HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: idealord@dorsai.com (Jeff Harrington)
Subject: Re: Regarding the Questionable use of the Word -> Advance
Organization: The Dorsai Embassy, New York's Computer Consulate. +1.718.729.5018
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 14:00:50 GMT

rmc@wang.com (rmc) writes:

> idealord@dorsai.com (Jeff Harrington) asks:
> 
> > I would just like to briefly mention my interpretation of the discussion 
> > of "Advances in Music Composition" as being biased towards a teleological 
> > interpretation of music history.  Where are we going, people?  
>  
> > I still feel that the late string quartets of Beethoven are
> > infinitely more "advanced" regarding real human musical expression than
> > anything I've heard from this century.  (Bach's Art of Fugue, too).
> 
> 1)  I find the Bartok quartets "speak more to me" than the Beethoven
> quartets.  Last i looked, they were from this century.
 
Please, this was not meant as a criticism of 20th century music in toto.  
Bartok is one of my favorite composers.  My criticism was one of the use 
of the word "advancement."  How is a 20th century work more advanced than 
a 19th century work?  Is complexity inherently advanced.  Are works which 
are based on non-hierarchical tonal procedures more complex than tonal 
music?  Schenker's technology shows that tonal music is complex in a 
way which may be impossible to analyze completely.  Is this true with 
works based on simple number series, no matter how rhythmically complex.
 
> 
> 2)  I find that the various pieces by George Crumb setting the Lorca
> poems to music far more sophisticated in their "real human expression"
> than the entire corpus of Beethoven's vocal music and the Italian
> operatic composers, combined.  Maybe even just "Night of the Four
> Moons" all by itself.  (Although then one should ask the question "Why
> 'Night of the Four Moons' and not Ravel's 'Chassons de Medecai'
> (sp?)?").  Last i heard, George Crumb was alive and still composing.
 
Oh, I see, music by living composers is inherently more "advanced" than 
music by dead composers.  
 
> R Mark Chilenskas
> rmc@wang.com

It never ceases to amaze me how at mid century composers and musicians 
are so defensive of 20th century music.  Maybe if it were more popular, I 
don't know.  But my point is that the notion of advancement is 
symptomatic of a culture driven by academic achievement, not artistry.  
Artistry, no matter what Mr. Feldman thinks is not a "romantic" emotional 
process inherently.  It is fundamentally the capacity to speak and form 
truths through art.  
 

Jeff Harrington      
IdEAL ORDER               
idealord@dorsai.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.software,rec.music.compose,rec.music.makers
From: downs@helios.nevada.edu (Lamont Downs)
Subject: Re: Problem with Finale (PC) and Deskjet ! Help !
Organization: UNLV
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 01:23:00 GMT

>I recently bought the music notation program Finale for Windows. 
>But i have some printing problems: if I print in the normal way
>(i.e. ms-windows prints the file) the solution is *really* very bad.
>(I've a deskjet 500 but this isn't 300dpi which I receive, perhaps
>150dpi!!)
>I've also tried to compile a Postscript listing and then to print
>it by Ghostscript, but sometimes I receive some errors of which I think
>that they're caused by Ghostscript.
>
>Does anyone out there has the combination of Finale(PC) and HP Deskjet
>running ? Do you have anyhints to get a better printing qualitiy
>(either by windows or Ghostscript) ??

I'm not using the DJ (using a Canon BJ-330 instead) but it sounds like what 
I used to get before I installed Adobe Type Manager. If you're not using ATM 
or PostScript, Finale uses a bitmapped font which is not very high 
resolution for printing and looks terrible. With ATM installed, Windows 
uses the Adobe Type 1 information to create characters scaled to the actual 
resolution your printer is capable of. The difference in appearance with & 
without ATM (which costs about $50 or so) is breathtaking. Unfortunately, 
the current version of Finale does not work with Win 3.1's TrueType, though 
_supposedly_ a version 3.0 to be released someday will.

If you're already using ATM, just ignore this...

