Greetings from The Alamo City

Got 2 of 3 moving trips out of the way - one more tomorrow just to get the last few things that wouldn't fit in the 12x6 U-Haul I rented (It's times like this I really love having a full-sized pickup with a tow package) - and I'm obviously now reconnected to the internet and staying in my house (!) in San Antonio, but still sleeping on a futon.

I'll do a New Year's post with show-off pix when I return!

So, here's a redhead.



Even her lips have freckles!

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Vanessa Mae: Iconoclast

Being an iconoclast myself, I like the ideas behind Vanessa Mae's renditions of classic chestnuts, even if the execution of those ideas is sometimes a bit... well... you'll see.

Toccata and Fugue in D minor:



And, since I play my own arrangement of this, Classical Gas:



While we're at it, let's eviscerate Vivaldi:



OK, this one is just bad, but her British accent isn't, so, Vanessa Mae murders Paganini's 24th Caprice:



Didn't like the earlier Classical Gas? How about Bob Marley meets Mason Williams in Raggae Hell:



Just to make a point, she can play straight ahead. Here's some J.S. Bach to prove it:



Her intonation isn't exactly perfect, but it is a live performance.

Finally, The Devil's Trill:

(No embed available)

And, of course, it doesn't hurt that she's the hottest girl in all of music at the moment. I. love. her.

No redhead today. LOL!

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Musical Monk Moves!

Not the blog, but ME!

What an amazing Thanksgiving. I drove to mom's place in San Antonio last Sunday, looked at a house on Monday, made the guy an offer on Tuesday, he accepted on Wednesday, and then on Thanksgiving Day - after the Macy's Parade - The National Dog Show was televised. Mom's Lhasa Apso, Lulu, won both of her rounds and got to the Best in Show round - that dog got a lot of air time! The Pointer won Best in Show - hilariously, Lulu took a dump on the lead-in to that round (Mom and I were initially mortified... and then we laughed ourselves into helplessness) - but Lulu is barely two years old, so she's going places fast. They even mentioned mom's name on TV! She was thrilled. Then we consumed mass quantities and passed out. LOL!

The house I ended up getting was the one I really, really wanted, which I posted a bunch of pix of in this post from September 27th. The guy ended up not getting any other offers as good as mine, and he was looking at the economy and next year's property taxes, so he came down some and I went up some, and there you have it.

The Monk's new abode:



Like I said in the earlier post, this house was owned by a contractor who redid every room in the house, so it needs absolutely nothing. His bathroom and floor tile work is particularly stunning, and there's even a kick ass glass brick wall into the front living area. No cheap PVC plumbing either. All copper with metal finishing at the sinks! Then there's the permanently installed gas grill in the back yard, which is connected to the house's gas lines, so no gas bottles to run out or refill. I'm psyched!

I thought it also interesting that I posted about that house on the 27th, and the last two digits in the address are also 27: A number that's permeated my life since I was born (On 12/15, of course). It will also be 5 years to the month since I moved to Alpine. I hate to leave as I love it out here in the desert expanse, but being home for Thanksgiving really drove home that my mom is 80 and needs some help now. I think I changed almost a half-dozen light bulbs alone! I'm the only child, so it's not like anyone else can do it, not that I'd want them to. This house is only a mile away from her in the same 'hood, so it's a slam dunk, gift from God type of deal.

Plus, I'll be 51 when I make this move, I've been on every continent in the northern hemisphere, and I've been to every State except Maine, so I guess it's time to settle down... just a little.

The house closes on the 19th, so needless to say, the rest of this month will be a Chinese Fire Drill and I doubt there will be many more posts before I move.

Have a Merry Christmas everybody!



I thought the over-the-shoulder look would be apropos for a moving post.

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Tap Technique Breakthrough

I have only two tap technique pieces in my set so far - Eddie Van Halen's Spanish Fly and Joe Satriani's A Day at the Beach - though there is a third that I wrote coming up soon on my to-do list (The Toccata in E Minor from Sonata One in E Minor; link, PDF and streaming MP3 in the right sidebar).

The first problems I encountered when I started learning tap on the nylon string were, 1) Getting the tapped notes to ring well, and, 2) my left forearm would pump up and lose strength from all of the anaerobic activity involved, especially on the two-finger Satriani tap piece, which is motoric and fast throughout.

The problem of the notes not ringing well solved itself as I built up calluses on the tips of my right hand i and m fingers, and just a whole ton of forward and reverse wrist curls on my Bowflex allowed me to build up my forearm strength and endurance. Whereas at first my left forearm would pump up just one time through A Day at the Beach, now, three years later, I can go through it ten or more times in a row with no problem (And both of my forearms are all sinew and ripples now).

The final remaining problem has been that, in actual performance situations, I'm not warmed up to the tap technique when I get to the tap tech pieces in the set. When Im practicing, it takes three to five times through those pieces before I start to really flow with and groove on them, so in performance situations I have to play them rather slowly and deliberately. This has vexed me for over two years now, but I finally came up with the solution.

What happened was, I asked myself, "Self, what if you play these pieces once through each at the end of every suite when you practice, instead of eleven times through and only at the two places where they belong?" - the idea being, if I play them all the time when I'm not warmed up to them perhaps I'll get better at playing them relatively cold. Yes! That's the answer, right there.

There's two ways to look at this: I'm either getting much better at playing them cold, or I'm making myself warmed up for them all the time. Regardless of perspective, after just a couple of times through my set maintenance practice routine doing this, I can jump into them cold way better now.

Whew! What a relief.

So, if you are trying to learn tap tech, but like me find actually performing tap tech pieces in the middle of a set with mostly trad tech nightmarish, try this: Just play them cold a lot. It's worked near miraculously for me, and in just a week or so (But remember, I've been busting my butt over tap tech for a few years now).

*****

Had a really cool private party gig at a home in the hills above Alpine the other day.



The house was a gorgeous Spanish style place, and since it was below 60 degrees - my minimum required temp for outdoor playing - they put me in the living room. I thought it would be just another background music thing, but it turned into a command performance situation, with the living room packed with guests, many of whom had never heard me play before. It was a blast.

I wish I'd thought of taking some outside pix, but I only had my iPhone, which has a pretty lame camera (As you can see).

*****

I've come up with a novel approach for writing the final blog and book form of Why Music Works: The Harmonic Series, Musical Context, and the Natural Laws of Musical Motion." I'm writing all of the examples, which I call musical proofs, out in Encore 5 first, and then I'm going to go back and re-write the text. So, the first thing I'm going to post/publish will be an index of the musical examples, each of which will have streaming MP3 audio, a JPG of the score, and a link to PDF's, if anyone wants them. There are also Observations and Deductions on the score pages, so the index will serve as both a review and a primer.

There is going to be a lot better flow this time from a pedagogical standpoint - I've been working on this for two years since the Musical Relativity series of posts - and the musical proofs are way, way tighter now. I have 45 of the example proofs done so far, I'm really psyched at how well they are turning out, and I'm thinking I'll probably have well over sixty before I'm done.

My metronome slow-play season starts after Thanksgiving, and I could be interrupted by a move to San Antonio at any time if I find a house, so I may not have anything but the index posted until next March or so. We'll just have to see how it all works out.

