This is an experiment and I do
 

Hello M.G., I've been w
 

Hello M.G.,

I've been watching and listening to the progress of this piece over the last several days, as you submitted it in some bug reports (regarding adding notes after mid-measure clef changes). My ear was definitely hearing the augmented chords. Until you described above what you were doing, I didn't realize that the augment chords were naturally produced by the whole tone scale premise of this composition.

I think "experimenting" with constraints, such as sticking to a whole note scale, is an excellent way to develop one's composition skills. If I were to teach composition to others, that would be one of the main pedagogical techniques I would employ. Here, you have very strictly constrained yourself to the whole note scale. Such a constraint can paradoxically be very liberating. It means that you can, and should, focus on all the other elements of the music, which is exactly what you've done!

Within the constraint of the whole note scale, you have exercised much freedom in rhythms and texture. Texture in piano music is like orchestration in an orchestral piece. In piano music, texture is, to a large extent, how notes are distributed across the 88 keys, just as notes are distributed across instruments in an orchestra.

Other elements of texture that this piece uses to keep variety and interest are: octaves, rolled chords, and arpeggiation of chords at different speeds.

The whole note scale and its subsequent confinement to augmented chords come at the cost of homelessness, quite similar to the disorientation that 12-tone serialism brings to (or, rather, takes away from) harmony. This piece does convey such a feeling of "where am I, where am I going?" Such can be the consequence, if not the intention, of restricting the piece to the whole note scale (or 12-tone serialism).

If disorientation in harmony, homelessness is not the intention of the piece, then there might be ways to ground it. There are moments in which this piece seems to be to briefly settle harmonically, before it takes off again in long stretches of whole note and arpeggiated augmented chord sequences. I haven't tried to analyze what it is that offers these brief moments of harmonic groundedness, but for my ears, I found those moments satisfying-- similar to a V7-to-I resolution-- and wished for more such moments and longer such moments. I don't know if that's possible within the confines of the whole note scale. Debussy would know.

I'm quite interested in your work here, especially the idea of restricting yourself in one dimension of the music so that you might actually feel more free in the other dimensions of the music. I've often done the same thing myself. For example, I've written a suite of piano pieces, each one that confines itself to a special interval (minor and major 2nds, minor and major 3rds, augmented 4th, perfect 5th, minor and major 6ths, minor and major 7ths). Each hand is only allowed to play a the vertical interval, never (or rarely) single notes. I had a lot of fun writing these pieces and felt that I learned a lot doing so.

Cheers
-- Mark

Hi Mark, Thanks for your co
 

PS. When are you going to pos
 

PS. When are you going to post the piano suite? It sounds very interesting.

mgh

Hello M.G., Wow, this piece
 

Hello M.G.,

Wow, this piece is really developing. Your last version stopped around measure 25. More and more things are happening as it goes on. Tension is building. The whole note scale is relentless in holding back resolution.

<blockquote><hr size=0><!-quote-!><font size=1>quote:</font>

I wonder if a couple of places your ear heard a resting, a grounding, was in measures 6 and 8?<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>No, those seem to be rhythmic resting places, but not harmonic. Actually, I don't hear anything like a resolution in harmony. Such might be impossible staying purely in a whole not scale, because the resultant augmented 4th chord is the least resolving of any chord in the 12-tone universe.

I think what my ears were hearing were not resolutions in harmonies but, rather, shift in tonal centers. Here's where I heard some:

• last half note of measure 3
• last half note of measure 11
• first beat of measure 12 (the last half note of measure 11 seemed like a very brief harmony modulation that immediately returned at the beginning of measure 12)
• first beat of 20 (which you recognize with a key signature change)
• at the 2nd beat of measure 28, everything changes, with a chromatic progression of whole tone chords (augment 4th chords)-- this was a smart idea to build up even more interest

It's clear that your using your head, as well as your emotions, in composing this piece. Many listeners will probably find the piece too cerebral. But I would offer this piece to would-be listeners as a challenge, to listen outside of the bounds of normally expected harmony and focus on what else is happening in the music. A lot is happening in the music.

