Joseph, in the 2nd bar of excercises 2 & 3 you have a prominent diminished 5th between top & middle voices, which is forbidden (also known as the devil's interval), which you also leap from to an octave in the 3rd exercise, the B (leading note) needs to be used sparingly and only really at a cadence. Octaves should be limited to the final bar. Species counterpoint is definitely quite tricky, so keep persevering, from experience, it can really be very beneficial.
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Actually, in Counterpoint in Composition the diminished triad is permitted if it's in first inversion. Octaves also permitted if starting the exercise (or indeed finishing).Originally posted by Suffolkcoastal View PostComment
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Very brave.
Jacob Gran has some good videos - starting here - https://youtu.be/z08lTYclpps
also Kati Meyer - https://youtu.be/leFg0WDwmLQ
and Alan Belkin https://youtu.be/NMUTN43Kw2A
Josef Fux's book (in translation) is worth having too. The Study of Counterpoint: From Johann Joseph Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum.
MuseScore can help a lot too to try out the ideas - though it's not by any means perfect.
I'm still trying to do some of the cantus firmus exercises in Fux's book - but other things have caught up with me. We seem to be going opposite directions - I'm looking into jazz improvisation - not that I intend to go far with it - but just curious as to how it works.Comment
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I think (but am not completely certain) that Salzer & Schachter base the species counterpoint section of their book on Fux's book. I don't actually have Fux's book, but I do have Schoenberg's counterpoint text, and in fact most of his other didactic books.Originally posted by Dave2002 View PostComment
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Salzer and Schacter is good, but I couldn't decide whether to get the Kindle version or the printed version, so in the end I bought neither and settled for the Fux. The samples of Salzer and Schacter (both versions) on the Am.uk website give what I suspect is a good representation of its quality. Until I've got further with that I can leave S&S for a while.Originally posted by Joseph K View Post
I have Schoenberg's composition book.
In the meantime - https://youtu.be/TZleqbjwEuAComment
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I agree. It does make you more aware of what's going on between the voices when you move on to "proper composition". I studied harmony and counterpoint for a short time with the late Elgar expert Brian Trowell, who remarked that it was easy to tell from my exercises that my first instrument was the guitar. Ouch!Originally posted by Suffolkcoastal View PostComment
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Editing my current project t now. There’s some extra parts this music I’m transcribing, so I’m able to reduce the score by eight parts. This helped out an awful lot.Don’t cry for me
I go where music was born
J S Bach 1685-1750Comment
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For whatever reason, I found this cantus firmus (which like the last one, I wrote myself) much easier to write counterpoint against. I wrote most of this in about an hour, today.
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Have now listened right the way through - but I will have to listen again. I liked the first part a lot - but I need to hear it all again.Originally posted by Suffolkcoastal View Post
Re uploading to Youtube - if you wanted to do that can't you split it into two parts and upload separately? Not very convenient perhaps, but it would overcome the difficulty wouldn't it?
Otherwise you could perhaps allow Richard access to the score on MuseScore, and he could then download and watch it in whatever form he wanted. As I mentioned earlier it might be easier to not see the blank staves if instruments are "at rest", and it would also be possible to see it in different views - such as Continuous view. I can understand that you might not want to do that - and that using the public methods for distribution which don't permit downloads might make sense - but how you decide on whether to allow someone else to look at your work is for you to decide.Comment
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Follow up to above.
If you want to post your work to MuseScore.com with almost the same settings as now, so that it can be viewed but not downloaded, then if you set the page size to A0 and in landscape mode I think it will show up in the online version of MuseScore with a lot more legibility, and playback with sound would be easier to follow.
Of course if anyone did then want to print it, they would have to have an A0 printer - but if most people are viewing scores online that wouldn't matter so much.
If you are going to upload more versions though, then I still feel that Format->Style -> Score -> Hide empty staves within systems would be helpful.
I did a test to check that this A0 page setting works - and it seems to do so. Setting the View mode to Continuous locally doesn't do anything useful - as the online system doesn't recognise local settings.Comment
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Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy (D760). Going well so farBest regards,
JonathanComment
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I discovered - to my surprise - that I must have written this about a month ago -
I guess I had nothing better to do at the time - usually the way!Comment
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Still practising BWV 998. I've changed my opinion about what the hardest movement is - before I thought it was the Allegro, now I think it's the Fugue, because yesterday I was able to get through most of the Allegro at quaver = 120 - granted that's not 'Allegro' but it sure did feel good! And it's not too far off... getting my metronome out and timing various performers, I should be able to do it at more like 140 or 150. Not far to go... while the three-part textured Fugue is still proving quite tough to put all of it together.Comment
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Improvising and playing with an app
Just spotted this video - and mention of an app which seems possibly to be helpful and of use to some performers (probably jazz mostly) and improvisers - https://youtu.be/Dazb5XgvJOw
I like Aimee Nolte's videos - she seems knowledgeable and talented - I don't think there's really any doubt.
The Genius Jamtracks app seems cheap enough - so even though I'm wary of "celebrity" endorsements, this might be something worth checking out.
I wonder if anyone round here has done so already, or would like to try.Comment
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I've been videoing myself a fair amount over the past few evenings playing this piece. I'm now at a place where I feel, at least this evening, that many of the technical difficulties I once had with it have been solved, and now, some of the difficulties manifest themselves as psychological, so that I found this evening the opening page the most difficult section and that, once I'd got over that, I could relax more (this despite the putatively more difficult passages being on the second and third pages).
Yes, I am aware that the performance is not perfect, there are hesitations and scuffed, missed and mis-fretted notes...
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