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Reddit mentions of Twentieth-Century Harmony: Creative Aspects and Practice
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Reddit mentions: 19
We found 19 Reddit mentions of Twentieth-Century Harmony: Creative Aspects and Practice. Here are the top ones.
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There are a lot of courses. Any specific topics you're interested in?
Edit: I'll just list a few anyway that I've used in classes (this may not reflect all professors' choices for the same subjects).
Tonal Harmony: Kostka-Payne - Tonal Harmony
Counterpoint 1: A Berklee book by the late professor Rick Applin. Some also use this Fux translation/adaptation
Counterpoint 2: Bach Inventions & Sinfonias (any edition, really)
"Advanced" Counterpoint: The Well-Tempered Clavier (again, any edition)
Early Twentieth-Century Harmony: Persichetti - Twentieth-Century Harmony
Post-Tonal Theory/Analysis: Straus - Intro to Post-Tonal Theory
Instrumentation/Orchestration: Adler - The Study of Orchestration &
Casella/Mortari - The Technique of Contemporary Orchestration
Western Music History - Burkholder/Paiisca - A History of Western Music (8th or 9th edition)
Conducting 1 - Notion Conducting
Conducting 2 Notion + Stravinsky's Petrushka
Berklee's own (jazz-based) core harmony and ear-training curricula use Berklee textbooks written by professors which, as someone else mentioned, come unbound and shrink-wrapped at the bookstore. You can find older (PDF) versions of the Berklee harmony textbooks here. Of course this list only represents explicit book choices - there are a lot of excerpt-readings, and there's a lot of instruction that isn't found in these books even in the associated courses.
Normally, I would try to (somewhat) annotate stuff I link/mention but I'm tired on all levels of my being so forgive me for making this reply less detailed than I'd like it to be. Keep in mind that I don't know sht and half the time, I'm talking out my ss.
Mostly I hope this, at least, helps you guide your search. Or the things I write here are so horribad that it prompts someone to viciously correct me, thus giving you the real info you need! :p
I might circle back after some time to add notes here and there. Maybe. Also, this first reply will be focused on quartal harmony but I should be able to muster up the spoons to write up a search guide for minimalism later.
First, there are some really neat proto examples of quartal/quintal harmony in Medieval music. The starting search term for this would be organum. There were/are more than a few kinds^A of organum but examples of parallel organum should be most interesting to you.
David Fenwick Wilson has a book on Early music called Music in the Middle Ages: Style and Structure. It's admittedly an older book but I mention it specifically because there's a lovely youtube video^B with examples from the related anthology. As always, I'm a sl*t for Norton's music history books^C so check those out as well, imo.
Outside of the realm of "classical" music, most of the quartal harmony you'll encounter will be in the form of quartal voicings^D for otherwise tertian chords. It's a favorite trick for more than a few jazz giants so naturally, there's an absolute glut^E of resources for this.
When we get to classical music though, we start to get some actual spicy stuff, like fully formed quartal harmonic systems and languages. Paul Hindemith was a BIG fan of quartal stuff. You can check out his own writings^F about his musical system in his book on composition. Arnold Schoenberg also devotes a section in his book on harmony^G to the newer quartal sounds cropping up (well "new" when he wrote it at any rate).
From there it's really a matter of doing the grunt work of either analyzing composers you find writing quartal harmony OR researching analyses of said composers. Sure, quartal harmony (and the related term "interval cycle") gets mentioned in more than a few books on 20th century harmony like Vincent Persichetti's^H or Richard Strauss's^I books; both might be good jumping off points on your journey.
Seemingly, every composer and their mother (Hindemith, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Copland, Cowell, Ives) experimented with quartal writing in the 20th century. So while definitive guides might be hard to track down, specific examples aren't. I'll include an analysis or two that you might find helpful in the list below. Be on the look out for any edits I might sneak in!
Beyond that, perhaps the most concrete way we could help you would be to analyze specific pieces/instances of quartal language you find and walk you through any questions you had about the piece. When I'm not tired, I'm usually down to dig into some cool music. Drop a score, ask something, and let's analyze something together! Still, I hope this helps. Have fun on your compositional journey and take care!