Lamont Downs
downs@helios.nevada.edu

PS: With ATM installed, _any_ Type 1 fonts you install become available to 
_all_ your Windows applications, not just Finale (for example, WordPerfect 
for Windows).
Newsgroups: rec.music.compose
From: fields@zip.eecs.umich.edu (Matthew Fields)
Subject: Re: // 5ths & 8ves
Organization: University of Michigan EECS Dept., Ann Arbor
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 14:29:23 GMT

In article <1992Dec29.021154.25210@cucs5.cs.cuhk.hk> bmtong@cs.cuhk.hk (Tong Bo-Ming) writes:
>idealord@dorsai.com (Jeff Harrington) writes:
>
>>Wait a minute, you're talking orchestration, whether by the use of 
>>octaves in the piano or in the orchestra.  That's a totally different 
>>thing from voice leading.  
>> 
>>Matt's got some good points.  Ultimately, anyone who thinks an Alberti 
>>bass never bends with the melody doesn't know the literature :-).  
>> 
>
>>Jeff Harrington      
>>IdEAL ORDER               
>>idealord@dorsai.com
>
>How do we distinguish between doubling and orchestration ?

I think the distinction is between counterpoint and orchestration.
Between things that I consider separate voices, I personally just DON'T
have parallel octaves.  Between melody lines that might be orchestrating a
single melody, I have A LOT of parallel octaves.  If you've got parts that
are moving along more or less independently, but suddenly in the middle
they just slip into one isolated instance of parallel octaves, you might
consider adjusting one of them so this doesn't happen.  In the case of the
texture you described [arppegiated descant, slow-moving bass, featured melody
in the alto], you could simply permute the order of pitches in the arppegiation
pattern.

To summarize this rather slippery idea with Yet Another Metaphor,
think of a 3-d saddle-point.  This locus is unstable, and objects on
it prefer either to shift on the x axis downward, or on the y axis
upward.  Similarly, many folks prefer to experience parallel octaves
as a constant feature of a melody or a banished feature of two
melodies. If you make it a rare feature of two melodies, then those
few instances are unstable in the ears of a classically-trained
musician.

Look at the two-voice fugue in E-minor from Book I of the Well Tempered
Clavier by J.S.Bach.  There are two separate measures where abruptly he
shifts to parallel octaves, i.e. one voice doubled--and in each case,
there's not just one isolated instance of parallel octaves, but TWELVE of
them in a row.  These surprising measures also mark key points in the
tonal rhetoric of the composition (I don't have the fugue handy, so I can't
tell you further details).
From: dvf@kepler.unh.edu (David V Feldman)
Newsgroups: rec.music.compose
Subject: Re: academia, power, priveledge...
Date: 30 Dec 1992 06:46:21 GMT
Organization: University of New Hampshire  -  Durham, NH
NNTP-Posting-Host: kepler.unh.edu

In article <1992Dec28.174552.26836@zip.eecs.umich.edu> fields@zip.eecs.umich.edu (Matthew Fields) writes:
>In article <1992Dec28.160411.7811@engage.pko.dec.com> sherman@ecadsr.enet.dec.com (My name is...) writes:
>>>But nobody should be teaching composition who doesn't complete at least...
>>
>>You know, this might be an invalid assertion.  In looking over some info
>>about many of the great recent composers, the name of Nadia Boulanger comes
>>up quite often...
>
>Two miscelanies here: Anybody know (of) any of her works? and
>on the other hand, I've met a couple of folks still living who studied
>with her (no names today but the initials WB and JC come to mind) who said
>that she was a meticulous teacher of theoretical exercises, but that they
>left her and went elsewhere to master composition...

I studied many years ago with a composer who had a stint studying with
Boulanger, who described her method thus:  She had a program that she
was ready to put any student through to turn them into a ``minor league
Stravinsky'';  some students would resist, having their own ideas.  If they
fought hard enough, she would engage them and help them develop their own
ideas.

I heard another story about her, from a younger man who took a class with
her when she was a much older woman.  She was playing a recording of
the Rite of Spring for the class, commenting all the while about all sorts
of details  (my friend, telling the story would say ``Ecoutez la fagotte.''
The sound from the record was scratch, distorted, unlistenable.  So my
friend asked her after the class how long she had had this particular
phonograph.  She proudly announced that she had acquired it in 1948, just
as soon as long playing records had become available.  So my friend asked
``Have you ever changed the needle?'' and she looked back in astonishment,
again as he tells it, ``Changez le needle?''  (Moral: you don't have to
be an audiophile to be a great musician; probably moot in the CD era.)