*****

Off to San Antonio for a week tomorrow, so I can look at houses, do some bee's wax, irritate old fiends friends, and spend Thanksgiving with mommy. So, have a happy Thanksgiving, and I'll have a post for when I get back.



Don't think mom invited Erica Campbell. Pity.

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The Experience is No More: Mitch Mitchell Dies

No band influenced my teenage years more than The Jimi Hendrix Experience. The only others even in the same league to me were Cream, The Who, and Led Zeppelin. I didn't have any posters of anybody but Hendrix in my bedroom, however. In fact, I had this one from Woodstock. I see that it's "rare" now and commands $85.00!



That poster was in the bedroom of my first three apartments as well, until a ruptured pipe upstairs from my condo destroyed it in 1980. I wanted to be the right handed white guy version of him for years, but my musical tastes eventually turned to jazz and then classical music. I always thought that particular poster represented the epitome of the rock guitar god much more than the more flamboyant poses and guitar burning stunts: Eyes closed, riding the wah-wah pedal... just into it.

So, it was with a true sense of loss that I read today that Mitch Mitchell has died while on tour with his tribute band, Experience Hendrix. Noel Redding died back in 2003, before I started this blog, and Jimi, of course, infamously died in 1970 at the age of only 27.

My favorite Hendrix album was, by far, Electric Ladyland, and THE higlight of my NYC rock band days was the time my band did some recording at Electric Lady Studios, which was, "The House that Jimi Built."

RIP and Godspeed, Mitch. I'm sure there's one hell of a reunion concert going on about now in Rock and Roll Heaven.


The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Noel Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and Mitch Mitchell.

*****

Major undertakings going on, and another epic series of deep musico-philosophical posts are on the way. Plus, a review of GVOX Encore 5, which is what inspired this upcoming series of epic posts.

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Interesting Representation of Jesus (Updated)

While doing a Google image search of "Jesus" to get wallpaper for my iPhone (Hey, it's the "Jesus Phone" right?), I came across this image.



I'd link to the site, but it didn't explain any more than this: The image was made from The Shroud of Turin. It is quite striking to me, and I've read more than one book about the Shroud, in addition to many, many articles.

Anyway, I think it looks quite inspiring on my "Jesus Phone."



UPDATE: Here is Chist Pantocrator, the sixth century representation of Jesus that Dr. Shield mentioned in comments.



This was also based on the Shroud of Turin, and any student of western civ ought to be familiar with it... which begs the question, of course, that if carbon fourteen dating places the Shroud in the middle ages, how does Christ Pantocrator even exist with a much earlier date of nearly a thousand years? I'm smart, but I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, and the first thing I thought when those carbon fourteen results came back was, "Well, duh. The Shroud barely survived a fire at about that time, so of course it's infused with carbon from around that date." Simplistic, as there are other factors involved, like the patches of cloth from the repair after that fire, but really.

Much practicing and house hunting going on, so posting will continue to be once a week or so, and, well, trivial I guess.

Nothing trivial about this, however.



Never seen this sectacular redhead before, but the set dates from 2005, so she's not exactly new. Yes, her hair is really that red. All of it. LOL!

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The Difference Between Practicing and Performing

Lot of developments here, so this will probably be a long, long post.

One of the things I have trouble getting into the heads of my students is the difference between practicing and performing. When you perform, it's just a matter of recitation - going through the set that you've developed - while practicing is preparation for that. So, as a result, just reciting your set in your bedroom is not enough to prepare for a performance, you rather have to concentrate on certain things when you practice in order to be well prepared.

One of the main things is repetition. When you perform, you just play your tunes as they are written to be performed, but when you practice, you have to do more than that. Some pieces I can keep comfortably under my fingers by just playing them regularly - I'm thinking of the figuration preludes I've written here - but others I have to put a little extra effort into - that would be the more intricate polyphonic and homophonic stuff.

What I have discovered over the years, through admittedly anecdotal trial and error, is that prime number repetitions work the best. Now, I'm not attributing any magical properties to prime number repetitions, rather I have come to the conclusion that because prime numbers are only divisible by one and themselves, they form a single unit larger group. Since the human mind is an example of bi-fold symmetry, it tries to divide everything by twos, fives, and tens. Everyone knows how to multiply by two, five and ten almost instinctively, but sevens and threes are a different matter (Remember the IIII ancient by-five counting system you learned as a kid?).

The least of these "magical" prime numbers is three. Most musical repetition schemes are based on two (The only even prime number), and if you exceed this, it puts your mind and your memory into a whole different state.

Let's say you have an antiquated Baroque era sectional binary piece in your set with the form of A, A, B, B. If when practicing you play it A, A, A, B, B, B you'll be doing your memory much more good than if you play it as you'd perform it. Aside from the single additional repetition of each section, you are also having to concentrate more to change the form. Just knowing this can make for more effective and efficient set maintenance practice.

Now, let's say you have a thoroughly modern piece in your set with the form, A, A', B, A, A', B, A". You are already playing the A sections five times, a prime above two, but you only hit the B's twice. If you just got through the piece like this; A, A', B, A, A', B, A, A', B, A" you will have hit the A's seven times and the B's three. This is a very efficient memory reinforcer, and a great strategy for set maintenance.

For major biggie pieces, like the crowd pleasers in my set, I'll go ahead and play them three times through in their entirety, and for the super special pieces in my set, like the tap tech pieces, I'll play them a full eleven times. Admittedly, all of that repetition above seven is to maintain the calluses on my right hand i and m fingers, but eleven seems to work much better than ten. Humorously - or not - when I went to thirteen reps, I started to get some overuse syndrome symptoms. Don't think I'll go for seventeen just yet. LOL!

So, try the additional repeat scheme in your practicing for set maintenance, and stick to the prime numbers and see how it works out for you.

*****

I mentioned previously that I have gotten into a scale practice regimen for the first time in years, and that this activity made me rethink my nail shape and length: They have gotten both shorter and flatter on the tips (The i and m have gotten shorter and flatter, while the a and c have stayed round, but are shorter).



This has been one time I'm glad I use glue-on acrylic nails. Experimenting with nail shape and length is a lot easier if you can just put on another set when you screw up versus having to let your mistakes grow out. As you can see, the index and middle fingers are quite short and relatively flat, while the ring and pinky are a bit longer and rounded: I think of them as two pairs, and the ring and middle fingers don't play the scalar passages, and they are at an angle that requires a bit more length.



From the other side, you can see that the index and middle barely show, while the ring and pinky carry a bit more length. The shorter i and m make scale playing much more smooth - no string snap or nail hang-up - while the longer a and c allow me to reach more distant strings easier when I'm playing arpeggios and whatnot.

*****

As you can see from the top photo, I've gotten the eleven-string fretted Reynolds-Godin Glissentar out, and am playing that again. To be honest, I haven't even picked it up in well over a year. What happened is, when I started radically altering my nail shape, I wondered how the new nails would work on it. Since I'm sending it off to Jim Kozel to have a RMC Polydrive installed in it this winter, I thought I should re-familiarize myself with it anyway. Good idea! The shorter nails make all the difference in getting the string courses to ring evenly, and the extra effort involved in playing it - think playing two guitars at once - are giving me added left arm forearm strength. Playing it a bunch now will hasten my being able to add the guitar into my set when I get it back from Jim next spring, and my other two guitars feel like butter after a set go-through with it.

