, the (local) key is an inseparable part of the problem. Hence we have a three-body problem, which complicates the simplicity of a two-note interval with necessary ambiguity.

My favorite example is the major sixth, because either note can be the "root". What's worse, if the major sixth is G E and the key of C is well-understood, the root is the C, a note not even in the interval! If an E minor harmony is implied, E is the root; if a dominant function in the key of C is implied, G is the root. If the interval is present by itself, without any context -- or, rather, with itself as its context -- a trick of the ear can change the root, like the spinning dancer or the cube that looks like it's either coming out of the page or into the page. The beautiful simplicity of the analysis of only two tones is, sadly, not to be.

I hope that this helps dispel the notion that the overtone series has much to do with harmony beyond providing the fifth. That notion needs dispelling, and any little bit counts.

Interval of the Moment

2008-01-11T16:29:00.000-05:00

Diminished octave. In particular, in Villa-Lobos's Suite Popular Brasileira, V - Chorinho, where there's a held low E in the bass, struck D G# B in the middle, and struck G natural in the melody. It's obviously a dominant 7th chord to A minor, even though it doesn't actually resolve that way; the G natural goes down to F then E. It's the clash of the two natures of "traditional" melodic minor that sounds so great.

Another great interval is the diminished third, especially between the raised 7th and lowered 2nd, as used melodically in Tarrega's Recuerdos de Alhambra (which, unlike the Villa-Lobos, I have not yet attempted to play; the right hand figuration is HARD). One phrase ends on the G#, the 3rd of the dominant 7th of A minor, and the next one begins on Bb, the b9th of the secondary dominant to D minor. The melody: C B A B A G#; Bb A G A G F... The first few times I heard it, I couldn't identify the interval. It's just so remote -- a diminished 3rd -- and it was THAT interval that led me to realize that a diminished 3rd is NOT the same as a major 2nd. Ah, context.

The Value of Planning

2008-01-09T02:17:00.000-05:00

Every year I participate in a great competition that requires a composition for brass ensemble of varying size (this year, a septet) of around 15 minutes. It's a great chance to write something with a deadline, since it's due February 1st, and I do something different every year. I've been working on this year's entry lately, and I realized something everyone already knows: planning is GOOD. Editing is GOOD. Showering is GOOD.

The problem is that it takes a lot longer to write something than to sing something or think about something, so sections end up being too short. I get bored writing even short segments because it takes so much longer than the segments themselves, so my writing ends up all over the place because my ideas change much more quickly than the music. I'm finding, then, that it's a good idea to think about how things will develop in the shower, try to remember them, and write them in. Things sound much better in my head than they do once I've written them, but also, once I've written them, I can't really think of them any other way, so this is hard to do.

One thing that I used to not understand until very recently was how composers could write music that doesn't sound great throughout, with some boring moments. I think I understand now that it's for pacing reasons, because otherwise the piece isn't balanced. There needs to be time with nothing important happening so that important things are more important. Filler material, if you will, that serves to continue the piece until what needs to happen can happen. It's also a great time to introduce new motifs, or to quote old ones. There's an art to writing "boring" music as well.

Everyone already knows this, but that's what I figured out today. (: I'll hold off on details of the piece until I hear back from the competition to maintain the anonymity of my piece.

In Which I Rant About The Overtone Series

2007-12-10T22:56:00.001-05:00

GAH. I'm reading through Hindemith's "The Craft of Musical Composition", and like every other book written about music, no introduction is complete without a discussion of the overtone series. And somehow, maybe because they're musicians rather than physicists, it's ALWAYS unsatisfactory. I've NEVER seen the overtone series explained correctly except in the Griffiths Intro to Quantum Mechanics book. Yeah, QM, not music theory. It's ridiculous. The overtone series isn't what it claims to be, and explanations of other phenomena involving it are just wrong. I don't know why. So here we go.

There is no such thing as the overtone series. There is AN overtone series, but not THE overtone series, except in mathematics. That description makes a lot of sense to someone who has studied Fourier analysis and less sense to someone who hasn't, but it's worth a try. Pretend that there is a perfect string with constant density and infinitesimal width and that it has some finite length L and is held taut and fast at both ends. This is an idealization, remember. Now, pull the string in some shape with very small deviations from the resting state. Regardless of what that shape is, and this is the magic of it, you can write it as a sum of sine functions. This is called a Fourier decomposition, or a Fourier series. Those sine functions will look like your normal sine wave, but only those sine waves that have value 0 at the endpoints will be in the series -- so sin(pi*L), sin(2pi*L), sin(3pi*L), ..., sin(n*pi*L), for any integer n. For your perfect idealized string, the relationship between wavelength and frequency is such that if the whole string (sin(pi*L)) vibrates at a particular frequency (which depends only on the string's length, tension, and density), half the string (sin(2pi*L)) will vibrate at double the frequency, a third of the string (sin(3pi*L)) will vibrate at triple the frequency, and so on. So WHATEVER you do to the string at the start (assuming your stretching is very small), it will be vibrating in some weird pattern, but that weird pattern will be a sum of the frequencies of the whole string, half, one third, one fourth, and so on. If the whole string vibrates at a frequency of 64 Hz, after you make your weird initial condition, you will hear the 64 Hz, twice that (128 Hz), three times that (192 Hz), and so on. You'll actually hear all those notes. That is THE overtone series. It's described as C', C, G, c, e, g, bb, c', ..., with some exact pitches, where the G's are a little tiny bit sharp, the E's are somewhat flat, the Bb's are very flat, and so on, and authors make various claims as to its usefulness in various situations and as various explanations.

Of course, what I described is the perfect string. Real strings don't work like that, though they come close. Piano strings especially don't work like that, and if you look at them, you'll see that they aren't just plain strings, since piano makers try to correct those effects. The perfect string, where the overtones are integer multiples of the fundamental, is a linear medium. Real instruments aren't. The overtone series of a crotale, for instance, which is a round metallic pitched plate, is nothing like a string's -- since it's a circle, you can't break down a perturbation into sines; you have to use a different set of functions at different frequencies. Non-pitched instruments are even more nonlinear. Strings come close to being linear, but aren't exactly. Not even the human ear is exactly linear in its response. Vibrating air columns aren't. Reeds certainly aren't, and they respond differently at different frequencies.

This perfect string is used to describe the sounds that you hear from an instrument. An instrument produces, along with the fundamental that you hear clearly, a series of overtones at varying strengths. An oboe has strong overtones, for instance, which explains its rich sound, while the clarinet has weak ones, which explains it's dark quality. But since no instrument is really linear, this overtone series isn't exactly the one described. The set of frequencies sounded is called a spectrum, and it doesn't necessarily look like the overtone series described. It's just not perfectly in tune.

The overtone series is considered the basis of all everything. It's annoying, because, well, it isn't. Only the octave and fifth are actually important. The overtone third isn't the same third as the one in our triads, and this is obvious when we consider the minor triad -- it's not more dissonant than the major triad, but the minor third is much farther away from the "natural" third of the harmonic series. The third in our triads is, I believe, psychologically conditioned in us rather than an aural phenomenon like the octave and fifth. When those are in tune, mathematical cancellations in the sound waves (and the sound waves in the air themselves ARE linear, unlike the ones on the string) are audible, and the interval is perceived as "open". If the third is tuned correctly, it can also sound "open", and an in-tune major ninth can also sound "open". That is a DIFFERENT characteristic from tonal character. We can see from the scales of non-Western cultures that thirds can actually vary widely in pitch, and that major doesn't necessarily mean happy, and so on. The third isn't really a function of the overtone scale. The other notes aren't, either! At least not the way we do it. We take a fifth -- actually, something very close to the fifth -- and stack it repeatedly until we get to the original note (assuming everything is octave-reduced, of course), and THAT is what our system of harmony is based on, not the overtone series -- or rather, only indirectly the overtone series. Luckily, 3^12 = 531441 is very close to 2^19 = 524288, a difference of 1.36% (or 1.35%, depending on how you count it), so the perfect fifth needs to be fudged only a tiny bit to make it fit the octaves. There are twelve of them, so we get 12 evenly spaced tones in an octave, each therefore having a frequency of 2^(1/12) the previous pitch. This is NOT the overtone series! The overtone series does affect consonance and dissonance, to some extent, but only in the "beats" between notes of similar pitch -- play a C and a C#, and the waves will interfere and sound somewhat ugly. Play a C and a B, and it won't be so bad, but there will be beats between the B and the first overtone of C to create the dissonance. The dissonance can be hidden, say by playing C E G B, in which case the ear will hear a C major chord and an E minor chord rather than a strident major seventh interval. However, only the first few overtones (essentially up to the perfect fifth, not even so far as the "perfect" third) actually have this aural property to a reasonable strength. The higher terms in the overtone series are meaningless in this respect.

