Scholarly writing and how to get it done. / And a workshop for my own ideas, scholarly and poetic
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I am posting this as a benchmark, not because I think I'm playing very well yet. The idea would be post a video every month for a ye...
Tuesday, December 4, 2018
9 measures
I was writing down a piece of music. I decided not to use Sibelius, and am now using a free program I downloaded on line that is much easier to use. Any way, I noticed that the phrases are 9 measures long, with a structure A B A B. Both A and B section have a structure of 5 + 4. It is kind of interesting that I didn't notice that until I started to notate it. I never thought even of the bar lines at all. I won't know what my Niedecker piece is, either, until I compose it on paper. I don't even think of quarter notes or eighth notes, though I do think very self-consciously about harmony.
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This stuff matters and yet many musicians don't discuss it. This past month, I made a Christmas carol arrangement for my choir, and we performed it. The tune is a fairly well-known one with an irregular phrase structure: 3 bars, 3 bars, repeat, 4 bars, 3 bars. I built on this in the arrangement, with interludes of various other odd composite lengths. In all the back and forth with the director, the other singers, the rehearsal pianist, and five instrumentalists, nobody else mentioned it. (Well, indirectly the percussionist did, but I had already brought it up in trying to explain his part.)
But once you start looking for this sort of thing it's everywhere. One of the reasons for the distinctive character of Classical finales is the greater reliance on binary groupings, e.g. sections of 4 phrases of 4 bars. And one of the sources of the distinctive character of the Brahms "Haydn" variations really is the unusual phrase length.
That is, Mozartean finales use 4x4 more than the first movements do, on the whole. Philip Glass uses this in his symphonies too.
There's an Artie Shaw version of "A Foggy Day" with a 7-bar introduction. It bugs me every time. Yet my song works because the asymmetry is itself symmetrical, repeated four times in exactly the same pattern.
You could make your asymmetries balanced, or complementary, rather than simply repeated. There are lots of ways to create satisfying form.
I'm sure that's true. I haven't quite arrived there yet.
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