88CET #18: Other Part-Writing Thoughts

Continuing with typical choral-like voice-leading considerations, parallel
motion is worth talking about a bit.

Parallel octaves aren't much of a concern in 88CET, but not because 88CET has
no octave, as much as because you'll probably want to avoid its off-octaves
anyway (in harmonic timbres at least). 88CET's off-octaves in parallel motion
still do compromise independence of contrapuntal voicing to a fair degree. My
ears at least get the sense of a voice dropping out and something being out of
tune.

So in that sense, parallel octaves may actually be a bigger concern in 88CET.
And consider also that voices could move in similar, but not quite parallel,
motion from one off-octave to the other! I haven't tested that case personally,
but I doubt that whether its one off-octave or the other would be of much
concern to our ears. They're just really nasty intervals (again, not in the
case of Bill Sethares' mapped timbres).

I suspect that all of this also applies, but not as critically, to the
off-twelfth and -double-octave intervals. But I haven't specifically tried
those cases either.

But what about 88CET's fairly accurate triple octave? At the risk of
committing blasphemy against my classical music training, I'll suggest that
parallel triple-octaves rarely compromise independence of contrapuntal voicing
in any tuning. It's just simply too distant an interval for the two voices
involved to be confused. Still, classically trained ears are conditioned to
shun them, so you're probably better off not using them anyway (unless you're
just trying to thumb your nose at your old Walter Piston textbook!).

What about other parallel intervals? As you'd probably suspect, they're
generally fine, best I've noticed anyway. Still, I mentioned "raising the ante"
earlier. I find that the 5:2 major tenth sounds strangely perfect-like in an
environment of more complex, nontraditional harmonies.

Moving on from parallel motion, classical voice-leading rules say that you're
not supposed to write melodic tritones. That has always struck me as the
spoilsport's rule, and a lot of modern traditional music tosses it out the
window. I recommend ignoring that rule in 88CET.

A lot of students and instructors alike profess that these textbook
voice-leading rules are all a bunch of hooey anyway; not of interest for real
compositional purposes. You may well ask why I'm messing around with drivel
like this.

There's a difference between ignoring such considerations and consciously
violating them for musical effect. Anybody who's heard Mozart's "Ave Verum
Corpus" can readily see that music written in this sort of style can be very
powerful. These considerations definitely aren't pointless nonsense! They
describe pretty much indisputably real and useful musical effects. Whether or
not you want to invoke those effects is a compositional choice to be made. But
to not evaluate these or other compositional tools is to be ignorant of a
significant concern to western ears.


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