David


Newsgroups: rec.music.compose
From: idealord@dorsai.com (Jeff Harrington)
Subject: Re: academia, power, priveledge...
Organization: The Dorsai Embassy, New York's Computer Consulate. +1.718.729.5018
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1992 14:37:18 GMT

fields@zip.eecs.umich.edu (Matthew Fields) writes:

> In article <0105009A.mata17@david.roth-music.com> david@roth-music.com (David
> >
> >In article <1992Dec28.134620.16506@zip.eecs.umich.edu> (rec.music.compose), 
> >> 
> >> 
> >> Secondly, when I listed what I think a professor of composition should be
> >> doing regularly, I intended to be inclusive of all truly compositional
> >> activities, but not to include administrative work, computer support for
> >> other composers, abstract research with no work of entertainment as its
> >> end goal, or political maneuvering.
> >
> >In other words, waste resources while the University foots the bill
> >creating music theory works called composition to be played by a captive
> >audience of students who have payed dearly to attention a place of
> >higher learning.
> 
> So this is what Leslie Basset's premeires by the Detroit Symphony, or
> Bill Bolcolm's recent 9 sold-out premeire performances by the Lyric
> Opera of Chicago are all about.  Thanks for telling me. I could have sworn
> that the university wasn't paying for these, and that the audiences
> weren't captive audiences of students but a mixture of season subscribers
> and ticketholders.  I could have sworn they went because the folks had
> reputations for being entertaining.  But you obviously know better.
> 
> 
> 

Come on Matt!  You know that these schools are just papering the halls.  
The entire custodial staff of Bolcom's alma mater were _required_ to go 
to his concert!  ;-)  
 
Really, that guy just won't leave town (NY) here either!  
 

Jeff Harrington      
IdEAL ORDER               
idealord@dorsai.com
Newsgroups: rec.music.compose
From: idealord@dorsai.com (Jeff Harrington)
Subject: Re: music theory text
Organization: The Dorsai Embassy, New York's Computer Consulate. +1.718.729.5018
Date: Fri, 25 Dec 1992 00:10:21 GMT

whare@ac.dal.ca writes:

> Combinatorial hexachords. Cells. Serialism. Set theory.
> 
> Could some of you out there *please* tell me the name 
> of a textbook or two that would explain what these 
> things are? That is: what is your favorite tough good
> modern music theory text.
> Email me if you prefer.
> 
> Thanks!
> Andrew 

 
Basic Atonal Theory by John Rahn, 1980, Schirmer Books
 

Jeff Harrington      
IdEAL ORDER               
idealord@dorsai.com
From: borden@head-cfa.harvard.edu (Dave Borden)
Newsgroups: rec.music.compose
Subject: notational issue - timing
Date: 30 Dec 92 17:57:39 GMT
Reply-To: borden@m5.hravard.edu
Organization: Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, MA,  USA

Might anyone be able to offer me some advice on a notational issue?  I'm
writing out one of my piano pieces, a piece which has a lot of subtle
timing in it, like short accelerations, decelerations, rushing a little bit
here, delaying a little bit there, etc.  I'm really not sure how this sort
of thing is notated.  Any suggestions of what to do or where to look would
be appreciated.  Thanks.

  - Dave Borden
    borden@m5.harvard.edu
Newsgroups: rec.music.compose
From: fields@zip.eecs.umich.edu (Matthew Fields)
Subject: Re: // 5ths & 8ves
Organization: University of Michigan EECS Dept., Ann Arbor
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 18:27:04 GMT

In article <1992Dec29.021154.25210@cucs5.cs.cuhk.hk> bmtong@cs.cuhk.hk (Tong Bo-Ming) writes:
>My usual practice is this: if I have more than 4 parts, I allow myself
>to have some octaves (and sometimes fifths as well).  However, for n
>parts I only allow n-4 parallel octaves.  (What do you think about this
>?)  It is clear that the piece in my original posting does not obey this
>rule, and my ear tells me that it is not too pleasing to hear.  I
>would seek some 'justification' from you.


Whoops, this paragraph slipped right by me.  4 part chorale harmonization
works pretty good for choirs, but sounds pretty thin on, e.g., a harpsichord,
or too thick on 12-string guitar.  If you're writing instrumental music,
go look at a lot of instrumental music, and notice that the number of sounding
voices can change constantly, and indeed be one of the more interesting
variables of the composition.