Finally, people try to say that the most stable voicings for chords have a spacing like that of the overtone series, wide at the bottom and tight at the top. THIS IS A CROCK OF BULLSHIT. The reason for this has nothing to do with the overtone series, except perhaps that some of the basic principles are the same. Two notes in the lower register are MUCH closer in frequency than the same two notes in a higher register due to the logarithmic nature of the scale. Two low C's are 32 Hz apart, from 32 Hz to 64 Hz, whereas two high C's are, say, 4096 Hz apart, from 4096 Hz to 8192 Hz. It's 8 octaves from the 32 Hz to the 8192 Hz, by the way. Part of the ear's pitch resolution is based on linear frequency, not the logarithm of it, which is what musical pitch is based on. This changes for the very high notes, of course, at the threshhold of hearing, but it's still very clear in, say, the piccolo range. So at the upper end of things, close pitches can be resolved by the ear much more easily than at the lower end of things. Furthermore, the overtone series DOES play a role, but it's only that part of the reason for the dissonance of low pitches is that the overtone series clash. They shouldn't clash much, but remember that the instruments are nonlinear, so they end up clashing quite a bit, especially on the piano. On a string or electric bass, which produces rather pure pitches, the clash is due to the bad resolution rather than the overtones, since the overtones are mostly absent.

OK, I think I've exhausted my rant. Feel free to disagree, of course.

A Scale! Ahava Rabbah!

2007-11-29T00:57:00.000-05:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahava_Rabbah

I'm a Jewish atheist, or Humanist, or Pastafarian, or whatever. I don't believe in gods, but I'm Jewish. Figure it out if you feel so inclined (Wikipedia can help). But the Ahava Rabbah scale is one of my favorite scales (mentioned in the last post as well), also known, according to the article linked above, as the Spanish phrygian, Jewish scale, Hungarian scale, or phrygian dominant. I'll stick with Ahava Rabbah, at least for now, but it really is a phrygian with raised 3rd.

I love this scale. I suppose the augmented second sounds "mystical", which in today's postpostmodern age is quite the cliche, but to me it really does. Listening to liturgical music that uses it makes me feel, well, elevated, which I'm sure the religious would interpret as "closer to Hashem". (This is because the religious can't write "Adonai", as that is using the name of God in vain -- instead, they use "Hashem", meaning "the name", in writing and singing, and they use "Adonai", "Lord", in actual prayer. They will sometimes use "Adoshem" when emphasis on pronunciation is necessary, and "Elokeinu" for "Eloheinu". Now you know.) The point is that I love this scale, and modulating to it is an interesting touch, much like that major chord in a minor piece that is like sunlight.

The typical cadences in Ahava Rabbah are not V-I as might be expected, since the 5 chord is actually vo rather than the v that you can change into a V. Instead, the cadences are bII-I and bvii-I (the convention is confusing and I can't be bothered to follow it; hopefully this is clearly referring to the chords on the 2 and 7 of this scale). bvii is especially nice, because since the important half step occurs between 3 and 4, an improvisatory-style melody would tend to hover around there, and the 7th degree would be a refreshing note to signal the cadence. In some chanting schemes this is actually done. A nice melodic cadence using bvii-I would be, in C: Bb' F E Db C; the Shabbat prayer Shalom Aleichem uses this, though the position of the tonal center makes this a half cadence instead. In fact, this is just the conventional phrygian cadence of Western tonal music, iv6-V, but with the function of an authentic cadence (and since this is used in mostly monophonic liturgical music anyway, with no attention to inversion numbers).

But yeah, Ahava Rabah, awesome scale.

Scales, Harmonic and Melodic

2007-11-18T00:11:00.000-05:00

There are two similar but somewhat different things we call "scales", and sometimes those two things are different and sometimes the same. There is the harmonic scale and there is the melodic scale, and they are each sets of pitches from which one draws harmony and melody, respectively. The melodic scale is an ORDERED set of pitches, and the harmonic scale is not -- this is one of the main distinctions between them. This is important when we consider what the silly "common practice" people call the minor key.

It took me a while to realize that the three minor "scales", natural, harmonic, and melodic (and I don't mean the jazz melodic scale, I mean the CP one), were not all meant to be played. My first encounter with scales, as such, was in beginning band in sixth grade, or maybe in my piano computer program in fifth grade, and they were major. I knew what the minor keys were, but I never had to play minor scales. When I saw "harmonic minor" and "melodic minor" in a book from the school media center in sixth grade, or maybe someplace else, I saw them as curiosities, and I liked the sound of the harmonic minor scale, and I wondered at this melodic scale thing that goes up and down differently.

Eventually, in college, while taking a music theory course, I realized several things. First, the augmented second in the harmonic minor is essentially wrong. Second, the leading tone HAS to be a half step below the tonic, which is why the 7th is raised. Therefore, the 6th needs to be raised as well if you're moving to the raised 7th from below. So the minor key, with a flatted 7th and 6th, needs to be modified. The V chord has a leading tone when it goes to i, so it has to be V rather than v. Everything else still works, so the scale with this modification is the harmonic scale. The b6 and b7 still want to be used, but they can't be used if the tonic is approached by step from below. So if you're going to PLAY the scale, you have to raise the 6th and 7th on the way up, but going down you can keep the minor key feeling.

Personally, I find this all very silly, and enough other people find it silly, so we play just one minor scale: the melodic minor. When we play scales, which are a useful exercise for instrumental technique, the melodic minor should be played (if we are practicing for CP music), since those are the note patterns that we are likely to see. There is no reason to practice playing the harmonic minor scale -- this is because the harmonic minor scale was never meant to be played! The harmonic minor is the set of notes from which we draw the harmony. There are really only five chords, i, ii0, iv, V, VI, in the minor key (though with melodic minor melodic materials, you can include also ii and IV, but these are essentially chromatic alterations). III and VII don't really have functions so much, and even VI is a little iffy, so we can essentially limit ourselves to using the notes from the harmonic scale. The melody, conceived entirely separately and heard entirely separately (this is not true, but let's consider it as such), uses a different set of notes, and given the rules of CP, they are different going up from going down.

The melody and harmony, let me stress, use DIFFERENT SETS OF NOTES. There are plenty of examples, of course.

First, the blues scale. Mark Levine's Jazz Theory Book claims that nobody understands how it manages to work, but I claim that I do. (: In the key of C, the blues scale is C Eb F F#/Gb G Bb C. The twelve bar blues progression is C7 C7 C7 C7 F7 F7 C7 C7 G7 F7 C7 C7. Now, let's consider ripping the nonfuctional dominant 7ths out first, so we have C C C C F F C C G7 F C C. This uses the harmonic scale C D E F G A B, so we have that as a harmonic scale and C Eb F F#/Gb G Bb C as the melodic scale. The only common notes here are the tonic, subdominant, and dominant, the roots of the chords! We have here an extremely inflexible system, since this blues scale depends in a way on the fact that we're not using it freely but over a progression that essentially works like the traditional 12-bar blues. We can't really modulate in the scale; the scale has no symmetries! Of course, that's also true of the normal major scale; we have to introduce new notes to modulate. In this case, though, the tendency to the tonic is very strong from the Eb and the Bb. The Gb also tends very strongly down in a way that leads to the tonic. NONE OF THOSE THREE NOTES NEEDS TO BE IN TUNE. They aren't in the harmonic scale, and they form no harmonies. They can be wildly flat and they'll work just as well! (If C7 and F7 are used, though, the 7ths in those chords should probably be the same as the ones in the melody, since those are essentially melodic tones added to the chords rather than harmonic/functional ones).

