Treatise on Chromatic Harmony

Treatise on Chromatic Harmony
Author: Tomás Morales y Durán
Publisher: Libros de Verdad
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2022-12-08
Genre: Music
ISBN:

What we call today "Western Music" has been turning over millennia into a gigantic accumulation of intellectual crap seasoned with religious necromancy without anyone stopping to try to put order in this mess. The abuse of so much rancid irrationality has made it a forbidden ground for reason and that it is only accessible through the abuse of memory and repetition; of suffering, in short. From Pythagoras, who wanted to reach twelve notes by combining seven different series of seven notes each, to the monk Guido of Arezzo who had the idea of ​​recording music with ink so that his melodies would not degenerate when going from one monastery to another. He designs the solfeggio with the obsessive idea of ​​avoiding playing the cursed tritone that would invoke Satan, dragging any good Christian into the most terrible hells, an idea that excited the Pope of the time and that ordered his learning. Another monk could not be missing, Miguel García alias "Padre Basilio" who at the end of the 18th century put so many strings on the guitar that he found himself with the problem that he did not have enough fingers to play three notes with six strings using only four fingers, so he dedicated himself to arranging orthopedic postures so that the new instrument would not sound horrendously bad. Most musicians are unaware that we are in the 21st century, that we know how to count to twelve, that we have devices for recording music that are better than India ink, and that we have five fingers on our right hand with which to select which strings to play and not just a deformed stump to tear them. We know that sound is produced in the auditory consciousness. We also know how we hear based on our anatomy and we have done neuroscientific studies with which we have defined harmony based on subjective relative dissonances and even that the most important thing, rhythm, is what music draws. Music differs from noise in its simplicity, and if there is anything a healthy brain hates more than complex sounds.

Composition, Chromaticism and the Developmental Process

Composition, Chromaticism and the Developmental Process
Author: Henry Burnett
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 431
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1351571338

Musicology, having been transmitted as a compilation of disparate events and disciplines, has long necessitated a 'magic bullet', a 'unified field theory' so to speak, that can interpret the steady metamorphosis of Western art music from late medieval modality to twentieth-century atonality within a single theoretical construct. Without that magic bullet, discussions of this kind are increasingly complicated and, to make matters worse, the validity of any transformational models and ideas of the natural evolution of styles is questioned and even frowned upon today as epitomizing a grotesque teleological bigotry. Going against current thinking, Henry Burnett and Roy Nitzberg claim that the teleological approach to observing stylistic change is still valid when considered from the purely compositional perspective. The authors challenge the traditional understanding of development, and advance a new theory of eleven-pitch tonality as it relates to the corpus of Western composition. The book plots the evolution of tonality and its bearing on style and the compositional process itself. The theory is not based on the diatonic aspect of the various tonal systems exploited by composers; rather, the theory is chromatically based - the chromatically inflected octave being the source not only of a highly ingenious developmental dialectic, but also encompassing the moment-to-moment progression of the musical narrative itself. Even the most profound teachings of Schenker, and the often startlingly original and worthwhile speculations of Riemann, Tovey, Dahlhaus and others, still provide no theory of development and so are ultimately unable to unite the various tendrils of the compositional organism into a unified whole. Burnett and Nitzberg move beyond existing theory and analysis to base their theory from the standpoint of chromatic 'pitch fields'. These fields are the specific chromatic pitch choices that a composer uses to inform and design a complete composition, utilizing

Charles-Simon Catel's Treatise on Harmony and the Disciplining of Harmony at the Early Paris Conservatory

Charles-Simon Catel's Treatise on Harmony and the Disciplining of Harmony at the Early Paris Conservatory
Author: Michael J. Masci
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2023
Genre: Harmony
ISBN: 1793630461

"This book traces the formation of the discipline of harmony at the Paris Conservatory, focusing on the seminal work of Charles-Simon Catel, and outlines the processes that would determine the content and scope of the discipline for much of the nineteenth century"--

A Geometry of Music

A Geometry of Music
Author: Dmitri Tymoczko
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 469
Release: 2011-03-21
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 0195336674

In this groundbreaking book, Tymoczko uses contemporary geometry to provide a new framework for thinking about music, one that emphasizes the commonalities among styles from Medieval polyphony to contemporary jazz.

Desire in Chromatic Harmony

Desire in Chromatic Harmony
Author: Kenneth M. Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2020-04-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 019092344X

How does musical harmony engage listeners in relations of desire? Where does this desire come from? Author Kenneth Smith seeks to answer these questions by analyzing works from the turn of the twentieth- century that are both harmonically enriched and psychologically complex. Desire in Chromatic Harmony yields a new theory of how chromatic chord progressions direct the listener on intricate journeys through harmonic space, mirroring the tensions of the psyche found in Schopenhauer, Freud, Lacan, Lyotard, and Deleuze. Smith extends this mode of enquiry into sophisticated music theory, while exploring philosophically engaged European and American composers such as Richard Strauss, Alexander Skryabin, Josef Suk, Charles Ives, and Aaron Copland. Focusing on harmony and chord progression, the book drills down into the diatonic undercurrent beneath densely chromatic and dissonant surfaces. From the obsession with death and mourning in Suk's asrael Symphony to an exploration of "perversion" in Strauss's elektra; from the Sufi mysticism of Szymanowski's Song of the Night to the failed fantasy of the American dream in Copland's The Tender Land, Desire in Chromatic Harmony cuts a path through the dense forests of chromatic complexity, revealing the psychological make-up of post-Wagnerian psychodynamic music.

Audacious Euphony

Audacious Euphony
Author: Richard Cohn
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2012-01-23
Genre: Music
ISBN: 019977269X

Reconstructing historical conceptions of harmonic distance, Audacious Euphony advances a geometric model appropriate to understanding triadic progressions characteristic of 19th-century music. Author Rick Cohn uncovers the source of the indeterminacy and uncanniness of romantic music, as he focuses on the slippage between chromatic and diatonic progressions and the systematic principles under which each operate.

How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care)

How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care)
Author: Ross W. Duffin
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2008-10-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0393075648

"A fascinating and genuinely accessible guide....Educating, enjoyable, and delightfully unscary."—Classical Music What if Bach and Mozart heard richer, more dramatic chords than we hear in music today? What sonorities and moods have we lost in playing music in "equal temperament"—the equal division of the octave into twelve notes that has become our standard tuning method? Thanks to How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony, "we may soon be able to hear for ourselves what Beethoven really meant when he called B minor 'black'" (Wall Street Journal).In this "comprehensive plea for more variety in tuning methods" (Kirkus Reviews), Ross W. Duffin presents "a serious and well-argued case" (Goldberg Magazine) that "should make any contemporary musician think differently about tuning" (Saturday Guardian). Some images in the ebook are not displayed owing to permissions issues.