...and when I wrote my paper about Dallapiccola's dodecaphonic "Quaderno per Annalibera" for a theery professor who had evidenced a snooty pedantic side whoever graded the paper red-pencilled "vertical simultaneity" and wrote that "'chord' sould suffice." Go figure.
Aaron J. Rabushka tempted to start another thread on great composers who bombed in academia [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://users.waymark.net/arabushk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Randolph Peters" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2007 12:43 AM Subject: [Finale] OT: music terminology > I wrote: > >>At Indiana University they kept drubbing into me "It's a MAY-SURE, > >>not a bar!" > > John Howell replied: > >Well, I never ran into that at I.U. (in grad school), and neither > >did my wife (as an undergrad). I suspect that it was one particular > >professor or A.I. who had that particular bug up his ... well, you > >know where! That, unfortunately, can happen. > > Composition was my doctoral major, but theory was the minor. (I'll > never know why they always pair these two subjects. It is a barely > concealed secret that they don't get along all that well.) > > Anyway, during the 80's the theory department was fairly strict about > its terminology. I guess they were trying to build their status in > the music theory world. I didn't mind. In fact I was glad to shed all > vestiges of the tired, old Royal Toronto Conservatory system that we > still have in Canada. > > Composers could be just as prickly. I'll never forget my composition > professor once exasperating, "That's not a chord! It's a sonority!" > (The idea being that "chords" are reserved for major, minor, > augmented, diminished and their extensions.) > > And I'm pretty sure that when we talked about tonality, we were > juxtaposing it against atonality. Anything with a tonal center (or > centers) was in the tonal camp. Functional tonality was a subset of > that. Atonality stood proudly against such "outdated" ways of making > music. (Boulez still talks like that.) > > It wasn't until recently, on this list, that Andrew Stiller convinced > me that such a nomenclature was absurd. > > ----Randolph Peters > _______________________________________________ > Finale mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale > _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