The blues scale is essentially a harmony that works with bitonality over the C major harmonies in the progression. Let's see how the notes match up, ignoring common tones. Over a C chord, we have the Eb clashing with the E. The Eb has a strong melodic pull to the tonic, so you can hear it as an appoggiatura, essentially. The F clashes with the E as well, but that pulls to the Eb which pulls to the tonic. The Gb clashes with the G, but that pulls to the F which pulls to the Eb which pulls to the tonic. The F# pulls to the G, which is stable. The Bb pulls to the tonic or the fifth, but it doesn't actually clash with anything. The tonic essentially remains a pedal through the other chords, and the blues scale is essentially an elaboration of the tonic pedal. You can use the same logic to consider the notes over the other chords. Over F, then, you have C being stable as the fifth, Eb pulling down to it, F being stable as the tonic, Gb pulling down to it, F# not really working, G being the fifth of the pedal C blues scale, and Bb pulling the same as over the C chord in the tonic pedal scale. Over G7, C is the pedal, Eb tends to C in the pedal, F if the seventh, G is the root, F# tends to it, Gb tends down to the F, and the Bb tends either way in the pedal. So the clashes aren't really clashes because the harmony and the melody are heard separately.

Another example are the modes of the harmonic minor scale, taken melodically. The interesting ones in Jewish music are phrygian #3, dorian #4, and aeolian #7 (the original harmonic minor); they have names in Hebrew that I don't remember. The others (locrian #6, ionian #5, lydian #2, and, uh, mixolydian #1 which is really weird) don't have very useful corresponding harmonic scales, that is, the melody notes can't really be used to form harmonies very easily. You could make a doubly "harmonic" scale as well by taking a phrygian #3#7 or an aeolian #4#7. In these cases, the augmented second is a characteristic interval, though it doesn't have to be -- it might well be treated as a leap rather than a step.

The phrygian #3 scale in particular is a MAJOR scale. The tonic chord is major! The harmonic scale for it is certainly phrygian #3, but the melodic scale isn't, if you don't like augmented seconds. It's just as well to raise the 2nd going up and lower the 3rd coming down if it makes sense in the music when stepwise motion is called for. Of course, a solution is to avoid stepwise motion in that direction, never going lower than the raised 3rd in a scalar passage or higher than the 2nd, and leaping across the gap when necessary. An example from Fiddler on the Roof, "If I were a rich man", in C: G F G F E, C. E F G F G F E F G A Bb A Bb A G. This is a somewhat bad example because it isn't really in this mode, but see how it just avoids the Db or D altogether? This is actually mixolydian (which is another Jewish mode as well), of course. A better example, still from Fiddler on the Roof (it's really the easiest source for this, even though it's not particularly authentic), is the fathers' theme in "Tradition", also here in C: C CDE F GF#GAbG E FEFGF Db ED#EFE G C CDE F GF#GAbG EFEFGF Db C. In this case the majorness and the Db are very clear. There is one occasion of Db going to E, but it's certainly as a leap rather than a scale. When E has to be approached by step from below, the passing tone is D, not Db, but when the harmony is a bII Db chord (or a bvii Bbm chord), the Db is necessary. This way you can have music in the mode that still has smooth voice leading.

And so it is that harmonic and melodic scales are not only different notes but different things altogether. Comments?

What Music Is

2007-10-31T00:25:00.000-04:00

The definition I heard when I was in beginning band, in 6th grade, was that music is anything meant to be music. Lately, though, I've considered removing "pop" from this category to some extent, because if we redefine "music", we can say that what something was meant to be is not "music". It's a rather circular definition, but it might be better to say that it's a recursive definition. Makes it sound more sophisticated.

But really, we know what music is. Music is organized sound (where the level of organization can be arbitrarily small). But what makes it go? My answer used to be a very nonhesitant "Why, tension and release, of course!" Some people, when asked about their favorite music, will answer (with a desire to be inclusive) that it is "anything with a beat". If you think about it, though, you'll realize that a beat works on a completely different principle from tension and release, and if you give a piece of music enough of a beat, it will overshadow any tension and release present. It feels like there is some sort of innate "beat" response that makes you want to move your body, and it is a completely different response from the exhileration you might get from a buildup in the music. "Pop" music uses this beat response rather than the tension response, and while there's nothing wrong with that, in an interesting way, that completely changes music.

So I would consider cutting that part out of the definition of music, by making the beat effect, like the lyrics, extramusical. And then I would quickly unconsider that, because while it makes some sense, it's also extremely silly to disqualify large swaths of music. Still, I consider the beat effect nonmusical, and rap "music", for instance, as poetry for the most part. For the most part only; there's some good music in there as well sometimes, rhythmic effects, and various other nice things.

The more interesting music, I find, is way on the other side of the "spectrum". I think of the effects of music as an asymptotic series of sorts, with the leading terms usually dominating the "higher-order" terms. I see beat as dominating, rhythm and tension following, then pitch and dynamics, then sound. This is fairly loose, of course. Any effects of the set of pitches chosen -- tonal effects -- are under the tension heading. As music becomes more abstract, higher and higher terms dominate, leading to new ways to listen to music.

In particular, once everything is stripped away except for the sound term, we can have music as an experience rather than as something to be listened to. I've heard that being high is similar to this. You can pay attention to the sounds around you as if they were music, and though they weren't created that way, you, the listener, have essentially created their musicality. If all it takes to create art is a frame, then one can simply carry an inside-out frame and frame in the entire world. Music as an experience, in this sense, is music made up of random sounds of nature and artifice like the hallway lights and fans, like the chirping of the traffic lights (this is Cambridge; they make actual chirps), like impromptu organization. Like people who fail at singing in tune and create beautiful grating microtones, like multiple trucks backing up, like the subway door beeps. It's an intense immersive experience that requires nothing more than the will to hear the world in that light.

This is why, no matter my disdain, I can't chop off the beat from the set of things that make music music: so many people will much more readily end music at tension and release, or possibly require that it be the dominant term. It would be a horrible double standard to restrict my definition so. As much as I am a fan and student of harmony, and harmony in all its forms is my chief concern on this blog, I cannot ever neglect the intense musical experience possibly by mentally willing to be music what was not originally intended so. In that case, the heater isn't music. But draw a metaphorical shell around you, and you now have an instrument that produces whatever sounds pass through the shell -- the heater's sound becomes music! It's a cheap mathematical trick, of course. (: If you have not experienced music this way, you may be skeptical, but I encourage you to think deeply about the sounds you hear when walking -- do not get distracted by speech or more conventional music. Music will never be the same again.

A Chord

2007-10-18T10:46:00.000-04:00

When I was listening to my old college singing group (the Harvard Noteables) rehearsing last year, one thing struck me quite a bit. The seniors were singing "Hear My Song", from Jason Robert Brown's Songs for a New World, and towards the end, from 5:03 to 5:08 if you have the recording, they sang a wild chord! I keep thinking now that, if I were writing a marching show of Songs for a New World, this chord would be the point in the closer where the entire audience starts screaming. So what is it?

That section of the song is in the key of B. I'm doing this by ear, by the way, so feel free to correct me. This is Jason Robert Brown, so his chords are all 2's and 4's -- in the key of C, these would be the tonic CDG, the subdominant CFG (though the bass player would most likely play the F), and the dominant GCD (which actually makes it equal to a 64 chord). While this looks rather drab, with a C present in the important chords, it's important to note that his music's harmonic interest comes from having other chords besides those three. My point is really about the character of the primary chords he uses.

