Artefact Creation
The Contour Project
Introduction
"I had a basic contour structure of six elements: 5-1-4-3-6-2, the numbers giving relative altitude of which I made lots of transformations, mapping them to the pitch domain, filling in the notes between the elements mostly as fast scales but sometimes recursively as contours in their own right. In fact I used quite a lot of different techniques to it. For the Dutch among us: no, it doesn't have much to do with Loevendie.It's much, much, much better."
"...that's "skyscrapers" and is a reference to carpenter's use of a template."
"The Etudes by Maurice Ohana and Ligeti kind of flows between tonal and atonal and i think they might provide good solutions!"
It's never clear to me whether "rit." is short for "ritardando" or "ritenuto" - which in my mind are different: literally, "delaying" vs "held back". Kind of like the difference between merely taking your foot off the gas, and putting on the brakes. "Rall" of course is always "rallentando" which is the only one that has a literal meaning of "slowing down". Same root as "Lento." Then there's "calando" which is a term which applies equally to dynamic and tempo, meaning simply "decreasing." And there's "slentando" - yet another way of slowing down. The "s" prefix is interesting in Italian, as it has two opposing meanings when used: one deriving from Latin "ex," or "out" and therefore being a superlative prefix; and the other being derived from the Latin "dis" andtherefore being a negating prefix (sfortuna = bad luck). "Slentando"is the superlative use, therefore meaning "slowing down a lot."
Early atonality/analysis
Before analysis, listen to: Debussy: Feuilles mortes, No.2 of Book 2of Preludes; Skriabin: Vers la flamme op.72; Schoenberg's Gurrelieder,2nd string quartet, and Songs from the Book of the Hanging Garden, inthat order.Analyze:Schoenberg op.19.Berg, 4 pieces for clarinet and piano.Schoenberg op.11.You might come back and look at bits of the quartet and some of thesongs from an analytic point of view, but the 3 pieces for analysislisted above are chosen for their conciseness and clarity ofstructure, so in addition to continuing the trends from the listening,they are also highly amenable to analysis.
This would be a historical approach. You might also consider going infrom the extremes; listen first to, say, some Xenakis - 'Eonta' woulddo fine - or some Stockhausen - 'Kontakte' and 'Gruppen', I'd say -before going to middle Schoenberg. *******************
write a 5 minute piece based on the dialog between two random triads (no matter what degree). (schoenberg said berg Was musical, because Berg "understood music as a language"). if the five minute piece seems uncomposable, change the triads to fourth patterns (this will give a differnt "kind" of sound." string the notes of the chords out into time: make a simple melody from them. if the melody sounds too simple to you (go back to andrew lloyd webber, or:) raise every other note by a semi-tone. if this sounds more interesting as music, then extend the structure, note by note, until you have a tone-vocabulary you can write off of. see if you can make complicated chords from just this tone-group. see if you can make music that sounds like something more than a science-fiction film soundtrack! maybe you can't, and then you might throw in a quotation from tristan or michael jackson (supposedly to be droll, but actually to throw needed contrast to the listener.) gather all your friends together who also want to be modern and improvise "in the style", free-form Webern (we actually used to do this in cambridge during the 60's!). really modern music is non-scale oriented: samples of sounds bent and barked. it's very interesting stuff. "atonal" and "tonal" (for the musically musical) are retro and enjoyable, but i wouldn't advise any young composer to spend more time reading Boulez or Stockhausen's comments on their music than actually listening to them. Composers invent sound-stuctures. are you into sound or are you into "music"? i'm into music, but who really cares?
The Rules
- Awaiting rules...
Some Ideas
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General Notes from the last time this was done
This project has not run before (oh no...!).
A few other general points:
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Good luck!