Since the Reynolds Glissentar is so hard to play - some of the hard chords in my figuration preludes were dull thuds the first time through, and my left forearm would cramp up after thirty minutes with it - I have been playing it in between the other two guitars: Godin, Reynolds, Parker, Renolds &c.

The first time through, I just played my set as I'd perform it (Or tried to!), and then I've been adding repeats of the crowd pleasers, the tap tech pieces &c. each additional time. I've been through my set three times with it now, and am progressing quite quickly. I'm psyched!

Here it is, then, The Holy Trinity:


The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit. LOL!

*****

No houses on the horizon, so I'm here in Alpine for the time being. Kind of a bummer, because now that I'm into the idea of moving, I'd like to "git 'er done" if you know what I mean.



New model to me, but I'm digging the red eyebrows. Too bad about the eye makeup; I'm sure the lashes are red too.

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Computer Catastrophe (Updated)

Sorry for the break, but my heretofore trusty Mac Mini froze up the other day, and nothing would fix it but wiping the disk clean and reinstalling everything. Unfortunately, I lost all of my iLife apps - iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and Garage Band - and they were not on the disks the Mini came with (?!), so I had to finally order a disk set of those apps. I lost a HUGE iPhoto library... for... ever, but all of the good stuff was backed up on my SmugMug account, so really no great loss, and I managed to recover my vast iTunes library off of my 30GB video iPod using TinkerTool (whew). All of my other vital stuff is on a 250 GB external drive, so I got off pretty easy, considering. The disk checked out OK and repairing the permissions didn't help, so I'm not sure what the problem was.

UPDATE: I'm still having the Mini freeze on me (But not terminally, as was the case before), and I found out what the problem was when I stumbled across this thread in which a Mini user had the same kinds of freezes after installing new RAM. So, I ran the Hardware Test disk, and guess what? Yup, I have developed some bad memory addresses. I've been wanting to upgrade because I only have 512 MB anyway, but the Mini is a MAJOR PITA to get into. Well, I also found an online tutorial for that, so I'm going to order 1 GB worth of fresh RAM and get with the program (ProTools gives me memory warnings all the time, so I've needed to do this for a while now).

Anyway, no more posting until iLife gets here next week because I have nothing to manipulate photos with. Believe it, or not, I've never even opened up any of the other iLife apps - I know nothing about Garage Band other than that it has a silly name and takes up disk space - so I basically just paid $79.00 for iPhoto!

Why Apple includes iTunes with OS X but not iPhoto is beyond me, as it seems just as necessary, but whatever.

I'm planning to get a digital video camera to make YouTube clips of me performing anyway, so I suppose I'll need iMovie soon enough, and I have two other computers that need the iLife apps, so I guess I ought to have a disk of them. Reinstalling ProTools LE 7 was actually worth while, as I got an entirely new point upgrade, from 7.0.2 to 7.1.0 out of the deal for free (I actually ended up with two ProTools LE 7 disks when I bought the Digi 002 earlier this year), so that was nice.

Oh, I also ordered the all-new version of Encore, v5.0.3, and my initial impressions are very favorable (I ordered a disk, but they also gave me an instant download of the full version, which was very cool). It pretty much works as before, but it looks like an OS X native app now instead of something ported in from OS 9, and the on screen display is WYSIWYG! Far more attractive. The old maximum file size feature bug is now fixed, though I haven't tested that out yet. First thing I'll do is try to combine all four movements of Sonata One into a single file so that they play seamlessly as I intended.

Finally, since this post will push the last Sonata One post off the bottom of the page - and this is post 401 for MMM since May, 2005 - I put a sidebar section with links to all four of those posts in the blog template.



It's a rerun, but one of my favorites.

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Progressing as a Guitarist: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

OK, so that was overly simplistic.

It has been an interesting adventure, picking up the guitar four years ago at forty-six, after not touching one for the previous four years. In the beginning, I learned very rapidly - or rather, I relearned - and in a mere two years, I had relearned almost all of my previous repertoire, and recovered circa 80% of my technique. After that, however, things became more of an effort.

More likely, I have to say that I took many steps forward, and then I'd have a revelation that made me rethink everything, necessitating that I step back a few paces and restart the process. Then, there were plateaus - frustrating in the extreme - but even during those times I knew I was progressing, even if it was just adding new pieces to my set.

Of course, I've also rebuilt a performing career during that time, and all of the gigs I've done have gotten me back into the game. Many years ago, I was an extremely nervous and self-conscious performer, and today - at the dinner club and piano bar gigs, at least - I'm so relaxed I can daydream and people watch during most of my set. Virtually all of that progress was simply due to the fact that I got busy and performed several times every week. Like I say to my students, If you want to get good at playing in your bedroom, then play in your bedroom; but if you want to get good at performing, then you have to perform a lot, and in many, many differing circumstances.

Well, the scale practice routine I recently started has been an unexpected double-sided blessing-curse. As I got into it, I had to rethink my right hand angle of attack, and more importantly, my fingernail shape and length: The i and m nails got a LOT shorter, and much less pointed as well. Of course, this made me rethink the p (Thumb) as well, and it got shorter too, and also more angled toward the inside of my hand.

The immediate result of this was that I started dropping a lot of notes in some of the pieces in my set. My nails were so much shorter and flatter on the tips that I was simply missing the strings. It was so bad I had to drop some pieces from my set for a while!

Well, a few weeks later, I've tightened things back up, and my tone - a product of nail attack and release - is much better, and I've gotten to a whole new level. Painful at first, but the end result has been the biggest technical leap I've made in well over a year.

So, as you progress, expect these setback-breakthroughs. Initially they might seem depressing, but it is the overall goal that you'll be closer to in the end.

FOOTNOTE: The house deal fell through because the seller was overly proud of the work he'd done to the place, and he wouldn't come down enough on his - way too high - asking price. Too bad, as I loved the place, but in addition to being a perfectionist, I'm also a cheapskate (Perhaps that's why I'm terminally single?). I understand markets, and I don't have a perfect 800 credit rating for nothing. LOL!



That's one of the most perfect redheads I've ever seen. No freckles, so I'm betting she never sees the sun (She's Russian, so that might figure). Her hair is actually redder than that, but she dresses it with something that dulls it a few shades - sacrilege. I only know this because the rest of her hair... er... never mind. LOL!

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Musing Musical Monk Mulls Move

How's that for alliteration?

For the past year, I've been thinking about leaving Alpine. I don't really want to leave - I absolutely love it out here - but several factors are weighing on my mind. For one thing, my mom turns 80 on New Year's Day, and I'm the only family she has, so I ought to be closer to her, and secondly, I'm well connected out here and all the way to Tucson now musically, so I will still be out here enough playing gigs. Finally, I need a bigger market - San Antonio is my home town and there are 2.3M people there these days - so logic and necessity have both conspired to prompt me into action. This is no small deal, as I positively hate moving... but I've been here five years, and that seems to be the maximum time I spend in any one place, going by the pattern of my life.