Back to the music. Starting at 4:50, we have repeated melodic precadential material over a dominant F#4 chord (or B2/F# if you prefer, but there is ambiguity between the V and I64 feelings). The bass alternates the F# with an E, so this could also be a quartal dominant 7th in whatever inversion it is that has the 7th in the bass (3rd in CP theory -- CP being Common Practice -- but that isn't very meaningful here). After three bars, this is followed by a chord with an A in the bass guitar and soprano, a B in the man's voice, and possibly an E somewhere, for an A2 chord (though I hear it as an A chord with an added 9, since that B is important). The next bar features a B2 chord, with mostly parallel motion (though the male voice goes to a different note to jump instead of moving in parallel), and the next bar, that wild chord, has a G in the bass, an F# in the man, D in the woman. I think. And possibly an A someplace else. If I can get a hold of the score, I'll check. But at least on the piano, G A F# D sounds about right, with a ninth between the G and the A. This looks like a D/G chord, which would be -- ahem -- bIII/b6^, if that makes any sense. However, it's clearly a G9 chord of some sort, in this case a Gmaj9 with no third. It's hard to fit non-CP chords into CP conventions! In that case, this is a bVI chord, but there is no third because that would make a minor chord with the F# and D and that would change the energy of that chord. But it's ambiguous enough that it could be both a D/G and a Gmaj9.

Where does the chord get this energy? Partly from that beautiful major ninth, I think. The major ninth, where the top note is tonicized, is a very harmonic interval that does not resolve as might be expected, since the bass and not the soprano is the source of tension. As I hear it, it has no directional pull, but it clearly can't end a piece. Another example is in Meadowlark. This major ninth could actually be considered a diminished tenth, possibly. I don't know. One possible resolution is for both notes to resolve a half step in, to an octave; an example would be (in diminished 10th form) D# f to E e, but the idea can be expanded to resolve to E g instead, which is the same harmony in this case. Consider the following progression of two-note chords: F e, Bb d, F e, D# f, E g. The D# f chord is pretty much an Eb9, but since it's so foreign to the key, it might be better to interpret it as D# dim10, or however you want to write it. It's the inverse of the augmented 6th, but since it's a major 9th it sounds much more open (since the 9th is made up of two open fifths stacked) and therefore much more powerful. IF IT'S IN TUNE. I'm also hoping that the 9th really is in the chord, or I'll look stupid. (: The chord two chords before the chord in question is a 9th chord with this property.

Another part of the power of that chord, I think, is that the (human) voices all leap up to the note. Persichetti uses this as well, for great effect, in his Psalm, for a similar I - bVI progression that could be written C c e g, C c e g, C c e g, Ab eb ab c'. The bVI is a very powerful chord, since it's new to the scale in major and just a major chord in minor, but if the upper voices leap up to it, it's a gigantic swell of excitement. In our example, the chord is a bVI in the bass, giving it this powerful function, even though the other notes aren't those of a bVI major chord.

Finally, that chord is powerful because it's in tune. I can't pick out the notes of the singers at all, yet they're so crunchy!

Thoughts?

Bare Necessities (Terry Gilkyson)

2007-10-01T18:21:00.000-04:00

3 clarinets, bass clarinet

This song is totally awesome. I don't remember how it ended up being sung at the summer program I went to before senior year of high school, but it is just really cool. The intro is beautiful, and the rest of the instrumental parts are masterful. This is the kind of stuff you don't always notice in Disney music, but back however many years ago it was, it was really good. Even the solos are amazing. So I figured I'd arrange it for my clarinet quartet as a crowd pleaser -- though we never did perform, but still. The bass clarinet is instructed to ad lib, which can only be approximated by grace notes and odd rhythms, so the recording isn't perfect. And "Oh, man, this is really livin'!" is supposed to be spoken, but it's not there. Oh, well. The bass clarinet has the solo most of the time, but during the instrumental section, the other three clarinets each get a solo. There was nothing special about the second solo -- the piano solo -- that would be interesting to reproduce on clarinets, so I replaced it, though I won't tell you with what. ;p

Listen to Bare Necessities (right-click to download)

Tennessee Waltz (Redd Stewart and Pee Wee King)

2007-10-01T18:18:00.000-04:00

3 clarinets, bass clarinet

A clarinet quartet (see the note for Carinhoso -- there are NO STRINGS in a clarinet quartet, since then it wouldn't be a clarinet quartet; it would be some sort of mixed ensemble) version of this famous tune. I've always liked it, so I wrote it for my quartet. I don't know much about the piece except the melody, so I can't really talk about it, but hey, it's pretty. (: I should mention that while I haven't ever performed this, I have given other people the sheet music and they have performed it with some success, though not in my presence. This probably applies to the rest of my clarinet ensemble music.

Listen to Tennessee Waltz (right-click to download)

Carinhoso (Pixinguinha)

2007-10-01T18:17:00.002-04:00

flute, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet

So once upon a time I had a clarinet quartet (for those of you who aren't well-trained in musical terminology, a clarinet quartet consists of four clarinets, which can be of various sizes -- this one contained three sopranos and a bass). We met once a week for half an hour each time for a semester, and we never performed, but I did get to write music for it -- nothing original, just arrangements. I figured I could transcribe some chorinhos, and those sound so much better with a flute that I figured I'd add one. Thus I wrote Carinhoso for mixed woodwind quintet (which is different from a "flute quintet", which would consist of five flutes, perhaps including a piccolo and an alto flute; this quintet only contains one flute and therefore it can't be a flute quintet). It can be said that chorinhos are to Brazilian music what ragtime is to American music. They sound quite similar, in fact. But like the Australian and European wolves, they're not related. Only later were chorinhos influenced by jazz and evolved into bossa nova. But anyway. Carinhoso is one of those "signature" Brazilian songs, something like Stars and Stripes forever in the US. It's about as famous as famous gets. I hope to be able to play it on guitar to a girlfriend at some point, but until then we'll have to be content with this recording.

Listen to Carinhoso (right-click to download)

UPDATE: While not played on guitar specifically, a much cooler, sung, recorded version (by me) is here!

Concerto de Choro

2007-10-01T18:15:00.000-04:00

clarinet, piano

After listening to a CD of Brazilian guitar music in the summer of 2005, I decided that it would be cool to write a chorinho, and as a clarinet player, I wrote it for clarinet and piano. I made a concerto out of it because, hey, why not? So here are three chorinhos in a concerto, for clarinet and piano accompaniment. A chorinho is kind of like a rag -- it's explained below, since Carinhoso is a chorinho as well. The first movement is a fast, bird-like choro; the second is a melodious waltz; the third is a boisterous samba. The second movement in particular should quiet you critics that think I can't write melodies; it's one of the most beautiful things I've written. The movement titles are just colors -- the -inho ending is a diminutive, so the first movement is entitled Yellow Chorinho (with a diminutive yellow), the second, Black Choro (where "choro" rhymes with "ouro", gold, and Ouro Preto is the name of some city somewhere, maybe), and the third, Greenish Chorado (where -ado is the ending for the past participle). So not very meaningful, but very, very pretty!

Listen to Concerto de Choro - I - Chorinho Amarelinho (right-click to download)
Listen to Concerto de Choro - II - Choro Preto (right-click to download)
Listen to Concerto de Choro - III - Chorado Esverdeado (right-click to download)

Beren and Luthien

2007-10-01T18:13:00.000-04:00

soprano, tenor, piano

This recording is missing the words. Beren and Luthien is a duet for soprano and tenor, accompanied by piano; the text is J. R. R. Tolkien's poem about Beren and Luthien Tinuviel sung by Aragorn in Lord of the Rings. I finished it in June 2006 and started it in the summer of 2005. It was originally meant to be a duet for myself and someone else, but the someone else lost interest and the piece wasn't finished until I picked it up again the following summer. I revived it as a work dedicated to the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association. It will hopefully be recorded one day by HRSFen. If that happens, I will post the live recording here, of course. If you will be in the Cambridge area and want to help me record this, email me.

