any benefit looping a MIDI section?

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Re: any benefit looping a MIDI section?

Post by FMiguelez »

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:
Shooshie wrote:...the greatest composers all repeated stuff verbatim. ...
Shooshie
And other times, not so much... watch at least the first 10 minutes. Great stuff, if you like that "academic research, science stuff."
I think one of the traits that qualify composers as geniuses is how they repeat material, but with some great changes.
All THE Masters did this. Chopin, Liszt and Beethoven sonatas and concertos, and LVB symphonies anyone? I love how they clarified their forms in the recapitulations, but always with a twist.
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Re: any benefit looping a MIDI section?

Post by bayswater »

Shooshie wrote:Many performers use the repeat as an opportunity to improvise and embellish the music with ornamentation (in jazz we just call it taking a solo), and that's a valid option, too, that keeps the music more entertaining.

But unless the form calls for it and the music exploits that aspect of the form, simple looping of music is like listening to fingernails on a chalk board.

Shooshie
I can appreciate the use of repeats as opportunities to "improvise and embellish". I was reacting more to "simple looping". Then tedium sets in quickly.
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Re: any benefit looping a MIDI section?

Post by Shooshie »

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:And other times, not so much... watch at least the first 10 minutes. Great stuff, if you like that "academic research, science stuff."

I do.

http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1967/199
Bravo! Bravo! Bravissimo! Bravississimo!

Where was that guy 30 years ago? He's saying what I have believed (and performed by) since I became a real musician. The whole academic saddlebags we've inherited from 200 years of nay-sayers has been wrong from the beginning, and this guy just proved it beyond even the remotest shadow of doubt. And he also proved that he's very qualified to do it. I'm just thoroughly impressed, even thrilled, to hear that.

And I'm also impressed with some particular bits of knowledge he points out, such as the fact that Mozart's cadenzas never left the keys of the movement to which they belonged. Maybe he used a Neapolitan cadence or French 6th, but he didn't modulate to those keys; just visited them. Many of the cadenzas to Mozart Concertos for other instruments besides piano were written by established professors for those instruments during the romantic era, where the nature of the cadenza was more indicative of their own era, so of course one of the things they do to make it "interesting" is jump to a distantly related key. Beethoven did it in Mozart's cadenzas, so why not them? But I'd love to see people return to Mozart's way and keep the cadenzas pure in key, but improvised in spirit.

If you ask me, I think the elimination of improvisation is one of the reasons classical music died. We hear that the greatest of improvisors were Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, and yet we never hear anyone IMPROVISE Bach, Mozart or Beethoven, much less anyone else of the period. Naturally, it takes an intimate knowledge of form, proportion and balance, with a big knack for invention. If people did that, you'd immediately distinguish between two player's versions of any piece. Classical music would live and breathe again. And it would inform modern players in modern music to make inventiveness a part of their music again.

The "composer is god" thing was always heretical to me. I freely altered composers' intentions when I thought they lost the track, or had been poorly transcribed, and sometimes completely rewrote the piano part for my accompanists, or altered my cadenzas, and sometimes even parts of the solo itself, when I thought it was imperative to do so. We forget that between composer and listener are layers of judgment by various participants in the chain: the copyist, the editor, the engraver, the performer. Lots of room for interpretation, misunderstanding, and outright error. Lots of room for correcting those errors, or for that matter, just reinventing bad writing. (not in Mozart, of course, but certainly in Glazounov or many other 2nd or 3rd tier composers)

Anyway, Professor Levin's lecture may have seemed drab or academic to some, but to me it was a sign that the academy may be waking up after a sleep that would make Rip Van Winkle seem positively wired.

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Re: any benefit looping a MIDI section?

Post by MIDI Life Crisis »

I still improv in the styles of Mozart, and Beethoven, and Bach, and Brahms, et al on a daily basis. It's my warmup to composing and sometimes is composing in and of itself.

After seeing the video I feel hopelessly ignorant and inadequate. Of course, that won't stop me. There is no commercial "value" except as an accompanist in silent film and dance classes. Yet it remains my most cherished skill.
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Re: any benefit looping a MIDI section?

Post by Shooshie »

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:I still improv in the styles of Mozart, and Beethoven, and Bach, and Brahms, et al on a daily basis. It's my warmup to composing and sometimes is composing in and of itself.

After seeing the video I feel hopelessly ignorant and inadequate. Of course, that won't stop me. There is no commercial "value" except as an accompanist in silent film and dance classes. Yet it remains my most cherished skill.
Maybe you should book a recital somewhere with a catchy title like "Mozart and all that Jazz, a Classical gas." You may find that audiences will enjoy you without the film getting in the way.