By the way, can you play this on the piano?! It's playable, but probably only by a virtuoso pianist. The left-hand leaves are killers for the pianist (but effective compositionally).

<blockquote><hr size=0><!-quote-!><font size=1>quote:</font>

When are you going to post the piano suite?<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>When am I ever going to get around to entering any of my past compositions into Composer, I ask myself.

Cheers
-- Mark

Howdy, I have nothing of va
 

Hi Mark, Thanks again.
 

Hi Mark,

Thanks again.

I am stuck a bit now, or rather working out the next section in my head.

One change. The last two beats of measure 11 should have an A minor chord in the right hand as well as the left.

You ask could I play this. Once upon a time, yes. Now, definitely not--not even with practice, at least not up to tempo. Too long away from the keyboard. But I haven't been worrying about human performance yet. When I get that far, there are a number of places some annotation might be added (e.g., measure 12, suggesting some RH over), and some simplification might be in order. But I suspect there will be some passages, even then, that might require a virtuoso's technique.

quote: When am I ever going to get around to entering any of my past compositions into Composer, I ask myself.

Perhaps you need to furnish a copyist with a copy of Composer ;)

all best,
mgj

Hi Sherry, Thank you for yo
 

Hi Sherry,

Thank you for your interest. It is fun, after many years of thinking I'd really like to play with that toy, to actually get your hands on it, wind it up and put it through its paces.

This started out as pure experiment, but the intention changed somewhat when the idea flickered across my mind that what I had so far done made a very good impression of a couple of cats I had known, both large, both white, both as friendly as dogs, and both about as cat-graceful as elephants trying to pick their way through the Viking glass outlet store. One of them pulled a chair frame down on his head and spent the last half of his life as a winking kitty; the other could jump up onto a shelf and knock down a glass which was sitting at the BACK of the shelf. But I'm more after a general impression that specifics--the kind of impression of character one gets from looking at a portrait as one concentrates on one feature then another and finally derives an overall sense of the person (or cats, in this case).

BTW, I've decided to get my new whistle on my next visit to the city, where there are a couple of music stores (and it will make filling the gas tank a bit less disgusting).

The "Simple Gifts" piece is a week, maybe two, away from being ready to send. I'm working with volume levels now.

all best,
mgj

Howdy M G, You are one busy
 

Hi Mark and Sherry, I think
 

Hello M.G., Congratulations
 

Hello M.G.,

Congratulations on finishing this piece. It demonstrates a lot of composition technique. You were able to do this so quickly, too.

<blockquote><hr size=0><!-quote-!><font size=1>quote:</font>

One think I haven't done with this piece until about a half hour ago is apply the acid test--that is, listen to it whole.<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>I wish I could write that way. Until I had Composer, I wrote at the piano, I would start at the beginning of the piece, and play up to the point where I had last stopped writing, and improvise a few more notes, or if I were lucky, a few more measures, and jot them down. It was like pushing a manual lawn-mover over deep grass-- I'd keep having to back up, often from the beginning edge of the cut lawn, to gain enough momentum to cut another foot of grass.

Seeing the incremental versions of the piece that you have submitted to the forum, it's clear that you write in voices and lines. That's a good approach to writing music for certain styles. I should do more of that myself.

Good work!

Cheers
-- Mark

Hi all, Mark was right. Th
 

Hello M.G., I haven't p
 

Hello M.G.,

I haven't printed Tassle and Smudgie yet to try playing it, but I can see that my downfall will be the leaps in the bass. That just happens to be an especially weak area in my playing. I've always been lousy playing ragtime for that reason.