Well, being that I've been a housing inspector for both FEMA and HUD in past years, lets just say that I have impossibly high standards for a house. I've been looking for a while, and have turned down a house or two because they weren't "perfect" - I know an amazingly detailed inspector in San Antonio who I have working for me - and I must admit that I figured that my standards would delay the process for a year or more.

Well, God has a sense of humor. It's - needless to say with the credit crisis - a buyers market today, and guess what just came up for listing? A small house just a couple of miles from mom's place that belonged to a building contractor! He's been in the place seven or eight years - the house is 25 years old - and it's a tricked out hot rod for such a small house. I'm talking 1,400 square feet, three bedrooms, two baths, corner lot (Mom's place is well over 2K square feet).

Super clean looking from the front.



New roof, fresh paint, nice landscape work.

The contractor-owner redid every room in the house: dining area.



Living room.



Kitchen.



Master bath (Hall bath has a tub and is completely tiled in bright white: I probably won't set foot in it for fear of smudging something. LOL!).



So, this is the ultimate bachelor pad for me. Perfect in every detail, redone by a meticulous independent contractor like I used to be... so, I put an offer in on it. Oh, the back yard has a covered section of the patio with ceiling fans (!) and an open stone section with a permanently installed gas grill. YESSSSSS!

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Keeping Scale Practice in Proper Perspective (Updated)

As regular readers know, I'm not a big fan of practicing scales, and I think too much emphasis is put on scales by some teachers and performers. Sure, learning scales is an important part of the process of learning the idiom of the guitar and developing basic technique, but they can be overdone, and much time can be wasted by practicing them too much.

Perhaps it is inevitable that going through a phase of playing scales "too much" will be a part of most guitarist's learning and evolution process, but if this phase is overly long, scales can become a retrograde force that actually inhibits musical development. This is exactly what happened to me when I was at Berklee back in the early '80's. My goal was to be able to play single lines very fast, picking every note using alternate-picking plectrum technique. A few years earlier, Al Di Meola had come out with the Elegant Gypsy album, and it completely wiped me out how fast and clean his lines were. So, I spent hours and hours and hours, day after day after day, week after week after week, month after month after month, year after year after year... practicing scales and non-scalar finger independence exercises trying to achieve that kind of velocity. I got pretty close, too, but I continued in this scale addiction long after I had developed plenty good single-line technique, when my time would have been much better spent working on learning other aspects of music.

The bottom line with this is, by the way, genetic potential: You either have the genetic makeup to play blazingly fast, or you do not. I've studied quite a bit about this, but I don't want to get bogged down in an esoteric physiological discussion here, so let it suffice to say that there are many factors involved, including individual ratios of fast-twitch to slow-twitch muscle fiber, how thick or thin the myelin sheaths around the nerves are, and how an individual's particular genetic expression has them handling neurotransmitters. It is exactly analogous to being a world class sprinter: No matter how hard most individuals train - they can follow an Olympian's regimen exactly - they simply lack the genetic potential to compete at that level. Same with playing scales fast; most guitarists simply lack the proper genetic expression to keep up with Al Di Meola, Paco de Lucia, Pepe Romero or whomever. Through many years of over-practice, I was able to get close to Di Meola speed, but I could never get that last little bit of super-extraordinary velocity... because I don't have the proper genetic makeup.

Knowing this stark fact of reality can save a guitarist literally years of fruitless labor. If you have gone through an extended period of scale over-practice, have listened to your teacher's advice, have gleaned every last little tip you can from interviews of and articles by your favorite speed demons, and you still can't get to that level of velocity, don't sweat it. Far from being alone, you are in the vast majority. Stop wasting your time, stop beating your head against the genetic velocity wall, and get on with discovering what you can do better than anyone else, and become the musician you were meant to be.

My favorite quotation about this speed-obsession phenomenon comes from Winton Marsalis:

"The ultimate expression of technique is not velocity, it is nuance."

That's it exactly. What makes a virtuoso in his fifties or sixties - well past physiological prime - so vastly superior to a young prodigy is nuance.

As a direct result of that earlier series of changes I went through while at Berklee, when I switched to playing using classical right hand technique at age 29, my period of being addicted to scales was years behind me, I actually had a distaste for them, and I didn't want to repeat my previous scale-addicted phase at all. It is probably no surprise then, that my linear playing using classical right hand technique has always been pretty lame... OK, very lame.

When I decided to go the solo guitarist route again four years ago - instead of just composing - I even decided to not play scales at all, relying instead on a metronome slow-play regimen to get the music tight. And, that worked fantastically well... until I started playing pieces with extended single line passages and composing my series of twenty-four Lineal Studies.

The problem, then, is one of perspective: Achieving a balance that will allow one to maximize technical potential, while not getting obsessive to the point that other areas of one's musicianship suffer. I can't tell you what will work best for you, as that is something you'll just have to discover for yourself. But for me, just adding a hour of scale free-practice (no metronome) into my routine has worked quite well as a start.

What I do is, I play all seven of the in-position two-octave mode forms (versus position-shifting forms such as the Segovia scales) from the twelfth or thirteenth fret - depending upon whether the mode form spans four frets or five - down to open position and back up. I do this four times: Once with rest-stroke starting with the i finger, free-stroke starting with i, rest-stroke starting with m, and finally free-stroke starting with m.

Instead of calculating the form's name by the position of the index finger (1) - where the form spans two octaves and a third - as is the usual practice, I calculate it from where the pinky (4) is, which gives an even two octaves. I do this so that there is only one note played on the low E string, which can't be a rest-stroke (Segovia created his position-shifting forms to deal with this issue, but in-position forms are better for improvisation, obviously).

Going through all seven of the mode forms - Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, and Locrian - in this way takes about an hour, and I just treat that as one of my two or three daily practice sessions. This means that as I cycle through the 64 pieces currently in my set, I end up doing scales every other day. This is plenty often for my regular set-maintenance practice routine.

*****

UPDATE 09/21/08: Since I originally posted this, I have reversed the order of the mode forms, starting out in open position and playing them to the very top of the fingerboard. Since I play only cutaway guitars now, and the Godin has 19 frets, the Reynolds fretted Glissentar has 22, and the RMC Parker Nylon Fly has 24, this makes the sessions 1.5 to 2 hours each, which is in keeping with the time range of my repertoire maintenance practice sessions. The original idea was to gently stretch the hand out while warming up, but that meant I only played the open position forms once each pass. This way, I begin and end with the open forms, and I'm getting comfortable in every position on my three guitars. I figured that since I had done a lot of scale practice when I was young, the left hand would outpace the right in development speed, and this has been the case. However, since I have four years of practicing and performing under my belt this time, the right hand is progressing quite quickly too. I'm actually looking forward to my wintertime metronome practice regimen, when I can play these super-slow and really tighten them up. Yeah, yeah; I should have done this earlier. Live and learn, live and learn.