A.) https://sophia.smith.edu/~rsherr/earlypol.htm
B.) https://youtu.be/SgHzH5iDcGQ
C.) https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393929157
D.) https://leadingtone.tumblr.com/post/8203279125/quartal-voicings-in-jazz-here-refers-to-an
E1.) https://www.jazzguitar.be/blog/quartal-chords-harmony-voicings-for-guitar/
E2.) https://www.thejazzpianosite.com/jazz-piano-lessons/jazz-chord-voicings/quartal-voicings/
E3.) http://greglui.com/blog/quartal-voicings/
F.) https://www.amazon.com/Craft-Musical-Composition-Theoretical-Part/dp/0901938300
G.) https://www.amazon.com/Theory-Harmony-ANNIVERSARY-Arnold-Schoenberg/dp/0520266080
H.) https://www.amazon.com/Twentieth-Century-Harmony-Creative-Aspects-Practice/dp/0393095398
I.) https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Post-Tonal-Theory-Fourth-Joseph/dp/0393938832
J.) Berg's Lyric Suite has plenty of quintal yumminess. Check out Perle's analysis of its interval cycles: https://www.jstor.org/stable/741747?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Go and buy yourself a copy of Twentieth-Century Harmony by Vincent Persichetti! It sounds like just the thing you need, and it's legit the most inspiring theory book I've ever had!
And some musical recommendations: Jack Conte has some really harmonically interesting songs. It's never atonal or anything, but there are still some cool weird chord progressions I don't think I've heard anywhere else. Also, go back and listen to some Carlo Gesualdo! Seriously, there's some really out-there stuff in his music, even to modern ears.
Because you have an issue of constantly writing in the same key, I feel like your issue won’t be solved by just learning about modal interchange. I believe that thinking about harmony and phrase structure Functionally would be of more use to your process.
Every chord in a harmonic progression serves a function that can be broken down into 3 basic categories:
Each chord flows to the next, so a progression from:
Tonic -> Subdominant -> Dominant -> Tonic
Is atypical. It’s important to note that Tonics can come after a subdominant (T - SD - T), and the subdominant can be skipped and a tonic can lead directly to a dominant (T - D - T). Tonic chords can also lead to other Tonic chords (T - T), the same goes for subdominants and Dominants (S - S; D - D) so our new chart would look like this:
Tonic -><- Subdominant -> Dominant -><- Tonic
Harmonic progressions serve functions as well, and you can reduce almost every harmonic progression can into 3 basic categories (some would say there are only 2, but I prefer to think about it in terms of 3):
I - V - I
I - IV - I
i - ii^o - i
V - I - V
iv - i - iv
I - vi
IV - ii
ii - ii^6
I - vii^6/5ø - I^6
Etc etc
vi - ii - V - I, iv - V - VI, ii - vii^o - V - I, ii - I6/4 - V^7 - I
Etc etc
Ex
(by ascending 4th) vii - iii - vi - (ii - V - I)
(By descending 2nd) V - IV - iii - iii - (ii - V - I)
(Descending 4th) I - V - ii - vi - (V/V - V - I)
Etc etc etc etc
You can interject prolongation and cadential functions in between each sequential chord: I (V - I) - ii - (vi - ii) - iii - (vii - ii) etc. you can also tonicize each chord in the sequence: I - vii^o / ii - ii - vii^o /iii - iii etc etc etc
Phrase functions are also a thing, and these are strongly linked to Harmonic Progression Functions this is where both the theory behind natural chord progressions and sets of harmonic progressions come together. Understanding and being comfortable with phrase functions is extremely important.
In a typical musical sentence, you would have phrase structure that looks like this:
Presentation -> continuation -> cadential
A typical musical period looks like this:
Antecedent -> Consequent
You can mix and match functions to your pleasure, (one b.i. followed by a continuation function; antecedent -> continuation; antecedent -> continuation -> consequent; presentation -> cadential; etc)
Because you write rock music, adhering to Classical Formal structures is not gonna happen. However, each function and it’s interior components (b.i. , c.i., continuation, fragmentation, etc) are used in an altered way very very frequently.
I did not cover modulation is this post, but I will link an article below.
I hope this helps, bellow I will link some sites and books that could help with understanding these concepts beyond this post:
Links:
http://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/mt21c/HarmonicFunction.html
http://openmusictheory.com/sentence.html
http://openmusictheory.com/period.html
http://openmusictheory.com/hybridThemes.html
http://openmusictheory.com/themeFunctions.html
http://openmusictheory.com/popRockForm-functions
http://openmusictheory.com/Modulation.html
Books:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Analyzing-Classical-Form-Approach-Classroom/dp/0199987297
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Melody-Songwriting-Berklee-Guide-Perricone/dp/063400638X
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Twentieth-Century-Harmony-Creative-Aspects-Practice/dp/0393095398
Persichetti's 20th Century Harmony might be exactly what you're looking for.
20th century harmony goes fairly in-depth about all of those topics.