The Lento marketing doesn't seem quite right to me, but I think I understand where that slow tempo marking comes from. There is overall a slow rhythm of 3 half notes per measure (that's what you mean by waltz, right?), underneath which there are fast rhythms. I'd probably side-step the issue and use d=47 (47 half notes per minute), and give the player some initial expressive suggestion rather than a traditional Italian tempo.

I wonder, though, whether I'm hearing the whole rhythmic structure differently than what you intended. (This is issue sort of like that famous ambiguous drawing of an old "hag" lady, which if you look at it a different way looks like an early 1900's much younger woman wearing a hat with a feather.) Instead of a 6:4 meter (which suggests a division of two dotted half notes), and instead of a 3:2 meter (which suggests divisions of 3 half notes-- the waltz?), I hear 2:4 (each measure has two quarter notes). This way of hearing the piece probably totally destroys the waltz that you heard when you were composing it. Is the waltz the 3 half notes per measure? I do hear and see a 3:4 waltz starting in measure 33, ending later, but starting again in measure 59. Perhaps you're playing games with the listeners ear, shifting between a 3:2 waltz and a double-time 3:4 waltz?

I suspect that the reason I'm not hearing the rhythmic structure as clearly as you do, as composer, is that no MIDI velocity editing has been done yet. Every note has a velocity of 64. It's fairly tedious to manually edit the velocity of notes. A later version of Composer will have tools that will make it easier to do a lot of MIDI velocity editing at once. The current version does have some options that can help. For example, if you add accent marks, then you can use a Region menu command to select notes that use a particular accent mark. Then you can change the MIDI velocity of those notes all at once.

I'll be very interested in hearing your orchestral version of Tassle and Smudgie, if you decide to do it.

Cheers
-- Mark

Hi Mark, No, I think you
 

Hello M.G., Your explanatio
 

Hello M.G.,

Your explanation about what the 6/4 meter is used throughout the piece makes sense to me. 6/4 is a common denominator between 3/4 and 2/4, which are alternatively used through the piece, like shifting gears going up and down hills in a car; and in other places "there is a less frequent primary accent", which gives the piece a feeling of fluidity, consistent with the "homeless" harmony of the whole scale and subsequent augmented 4th chords.

Regarding your last comment, I didn't intend to imply that the piece is not done, unless you mean that the annotations are done. I can empathize with that; more times than not I never get around to adding any annotations except the most important ones. Heck, I know what my piece is supposed to sound like, and nobody else is ever going to play it, so why bother? :-) (I don't really believe that; I added dynamic marks, accents marks, and such fairly early in the development of Composer.)

I've tried to imagine the personality of your two cats. I hate to admit it, but I'm a cat person also. In fact, I used to have a "Developer's Blog" at this web site, and I talked about my cat a lot. Nobody was interested. I can't blame them.

Let me guess at the personality of your cats, based on your musical descriptions of them; and you tell me whether I'm close or not. These are fairly mature cats, but not really old. Maybe 5 to 7 years old. Their personalities are fairly similar; they're a pair; I didn't hear a conflict of personalities between the two cats. They are somewhat aloof-- not the kind of cats where you say, "here kitty, kitty" and they come up running to be petted. Nevertheless, they are friendly (and, of course, especially friendly to you; cats aren't dumb; they know who feeds them). Even in middle age, they have a certain amount of playfulness, but restrained, somewhat dignified, in contrast to the playfulness of kittens, or an adult cat that has had too much catnip. How close was I? If I'm wrong, please shoot me instead of thinking you need to rewrite the piece to better describe the cats. Usually, I listen to music abstractly, so I don't have a lot of practice listening for stories or portraits. 'Kitten on the Keys' is an exception.

Cheers
-- Mark

Hi all, I won't pretend
 

as a PS to the above, here is
 

Hello M.G., Your addition o
 

Hello M.G.,

Your addition of various annotations (dynamic marks, accent marks, RH/LH, tempo marks, etc.) make this piece look finished. It's a pleasure to see as well as hear.

It was fun guessing what your cats were like.

Cheers
-- Mark