*****

When I get into my winter metronome slow-play regimen, I'll add one of the mode forms at the beginning, and each of the others successively in between the categories of pieces as I go, which means I'll hit them all several times from the beginning of December to the end of February. By that time, my linear playing ought to be tight and smooth, if not particularly fast, and as the Lineal Studies start to come together for me - it was problems with those that lead to my deciding to add scales back into my regular routine - I ought to be achieving some decent velocity again.

So, I hope my experiences here are helpful: You don't want to go overboard with scales, but you don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water either. LOL!

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09/11/01 Plus Seven Years

Seven years ago this morning, I awoke at my condo in Adelphi, MD - an inside-the-Beltway suburb of Washington, D.C. - to go to work a mere three miles south in Hayattsville. It was one of those impossibly crisp, cool, preview-of-fall days wherein there was not a cloud from horizon to horizon and the sky was unusually deeply blue.

I rode "Leviathan" - my then-new 2001 BMW K1200LT motorcycle - to work that morning. Even a three mile commute on that thing was a riotous joy to me then, so I arrived to work smiling from ear to ear and in an excellent mood.

Things were fairly slow at work that morning - I alternated between being a Case Reviewer and a Field Inspector for FEMA back in those days - so I grabbed a cup of coffee, booted up my computer, and began working the cases in the queues.

It wasn't very long - I don't think I'd finished my first cup of coffee yet - before someone said that an airplane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. The guy didn't sound overly alarmed or breathless, so my first thought was that it was a small private aircraft, and so I just kept working.

Within a very short time, however, someone said it was an airliner, and that one of the WTC towers was ablaze. For some reason I still can't comprehend, I wasn't freaked out by this news either, and I was still working when someone yelled - actually yelled - that a second airliner had hit the other WTC tower. Probably needless to say, this got my full and complete attention, and I had a bottomless pit feeling in my gut.

I can't remember clearly the exact chain of events after that, but I got down to the employee lunch room, where they had CNN on the TV, just in time to see the first tower collapse. I couldn't watch any more of it.

Back in the mid to late 80's, I lived in Hoboken, NJ and worked in Manhattan. I was in a rock band, did some studio work, and during the summer I worked as a bicycle messenger to keep in shape and make some extra cash. Several clients of the outfit I rode for were in the WTC towers, so I'd been up and down them many times. On nice, clear days, which were few and far between in the Summer, I'd take a break on the observation deck to enjoy the spectacular view. Additionally, whenever I went to the towers, I'd walk between them just to look up and capture the vanishing point effect. It was so awesome it made me laugh every time.



The photo doesn't do it justice, but it is the closest I could find.

While sitting back in my cubicle in shock, yet a third call came out that an airplane had hit the Pentagon. Though the Pentagon was several miles across town, because I had a south facing window, all I had to do to confirm this was to look over my left shoulder: There it was, a rising black semi-mushroom cloud against the now fierce looking blue sky.

Everything after that point was a blur, but because we were federal employees the powers that be sent us home around lunch time. I distinctly remember how ironic I thought it was that my mood on the ride home couldn't possibly have been more opposite of that on the ride in.

I spent the rest of the day on the internet and watching TV - I have cable piped into my computer, so I can watch TV in a small window on my monitor as I surf - just trying to absorb it all and make some kind of sense out of it. It was just the beginning of a very long process.

For the next eighteen months, on and off, I reviewed cases from the 09/11 terror attacks, and some of them were heartbreaking in the extreme. I was never sent to New York to do field work, and I was actually thankful for that. Personally, I have no problem with death and destruction that is brought about by natural disasters, as harsh as that might sound, but working those 09/11 cases was positively spirit-crushing. I was happy to be sent out to other disasters, and assigned to work other case files.

Some FEMA people were on the scene almost immediately, of course, and one of them emailed me this picture jut a couple of days later.



I couldn't believe that this was all that was left of those towers I'd been in so many times, and I couldn't believe that over 2,700 people died that day.

My idea to return to Texas and resume being a musician dates from precisely this time. Whether or not I'd ever have to work a terrorist attack again, working 09/11 cases made me lose my stomach for the job. It was only ever an accidental mini-career that arose from a part-time job I took as a DMA candidate while at UNT anyway, but I know for certain I'm thankful for the experience, as strange as that might sound. I can't explain, so I won't even try.

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A Gig with a View

This was the view from where I was performing on Saturday.



First of all, this was on a private ranch, and it never looks that green: We've had the rainiest summer for years around here, and everything is spectacularly green. Usually, it's quite brown this time of year. Second, that is not a river or a lake, but a dammed creek, and it's hardly ever that full either, as you can tell from the amount of greenery that is in the water. The dam is just out of the shot to the left. Third, this ranch is over ten miles from the nearest paved public road, so it took a long time to get to the gig once I actually got to the gate. The place is huge!

And people wonder why a musician would drive a vehicle like this.



Though I didn't need to use the 4x4 this time, I have in the past on some of the grades these ranch roads have. One of the most fun parts of the gig was leaving: On the way out I put on my PIAA off road lights and played Baja 1,000 with my truck. Ten miles of off road racing. Massive fun! LOL!

Finally, I don't want to tell you who the ranch belongs to or exactly where it is, as he's quite famous and likes to escape there. All I'll say is that it is outside of Big Bend National Park, and looks like it might as well be the park. Incredibly cool ranch, incredibly cool folks, and an incredibly cool gig.

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Gavotte II - J.S. Bach

After some higher-than-normal-pressure gigs last month, which necessitated many hours of practice, I am back to my repertoire to-do list. Currently, it looks like this (I usually only keep track of ten):

01] Gavotte II - J.S. Bach (A minor)
02] Bourree - Jethro Tull (D minor/Drop-D tuning)
03] Scherzo - G. Pepper (G major)
04] Mysterious Barricades - F. Couperin (C major)
05] Mood for a Day - Yes/Steve Howe (F-sharp flamenco)
06] Sonata - G. Pepper (A minor)
07] Jesu, Mein Freude - J.S. Bach (G major)
08] Toccata - G. Pepper (E minor)
09] Sleepers, Awake - J.S. Bach (D major/Drop-D tuning)
10] Fugue - G. Pepper (A minor)

My approach to this as been, for the last four years - this month is four years since I picked up the guitar after four years of not touching one - to learn one of my pieces, a standard classical repertoire piece, and then a contemporary "crowd pleaser" type of thing. I've done quite well for only four years back into the game, as I've learned 63 pieces in these 48 months, and my complete set is now +/- three hours in duration. The goal is to have 3.5 hours of music, as most of the dinner club and piano bar gigs I do want me there for four hours with a half-hour break.