The poem is nine stanzas long, with each stanza containing eight lines of iambic tetrameter. That's a lot. The melody, then, is sung about eighteen times, but it's different every time: the embellishments vary, the shape varies, the chords vary, the mode varies, etc. The piano part is mostly tonal, though not always, making this one of my first successful uses of atonal material. When listening to this, I recommend also reading along in the poem. There are no repeated lines, though occasionally the singer not singing the text will sing "Tinuviel!" or "Beren!". There is also little melisma, but almost every iamb is a full beat (eighth quarter) in 6/8, so the 16th notes in "ri-i-i-sing la-a-ark and fa-a-a-al-li-ing rain" are somewhat clear. This poem, by the way, can be found at this site.

Listen to Beren and Luthien (right-click to download)

A Day at the Fair for Keyboards

2007-10-01T18:11:00.004-04:00

A treat for you! This set of works is performable only by computer. I plan to somehow release the sheet music so that anyone can attempt to perform it, but that's after I'm done writing it. (: So far I wrote only the movements you see here; I'll add more as I write them. My goal is about an hour's worth of short pieces, with maybe a long one or two, but nothing too complicated. Each movement is set for a different synthesized instrument or sets of instruments; the Intrada is for Hammond organ, the Serenade is for vibraphone, the Carnaval is for music box, the Primera Danza is for an electric piano sound, the Temple is for sitar and bass, and the Club Groove is for a synth "orchestra". I write this partly to celebrate the memory of the composer Gyorgy Ligeti, who passed away June 2006. His music was my first true introduction to modern music, and the first piece I heard -- Ramifications -- that made me really like minimalism. That piece was for 12 strings, 6 tuned a quarter step sharp.

A Day at the Fair is in that spirit -- it uses two sets of staves, one tuned a quarter step higher, to create micronotal music by MIDI. (: However, I don't treat them as separate voices in any way: melodies, harmonies, and everything all use quarter tones whenever I can fit them in. I'm writing this for two main reasons: the first is to learn to sing and become familiar with quarter steps, which have intrigued me for a while, and the second and more important is to find out what new harmonic and melodic possibilities exist with an expanded scale. One thing you will surely notice is that much sounds "out of tune". You can only really tell in chords, since the chord members don't have the expected relationships with each other. I often use the note between the major and the minor third for triads, which has an interesting neutral sound, and I flat the minor seventh of a dominant chord an additional quarter step (which brings it closer to, albeit on the other side of, the "natural" overtone seventh). Leading tones should be raised a quarter step to make them closer to the tonic. So a dominant 7th chord in C can be spelled (where d means half flat and t means half sharp) G Bt D Fd or G Bd D Fd. In the first case, the interval between the 3rd and 7th is a perfect 4th; in the second, a tritone. The normal 12-tone scale has a good solution for this that sounds fine, but in the 24-tone scale, these changes make it a bit odd. So I'm experimenting. One of the big problems is that the most important relationship, the fifth relationship, doesn't generate any quarter tones, so it doesn't bother anyone that these are normally missing -- to show you what I mean, 12 stacked fifths will take you from C to C, but if these are natural fifths, the final C will be 23 cents -- a quarter of a semitone, so an eighth tone -- sharp. That's not much. That interval (called a comma) will spoil unisons, but that's about it. Thirds will give you a quarter tone quite quickly, but our system of tonality is based almost entirely on the fifth, so that leaves little room for quarter tones. Therefore, fundamentally quarter-tonal melodies and harmonies are less intelligible to the ear. Hopefully this experiment will discover some pretty ones. (: Try the Serenade, for instance!

Listen to A Day at the Fair - I - Intrada (right-click to download)
Listen to A Day at the Fair - II - Serenade (right-click to download)
Listen to A Day at the Fair - III - Carnaval (right-click to download)
Listen to A Day at the Fair - IV - Primera Danza (right-click to download)
Listen to A Day at the Fair - V - Temple (right-click to download)
Listen to A Day at the Fair - VI - Club Groove (right-click to download)

The Mask of the Elven King

2007-10-01T18:06:00.000-04:00

Full Band

After the success of Mystic Gate, I wanted to write another videogame suite. I started this in the summer of 2005 and haven't worked on it much since the winter following, so movements will come up as I write them, eventually. This "game" is more like Secret of Mana, or even Zelda, than like Chrono Trigger, and the name comes from Alex Ellis, who came up with it when I saw him on the street. The four-note fanfare-like theme at the beginning of the overture (II) is based on the melody that came through my head when I was reading the name of the creator god, Iluvatar, in the Silmarillion. The movements this time are more terrain-based.

Listen to The Mask of the Elven King - I - Introduction (right-click to download)
Listen to The Mask of the Elven King - II - Overture (right-click to download)
Listen to The Mask of the Elven King - III - Forest (right-click to download)
Listen to The Mask of the Elven King - IV - Cavern (right-click to download)
Listen to The Mask of the Elven King - IV - Mountain (right-click to download)
Listen to The Mask of the Elven King - IV - The Earth Shard (right-click to download)

To Sepharad (Full Band)

2007-10-01T18:03:00.000-04:00

Full Band

Since To Sepharad was originally written for a brass octet (and you can find a better description of the music and meaning on its other post), and the brass octet is a fairly large ensemble, I decided that the piece would be appropriate for transcription to a larger ensemble, with percussion. The chimes are now actual chimes in the third movement. I changed the octaves of several things -- trombone solos became Eb clarinet solos, two octaves higher, for example -- and I played around with instrumental color, especially in the second movement. These are not new movements, but they do have a new flavor.

Listen to To Sepharad (Band) - I - The Nagid (right-click to download)
Listen to To Sepharad (Band) - II - Ramban (right-click to download)
Listen to To Sepharad (Band) - III - Abravanel (right-click to download)

Symphony No. 1

2007-10-01T17:57:00.000-04:00

Full Band

Here it is: a symphony. Well, part of a symphony: I've only written the first two movements. I drew inspiration from various composers; I want to say Persichetti (Symphony No. 6) and Sparke (Dance Movements), but also Shostakovich (Symphony No. 5) and Ito ("La Vita" Symphony). The first movement is in traditional syphonic sonata form, though the tempo varies a bit, and it's not really in any key: I don't use traditional chord functions much, so you could call it mostly atonal, but in reality that's not very descriptive. I had originally intended this to be a piece in Bb lydian -- I was really going to call it Lemonade River; I may still write one -- hence the first measure, but by measure 4 or so it became clear that this wasn't happening, so I figured now would be a good time as any to write my first symphony. Around measure 5, which is in 7/4 rather than the intro 5/4, I decided not to be confined by time signatures, so you will never hear more than two measures in a row in the same time signature except for four bars of 5/4 a couple of times. Time signatures are constraining, because they have their own pattern of accents that the music has to agree with. Here, I let the music dictate the time signature instead of the reverse, which means that the music's natural accents indicate each new measure rather than the other way around. When I feel like it I'll do a statistical analysis of the time signatures, but they range from 2/4 to a case of 8/4, with 3, 4, and 5 being rather frequent, 2 and 6 less so, and 7 even less so. That's because 7 feels like a run-on -- if there were a secondary emphasis, the measure would have been broken. The second movement continues the principle of changing time signatures, but since the tempo is much slower, fractional beats abound -- 3/8, 5/8, 7/8, and even a 9/8 or two, sometimes using compound meter but usually just having one beat longer than the others. Anyway, have a listen. I have yet to compose the other two movements, but be patient!

