Saturday, August 23, 2025
I've got a little Liszt...to add to this list
Thursday, August 21, 2025
A whole new world
Once again, one blog post topic has generated unexpected journeys down a path I'd never intended. You could say that exploring the harmonic progression in four bars of Dvořák's "New World" Symphony opened up whole new worlds of things to write about. At first I thought this would just be a little postscript post, but it has resulted in a few more creations than I'd imagined.
The topic of the day is this: what is actually "new world"-ish about Dvořák's 9th Symphony "From the New World?"
Tuesday, August 19, 2025
Post #700: America the Beautifulish (Emptying the Desk Drawer #8)
Saturday, August 16, 2025
...to explore strange new worlds
As summer winds down and students begin to embark on new worlds of learning, let's consider seven chords from Antonín Dvořák's famous Symphony No. 9 titled “From the New World.” Although most of the discussion of the “New World” quality of this symphony focuses on melodic material that might borrow from Native-American or African-American influences, the opening of the second movement has an other-worldly quality which comes mostly from its unconventional harmonic progression.
Someone posted last week on a Facebook Music Theory group asking how these harmonies would have been understood by theorists in Dvořák's time. Most of the hundred-plus responses focused more on how one might now analyze the harmonies, and that's what I'll do as well;
Wednesday, August 6, 2025
The Augmented Reality Waltz
Ever since that fateful day (a story with an amazing coincidence) thirteen years ago when I discovered "Augmented Sixth Day," I've found that many years I forget to celebrate either until the day of or even long after the day has passed. (This is where a well-stocked Hallmark section could really help keep a guy on track.) In fact, I'm alarmed to see that I've only made holiday-specific posts three times before on this august day, plus another one a couple of months late in 2021. Here's where we've been so far.
- Happy Augmented Sixth Day - 8/6/2012
- Happy Augmented Sixth Day! (2016 ed.) - 8/6/2016
- Augmented Reality - 10/16/2021
- An Aug 6 for Aug 6 in an August Sextet - 8/6/2022
Friday, August 1, 2025
Ghosts in the Machine
Continuing from my last post in a "what I did this summer" at music camp kind of vein, I had one other burst of creativity (?) come from our daily piano seminars. A student had gotten up to play the breakneck final movement of Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata, and in the moment, this reminded me of a commercial from about a decade back.
That video will also show/remind you how this music is supposed to go - before it becomes literally monotone. [The logic of the ad itself is so bad that I had no memory of what product was being advertised, so it took me a little while to track it down.]
The dozen or so students in the seminar (ages 8 to 16 or so) loved both videos, so it occurred to me that it would be fun to let them try this out. Of course, there's no way I could re-string a piano, but I figured there must be a way to program a computer to accept input from a digital piano and send back...well, whatever. (I already have a digital piano on hand in the room to pair with the "real" piano so more students can practice sight-reading at a time.) There are probably simpler ways to do it, but I found a way to set up Ableton Live to re-map each key to C, so the next day we gave it a try. It was interesting to see the range of reactions. Some students were immediately amused and intrigued and others just seemed annoyed. Meanwhile, I found that I really enjoyed the feeling of playing one thing and getting this quirky feedback. It's especially fun to play fast passages since playing repeated notes quickly is notoriously difficult on a piano action, but here it's a breeze!
But of course, once I'd thought about remapping the keys, I couldn't resist other possibilities. The most obvious and fruitful so far has been the simplest: reverse everything so the notes go in reverse order. This actually turned out to be even more fun, although again, it would be nice if I had a quicker way to choose the inversion point.
I can easily imagine some people thinking I'm wasting my time with this. Among other things, it would be trivially easy simply to drop this music into a DAW as MIDI and create the same repeated note or inverted effects. In fact, I've done this kind of thing before. What was different for me in this case was the experience of playing familiar music and having these odd artifacts of remapping sounding instead of what my finger-to-ear system expects. Perhaps it's a little like speaking English but somehow having the words come out in French - there's an "out of body" element in play.