Music Theory, maybe throughout history, is and was always a result of analizing, closely watching at and listening to what other people
already *did*. A rule did not neccessarily apply to them, as theory was always sort of later than the actual works theory dealt with. So what is does is to afterwards find out why certain horizontal / vertical elements of music actually sound good, for example. We often seem to assume that theory follows practice, because to argue the reverse seems nonsensical, but perhaps the attitude or even the worldview which would give rise to theoretical treatises in the field of music as in many other fields became embedded in the practice of writing music from a certain point onwards to begin with and then this thesis makes no sense. On an anecdotical note, what about composers such as Hindemith and Messiaen who both wrote long theoretical treatises and started to compose from there? What about Schoenberg and Webern whos theoretical work on polyphony (it was the topic of his doctoral dissertation) was enormously important for his compositional output? What about the theories of Boulez, Stockhausen and Xenakis? What about electronic music? In the cases where theory came sort of later, it would be interesting to know how much later and for which reasons. This is something that I am asking myself. I do not know when Bach became the prime example to study when talking about traditional counterpoint. We accept Bachs rules now as the common rules of counterpoint (although Bach broke a lot of them). This is because Bachs rules make a lot of sense to us now, but maybe also because there were powerful interests behind it during the 19th Century? Because we all had to learn it? I do not know much about this, but I wish there was more interest in other important polyphonic composers, in Ockeghem for example, who I find unbelievably good. Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