Chorale harmonization tunes move mainly stepwise.  Look at, um, how
about the prelude to the D major cello suite (no. 6) of J.S.Bach.  The
melodic line is dominated by by leaps, and fills our ear with the
image of many melody lines that each move by step.  Look at the trio
of the minuet to the G major suite (no. 1).  This composition in g
minor has only one note sounding at a time, and is filled with leaps,
but clearly expresses three melody lines, each of which moves mainly by step.
This process of timesharing between melodies is called compound melody.
I'm reminded of a research project somebody did at CCRMA at Stanford
where they made a machine alternate between two different pitches, and
found that both increasing the speed of altenation and widening the
interval contributed to the sense of there being TWO sounds, whereas
even a wide interval played slowly or a narrow one trilled fast sounds to
most folks like a single sound source---a fact which composers had known
and exploited for centuries, without giving or asking for a detailed
quantification of the matter.

Texture, by which word I mean the variable number of sounding parts, their
distribution in register, the ways in which pairs of them may actually
sound like a single melody (due to doubling at the unison or octave), and
the ways in which individual lines may sound like multiple lines (through
compound melody), is a concept you can play with to great expressive
advantage.  I encourage you to go look at and listen to your favorite
classical works while concentrating on how they address texture...and to
play around with it yourself.
Newsgroups: rec.music.compose
From: fields@zip.eecs.umich.edu (Matthew Fields)
Subject: Re: academia, power, priveledge...
Organization: University of Michigan EECS Dept., Ann Arbor
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 19:19:08 GMT

In article <0105009A.mata17@david.roth-music.com> david@roth-music.com (David A. Roth) writes:
>
>In article <1992Dec28.134620.16506@zip.eecs.umich.edu> (rec.music.compose), fields@zip.eecs.umich.edu (Matthew Fields) writes:
>> 
>> 
>> Secondly, when I listed what I think a professor of composition should be
>> doing regularly, I intended to be inclusive of all truly compositional
>> activities, but not to include administrative work, computer support for
>> other composers, abstract research with no work of entertainment as its
>> end goal, or political maneuvering.
>
>In other words, waste resources while the University foots the bill
>creating music theory works called composition to be played by a captive
>audience of students who have payed dearly to attention a place of
>higher learning.

So this is what Leslie Basset's premeires by the Detroit Symphony, or
Bill Bolcolm's recent 9 sold-out premeire performances by the Lyric
Opera of Chicago are all about.  Thanks for telling me. I could have sworn
that the university wasn't paying for these, and that the audiences
weren't captive audiences of students but a mixture of season subscribers
and ticketholders.  I could have sworn they went because the folks had
reputations for being entertaining.  But you obviously know better.



Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.software,rec.music.compose,rec.music.makers
From: stefan@sinus.stgt.sub.org (Stefan Bechtold)
Subject: Problem with Finale (PC) and Deskjet ! Help !
Organization: Sinus Stuttgart, Germany
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 1992 22:22:06 GMT

Hi !

I recently bought the music notation program Finale for Windows. 
But i have some printing problems: if I print in the normal way
(i.e. ms-windows prints the file) the solution is *really* very bad.
(I've a deskjet 500 but this isn't 300dpi which I receive, perhaps
150dpi!!)
I've also tried to compile a Postscript listing and then to print
it by Ghostscript, but sometimes I receive some errors of which I think
that they're caused by Ghostscript.

Does anyone out there has the combination of Finale(PC) and HP Deskjet
running ? Do you have anyhints to get a better printing qualitiy
(either by windows or Ghostscript) ??

Thank you for any response,
Stefan
-- 
+ Stefan Bechtold # stefanb@delos.stgt.sub.org # Voice +49 711 813240 +
++++++++sed nemo potuit tangere: merda fuit ! (Martial III 17)+++++++++
From: mangoe@cs.umd.edu (Charley Wingate)
Newsgroups: rec.music.compose
Subject: Re: Carping and Per Diem
Date: 23 Dec 92 11:30:16 GMT

Jeff Harrington writes:

>Excuse me, but this is utterly ridiculous.  The concept of an artist 
>wishing suffering on herself is a product of pop culture.  (A mis-guided
>caricature attempting to poke holes in the artifice of self-importance so 
>hated by the popular media).  

