When we talk about "classical music"...

If you haven't guessed already, I'm using both this (recently resurrected) Facebook page and my blog as sort of a free music theory class, only I'm teaching it way differently than they do at conservatories.

You can also teach yourself most of what you'd learn at a university just by reading Wikipedia articles. (But I'd always study further elsewhere.)

There isn't really a set definition of what is collectively called "classical music", so I try to avoid using the term except when talking about Classical-era music (Haydn, Mozart, earlier Beethoven), and use "Western common practice" as a broad term to include the the Baroque, Classical and Romantic eras. (This does not include early music, i.e. the ancient, medieval, or Renaissance eras; nor does it include modern-contemporary music. However, the lines that begin and end common practice are blurry; one has to set an arbitrary date range, such as 1600-1900.)

What unites common practice music? A number of things:

• a chromatic scale with twelve notes per octave; the gradual dominance of equal temperament; quarter tones and other microtonal intervals were never used
• tonality based on major and minor keys, with major and minor scales (for the latter: natural, harmonic and melodic), as opposed to modes in early music and atonality in much modern music
• relatively little distinction between sacred and secular music
• functional harmony, predictable chord progressions and cadences
• divisive meters (simple and compound), rather than additive meters, and a steady pulse and a generally consistent tempo (the usual time signatures were 4/4 or common time, 2/4, 2/2 or cut time / alla breve, 3/4, 6/8, 9/8 and 12/8, with little use of odd meters such as 5/4 and 7/8)
• the virtual disappearance of notes longer than a whole note (i.e. breve, longa, larga); the end of mensural notation and the dominance of modern staff notation
• the establishment of bel canto and the standard tessituras of soprano, alto, tenor and bass voices
• the widest gulf between "high" (art) and "low" (popular and folk) musics; this would begin to be broken down in the modern era

... and so on and so forth.

Quarter-, third- and sixth-tone accidentals

The system of microtonal accidentals I've been using for most of my music. (Though a quarter tone would be at least vaguely 50 cents, a third tone 33 cents and a sixth tone 17 cents, this is not for exact 72-edo--I use a similar but different system for that.)

The sixth-tone sharps and flats (the natural signs with arrows) are also used when a third-tone accidental is combined with a regular one, e.g. third-tone sharp plus (half-tone) flat equals sixth-tone flat.

These symbols are contained in fonts available in Finale and Notepad, and also Sibelius and the Scorch reader.

The Istanbul Manifesto (work in progress)

In December 2011, I got together with some fellow composers, who I had already met online, in Istanbul, Turkey. While I was there, I was going to write a sort of "manifesto" of my musical ideas and plans, but I didn't have time.

Two and a half years later, while still working on my vast musical projects, I've decided to form my own circle of composers, like the Russian Five (Могучая кучка) or France's Les Six. However, my group would be international, and not limited to a such a small number of composers.

While having a great deal of diversity, we would be united by these concepts:

• The innovations and revolutionary ideas of the 20th and early 21st century masters would be continued, with serialism, minimalism et cetera being used not as genres unto themselves as much as techniques. At the same time, the music would be rooted in the music of the common practice era (Baroque, Classical, Romantic) as well as early-music era, while still progressive in outlook. (It would take Liszt and Wagner's side in the "War of the Romantics".)

• In the spirit of the ancient city which straddles the natural border between Europe and the Middle East (the Bosphorus), non-Western musical styles will be explored, with their melodic complexity that often uses pitches outside the conventional twelve-tone scale, and complex rhythms in both additive and divisive meters. Also, it would be important to treat these "world music" styles with respect and not misrepresent them as Ersatz. Appreciate, don't appropriate.

• For reasons stated above, and in the spirit of experimentalism/the avant-garde, tuning systems not based on the twelve-tone equal tempered scale should be greatly employed. I personally will be using 72 equal divisions of the octave, but other tunings--19, 22, 31, 41, 53 and other equal temperaments, Harry Partch's 43-tone just scale, historical meantones and well-temperaments--should also be explored.

