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re: Rapoport: On Hindemith

🔗ribarbe@garlic.com (Atlas Eclipticalis)

6/8/1996 11:52:19 PM
Quoting From: Paul Rapoport

>2. On Hindemith. Having never studied with him, I can only report his book
>Unterweisung im Tonsatz, translated as The Craft of Musical Composition.
>This is the book in which he builds up a new harmonic theory based on the
>harmonic series and then treats everything as 12-tET. Hindemith discussed
>the 7th harmonic at some length but did not, as far as I can tell,
>understand it. His book is to me a historical curiosity: it almost did
>something right, perceived something of an abyss at really paying
>attention to the harmonic series, and then retreated into the familiar.

I sat in on a music theory class on Friday, they were going through
Messiaen's Quatour pour la Fin du Temps. When they got to discussing his
choice of mode and the melodic motif of descending tritone, the teacher
explained that the interval of singing the eleventh harmonic, then the
eigth (11:8) results in a resolution, as opposed to the traditional
tonic-augmentedfourth-fifth. He sang these intervals to demonstrate. He
even built the mode by tritones by singing. I might have raised the point
that the intervals he is singing don't happen on the piano. This teacher
is, too, almost doing something right. But he retreats.

---
E am not especially clever, just basically very average, E merely try
to maximise thee effectiveness of whatever gifts or abilities E have by
focusing them towards what E want to happen.
Genesis P-Orridge
finger for PGP pub key 9 Jul 81 TGHQGB

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