For orchestration, the Adler book is definitely the modern day definitive book, but as a high schooler, paying for the Adler is probably not on your to-do list. Instead, I recommend the Rimsky-Korsakov because it's free on IMSLP.
http://imslp.org/wiki/Principles_of_Orchestration_(Rimsky-Korsakov,_Nikolay)
For composition, I recommend Persechetti's book, Twentieth Century Harmony. It's not really about telling you how to compose, it's more like an encyclopedia of possibilities and descriptions of what those possibilities sound like.
Writing short little concentrated pieces is a very good idea. Try creating as much material out of the smallest idea you can. I like to pick a small little theme/motif and just run with it.
The piano music I've been listening to includes; Scriabin (I have a book of his Piano Sonatas on my desk right now), Bartok, Prokofiev, Roslavets, Mosolov, Bach, and Beethoven. If you like Scriabin then I suggest going on youtube and listening to Roslavets and Mosolov, they write in a very Scriabin-esque fashion.
Books, I personally love reading about music. I do a lot of reading about composers and about harmonies and stuff. Wikipedia is a good place to start, but it's certainly not a definitive source. Persichetti's book on harmony is a good book for harmony, it certainly helped me think about harmony in different ways. And Modernism in Russian Piano Music is very good if you're looking to mimic Scriabin/Prokofiev and other composers of that musical language.
Here is a list of books that I own and were recommended to me.
Harmony and Voice Leading by Aldwell/Schachter/Cadwallader
Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven by Caplin
Study of Orchestration by Adler
20th century Harmony by Persichetti
Many of the best books written about 20th century music were written by relatively unsuccessful composers. Eric Salzman, Robert P. Morgan, even Alex Ross who is known as a journalist and not a composer studied under Peter Lieberson (Ross wrote The Rest is Noise).
That said, perhaps you'd enjoy The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer's View of Twentieth-Century Music by George Rochberg. There's also Michael Nyman's book, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, and George Perle's collection of essays The Right Notes.
If you're really concerned about what composers consider important in composing music, I would read a book about 20th century theory & composition, not a history book. If it must be written by a "successful" composer, check out the classic by Vincent Persichetti - Twentieth-Century Harmony: Creative Aspects and Practice.
You could do worse than pick up a cheap copy of Persichetti.
Playing two chords at the same time is also called a polychord. Vincent Persichetti's "Twentieth-Century Harmony" has a good section on polychords. https://www.amazon.com/Twentieth-Century-Harmony-Creative-Aspects-Practice/dp/0393095398
It's true that there's a ton of great information online, but books present the info in an organized, trustworthy fashion. Online learning should be fine for more introductory music theory and common practice period harmony, but once you're looking into more advanced stuff, check out these books:
-20th Century Harmony by Vincent Persichetti
-Contemporary Harmony by Ludmila Ulehla
Great that you know what you want to do with the webapp. As said, break into small chunks and conquer. Even to the point of 'sit at desk', 'open computer'... so small that it's impossible not to do them. On the days where that's too much, just imagine yourself doing it. This will create cognitive dissonance and make you want to do it. This video shows you how.
Yeah work your way up to jamming. Play along CD's like Aebersold are great to start with.
First step is to learn the Cmaj scale fingering. Once you have that, move up a string and you have the Fmaj fingering. As said, practice around the circle of 5ths.
I'm living abroad too ha ha. I know exactly how you feel. I recommend reading this book.
Some Books that I have that are good are:
Twentieth Century Harmony by Vincent Persichetti
Theory of Harmony by Arnold Schoenberg
A Chromatic Approach to Jazz Harmony and Melody by David Liebman
I have no single favorite chord. But if I shared my whole list of favorites, I would be giving away all my compositional secrets!
Here's one though. I like this monster:
B♭2 A♭3 C4 E4 G4 B5 D5 F#5 B6
Those doubled B♮ notes over the B♭ bass ought to sound like a train wreck -- but they don't, thanks to the other supporting notes.
As to how to hear it or parse it, you can treat it as a polychord: in slash notation, perhaps Bm / B♭13#11? That's how you are likely to play it at a keyboard.
Alternately, read composer Enrique Ubieta's thoughts on the idea of augmented 15th chords, which Vincent Persichetti also considers in his Twentieth-Century Harmony. I think the notes in this stack mesh well enough that you are less likely to hear it as a polychord, and more likely to hear it as a dominant 13#11 with a #15.
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You mean this I think.
I recommend Persichetti's Twentieth Century Harmony instead. I think you may find it closer to what you are looking for.
You can combine with what you learn in that book with a little more flair and flavor, from this book: Twentieth Century Harmony. But if you can only get one. Get the Fundamentals of Musical Composition above.
https://www.amazon.com/Twentieth-Century-Harmony-Creative-Aspects-Practice/dp/0393095398/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1518151206&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=Twentieth+century+harmony