A picardy is a minor-major switcheroo. When music is sad, and suddenly turns triumphant, this is the picardy at work. And it is all thanks to one little note – the Third or Mediant. In the example above, the Mediant is the note in the middle – the Third. In C Minor the mediant E […]
Archive of posts filed under the Bloggies category.
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
There’s a kind of swelling of guitars, like violins joyously weeping. Some of them, are possibly reversed. Who can tell? They cyclone around the protagonist’s sorrow, wrapping up the episode’s final moment, when the TV composer twists it all around and drops a heavy Twin Peaks chord on the Stringboard, if only to launch the […]
Dwo Durtle Doves
The turtle dove sings around a C♮ and C# in sets of three. Click and drag over each phrase above. Those are trills of 64th notes, or maybe even 128th notes. You can call them “hemdemisemiquavers”. To check his pitch, just click the Rabbit Face on the Color Keyboard up top. That’s a C Natural […]
Do You Know Your CBA’s?
Have you ever been on your way to a gig, when the police and their portamento cries pull-over your tour-car, and force your band to perform all manner of hazing rituals and musical games? Musicians and civilians alike are expected to recite things never learned by rote, or learned at all—retrograded songs, inverted childhood concepts—and […]
Bustin’ Makes Me Feel Good
The high B and C on a pianoforte drive the spirits away. Every house should have a baby Steinway, just in case, for bustin’s sake. Oh, but don’t you go anywhere poltergeists! You can rap upon the walls, bewitch the acoustics and electronics. Add some much-needed white noise. Watch Murray hit this little semitone upside […]
Owlisimo
Igor Stravinsky relates the following story in his “Conversations with Robert Craft” (Now with computerized sounds!): “On a recent visit to Asolo, to see the composer Malipiero, I was strongly reminded of D’Annunzio. Malipiero has a most extraordinary and not entirely un-D’Annunzian house himself, a fine Venetian building on a hillside. One enters under a […]
