http://www.christonium.com/music-and-movies/ Counterpoint Wed, 17 Mar 2010 01:02:51 MST en-us http://www.christonium.com/music-and-movies/Super_Flumina_Babilonis http://www.christonium.com/music-and-movies/Super_Flumina_Babilonis Wed, 02 May 2007 03:32:54 MST I will be posting periodic updates to a harmonic and structural analysis on Palestrina's "Super Flumina Babilonis" to this item. The attached PDF is the GPL release of the score. http://www.christonium.com/music-and-movies/Counterpoint_in_Modern_Music http://www.christonium.com/music-and-movies/Counterpoint_in_Modern_Music Fri, 20 Apr 2007 06:04:10 MST I'm thinking backwards towards the great composers. Who were they in their time? I don't mean the men themselves. I mean to question how the world around them perceived them. Bach was virtually unkown; Handel, a popular legend; Mozart, a prodigy; Beethoven, a tortured genius; Brams, a visionary and gaurdian. From Brahms onward I see a schism accelerating, which I believe is directly related to Thomas Edison's invention of sound recording. In 1876 Brahms completed his first symphony. It took him nearly 20 years to complete. When Brahms finally debuted his First Symphony it recieved mixed critical review but it was destined to become the most popular symphony ever composed. It was during this time that I percieve to be the begining of the end for what is now called classical music. In 1877 Thomas Edison invented sound recording. It was a technology that would eventually deliver an infinite variety of music first into the homes of the middle class and then the lower class by way of wax cylinder, then phonographs, magnetic tape, compact discs, and compressed digital music formats. There has always been a sort of schism between folk, lay, and ethnic music and western music. Western music is composed by trained artists who, utilizing a complete documented history, understand all techniques and methods used for western composition. Lay music can be written by anyone without any knowledge of music. A western musician is educated by way of documentation. Lay music is an oral tradition at best (jazz essentially became western when they started teaching it in university). None of this is to say that western music is more complicated, or better or any other subjective nonsense you want to read into my statments of fact. Lay music is composed of a melody and rythmn, or just melody, or just rythmn. Music theory can be applied to these compositions to create western sounding songs. This method of music composition has been used by folk artists for a very long time. The most complex and western application of this method of music composition is found in Jazz music which reached a popular climax in the United States during the 1960's. Jazz music has since become too complex and out of touch, much the way classical music has. While Counterpoint is difficult to define it can be described as multidimensional melodic movement. A melody has an independantly resonant quality; it makes sense and has a descriptive feel. Counterpoint is a set of rules which dictate a process of creating two or more such meldoies while layering them over eachother in a way which leaves a deeper and more affectual impact. True counterpoint is something I rarely hear even attempted in modern popular music, yet it was the foundation of early western music. To much less a degree it is was also applied to the development of jazz. I directly attribute the deterioration of counterpoint to the mass distribution of sound recording technology that has essentially turned music into an aural tradition again. The analytical aspects of music have been lost in history and are currently only observed by completely out of touch university profesors who are incapable of understanding why their students aren't interested anymore.