Listen to Symphony No. 1 - I - Moderato (right-click to download)
Listen to Symphony No. 1 - II - Adagio (right-click to download)

The One-Armed Tailor

2007-10-01T17:52:00.000-04:00

Full Band

This is a Jewish-American wind ensemble composition, finished July 16, 2006. It was inspired by "Tevye the Dairyman", a collection of short stories by Sholom Aleichem; the title is some image Tevye used somewhere (I don't remember where). I did analyze much of Jerry Bock's "Fiddler on the Roof" score, so there are some stylistic similarities, but I also listened to other Jewish music. There is a very extended clarinet solo. It's cool. As I said, it's for wind ensemble, though I'm in the habit of including a prominent string bass part. The scale I used mostly is an interesting one: phrygian with raised third. I say that because the second step functions very much like a phrygian second, and bII holds almost a dominant position to I. Interestingly, substituting a raised fourth for the fifth in bII makes a tritone with an interesting resolution; in the key of C, this is Db F G to C E G. It's a pretty characteristic Spanish sound, which is interesting because the Spanish modality has strong resemblances to Jewish and Arabic modalities. I'm not sure how this character made its way through the cultures, though my guess is that the Arabs spread it to Spain and to the new Muslims everywhere in the Muslim world, and the Jews lived mostly around the Muslims. But this is a stupid guess. Reality may look very different.

This piece is ideal for a band who wants to show off its clarinetist, but it isn't a concerto or anything. I'd say it's near the borderline, though not on it or past it. The reason, of course, is the very prominent role of the clarinet in klezmer music. Kontakt Player actually has a decent clarinet patch; the high notes sound like they would on a clarinet: squeaky. However, the recording doesn't capture ad libs at all -- obviously. Local variations in tempo by the soloist, lip bends (there should be no other kind in this piece), and the like would sound better in real life. Still, here you go. (:

Listen to The One-Armed Tailor (right-click to download)

Mystic Gate Suite

2007-10-01T17:47:00.000-04:00

Full Band

This was my first "long" composition project -- it's twenty-five minutes long, with twelve or so movements, depending on how you count them. It is a suite from the game "Mystic Gate", which has not ever nor will ever be written (at least not to my knowledge). Think of it as a symphonic version of the soundtrack. It contains many musical scenes from the game, an SNES RPG like Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy III/6j, and somewhere or another there is a gate which is closed after the final boss. This is all in the "program". Of course, this is not actually an SNES RPG soundtrack; it's a long work native for band. But it's cool. You can also pick out influences, if you're clever -- In Town sounds not unlike a Japanese march, more specifically one of the town themes from FF8, and if the waltz in the Finale resembles the Waltz to the Moon, also from FF8, that is no coincidence. Danger and Battle may remind you of FF5, perhaps, and the Fanfare may remind you of Donkey Kong Country, which is where I got the idea to even have a fanfare (like the blinking Nintendo logo in Mario games). And that little clarinet and flute run in the Overture is very... videogamey, no? The drums in the Battle? Enjoy; I worked my ass off for this one.

Remember, of course, that this is a crappy "recording", so the balance will be off, crescendi and diminuendi won't sound right, and that weird-sounding strident modified English horn is actually a soprano saxophone (damn Kontakt Player for not including one).

Listen to Mystic Gate Suite - I - Fanfare (right-click to download)
Listen to Mystic Gate Suite - II - Overture (right-click to download)
Listen to Mystic Gate Suite - III - Danger! (right-click to download)
Listen to Mystic Gate Suite - IV - In Town (right-click to download)
Listen to Mystic Gate Suite - V - Love (right-click to download)
Listen to Mystic Gate Suite - VI - Battle (right-click to download)
Listen to Mystic Gate Suite - VII - Dungeon (right-click to download)
Listen to Mystic Gate Suite - VIII - Overworld (right-click to download)
Listen to Mystic Gate Suite - IX - Dark Tower (right-click to download)
Listen to Mystic Gate Suite - X - Final Battle (right-click to download)
Listen to Mystic Gate Suite - XIa - Finale (right-click to download)
Listen to Mystic Gate Suite - XIb - Credits (right-click to download)

Dunth Valsante

2007-10-01T17:45:00.000-04:00

Full Band

Dunth Valsante is my third finished piece, composed in June of 2004, and it's just a light waltz. That's all it is, a light, fun waltz. It's somewhat Brazilian, though, and the first time through the trio, I tried to write a chorinho. I tried but failed, because a chorinho would be traditionally played by a flute and guitar, and the band doesn't have a guitar (nor did I want to add one just for this). So instead, I pretended that the clarinet section was a guitar, and I treated it accordingly. Hehehe.

"What is a dunth?" you may ask. A dunth is a word that has no rhymes. Month was a dunth before dunth, so dunth undunthes month. It's very simple. You can visit the Project Dunth page, as well. Spread the word. Listen to the piece.

There are some synchronization problems with the recording. I don't know why. Just imaging that it's being played by a crappy band.

Listen to Dunth Valsante (right-click to download)

Aleinu - March

2007-10-01T17:42:00.000-04:00

Full Band

Aleinu is my second composition for band, composed in the spring of 2004 for my old high school to play. I suppose it's really an arrangement rather than a composition, which is a step up from my first "composition", which was a transcription. The themes are all from Jewish liturgy; the introduction and first strain are Aleinu, the second strain is a dominant version of the Shema, and the trio is Shalom Aleichem. There are some other quotes thrown in as well. This is indeed a march, my first ever, and although it's a bit long, it follows more or less the customary march form. You may wonder at the appropriateness of the themes I chose for a march, especially Shalom Aleichem. Well, many years before I ever composed anything, I had noticed that Aleinu was distinctly march-like. This was one of those things I always wanted to write, and one of the reasons I started writing in the first place. I had also planned it way before actually notating it, which isn't something I do much these days, and I knew I wanted to have Shalom Aleichem, a beautiful and slow hymn, with fast things going on underneath it, so I figured this would be great for a trio. Needless to say, I really liked the result.

Then I took Music 51, and coming back a few years later, I noticed a lot of things I could have done better. So I did them better, and here it is, improved from the original version, the Aleinu march.

Listen to Aleinu (right-click to download)

Fuga IV, from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I (J. S. Bach)

2007-10-01T17:38:00.000-04:00

Full Band

Story: one day -- must have been January 19th, 2002 -- I went with some friends to a nearly empty cheap theater to see The Man Who Wasn't There. I hung out with film people in high school (this was senior year). Anyway, the second movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 8 "Pathetique" played several times. I got home and immediately listened to it, as well as some piano music my girlfriend at the time had played for me before. Next day, I decided to learn to play this on the piano, and two weeks later I could play the piece moderately well. Well, it's an easy piece. I found all my sheet music on websites offering it for free, and since I'd read (some of) Godel, Escher, Bach, I figured Bach's music is probably pretty cool. I was right. I learned some of his 2-part and 3-part Inventions (some of each one, I mean -- like, the right hand of 2-part No. 12, both parts separately of No. 14, etc.), and also printed some of the Well-Tempered Clavier. I started playing those in order (skipping the C# major fugue), and when I got to the C# minor 5-part fugue, I really liked it. Problem was, as you've probably noticed, I'm not a very good pianist, so I could never play it very well. And I kept fantasizing about a wind ensemble playing it, like I fantasized about a wind ensemble playing, say, the Star Fox 64 ending theme. Well, about a week before going to college for sophomore year (September 2003), I decided that, hey, let's transcribe this thing NOW. So I got myself a music notation program and, over the course of that week, transcribed the fugue.

That's not exactly what you'll hear here, however -- I've edited it, in recognition that this was my first "composition" ever and therefore I'd made some mistakes in orchestration. The piece was played by my high school band that year along with Aleinu March, which will go up on the website after I finish revising it. Keep in mind that Kontakt doesn't like suspended cymbals (NOTE: it actually does, but I haven't rerecorded this piece to reflect that), and while the patches generally sound pretty good, they're sometimes very unbalanced. A timpani low A, for example, is much louder than a mid-staff D for some reason, and the tuba is MUCH louder than, say, the trombone. Also, this fugue is in C minor instead of C# minor because unlike the keyboard, the band isn't well-tempered and would lose its temper if it had to play in four sharps (seven for Eb instruments -- yeah).