I have my set organized into suites that go around the circle of thirds from A minor to A major, with pieces up to five sharps (G-sharp minor and B major) and three flats (C minor and E-flat major) mixed in to add some variety within the suites. At the beginning of each suite is a prelude I wrote - I've done fourteen so far: all of the sharp keys to B major plus F major and D minor) - and then one of my Axial Studies. After that, the pieces alternate between standard repertoire classical pieces and my stuff, and every set ends with a contemporary crowd pleaser, one of which is actually mine. Here's the list of crowd pleasers in order by suite:

1] A minor: Classical Gas - Mason Williams
2] C major: Desert Song - Eric Johnson (In A minor, as I never have found a crowd pleaser type of piece in C)
3] E minor: Spanish Fly - Eddie Van Halen
4] G major: A Day at the Beach - Joe Satriani
5] B minor: Scherzo - George Pepper (This is the "classical" one from Sonata Zero)
6] D major: Eu So Quero Um Xodo - Dominguinhos (This entire suite uses drop-D tuning)
7] F-sharp minor: Mood for a Day - Yes/Steve Howe
8] A major: Stairway to Heaven - Led Zeppelin/Jimmy Page (In A minor, obviously)

Additionally, the A minor suite has Joe Satriani's Tears in the Rain, the D major suite will have the Jethro Tull-ized version of the Bach Bourree I arranged - It's just like Jethro Tull for the A section, but I did the same syncopated treatment for the B section as well: it totally kicks ass) - and the final suite in A major also has Chet Atkins' Yankee Doodle Dixie in it. So, as you can see, I have only two of the crowd pleasers left to learn - Bourree and Mood for a Day - and along with the Scherzo in G major - the jazz counterpoint piece from Sonata One - this will complete all of the pieces for the Heavy Nylon CD I'm working toward. My tune Heavy Nylon is, by the way, the finale or encore piece for the set.

With only five pieces left on my to-do list before I've learned all of the crowd pleasers and Heavy Nylon pieces, I'm getting pretty psyched. Over the past four years I've gotten pretty severely depressed at times just looking at the sheer volume of work ahead of me, but now there is actually light at the end of this tunnel I've been in since September of 2004.

Not only that, but when the last crowd pleaser is out of the way, I'll only be alternating between learning my pieces and standard repertoire classical pieces, so I'll be both catching up on the backlog of my stuff yet to learn, and finishing up on the CD of standard rep pieces I want to do, which will be called Electric Chestnuts.

They say time seems to pass faster as you grow older, but I have found a way to make time pass excruciatingly slowly if you are in your mid-forties to fifty: Compile a list of +/- 80 pieces of music you want to memorize, and get to work on it. LOL!

Yes, I memorize everything, and I reenforce it with very slow metronome practice, which I've mentioned here several times previously: You'll never catch me on stage with a music stand in front of me. Perhaps it's my former life as a rock and jazz player that is to blame, but I've always though sight-reading classical guitar music was completely impossible. I've met some amazingly good classical players, but none of them could really and truly sight-read like a monodic instrumentalist or a keyboardist can. And, since they can't really read having music on a music stand on stage when they perform strikes me as a bit pompous and, well, fraudulent.

My view of it is this: Standard music notation evolved to become tablature for organ and piano, and monodic instrumentalists and instruments with very limited polyphonic capacities, such as bowed string instruments, can use it OK, but the guitar is such a difficult idiom that sight-reading standard notation with it is like reading French, translating it into Mandarin in your head, and then reciting it aloud in English all at the same time. It is ridiculously difficult... which is why Baroque lutenists used lute tablature.

Anyway, I'm getting into one of my Epic Musical Musings digressions, but the new version of Encore I'm getting allows for guitar TAB under standard notation, and I plan on using it! From a practical standpoint, anything that makes the process of learning, memorizing, and performing guitar music easier, is valuable. As for composing, I think in standard notation. LOL!

At long last, here's today's piece:



As I've mentioned previously, I don't really like most of Bach's lute pieces, cello pieces, and violin pieces, and this is the very last lute suite piece I plan to learn. Gavotte I, for example, I positively can't stand. Most of Bach's music for solo instruments is so over-loaded with mechanically inefficient and quasi-improvisatory noodlings that I really can't even listen to it anymore. These tight, tiny little gems are all I like, and all I'll play of it. The one exception to this are his preludes, which are almost all great, but I write my own damn preludes, so I don't play any of his.

One piece of Bach's, the Bourree in B Minor from the violin sonatas and partitas, pissed me off so much I've actually re-composed the thing! I love the way it begins with the big strummed chords (in the guitar transcription), but a lot of the material in the middle of both the A and B sections is so mind-numblingly rambling that it just drove me insane. So, I just took the parts I liked and composed a completely new piece out of it. I call it, Bourree After Bach (Double entendre intentional). It's come out amazingly well by my reckoning, and is actually longer than the original, but I expect it will piss off all of the usual suspects who think Bach is sacrosanct. I actually look forward to those reactions. LOL!

Of the lute pieces, the only ones I play are the Sarabande in A minor from the same suite as this Gavotte, and the Bourree in E minor from the suite that is in that key for the guitar, and that's it: Only three pieces. I seriously do not like the rest of those suites, excepting the preludes, as I mentioned, and the lone fugue in A minor, which I may learn at some point, but it's a real bitch to play, and I have way more than enough pieces in A minor.

For the Sarabande in A minor, I completely ditched the traditional fingering and used my own fingering that gives as much over-ring as is possible: Just bucket-loads of sounding seconds and thirds. This turns an already strange and wonderful little piece into something positively spooky, especially when played on electric nylon string with the detune chorus and hall reverb I use for that suite's "virtual acoustic environment." I also use harmonics near the end of the B section (where the notorious super-wide stretches are), and this gives a really creepy effect that I just love, in addition to making that section easier to execute (all the over-ring fingerings make it more difficult, however).

So, since the Sarabande is the third piece in my A minor suite, and this Gavotte will be the seventh, I wanted to harken back to those over-ring effects I cultured earlier with this piece. The resulting fingering makes the interpretation a really cool, colorfully dissonant, and sorta/kinda impressionistically-blurry take on the thing in places. I like it a lot, but then, I'm an iconoclast and a philistine.

Though I'm about 95% certain of the left hand fingerings, the right hand stuff will probably change considerably as I work the piece up: They always do. As for the unorthodox placement of the finger numbers, when the notation is this tight - I wanted to keep it all on one page - this older version of Encore's minimum text box size makes the numbers clash and blot each other out. Sorry about that.

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Sonata One in E Minor IV: Axial Fugue in E Minor

This is the final of four posts in this series on Sonata One in E Minor for solo guitar. The first three movements are here: Toccata in E Minor, Sonata in A Minor, and Scherzo in G Major.

If I was to go strictly by the fugal categorizations as I learned them from analyzing J.S. Bach's music, this movement would have to be called a ricercare if for no other reason than the number and remoteness of the key regions it traverses. But there is much more that is unique to this piece, as it is a combination of fugal and sonata processes, it uses vertical-shifting counterpoint a la Sergi Taneiev, and the subject-answer theme appears in several modified forms. No other composer has ever used this subject modification scheme before, though Palestrina did present modal variants of some of his thematic material in a more casual way. I chose to call it a fugue because the constructivist approach I took to it is so rigorous.

Since the subject uses a zero axis that is played - and that zero axis can be the root, third, or fifth of a tonic major or minor triad - there are six rectus forms available for each open string of the guitar that is used as a zero axis: The high E, the B, and the G strings, respectively. The inversus forms only work with the root as the zero axis, so the low E and A strings offer an additional four possibilities. That makes for a total of twenty-two (!) possible permutations of the subject/answer theme. Obviously, presenting all of these would lead to a gargantuan and unwieldy work, so I had to come up with an organizational strategy that would present only the best possibilities in a logical order.

