On Fri, 30 Nov 2007 22:23:26 -0800, mmille10@comcast.net wrote:
The second course got more into "keyboard" harmony, as you put it. We learned about keys (ie. C major, etc.), identifying notes and chords by sound and making associations, learning "keyboarding" on a piano (doing scales and chords). The most interesting part to me was learning about the choral scheme. For the first time we discussed "music with constraints".
I'm admittedly a bit of a geek here (my degree is in music), but it's a fascinating trek through western music if you link up history and composition. Gregorian chants were highly constrained by certain rules (that would ultimately become the foundation of the "well-tempered" music we listen to today) but even as you look them over, you can see where the rules got broken, and how transgression became tradition over time.
Adding that second note to create harmony, melisma (extending a syllable over many notes)--it's sort of a wonder to realize that the music we listen to didn't just "happen".
For me, the pinnacle of the pre-harmonic/tempered era is de Lassus's Prophetiae Sibyllarum: The melodic lines all "make sense", and together the tones create what we would consider today to be relatively simple chords (i.e., major and minor), but there's little respect paid to what we would would call "key".
As a result, if you listen to it =vertically= (as we are trained to do from birth), it can seem very confusing. But if you listen to it =horizontally=, it makes perfect sense.
===Blake===