Aside from non-pitched percussion, this transcription is a faithful one: no notes have been altered. Some have had their octaves changed or doubled, but this is OK: imagine Bach improvising on the organ. Here I treat the wind ensemble like an organ, with changing stops. The instruments I use are the stops Bach pulls, and as it was not unusual for stops to also sound at the 8ve and the 15me, or even to have a glockenspiel, I do the same. One cannot say that this transcription is not in the spirit of Bach, save for the non-pitched percussion and the key difference. But hey, Bach uses the same chorale three times in different keys (with different words) in his St. Matthew's Passion. So he'll just have to live -- or stay dead, I guess -- with the C minor.

Listen to Fuga IV from WTC1 (right-click to download)

Your Country, 'Tis of Thee -- Fantasies on "America" for Two Races

2007-10-01T17:24:00.000-04:00

4 trumpets, 2 horns, 2 trombones, 2 euphonia, 2 tubas, 4 percussion

Another class project, though this time for American Protest Literature. This was never performed except for a recording similar to this one. The instrumentation is also not entirely realistic: two choruses, each containing two trumpets, horn, trombone, euphonium, tuba, and two percussion: sixteen players. The piece attempts to paint a picture of black/white racism in the US, though it's somewhat idealized. I'll let you make your own conclusions, but one chorus represents whites and the other represents blacks. They are heard on different channels, like Bytes, so I recommend either widely spacing your speakers or wearing good headphones. I tried to make this piece self-explanatory by titling the movements suggestively.

This is NOT a theme and variations on "America". There are many themes involved, and most are derived from "America", but this is not always obvious. For example, a certain rhythmic pattern represents the phrase "let freedom ring", though one probably wouldn't notice it. Another such motif is the melodic fragment F F G, or any transposition of it, which I used to build many of the other themes. The title, incidentally, was inspired by Frederick Douglass's speech "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" where he argues that the benefits of the Declaration of Independence were not applied to the slaves. The center of my emphasis on racism, though, is the second movement, Execution and Dance. Reading Ida B. Wells's "Southern Horrors" is nothing compared to seeing the actual images from a lynching. I'd recommend reading Wells's pamphlet, or at least the part of it I read (only the first chapter, I believe, was in the sourcebook), if you take pride in America's history.

Listen to Your Country, 'Tis of Thee - I - God Save King Cotton(right-click to download)
Listen to Your Country, 'Tis of Thee - II - Execution and Dance (right-click to download)
Listen to Your Country, 'Tis of Thee - III - Your Country, 'Tis of Me (right-click to download)
Listen to Your Country, 'Tis of Thee - IV - The Perfectly Standard Freedom Blues (right-click to download)
Listen to Your Country, 'Tis of Thee - V - Holy War and the Mourning After (right-click to download)
Listen to Your Country, 'Tis of Thee - VI - Let Freedom Rag (right-click to download)
Listen to Your Country, 'Tis of Thee - VII - Finale (right-click to download)

Bytes for Two Trumpets

2007-10-01T17:18:00.000-04:00

2 trumpets

I was asked to write a trumpet duet by my band director Mark Olson (though it took me so long to write it that it never got played). I asked him what it should be like; he said it should be fast, slow, a little Spanish, and probably a few other things. So I decided to experiment with a whole-tone scale. You'll notice I didn't stick to it, which is probably a good thing, but I also certainly never picked a key, and some of the motifs you'll hear are whole-tone-derived. This was also my first piece for a duet, so I had to learn how to work without full chords and not sound like Mozart. Not that I have anything against sounding like other composers, but I do have something against Mozart.

This recording is a bit different from the others in that it has somewhat realistic crescendi. Let me give some insight in the way this works. As I remarked above, Sibelius does not handle gradual dynamic changes during notes, only between them. There is a plugin that does that, though it's time-consuming to apply it (it has to be applied individually for each change, and various other MIDI things need to be set manually). Worse, the reverb function of Kontakt Player Gold does not obey those MIDI commands. So the only way is to save as MIDI (which loses some information sometimes), and use Synthfont, etc. This can't be done for band music, though, for various reasons which I don't feel like explaining, mostly having to do with the quality of the patches. So in the case of this piece, it's somewhat practical. There are kinks, though -- since I MIDI-controller-ized all dynamics, rapid changes don't sound very good. If you want to record a better version, perhaps with real trumpets, email me, but otherwise, this is the best I can do...

Oh, also, each trumpet plays in only one side. So if you have mono sound, you're missing out on the effect. If one of your stereo channels is muted, you'll only get one trumpet. I'd recommend (good) headphones for the best effect here.

Listen to Bytes for Two Trumpets (right-click to download)

Fanfare No. 2 for Brass Quintet

2007-10-01T17:16:00.000-04:00

2 trumpets, horn, trombone, tuba

Another short fanfare. I suppose it could be expanded one day, but probably not.

Listen to Fanfare No. 2 for Brass Quintet (right-click to download)

Fanfare for [Real] Brass Quintet

2007-10-01T17:15:00.000-04:00

2 trumpets, horn, trombone, tuba

This is another Music 51 project, though a much smaller one: the assignment was to write a piece based on a given chord progression. It was supposed to be played in section, so I wrote it for five voices in the style of a brass fanfare. The performance didn't go so well -- maybe rehearsals might have helped? -- but I eventually converted the piece to actual brass for my brother's brass quintet. Here it is.

Listen to Fanfare for [Real] Brass Quintet (right-click to download)

JPT Brass Medley 2006

2007-10-01T17:07:00.000-04:00

2 trumpets, horn, trombone, tuba

My brother asked me to arrange a medley of recognizable tunes for his brass quintet for the 2006 winter concert of the J. P. Taravella High School band program, and here it is, though the pieces quoted are far too numerous to name. It's worth mentioning that the trombonist is instructed to kill the other four ensemble members during the "Chester" section (he asked for death during Chester, so there it is), which are revived while the trombonist plays a few bars from Sorcerer's Aprentice. Almost everything in there is a famous band piece or some piece related to JPT; there's some stuff from Les Mis (the Fall 2006 musical production), the alma mater, the warmups for band and marching band, and some snatches from my own compositions for some shameless self-aggrandizement -- if the players, or even listeners, ever chance to come across Tolyo or Aleinu, they will find it familiar.

To hell with it; here are the pieces I quote, in order, for your following-along pleasure: Blue Shades (Ticheli), Rocky Point Holiday (Nelson), Chanson du Toreador (Bizet), The Klaxon (Fillmore), Sea Songs (Vaughan Williams), Tolyo March (Braunstein), Ballet Music from Macbeth (Verdi), Overture to "Candide" (Bernstein), Erhalt uns in der Wahrheit (Bach), First Suite in Eb (Holst), Lincolnshire Posy (Grainger), Wachet Auf (Bach), La Vita (Ito), A Heart Full of Love (Schoenberg et al), Ave Verum Corpus (Mozart), Prelude No. 14 in Eb (Shostakovich), Pepita Greus (Chovi), Hammersmith (Holst), Immoveable Do (Grainger), March of the Belgian Paratroopers (Leemans), Four Scottish Dances (Arnold), Second Suite in F (Holst), An American Elegy (Ticheli), Fanfare and Allegro (Williams), Mars (Holst), Music for Prague, 1968 (Husa), Trittico (Nelhybel), American Overture (Jenkins), Children's March (Grainger), Chester (Billings/Schuman), Sorcerer's Apprentice (Dukas), Hava Nagila (trad.), Armenian Dances, Part I (Reed), American Salute (Gould), Jupiter (Holst), J. P. Taravella High School Alma Mater (don't know), Aleinu (Braunstein). None are used with permission, with the exception of excerpts from my own works, and they were all rearranged, anyway.

Listen to JPT Brass Medley 2006 (right-click to download)

Hai-Kai

2007-10-01T14:47:00.000-04:00

2 trumpets, horn, trombone, euphonium, tuba

The 2007 entry to the BCMW contest, this time, is Brazilian. It's meant to sound like guitar music, and was inspired by such. It originally was going to be Haiku, but when I looked it up in Portuguese, it turns out that the poetic form in Brazil is something related but not identical called hai-kai, which has three lines but a less strict syllabic structure. You can probably tell by this page's colors that I like blue, so I wrote a poem (it's not very good, I'm sure), which translates roughly to "The morning sky/Shines on the ocean/Paints it blue". I know that HTML always messes up symbols, but I'm going to try to title it faithfully below anyway. The movements are named with the lines of the poem, and the only extramusical meaning I managed to insert was the sun in the first movement -- see if you can pick it out.

