Stearns improvs

>With the first piece, think Tatum--not so much vis a vis (because
>that's pretty much hopeless), but in much the same way that he
>fascinated Conlon Nancarrow for instance. With the ballad think of

Yeah, that makes sense.

>Schoenberg's early piano music, pieces like Op. 11 and Op. 19 if they
>were seen from an improvisational jazz perspective. Those were some of
>my influences with this material.

I think that's the best way to see them, really. . . .I remember when I
first found Forte's book "the Structure of Atonal Music" , I eagerly
paged through it, thinking that all of the wonderful free atonal stuff by
the 2nd Viennese school (schnbrg, Berg, Webern) would be "explained."

It only took a few pages to realize that this book wasn't "explaining"
anything. Any more than it would have explained a bunch of random notes.

I hear that Forte came out with a book on Webern analyzing his free atonal
music in terms of the octatonic scale???? Has anyone read this??? I've
seen some of the diagrams, and it looks like a crock to me.
This guy teaches at Yale, for pete's sake.

I will say, that set theory is useful and fun as a composing tool, but as
an analysis tool for this wonderful music, uh-uh. How it made it into the
halls of academia I don't know.

--- In metatuning@y..., Christopher Bailey <cb202@c...> wrote:

/metatuning/topicId_1583.html#1583

>
> I think that's the best way to see them, really. . . .I remember
when I first found Forte's book "the Structure of Atonal Music" , I
eagerly paged through it, thinking that all of the wonderful free
atonal stuff by the 2nd Viennese school (schnbrg, Berg, Webern) would
be "explained."
>

****That's a hard book to get through... although some have... :)

However, I "balked" at purchasing Forte's work on the serial
construction of *TONAL* music. Maybe that could work for *some*
people, but the concept seemed pretty "lame brained" to me...

(George Perle's _The Structure of Atonal Music_ is a *much* finer
read... which you probably know...)

[Forte's book on traditional _Tonal Harmony_ though is quite good...]

JP
JP

--- In metatuning@y..., "jpehrson2" <jpehrson@r...> wrote:

> [Forte's book on traditional _Tonal Harmony_ though is quite
good...]

Much better than the Walter Piston that most students get.