Obviously, the subject here bears more than a passing resemblance to the subject from the Organ Fugue in D Minor from the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor which has long been attributed to Bach, but which I'm 100% certain Bach did not compose. The Wikipedia entry on that work is a good place to start, if you want to research this for yourself. As for myself, I transcribed that fugue for the guitar, and I was amazed by how well it sits on the instrument in E minor: The answer at the fourth above uses the open B and E strings, just as I do here. The only problem is that of range in the bass, as a seventh string would be necessary - a low B - to get the organ transcription onto the guitar. I say "organ transcription" because I'm also 100% certain that the D Minor Organ Fugue was originally a piece for Baroque lute, which had many more courses than the guitar has strings. Not only that, but there is no counterpoint in the organ fugue, as the counter-subject, such as it is, merely doubles the melodic trajectory of the subject or answer in thirds or sixths. bach would never have done that, but this is exactly the sort of thing you'd expect of a lute virtuoso who had a shaky understanding of counterpoint, and who wanted to simply indulge in idiomatic fugue-like playing. As for the episodic material, I'm not sure: The provenance of the piece is via one of Bach's students who had a less than honorable reputation, so almost anything is possible.

In any event, doing that transcription exercise gave me the idea for this piece, as the idea is a good one, but the execution of that idea was very ham-fisted and lame. Yet another reason I'm sure Bach is not the author of that "fugue." Convinced I could do much, much better justice to the zero axis fugue theme concept, I looked through the Six Studies on an E Axis that I wrote back in 1987 to get some ideas. While doing that, I noticed that the melody and bass line of E-Axis Study No. 2 in A Minor contained nothing but contrary and oblique motion: If there is nothing but contrary and oblique motion between a melody and it's counterpoint, then both trajectories can be inverted at the octave, and they can be doubled in thirds or sixths! This is Sergi Taneiev's Convertible Counterpoint. So I was in business.

Here is an MP3 of me playing the E-Axis Study in A Minor.

The score is below.



As you can see, the zero axis E here is functioning as the fifth of the tonic minor triad, and there is nothing but contrary and oblique motion between the trajectory of the melody and the trajectory of the bass line, so either can be doubled in thirds and all resulting contrapuntal relationships will be technically correct. This is exactly what became the answer and counter-answer in the final fugal exposition, as you'll see. The problem is, using those doublings is not technically executable on the guitar in the key of A minor, but it is in the key of A major! This set up the fugue as a battle between minor and major, with major winning out at the end.

Here's page two of the study so you can follow the whole thing as you listen if you wish.



What was the melody and bass line of the study became the answer and counter-answer of the fugue, as I said.

Here is a MIDI to MP3 conversion I made in iTunes of the Axial Fugue in E Minor that you can play while reading the score.



So, the subject starts out using the open B string as the fifth of the tonic E minor triad on the top system - I used a system for a solo guitar piece because the music is far to much for a single stave, obviously - and that subject is 7.25 measures in length. As I've said before, odd and fractional bar lengths for fugue subjects are highly desirable.

The answer then comes in on the last eighth of measure seven over the desirable "dissonant fourth," and notice how the sixteenth ornamentation makes the previous zero axis on B "disappear" into the new melodic trajectory: I am very scrupulous and exacting in how I handle the axes and melodic trajectories in this fugue. Likewise, the melodic trajectory of the subject goes smoothly into the counter-answer from measure seven to measure eight.

On the third system down is a brief episode that I call a "release area" that sets up an inverted statement, still in A minor, on the fourth system down. Note how the melodic trajectory on the top staff in the release area and the bass line converge on the note A in measure nineteen, and the zero axis of E falls smoothly into the counter-answer of the inverted statement as well: No loose ends.

This inverted statement is one of the most difficult sections to perform in the fugue, because the E axis here is not an open string on the guitar. I toyed with the idea of using a scordatura tuning with the D raised to E, but that screws up some of the following material, so I'll just have to grin and bear it. In any case, this statement is positively required to get the structural architecture of the piece off the ground.

Starting in measure 27 there is the first of many sequential episodes that modulates the piece to C major.



Now, the open E string zero axis is functioning as the major third of the tonic C major triad: See how cool this device is? I'm able to get many modulations and still use the open strings of the guitar, which is the only thing that makes this fugue possible: It is quite idiomatic, for the most part. This is the subject form of the theme, by the way: The subject's trajectory descends at the end, while the counter-subject's trajectory rises at the end (The opposite is the case with the counter-subject and counter-answer, obviously). Again, there are no loose ends with the trajectories: The G above and the E below in measure forty converge on F-natural in forty-one, and this continues throughout the episode's sequences.

The second system, then, is another sequential episode that is organically spun out from the tail of the subject/counter-subject combination. This one doesn't modulate, however, it only changes mode genders by introducing the E-flat in measure forty-seven.

On the third system is another inverted statement, only this one is is the key of C minor, the G axis is an open string, and it is functioning as the fifth of the tonic triad again. In 55 is a new kind of episode, which leads to the counter-exposition. So, we've already been through the keys of E minor, A minor, C major, and C minor, and we're just getting out of the exposition (Remember, this is a mono-thematic sonata process exposition, and not a strictly fugal one). Note that this episode's ending sounds rather "incomplete" ending on the C in the bass as it does: This is intended, and I'll "fix it" next time we hear this episode, which will be leading into the recapitulation.

OUr counter-exposition begins in measure sixty-one, and we're back in E minor. The subject is exactly like it was at the beginning, but now the main counter-subject is below it, and it has a drone above. Since both the zero axis B and the drone E are open strings, this is not overly difficult.



Whereas the exposition's answer was two voices, here in the counter-exposition it is three voices. Though counter-answer two, the new element, crosses the melodic trajectory of the answer, it effectively doubles it in thirds, which is part of the progressive uncovering of the "original combination" which will appear in the recap.

The 'release area" episode is the same as before, only now I introduce a C-sharp at the end to make the next inverted statement in A major, versus the previous A minor. These sharps will help to affect the next modulation to C-sharp minor, as you can see in the sequential episode that begins at measure eighty-seven.

So the bottom system here is exactly the same as the C major statement in the same place from the exposition, but now we're in C-sharp minor with the zero axis open E string functioning as the minor third of the tonic triad. This is really, really cool, if I do say so myself.



This means that the following sequential episode has a sharp to shed, and so it is more interesting as well. At the end of this episode, I use some chromatic motion in the bass to lead into an entirely new element, which is a longer episode based upon an ascending chromatic bass line. The C-sharp in measure 107 appears to be "left hanging" - the first instance of this in the fugue - but it is all part of the plan of the episode. That C-sharp finds it's home as the D descends to C natural at the very end of the section in measures 124 and 125.

On the bottom system is the inverted statement in C again, but this time it's in C major instead of C minor, and the counter-answer is doubled in thirds for the first time.



That then leads to a gnarly episode with thirds in the lead, and that returns us to A major for the answer section in the major mode with the counter-answer below doubled in thirds. I needed a quarter rest in 143 because a unison is not physically possible there: I needed to re-attack the same E as is in the bass part. By the way, this is hard as hell to play.

