Hi David.
Without any hint of exaggeration, I want to say that this is extraordinary listening.
You really have a flair for creating thoughtful and enjoyable arrangements that mesmerize me.
Just what I like to hear - thanks!
I loved the harmony and the counterpoint. I'm a huge fan of counterpoint. It occupied quite a bit of my time back in the 1990s as I worked my way through Palestrina and Fux in an effort to better understand Bach. Later, when I moved on to 4-part harmony in the classical style, I found the understanding that I gained from learning counterpoint was invaluable. All the rules and patterns in 4-part harmony are mostly a consequence of contrapuntal techniques.
Alfred Mann's translation of Fux's
Gradus Ad Parnassus was a joy to read. The rules create a somewhat artificial style, but from a pedantic perspective, it's brilliant.
I read through it back in the '90s, but my keyboard technique was quite poor, so I had difficulty playing the examples. (Full Disclosure: my keyboard technique is still pretty terrible).
If you want an
accurate representation of Palestrina's style, I highly recommend Knud Jeppesen's
Counterpoint: The Polyphonic Vocal Style of the Sixteenth Century. I made a number of attempts to learn the text, but really should have spent more time actually
listening to Palestrina first. It's quite like trying to learn how jazz or rock sounds by reading about it.
I found Kent Kennan's
Counterpoint - Based on Eighteenth-Century Practice to be perhaps the best book on Bach's
actual style.
But all that feels like long ago and far away.
Pretty much all I remember is
Contrary motion sounds most like counterpoint and
Parallel motion with perfect consonances doesn't sound like counterpoint.
At the moment, I'm sitting here trying to work out why the 2-part harmony on "thing" (in "anything" at 1:42) doesn't quite sit comfortably for me. It's at times like this that I wished I had perfect pitch. Alas, I do not. I can't quite work out how your two voices travel to what sounds like an E-B vocal harmony at the cadence. Questions that are appearing in my mind right now are... Do the voices cross over and what was the upper voice becomes the lower voice? Is the E-B interval approached in similar motion? If it's any use to you, I find that in 2-part movement, perfect 5ths usually sound best when approached in contrary motion.
Your hearing is accurate! I think there are two main problems with the cadence.
First, there's a voice crossing. Even worse, it's a voice
exchange, where the voices are on thirds (F#/A) and swap parts, and then move by contrary motion into a perfect fifth. See the attached file - the green notes are the melody, the red lines are the counter line.
The motivation is probably obvious: I wanted to keep the counterline out of the low muddy register, because the vocal was already going pretty low.
Second, the synthetic voices on those open fifths are bit harsh and mechanical. So even though the
notes are right, they sound off.
But it was a better option than what I had before, so I went with it. I should probably revisit it at some point, but who knows?
Anyway, that's all beside the point. When I listened to your song, you made think all about this stuff that I haven't thought about for a couple of decades. That's a great thing
Thank you for that!
Glad to hear it! What's really nice about artificial voices is I can finally do the sort of thing that I had been only reading about 30 years ago. And it's
fun!
What stood out to me most in this production was your prosody. Your ability to align musical stress with syllabic stress is fantastic. I suspect that one of the reasons that Kevin sounds so brilliant in this presentation is because of your skills in the prosody arena.
I think this is the result of writing the music first - the phrasing
has to match the notes. There's some wiggle room, of course, and I'll rewrite the notes if needed.
So the musical phrasing leads to equivalent language stresses.
The
problem of the process is the amount of time it takes to find a phrase that fits into that spot.
On the other hand, it's
much better than dealing with a completely blank page. And it forces me to run through multiple iterations of an idea, which helps get the creaky gears of my lazy brain moving.
Also, I really loved reading your "Blah Blah Blah" section! It really was excellent background information and gave me huge insights into your creative process. You know, I've never once written a song that started with a chorus. I often don't have a title, either. For some reason, I always begin with a verse. Often, the first verse I write turns out to be verse 2. For me, verse 2 is usually a little bit more philosophical and usually has less imagery than verse 1. This is probably why I favor the AABA format when song writing.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who uses this process!
I think my imagination is just rusty, so it takes time to discover who the singer is, and what they're about. As you mentioned, imagery is important and good to place in the initial verse. It's a bit ironic to use spoken language to trigger visuals, but "show, don't tell" seems to work for songs as well as films.
Anyway, thank you for a terrific musical journey. And thank you for mentioning me a couple of times. Believe it or not, you've inspired me to get back into creating songs more often. I seem to have drifted out of songwriting over the last couple of years.
Well, you've done the same!
It's interesting that on a forum filled with songwriters, there aren't as many who talk about process. And that's understandable, because the
process can be super-dry as it's mostly "I had a basic idea, and then kept writing and re-writing until I had a song."
And for those who don't have to over-analyze things and the words just come, that's great. But that hasn't been the case for me for a long time.
I assume everyone else is writing songs instead of long posts.
Thanks for stopping by and your comments!
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