I’ve started to go the San Francisco Public Library on a regular basis, enjoying very much their CD and DVD collection as well as their fantastic music resources (books, scores). I can’t say enough how great it is as a resource.
I’ve been studying counterpoint on the side for a half-year or so now, not too deeply as I’d like, but here and there as time permits. I had been using Counterpointer for exercises and focusing mostly on looking at 16th Century style, but at the library I picked up Ernst Krenek’s Tonal Counterpoint in the Style of the Eighteenth Century, listed as an “Outline”, which read much like a set of notes. I enjoyed this text immensely as it was in this brief format. A very quick read but very thought provoking for me as well.
For some time I had thought that 16th Century counterpoint was more interesting, but in reading the Krenek text, I found myself drawn to thinking about 18th Century counterpoint and on a larger level, the progression of form, the concerns of material usage within the context of transformations of itself and other material, and treatments of musical time. I’ve long desired to to write a longer text on musical time as it has been the first major concern of mine and continues to this day to be what I meditate most on when contemplating music…
Now thinking about Counterpoint and how it relates to ideas of glissandi, masses of sound, and non-synchronized musical ideas (i.e. in varying tempi layers) amongst other things. A lot of thoughts on these matters lately, I think I’ll have to spend some time whenever I am finished with this piece I have been working on to write down these thoughts. Even if they are only in framents in my head now, it’ll be useful to get them down and to take a step back to see it as a whole. But first things first, and back to working on music…
^_^
(Sidenote: I think I understand now what Feldman was talking about when he said he was a melodist…)