At 147 the release area reappears, only this time in the major mode, and that leads to the first of the inversus statements, and it is also the first time that the zero axis open A is functioning as the root of the tonic triad, while the inverted counter-subject is doubled in thirds. This isn't exactly easy to execute either, but you ain't seen nothin' yet.

The inverted sequential episode is really weird and wonderful: The converging trajectories make it triad, diad, monad every iteration, and the whole of the thing modulates us back to E minor for the development sections. Yeah, it's a bitch to play.



Here in the development we start out with an answer-form variant on the original pitch level of E with the countersubject in the lead and a pedal point below. The only things that make this possible are all of the open strings involved.

At 173 is a new form of the release area, and 177 is the answer and counter-answer two over an alternating pedal point. Both the A and E are open strings, so this isn't that difficult to play, actually.

This leads to what at first sounds like the original release area episode, but this modulates to G major at the end in a startling way. Note the chromatic line from F-natural to E, and then D-sharp on the top staff which becomes D-natural on the bottom staff. I'll reverse the D-natural and D-sharp to get to G-sharp minor next time. Don't remember how I thought of this, but it's a nice effect.

The statement in G major is pretty tricky, but is is possible to keep the high G drone going with some fancy finger-work. note here that the open B zero axis is functioning as the major third of the tonic triad.



This sequential episode - notice how they are all the same and yet different: I like fractal self-similarity principles, and use them to get unity in variety throughout this piece - leads us back to E minor, and the first of two episodes based upon an ascending chromatic line in the bass that are the central pillars that this piece balances on.

The end of that episode introduces a sixteenth note run that is ridiculously difficult to execute with all of the other stuff going on, and we are back in E minor. I'll change that sixteenth note figure to lead into E-flat major next time.

From 216 into 217 is the only illegal intervallic sequence in the piece. Between the F-sharp in the bass and the G-natural above it in 216 is a minor ninth. That moves in stepwise parallel motion into a major ninth between the low E and F-sharp above in 217. Since the parallel ninths are unequal and the G is the beginning of the establishment of a new zero axis, I decided to allow myself this license. Plus, it doesn't sound in any way bad or wrong. It's one of those things that works, despite being technically illegal.

Our E minor statement at 217 is new, as the open G is functioning as the minor third of the tonic here, the open B above that is a drone, and the counter-subject is in the lead. All of that over the open low E string's pedal point. Yeah, it's a nightmare, and using the c finger of the right hand is positively required.

As a result, final sequential episode on the page is the most vigorous one yet, and this leads to the exuberance climax on the next page.



The second half of the development starts in the major mode, and now counter-answer two is added. Then, the newer release area episode is just a major mode variant.

OK, now for the third system. Stay with me here. We're in A major now, and we have the answer, counter-answer one as the top line of the lower stave, counter-answer two adding the thirds to the answer's trajectory, and a syncopated E pedal point in the bass. This is not impossible, but it is very difficult, and I actually anticipate using the bass player's technique of thumb slaps on that low E. If I can ever pull it off, it will be totally awesome, dude. LOL!

At 249 is the modulatory release area again, and as promised, I reverse the D-sharp and D-natural from before to modulate to G-sharp minor here.

Holding the G-sharp as a drone is at the edge of impossibility, so I made them eighth notes this time. I may do that with the earlier G's as well; we'll see when I start learning it... if that day ever comes. ;^)



We have a bunch of sharps to shed in this sequential episode to get us back to E minor for the upcoming chromatic bass line episode, so this one is more interesting, as it should be later in the work, and notice the F-natural at the very end of it in 265: This was an F-sharp last time, so now we have an augmented sixth with the D-sharp above. This is a setup for the modulation to E-flat major at the end of this next episode.

The second of our "pillars" is then exactly the same until the last measure where I change the sixteenth note run by introducing F-natural, A-flat, and B-flat in the run-up to E-flat in the lead, and the F-natural in the bass again. Since the guitar doesn't go down to E-flat, I was able to avoid the parallel ninths this time by simply having the bass drop out. LOL! That F-natural finally finds a home on the next page, however, when the low E picks it back up.

Since the B-flat drone is not an open string, obviously, I made the upper voices eighth notes for the E-flat major statement. Between this and the radically fast modulation down a semitone, this sounds "wicked pissah," as we used to say in Boston.

Finally, we get the second appearance of the episode that ended the exposition, but now it's completed and makes a proper modulation at the end. The high C-sharp in measure 294 is also the pitch climax of the piece: That's at the 73% point, which is virtually perfect for a piece based on the answering interval of a perfect fourth (a ratio of 4:3, i.e. 3÷4= .75).



So, here's our recapitulation, and now we are in E major. On the top system we have, top to bottom, a drone on the open high E string, the major mode variant of the subject with the open B zero axis functioning as the fifth of the tonic major triad, counter-subject two doubling the trajectory of the subject in thirds, and counter-subject one in the bass.

Then, the second system has the "original combination" in all of its glory: The answer using the open high E as the zero axis, which is the fifth of the tonic, of course, then counter-answer two doubling the answer's trajectory in thirds, and finally counter-answer one doubled in thirds. This is what I wrote first, and it's only executable in A major: The entire fugue is based on the possibilities of this combination. This is so highly virtuosic, I don't know if I'll live long enough to learn it. I'm not kidding. It would take someone like Kazuhito Yamashita to pull this off with the bravura I envision.

I then use the release area, which is stupid-simple after what just went before, to turn around to E minor again and the first of the inversus statements using the open low E string as the zero axis. It is again the root, of course.

At 320 is and inverted from of the release area episode, and that leads to...



... the first statement of the rectus form of the subject that uses the high E zero axis as the root of the tonic triad: Saving the best for last, as usual. A variant of counter-subject two is also present, but without the thirds in the bass this is much, much easier to play.

At 331 I introduce the ending episode, and it sounds like the minor mode is going to hijack the piece and end it early, but E major interrupts at the last possible moment in 342, and we get the major mode version of the inversus and its inverted release area episode.



As I said, save the best for last: These major mode variants using the zero axis as root work much better than their minor mode counterparts, which is the whole point.

At 361 the final episode based on a chromatic bass line interrupts the action, but this one is based upon a descending chromatic bass line, as is apropos nearing the end of the piece, and it balances out the one in the counter-exposition perfectly. Notice that I let placement of the sixteenth note ornaments from the subject clash with those in the episode this time: I've scrupulously avoided that up to now, because it is a really wild effect I wanted to save for the end.

The ending episode then returns at 373, but this time the bass gives mi, re, do after the descending chromatic tetrachord. Since the chromatic tetrachord implies minor and the bass lick implies major, this is the final clash of wills between minor and major.



After the point where major interrupted previously, minor finally surrenders as the chromatic line becomes diatonic and doubled in thirds on the second system. The final triumphant statement is the trajectory of the subject and the counter-subject in augmentation harmonized using all the strings of the guitar possible: Six voices except for measures 393 and 394, which are five voices. Ta da!

Probably needless to say, this piece is at the very bottom of my to-do list. LOL!

Of course, the series must end with a redhead.



That's a mirror, she's not twins. