I am a musician (conductor, composer, arranger and teacher) and educator (teacher, school administrator and teacher trainer) with many, many year's experience in both. Here, I share some ideas about music and music education as well as a few tips relating to virtual orchestration and digital music production. There are also a few of my own compositions and arrangements.
If you feel I might be able to help you in any of these areas, please don't hesitate to get in touch. My email address can be found below.
I hope you find the channel useful and enjoyable. Please share your feedback or suggestions for content in individual video comments - or you are welcome to send me an email any time.
Schoenberg was a musical grifter. He made “music” for people that hated music. Yes, you can take a series of his and play it retrograde, or inverted, or inverted retrograde, whatever. Because these are random notes played inside a childlike set of rules. These notes have no meaning or relationship or emotional connection to each other. You can play them forward, or backwards, or upside down or indeed rearrange them at random and no one would care or notice because they mean literally nothing. I could write you a relatively simple computer program that would create new compositions using the twelve tone system. And what that computer would generate would be as meaningful as any Schoenberg composition because it’s all meaningless crap.
I'd just like to point out that my video provides an explanation of how the system came about and the influence it had on later composer's. I offer no value judgement at all. I'd also like to say that I wish I had a pound (I'm British) for every time I'd heard comments like yours!
Hello! Your lessons are great! I would like to say that if you select accel. and rit. and go to the Inspector, then there you can specify the required numerical tempo value in BPM or percentage and thereby make your life much easier! Are you using the Graphical MIDI Tools plugin?
dear Robert, could you please shed some light on the recording device and software used to analyse and generate the spectrum graph? i'm trying to compare timbre between different guitars (just an example)
The software is a plugin, for use in a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) called 'Voxengo SPAN'. Designed as an aid for audio engineers, it analyses the frequency content of a track, or a whole mix, in real time.
This is a good summary, but don't you think we need a different approach to the Schoenbergian difference? Isn't the point, if you allow me to be crass, is that he was the first composer to write deliberately 'horrible' music? Perhaps in the how that todays ugly is tomorrow's beautiful, that maybe in the name of the progress of 'German music' black could be turned into white?
Thank you for taking the time to comment. Clearly, your assessment of Schoenberg's music as "horrible" is an opinion - to which, of course, you have an absolute right - but only that. If you were to revisit my video, you would find that while theories are proffered, opinions and judgements are absent. So, the "approach" is simply one of attempting to articulate how the system came about and what it stimulated in turn.
@@robertlennonmusedNo doubt. The problem is, I can’t see how to approach this crucial question without what are certainly subjective judgments. How can we explain the huge gulf between, say, Debussy and Scriabin, two composers who certainly made tonality drift, and the composer of the Op11 piano pieces? How do we get at the true atonality/Schoebergian difference? ‘Horrible’ is a start.
A very interesting and informative series. Thank you. I am surprised you did not mention, even if only in passing, embodiment as a potential factor in the unequal influence of timbre on melody/harmony versus rhythm. Put simply, can you dance to it? 😀 You had considered embodiment (though without explicitly noting it) when you considered the influence of the range of men's and boys' voices in the development of harmony from plainsong. My inexpert take on it (as a mere bass player😁) is that in 'music' the influence of the naturally occurring ratios in regular materials (strings, tubes, etc.) confronts, and is tempered by, the logistics of the human body: in melody/harmony e.g. the human audible range etc, and in rhythm to what extent can you 'shake a tail feather' - tap a foot or hand, nod a head, bounce from one leg to the other, swing your arms, etc. The music that is so 'unplayable' by humans that it has to be produced by machines, is also going to be very difficult to relate to bodily. That's not to say there shouldn't be music that you can't dance to, but that it will be experienced as something in opposition to that which one can have an obvious bodily response to. I say the above in the spirit of discussion, rather than as a criticism. I've found it a very illuminating and thought provoking series. Thank you.
Thank you for this clear presentation. I wonder what creates inharmonic timbre? As in a gong, couild it be the case that there are actually multiple fundamentals 'clashing' with their inherent overtones? Or are there other reasons for its existence?