• These ideas should be implemented not only in "high" art music, but in popular styles in a spirit of populism, while not "selling out" or "dumbing down". Progressive rock and metal in particular is fertile ground for such ideas. Another related concept is Gebrauchsmusik, that music should often have a useful purpose (including in theater, film, video games and the like), though it should always stand on its own merits.

• The relationship between music and other arts, and also literature and philosophy, should also be emphasized, as these disciplines are ultimately inseparable. Again, the emphasis will be on modern and postmodern schools of thought.

My invitation will be rather open, to any like-minded composer, musician and music lover. I want it to be an egalitarian, democratic organization, not anything with a dictatorial "leader".

More ideas to be added as they come to me.

Taking a break from composing; studying instead...

Note: I have a major blog entry to make very soon.

In the meantime, I'm back to studying Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Principles of Orchestration (English translation with commentary courtesy of Garritan, whose instruments I proudly use and endorse--Russian original in PDF format at IMSLP).

I'm also looking for anything about his grandson, Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov (article from German Wikipedia), himself a St. Petersburg-based composer who wrote quarter-tone pieces.

Apollo vs. Dionysus in an eternal football match

I was writing all kinds of positive and negative canons and weird inverted this and retrograde that and getting as spaced-out mathematically as I could and I was going "Wait a minute (laughs), who cares about that stuff?" I had always liked rhythm and blues so here I was stuck between the slide rule and the gut bucket somewhere and I decided that I would opt for a third road someplace in between.

--Frank Zappa, interview with Martin Perlich, 1972

There's a concept in philosophy: a dichotomy between the Apollonian aspects of art (intellectual, logical, "left-brained") and the Dionysian (emotional, "right-brained"). Nietzsche (with whom I've always had a love-hate relationship) is famous for developing this theory in The Birth of Tragedy, though he was not the first in doing so, even among modern German philosophers.

I'm oversimplifying a bit, but art music (i.e. classical traditions from around world; also jazz) tends to be Apollonian; popular and folk music Dionysian. My goal is to make my music a balance of both, intellectual and emotional.

The intellectual aspects come from many sources, from Baroque fugues and other counterpoint, to Classical form, to Modernist serialism and mathematical experimentation. The emotional from Romanticism, music from film, television and video games, and of course, popular music forms. Beethoven and Stravinsky both sought a balance of Apollonianism and Dionysianism, the latter in his later Neoclassicism and his earlier primitivism of The Rite of Spring.

My use of microtonality is also linked to this opposition. I arrived at 72 equal divisions of the octave after doing some middle-level mathematical calculations, finding a convenient equal temperament that approximates just intonation best, beyond the imperfection of 12-tone tuning. I also wanted to "paint with more colors", expressing moods well beyond the major and minor dichotomy.

I'm also taking a balanced populist approach to composing, writing for a broad audience and avoiding too much elitism while not dumbing myself down. I do the same for philosophy and other sciences.

Edit: I use the website TV Tropes a lot when talking about philosophy. There is an article on Enlightnment (in music, the Baroque and Classical eras) versus Romanticism.

A quote about Béla Bartók, from a book I've been reading

"Like Grainger in England, Bartók brought with him an Edison cylinder, and he listened as the machine listened. He observed the flexible tempo of sung phrases, how they would accelerate in ornamental passages and taper off at the end. He saw how phrases were seldom symmetrical in shape, how a beat or two might be added or subtracted. He savored 'bent' notes--shadings above or below the given note--and 'wrong' notes that added flavor and bite. He understood how decorative figures could evolve into fresh themes, how common rhythms tied disparate themes together, how songs moved in circles instead of going from point A to point B. Yet he also realized that folk musicians could play in absolutely strict tempo when the occasion demanded it. He came to understand rural music as a kind of archaic avant-garde, through which he could defy all banality and convention."

--Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise, p. 83