Scholarship Rocks

With the "Hucbald, Destroyer of Guitars" episode mostly behind me, I have returned to entering more of Taneiev's Convertible Counterpoint into Encore. This next installment is going to take a lot of time, as there are many, many musical examples for me to transcribe. The examples are quite fascinating however, as they are mostly from the music of Palestrina.

I also completed the metronome slow-play regimen with all of the pieces in my set, and I have began to re-record the pieces from my CD of Y2K: Both the sound and the performances are much better, and I'll post some MP3's to my fileshare page within the next few weeks. I want to wait until I can upload at least eight, and I have four in the can at this point.

As if that weren't enough, I've also started to memorize some new pieces for my performance set, and in the middle of that train of thought plopped some added impetus for the Convertible Counterpoint project:



It had been so long I almost forgot that I ordered the dissertation containing Taneiev's The Doctrine of the Canon by Dr. Paul Grove, but when I checked the mail this afternoon, there it was. A brief flip through the dissertation confirmed my suspicions that a firm grounding in the concepts of Convertible Counterpoint will be required before I study Doctrine: The same terminology is applied throughout. Especially, it seems, the later techniques dealing with horizontal shifting counterpoint. So, I'll doubtless have to blog through that before taking on the new treatise. This is starting to look like a project for aught-seven.

The conversation I had with the luthier was interesting. It took a while for me to work up the nerve. It was a pretty one-sided affair. After informing him that I ruined the ivory component, it went something like this:

Luthier: "Nooooooooo!"

Hucbald: "Yes, I'm afraid..."

Luthier: "You tried to file it?!"

Hucbald: "Well, yes. I thought..."

Luthier: "I have special tools for that sort of thing!"

Hucbald: "I know, it's just..."

Luthier: "Do you know how long it took to make that?"

Hucbald: "I'm sure..."

Luthier: "How hard that material is to come by?"

Hucbald: "Well..."

Luthier: [The longest, most drawn-out, dusgust-filled sigh I've ever heard in my life] "I hope you're not in a hurry to get it back."

Hucbald: "No, I..."

Luthier: "Because I'm going to have to do a lot of the work over from scratch."

Hucbald: "Yes, I understand..."

Luthier: "It's not like these things are interchangable, or that I have a pattern to make them with."

Hucbald: ...

Luthier: "Shit."

Hucbald: Yes, sir."



It's OK hon, I got the message loud and clear. Besides, we have satellite.