The Instant Composer course - thoughts?

[dermichl]

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Seriosuly, I wouldn't pay a penny for something that's not personal tutoring. You can read books and articles on your own for less.

you're probably right, but what if no tutor is available?

[jancivil]

maybe this is close to a teacher : http://www.ars-nova.com/cp/

I think *Species Counterpoint* is a bit of a red herring at this point. That one does go on to JS Bach-based 4 part exercises.
"ERROR: the marked events are not characteristic of the chosen style". Says you, a machine.

Rhythmic aspects of melody

These principles apply to each melodic line, independent of the other voices. In the ideal polyphony each melody is of equal value and "makes sense" on its own. In practical music it is also true that some voices will in fact be more important than others.
Seems robotic and lacking context and meaning to me.

It's a certain type of feedback, I donno.
$65? Is there not a community college in your area?

[Dewdman42]

Peter Alexander is offering to provide this experience with the Fux text for what seems like a very reasonable rate. I once studied this privately and it cost many times more to have a "Master" assign cantus firmi for me to work on and then analyze my work to see whether I did it right or not.

The Fux text is even written as a dialog between master and pupil. That is the way it was intended to be studied.

Now I want to address all this balonie I have seen on this thread that counterpoint is not relevant any more.

HOGWASH!

Anytime you have any counter melodies going on against another melody, you have counterpoint happening. Counter melodies can even be buried inside the instrumentation as "voice leading". A lot of voice leading principals are derived from counterpoint.

The word "counterpoint" does not have to mean 16th Century Bach music.

So what is counterpoint? Counterpoint is how in music we go from one note to the next in a certain voice while other prominent melodic lines are doing something else. The 2 or more melodic lines work in harmony with each other, not just harmonically, but also counter-pointally. There are in fact very important principles about how melodies interact with each other, and that is what is learned through study of counterpoint, even if you study in the context of Fux and 16th century bach music, you will still learn important concepts that will translate into any musical context.

Studying counter point and voice leading are very similar pursuits, but the emphasis in counter point study will generally be to step away from the harmonic progressions we are normally thinking about with voice leading and think at a much lower level about the movements of one note to the next, against other movements of one note to the next. Intervalic relationships (for example, 7ths, 4ths, etc) are considered and principals of movement of those intervals. During counter point study you often end up with surprising chord progressions that ended up being something different then you thought it would, because your focus is not on harmonic progressions, but more on the movements of the melodies and the intervals between them.

Voice leading, conversely is typically much more in tune with harmonic progression. You have a melody, you come up with the harmonic progression you want, and then you use voice leading to construct the the way the progression will be voiced. So you know the chord progression in advance. If you study counter point you will find a lot of overlap between voice leading and counterpoint in terms of some of the rules. That's because in voice leading while you are trying to force a particular harmonic progression to happen, there are still some fundamental rules of counterpoint that apply, only you learned them in your voice leading class rather than counterpoint class, but they are the same principals. Counterpoint study just focuses in on that focused area.

One interesting observation is that with voice leading exercises you end up with surprising counter melodies that you may not have thought of before doing it. Its the reverse of counterpoint. With counterpoint exercises you end up with surprising harmonic progressions, with voice leading exercises you end up with surprising counter melodies. But remember, these are just exercises.

Great music does not just have bland chords underneath a melody line. It has movement in multiple voices. In the end, we usually want to determine what our harmonic progression will be, but I have found that having studied counter point, my brain starts thinking outside the box in terms of melody lines and intervals and how two or more melody lines are interacting and moving along.

It applies to all forms of music.

[el-bo (formerly ebow)]

In reality a basic course in composition is going to consist of;

fundamental music theory,
harmony,
counterpoint,
modal and post-tonal music,
often other styles (popular, jazz, film, world music etc.),
musical form,
instrumentation, orchestration and arranging,
aural training and transcription,
music production

at the risk of getting a thorough kvr lashing (both for diverting a thread, and for asking THAT question)

if i were to follow that journey, as listed, what resources might you recommend for each stage ?? my lack of music theory has been frustrating me, but i have been at a loss to know where to start to make sense of it all

ideally it would be from a complete series, so as to maintain continuity, but not too important. i am not looking for a quick 'zero-to-hero in 10 days', kinda thing, just a sign-posted path

if it causes too much stress, then i'll start a new thread

cheers

[jancivil]

a lot of overlap between voice leading and counterpoint in terms of some of the rules. That's because in voice leading while you are trying to force a particular harmonic progression to happen, there are still some fundamental rules of counterpoint that apply, only you learned them in your voice leading class rather than counterpoint class, but they are the same principals. Counterpoint study just focuses in on that focused area.

One interesting observation is that with voice leading exercises you end up with surprising counter melodies that you may not have thought of before doing it. Its the reverse of counterpoint. With counterpoint exercises you end up with surprising harmonic progressions, with voice leading exercises you end up with surprising counter melodies.

good stuff.

I never took a counterpoint course; by the time this was available to me I had become skeptical of very guided courses and I chose Form and Analysis which was just 'you go write a paper'. But counterpoint is where I live, it's my natural way of thinking, lines intersecting more than blocks. Yes, I did get my sea legs from part-writing in a given harmony.

[pathworker]

I am very skeptical of anything that says "instant" in the blurb. composition . like anything else worthwhile takes effort and some basic knowledge of working principles.

below is a link to some genuinely free documents for download from the internet archive.

https://archive.org/details/fwk-archive-20121229-4006

whether it is what the initiator of this thread is looking for i leave for to them to look and make theri own judgment.
hope it is of help to someone anyway.

another usefull link on music theory generally is this one;-

http://www.music-theory-for-musicians.com/