Listen to Hai-Kai - I - O céu da manhã (right-click to download)
Listen to Hai-Kai - II - Brilha no oceano (right-click to download)
Listen to Hai-Kai - III - Pinta-o de azul (right-click to download)

To Sepharad

2007-10-01T14:25:00.000-04:00

3 trumpets, horn, 2 trombones, euphonium, tuba

I wrote this in January 2006 for the Humboldt contest; this year the instrumentation required was a brass octet. After several tries, I eventually decided to write a piece that told a story about, say, a Jewish tailor. Realizing that oh wait, Jason Robert Brown already did that in Last Five Years, and somewhat affected by the stories from my class on Jews in Spain, I changed the title to To Sepharad as an ode to Jewish Spain -- Sepharad is the Hebrew name for Spain.

The first movement, The Nagid, is named after Joseph ha Nagid, a Jewish vizier in one of the Taifa kingdoms, who was his king's general, trusted advisor, poet, physician, etc. in Muslim Spain. It's in 5/4 and, after an introductory prayer, goes gradually from very slow to very fast at the end, keeping essentially the same melody in variations.

The second movement, Ramban, is named after Rabbi Moses ben Nachman, or Nachmanides, of Christian Spain, partly famous for his debate against the only bishop to be succeeded by his son, Paul Christiani of Burgos. It's a natural enough march; there is no accelerando or much showiness, and there are no pretensions.

The third movement, Abravanel, is named after rather a family (I don't remember the first names; there were two Isaacs, I think) that was evicted from Spain in 1492 after the eldest member was one of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella's most trusted advisors. All Jews were expelled; some, like Abravanel's son, went to Portugal. He there begot a baby Isaac, who was forcibly taken from his father to be raised a Christian, and when the Jews were expelled from Portugal in 1497, Abravanel fled to Italy, where he wrote a letter he hoped would eventually reach this son. Naturally, this movement is slow and sad, with beautiful low brass chords and ugly out-of-the-mode trumpet chords, intended to sound like bells and represent the evil Christianity, interrupting the beauty. After a brief violent section, the low brass chorale takes up the melody again, and the tolling bells steal away members of the low brass chorale, who join the bells the next time, until all are taken. The piece ends with a solo tuba's unpunctuated lament.

This took me the better part of a month to write, with very little sleep. The Harvard Brass Ensemble was going to play the first movement, The Nagid, at Arts First on May 6, 2006, 2 PM, Sanders Theater, but they thought it was too hard.

Listen to To Sepharad - I - The Nagid (right-click to download)
Listen to To Sepharad - II - Ramban (right-click to download)
Listen to To Sepharad - III - Abravanel (right-click to download)

Tolyo March

2007-10-01T14:14:00.000-04:00

2 trumpets, horn, trombone, euphonium, tuba

This was my final project for Music 51; it's a brass sextet with the same instrumentation as Tower and it's a cute little march. The theme is just something I'd had in my head before, so since I had to write something, I figured a march would be most fun though most unoriginal. However, most everyone else wrote less exciting music and I got thunderous applause. I think it was my first time conducting at a performance, too. The Harvard Brass Ensemble performed a rendition (which differed from the original in many points, but such are marches) on May 6, 2006, in Sanders Theater.

The present "recording" does not follow the score exactly; it takes out the horn in one section, and reintroduces it at the end, with everyone else playing shorter and more quietly, with an accelerando. Such is the job of the conductor, I believe, and so I intentionally did not include these changes in the score. I may arrange it for band one day; we'll see. I originally wanted this to be in a Japanese march style, like Hello Sunshine, and titled it Tokyo provisionally. But I misspelled it. Whoops. And it stuck.

Listen to Tolyo (right-click to download)

Tower

2007-10-01T12:16:00.000-04:00

2 trumpets, horn, trombone, euphonium, tuba

This is a brass sextet I wrote in January 2005 for the Humboldt Brass Chamber Music Workshop, also performed by a brass sextet under my own direction at Harvard in the Holmes Living Room, Pfoho, on Sunday, 2/26/2006 at 4 PM. It was awarded third place. The three movements are untitled.

In Music 51 I was told not to write parallel fifths. Of course, this got me into trouble, because those things creep into your chorale writing and you don't notice them until the professor X's it in red pencil, so I banged out some parallel fifths and octaves on the keyboard until I got that little melody at the fast section. The intro tower chords, from which the piece gets its name, were my way of getting every voice into the forbidden parallel motion, with some chromatic alterations for fun. The rest of the first movement wrote itself; a little counterpoint with doublings at the fifth or fourth, some motifs came out of that, and eventually there was a sonata form. The second movement was something I was playing with on the keyboard for a long time which fascinated me because there were four chords, none with a third, and three of them were clearly major or minor. CGD, BbFC, AbEbBb, GDA... Neutral, major, major, minor. And no thirds. I improvised a little melody over them, heard in bars 5-8 and again in 9-12. This I already had before I found out about this contest, so I used that and continued writing based on themes from the first movement to both great effect and structure. Mmm, structure! The third movement I had less of an idea for what to do, but I felt it ought to be march-like. I had those first four bars for a long time before I could do anything else, but eventually I settled on the pretty obvious four-measure repeated line, over and over again. That's Tower.

Listen to Tower - I (right-click to download)
Listen to Tower - II (right-click to download)
Listen to Tower - III (right-click to download)

Welcome to The Harmony Note Book

2007-10-01T03:24:00.001-04:00

I am a student of harmony and composition, not so much in the formal sense but very much in the real sense, and as both cause and consequence I tend to think often about the meaning of harmony. In a way I am reinventing the wheel, but this is perfectly acceptable to me as the journey of harmonic discovery is as interesting as its mastery. On this blog I will post my thoughts about harmony and music in general, rant about Classical composers whom I dislike, and make uninformed controversial generalizations that anyone who is in fact a student of harmony in the formal sense will quickly point out are idiotic. Again, this is just fine; a lack of exposure to the longstanding traditions of musical thinking gives me a fresher perspective as well as a motive to rationalize why my talk is nonsense.

Feel free to correct anything you think is wrong, but remember that if I wrote it, it means I hear it that way, which you may not, and this is interesting in itself, since it speaks to a difference in perception of the same musical idea.

I will attempt to abstain from posts with nonharmonic tones like politics, Random Youtube Video That Is Funny, Why My Life Sucks/Rocks Right Now, general societal commentary (except on music), and How Awesome My Weekend Is/Was/Wasn't; for that, check out my LiveJournal at timmypowg.livejournal.com. I will NOT attempt to abstain from posting musical discoveries, analyses of music or musical moments, general comments about genres of music and why people should/shouldn't appreciate said genre but don't/do, and so on.

Be prepared for a non-traditional view of music. My genres of interest include music for wind ensemble, chorinhos, Jewish liturgy, MPB and bossa nova, videogame music, showtunes, and a bit of everything else. In real life I am a scientist (OK, fine, grad student), so what really concerns me is what makes this music tick. Why it sounds good, why it is effective or not, what elements convey a primary emotion, and also importantly, how these effects are achieved, how I can create them in my music, and so on. After all, I am an artist as well! What you won't find so much here are the "traditional" composers, especially those of the so-called Common Practice Period, as that is simply not the type of harmony in which I have interest.

Finally, I should restate that I am not a master of harmony but a student of harmony; there is much, much, much music with which I have no familiarity but probably should. This page will host what I hear as true and not what the "scholarly world" hears as true. I am also not a master of composition but a student of composition; my music is not always very good, but it is available (in synthesized recordings) at web.mit.edu/braunst/www. I always appreciate comments, and it is my plan to have a section of this site dedicated to each piece in order for there to be a convenient location for comments.

Thank you for reading, and do not hesitate to correct me!