What is wrong with music theory?

[trimph1]

::D

When I started out as a kid it was the trumpet. this one neighborhood dog would find out every time I practiced and swing by to jam, just post himself at the window and go for it.

Our neighbour has a schnauzer that does that everytime I go out to my driveshed to practice..HA!!..on my sax. Mind, the feral cats that I have out there do their own song when i do that as well...I got a real menagerie going here..

[jancivil]

ONE MORE TIME:

this is entertainment.

HEHEHEEEEE



why I sing da blues

[jlocri]

'no parallel fifths',

Well you'd be wrong there, parallel fifths were encouraged for orchestration. Also, you're likely to find a few parallel fifths in Brahms works, Mozart's works and even one of Handel's works. Their normal justification was that the interval didn't appear on important tones. This has been acceptable since about mid/late baroque music, it still disrupts melodic individuality imo.

ideas that certain intervals following others just aren't done in a line

I don't quite understand what you mean, but I think my first paragraph applies.

I guess my only point is, and it's a bit cliché, there are no rules. You just think there are because your university lecturers made it seem that way (taking marks of for parallel fifths... wow). In truth, there are a few principals and people who understand them see them as tools, people who don't (for whatever reason) see them as restrictive rules.

There's a midpoint between dogmatically following the conventions and dogmatically going against the conventions. I call this "creativity."

I did my due diligence on correct part-writing and found it a useful discipline but the context was perfectly clear to me.

I hope you realize that context isn't strictly composition? At least not since Ockeghem, who ironically predates Palestrina IIRC (whose music most strict part writing texts are based off of).

I see part-writing as a way of creating a harmonic framework and no more, but even then this view is seen as pretty obsolete and old-fashioned by a lot of people.

[jancivil]

'no parallel fifths',

Well you'd be wrong there, parallel fifths were encouraged for orchestration.

I guess my only point is, and it's a bit cliché, there are no rules. You just think there are because your university lecturers made it seem that way...

I think nothing remotely like that and never have. You asked me what rules Frank Zappa didn't like in high school and that's the best of my recollection from something I read twenty years ago. In four part writing, it takes points off your grade to use parallel, or hidden perfect fifths. Or it did in my experience, without exception. In James Gallatin's Honors Curriculum class I got a 96 on the final instead of a 100% for one hidden fifth. That says nothing about what I think. I was a bit peeved because I nailed that exam AND 'it sounded great'. As far as rules that apply to what I write, this is something I haven't thought about, like ever. It's like scales, I don't think about then. If I was f**king somebody, doing squats aren't what's on my mind.

this is what I do I don't guess my 2 years of conservatory are any great burden today.

[trimph1]

hhmmmmm....it would have been interesting to have heard from him just what the issue was with a 'hidden' perfect fifth in a piece of that sort....

I know some people were going on about 'cliche's' but....

[jancivil]

it's a rule, he was being strict. He hadn't any issue with it, he kind of apologized for it 'it sounded great, but I had to take 4 points off'. I'd like to have heard it.

It was a severely hard exam. All his exams were hard, but this was nuts. A lot of people did not complete the part-writing. I was still blazing on acid from the night before so I was zoomed in like Dock Ellis without the wildness. He was a grad student at the time. It seems to me like it was a stretch to call it wrong at all, it was so obscure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consecutiv ... nsecutives

f**k! there are many loopholes. I was just a kid, what did I know. IMO I aced that thing. "The parallel fifths [in the German sixth] arising from the natural progression to the dominant are always considered acceptable, except when occurring between soprano and bass. They are most often seen between tenor and bass. The third degree is, however, frequently tied over as a suspension, or repeated as an appoggiatura, before continuing down to the second degree" (Piston, Walter, Harmony,)"

I was looking at this in the aug. 6th thread.