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Re: any benefit looping a MIDI section?

Post by Tim »

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:
Shooshie wrote:...the greatest composers all repeated stuff verbatim. ...
Shooshie
watch at least the first 10 minutes.
Ah ha!
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Re: any benefit looping a MIDI section?

Post by MIDI Life Crisis »

Thanks, Shoosh. I've done pure improv concerts as well as a mix of composed works and improv "treats." I saw Frodo improv an encore after playing the Grieg Concerto as well. Today's audience just doesn't seem to have much appreciation for what something like that entails and just how much skill and experience and knowledge it takes to pull something like that off. Yet, they get "The Alley Car" and cheer it on.

Still, I'll keep on keepin' on. It's what I do. :)
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Re: any benefit looping a MIDI section?

Post by dewdman42 »

Thanks a lot for providing that video link!!!
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Re: any benefit looping a MIDI section?

Post by Shooshie »

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:
Shooshie wrote:...the greatest composers all repeated stuff verbatim. ...
Shooshie
And other times, not so much... watch at least the first 10 minutes. Great stuff, if you like that "academic research, science stuff."
While I didn't want to go into great detail, what I was really referring to at that time was how composers repeat brief passages, almost like an echo, not the repeat at the repeat sign. For example, after the opening of Prelude: l'apres MIDI d'une faune there is a horn solo with harp arpeggio that repeats verbatim, though the 2nd time it ends a little differently. Debussy does that all through his music, and I figured once that he did it as much as anything to show you that he intended to write it that way, but it also serves to let the listener savor the passage (usually a bar or two at most) and more fully hear how it functions. in older times a repeated bar was usually for emphasis, or for terraced dynamic effects. In these cases, it's probably not advisable to improvise on the 2nd time around. But where there is a repeat sign and an entire section or extended phrase and reply is repeated, improv is quite desirable as long as it serves the piece, and doesn't distract from what's in the actual music. (as in introduction of new themes, or completely ignoring the notes that are already there.)
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Re: any benefit looping a MIDI section?

Post by MIDI Life Crisis »

AS the lecturer points out, ornamentation is not to show how fast your little fingers can move, but serve to compliment the theme. This is where an awareness of counterpoint and various species are critical in good writing. I think it can become "second nature" in more mature composers and more experienced extemporizers.

And it sure beats working for a living! :)
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Re: any benefit looping a MIDI section?

Post by Shooshie »

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:AS the lecturer points out, ornamentation is not to show how fast your little fingers can move, but serve to compliment the theme. This is where an awareness of counterpoint and various species are critical in good writing. I think it can become "second nature" in more mature composers and more experienced extemporizers.

And it sure beats working for a living! :)
Ironically, anyone who has insisted on working from a Bach ürtext or manuscript has quickly discovered that most of the Baroque era's keyboard music was notated more like Count Basie than like the International, Leduc, Schirmer, Dover, and other such editions we tend to rely on. There's that piano part: a bass line with chord symbols. They called it figured bass, but it's essentially the same thing as chord symbols, just written a different way. Everyone understood voice leadings, so there was no question as to what had to be done to get to and from each of those chords, but no two minds are exactly alike, so improvisation was mandatory, not optional. Yet suggest that you improvise Bach's keyboard notations, and you'd get howls from critics, professors, and "authentic" performers alike. "What makes you think you can realize figured bass?" they'd say. Duh! The same thing that makes me believe I can improvise G-7/C7sus-9/Fmaj7... etc. They are chords. You get to them and out of them with the best voice leading you can come up with, and you try to cover the essential notes: 6, 4/2, 5, etc.

Not that I am worth a plugged nickel at doing that, but I have no problem with anyone doing it who has the skill or gumption to try it.

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Re: any benefit looping a MIDI section?

Post by MIDI Life Crisis »

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Re: any benefit looping a MIDI section?

Post by Dan Worley »

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:And then there's this:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ec-FrnaU0rs
I'm smiling ear to ear. Chills. Awe. I adored O.P.

Thanks for posting that, Michael.
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Re: any benefit looping a MIDI section?

Post by MIDI Life Crisis »

Between those two videos I realize how much I DON'T know about music and how much technique there is to still acquire. What giants!
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Re: any benefit looping a MIDI section?

Post by Shooshie »

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:And then there's this:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ec-FrnaU0rs
Damn! Oscar Peterson is one of the greats that I don't even put in the category of greats when people ask me to name some great pianists. I mean, if someone asks you to name some nearby stars in the universe, you'd be a smart-ass to say "well, there's the Sun." Oscar is sun-like.

And that was a superb demonstration of why he is sunlike. His gravitational pull on every style of piano playing is enough to keep them all in orbit around him.

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