Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Composer's Lounge Coming up with new compositional methods.

This is my first attempt at trying this, so I have no idea whether this will work or not.

Assuming it works, at the bottom of the page of music you'll see the beginning of a composition in three parts.

What's unique about this piece is that it's based upon a little discovery I made. In trying to see how many syncopated parts you could have going at once, without duplication, I found that you could have exactly three.

I'm not going to show you the rest of the piece, as it's still a work in progress. And in any event, I'd like someone else to take a crack at using this method to write a piece in three parts.

This two-bar bit took hours of fiddling around in order to get it right, and that was the easy part. Keeping the process going in order to turn out a full-length composition I found to be quite a challenge.

Keep in mind that in order to use this method, you must pay me $10 per note. Copyright, patent pending, trademark, no shoes, no shirt, no service.

Just kidding. Have fun. Let me know how you make out.

http://i1191.photobucket.com/albums/z463/gsmonks/moosic-book-4-016.jpg

So my interpretation of this is that you've composed a 3 part piece with unique rhythms for each part. Please help me understand what's new or different about this.

All three parts are syncopated. It's not simply a matter of counterpoint.

With counterpoint you can have up to six parts (fuga maestrale). With syncopated parts working together you can only have two, or three at the maximum.

In the foreword of Walter Piston's Counterpoint (my old 70's edition, anyway), Piston remarked that Western music tends to be rhythmically uninteresting. I began working on this piece as a response.

Yes, I know about writing parts with clearly defined independent rhythms. I know of none that incorporate syncopation as a rule or method of construction.

Something I forgot to mention: the syncopation can't simply be self-contained within each line. The parts have to play off one another. This means two syncopated lines vs one non-syncopated, with the non-syncopated aspect moving from line to line.

It's not as simple as it sounds. It's a bit like playing with a Rubic's cube, getting each bar and phrase right.

Here's a method that's not new, but it can be a lot of fun:

I've often taken pictures, or random patterns on surfaces, placed manuscript paper over them, approximated where notes would be, or where random dots are, tried the result out, tossed it out if it was junk, refined it if there was something good in there.

This approach has always amused me because it's a sure-fire way to avoid the natural avenues one's brain takes.

Or is it?

Something I used to play with as a university student was writing fugue using 7ths, 9ths, 11ths, 13ths, any-interval-goes-so-long-as-it-makes-musical-sense stuff. Back in Bach's day, if I'm remembering correctly, a fuga maestrale consisted of a maximum of six parts. A number of modern composers tried for much more, primarily by having more allowable intervals, but the result, to my ear, was pretty dense and hard to follow.

In terms of counterpoint, Richard Strauss was able to circumvent this phenomenon by breaking the orchestra into distinct groupings and playing the groupings off one another. I don't think he ever tried this as a fugue, but it would be interesting to see if it would work (as a fugue) with a large orchestra.

There is a german music mystery "Lethal Cantatas" in which appears the Italian Concerto No.2". I translated the novel into Japanese. And I want to hear the music. Then I made it.
http://www.geocities.jp/imyfujita/italianconcerto2/index.html
Can you imagine how I did it?

Yes, I think I can imagine Iori. I however, cannot understand its relevance to this thread.

Every single post he makes on this site is some random reference to this bad piece he has written. He appears to think very highly of himself for writing it, because in addition to these off-topic posts in other threads he also continually bumps the thread in which he posted the piece originally, using bad excuses such as making four different posts about checking some random link for a virus.

How can anyone say that my piece is bad?

Well... if it's bad, then why not?

As I said before, I made it as the Italian Concerto No.2. But it was composed by J.S.Bach.
Iori Fujita

Only the mighty Wanda Landowka gets to have the last word on the Italian Concerto

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17en4OCndC4

Okay, maybe THIS guy. I always wanted to hear the Italian Concerto arranged for organ:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l9VgJPsMmQ