Hey, you're the one who brought up suffering and the rent.  (And HAVE you
heard the "Bach Portrait"?!?)

>My point, (one more time, please turn up the volume for the hard of 
>hearing) is simple and concrete -> real artists do what they have to do.
>They don't compromise; they are truthful to themselves.

I agree with your first sentence, but not with your second, at least not in
such a bare form.  It's not that I think that they should be untrue to
themselves, or that I think that they should compromise their musical
integrity, whatever that means.  And the "whatever that means" is, I guess,
the crux of the matter.

>Our culture is in serious trouble because we all make too many compromises.

I disagree completely with this.  If anything, this is an era of absolute
stands on everything; your statements are entirely within character with it.
The problem with this approach, at least in the arts, is that it produces a
lot of junk, because it makes art essentially an act of self-indulgence.  If
you will not "compromise", then you become your sole audience.  Indeed, the
more typical end is that your in-group is your sole audience, and you can
easily end up with garbage like half of what passes for "classical music" in
this century.

Understand this: I do agree with your assertion that someone consumed with
wory over the bills and the like is going to have trouble producing.  But I
don't think that has anything to do with art; it's a very everyday sort of
thing.  And again, some of what you say about not compromising is true; if
one cannot establish one's voice and stick to it, one is destined to be a
copyist, a rewriter, rather than an artist.  But there are degrees of
compromise here, and in my experience, the great artists work with those
rather than in a perpetual combat against them.
-- 
C. Wingate        + "The peace of God, it is no peace,
                  +    but strife closed in the sod.
mangoe@cs.umd.edu +  Yet, brothers, pray for but one thing:
tove!mangoe       +    the marv'lous peace of God."
From: alves@calvin.usc.edu (William Alves)
Newsgroups: rec.music.compose
Subject: Re: Advances in composition
Date: 31 Dec 1992 14:11:36 -0800
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: calvin.usc.edu

David V. Feldman writes:
>(William Alves) writes:

>"If it works well for you, go for it. But changes in compositional techniques
>"to me should be driven by the necessities of personal expression, and thus a
>"historically changing process incidentally, not by design. 

>Again, I lack an object language for "the necessities of personal expression"
>that would usefully distinguish these from the products of expression.
>The process of composition, for me, is too complex to admit the 
>simplistic *a priori* hierarchization that you would mandate (at least for
>yourself.)  Materials, ideas, taste, practical exigencies, accidents,
>extramusical notions, experimentation, the input of others all these rebound
>one against the other until music results.  I hear in your comment an
>echo of the Romantic idealization of the creative process that would priorize 
>emotion, as though composers preceded directly from mental states to sound 
>images, with training, technique, thought, planning, design all at best
>necessary evils.

Whoa! Hardly. I use the term "personal expression" begrudgingly and only
in the most general sense. I don't mean to imply the romantic ideal of
communication of emotion AT ALL. Nor am I asking for a "simplistic *a
priori* hierarchization...mandate" (if I even know what that means). I
said nothing about the composition PROCESS. Of course materials, ideas,
taste, input, etc. are all important. The question is: are results adopted
from these processes because they best suit the music, or because there
is some extra-musical notion (e.g. a serial use of cells that has inter-
esting properties and hasn't been tried before) that the composer is trying
to put into practice? Of course there's a whole spectrum between these
two extremes - I never said there wasn't.

In fact, I see Schoenberg's, not my own, point of view as an echo of
romantic idealism. The cult of the individual genius that came to pervade
the 19th century caused originality and innovation to often become aesthetic
priorities sometimes at the expense of how the music sounds (or, yes, the
personal expression of the composer). For, how else can an artist be a
truly individual genius if what he/she is saying or even the language she/he
is using is not truly original (so I suppose the romantic-vestige argument
would run). 

Schoenberg might object to the term "innovation," because he wanted to
emphasize that his method was a logical historical development, but the
inversion of aesthetic concerns sticks. Thus the language of technology,
which is also concerned with innovation building off of previous experi-
mentation crept into the language of composition: research, experimenta-
tion, discoveries, and so on.

I don't argue that composers aren't influenced by new music and new ideas,
just that the reasons for the adoption of some of the ideas have changed.

Bill