Hi Robert, I want to congratulate you for the excellent content you are publishing. I would like to tell you about my experience. I am also a musician and work with NP4. Over the years I have realized that Note Performer destroys much more expensive libraries such as Spitfire, EW or even Vienna in terms of the quality of their articulations. My bet is that the future of computer orchestras lies in implementing realism directly from the score editor itself and not from the DAW, since programming conventional libraries consumes hours and hours for a very mediocre final result. The downside is that NP4 is not so much based on samples, but on synthesis, and can lose in timbral richness. My idea to mitigate this disadvantage would be to create templates in the DAW that work in depth the EQ of NP4 harmonics to resemble their real counterparts and even trying to mimic miking and reverb techniques adapted to achieve a studio sound. About this brief exercise you show us, it would be very interesting to first analyze a real reproduction of the solo by a pro flutist with some software that allows to mark the changes of the agogic, like Sonic Visualiser, and then try to imitate it with the score editor. I would also use the inspector instead of setting those unorthodox time signature changes, as it gives more individual control of each event. Anyway, excellent channel and I look forward to watching more of your work.
Although gongs are not in the harmonic series ( idiophone), they are overtones rich instruments with long sustain. And when played correctly they do bring a sense of harmony to the sound recipient. But the question remains, how are they so conducive to wellbeing in sound meditation yet, they don’t belong in any predictable system or notation. The full sound spectrum producing an array of overtones are indeed stable within the gong, it’s just a matter of pulling different aspects of it. The resonance, vibration has to be the key.
Further note that the twelve tone system, serialism as a whole amd atonality are not synonyms for each other. Serial procedures can be used with tonal functions, rhythm, texture... and atonality can encompass even some of the music by Wagner or Liszt.
Thanks for taking the time to comment but at no point do I treat twelve-tone and serialism as synonymous, and the application of serial procedures to parameters other than pitch is discussed. Thanks again.
I'm quite enthrilled to have discovered your channel by chance from my curiosity. Trying to use this for my accordion and future structuring is going to be fun and helpful. Can't wait for the next episode.
Robert you are awesome thank you so much for the videos. I would request a video with best Sibelius shortcuts and tips/tricks for notation. And yes, please continue the process of turning Sibelius midi into beautiful sounding music, especially in Logic
Incredible you just condensed western music by means of its most essential building blocks: ratios from the overtone series. You have opened my eyes. Thank you!!
thank you so much ! This was very helpful and so clearly explained. Many thanks to you. I would definitely love to know more about the next steps ...to manage to get a more realistic and beautiful interpretation from the work done on Sibelius and also on the Daw.Many thanks again!
Thank you for the kind comment. Perhaps this would be of interest: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-FyVnzbTQlCw.html There's also a follow up to this coming very soon, and there's a video featuring a finished mix here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-sq9rX8Aq0s8.html Thanks again.
Thank you very much for the kind comments. The incorrect Brahms dates are the result of an oversight during editing. It's acknowledged in the description. Thanks again!
A great intellectual exercise in music progression that had to happen. And now that that's done, we can get back to more enjoyable music... whether you want to describe it as simulacra or not. In other words, there's still nothing wrong with a tune you can whistle.
They are fundamentally similar but, as explained in the video, there comes a point at which they are perceived differently. Thanks for taking the time to comment!
I'm a philosophy graduate student extremely interested in Schoenberg and atonal music and I am very grateful for this series! This is a wonderfully lucid explanation for someone who is a complete amateur in this area. I was wondering if there are any books you might recommend that explain it further?
I found out you can notice that rhythm=pitch if you drop a coin, it'll bounce resulting in a rhythm but as it gets closer it speeds up becoming a pitch, same as a motorcycle, the slower you go, it's a pulse, but once you speed up it's a pitch
This series was fascinating and everything that I was looking for when my curiosity piqued about sound and harmony, and more! I have a question for you. In this series you have discussed harmony and rhythm and how they relate to natural overtones, but do you think that melody can be addressed with the same sort of mathematical approach? If physics is responsible for the origin of harmony and rhythm, what about melody? I'm curious about your thoughts. Thank you!
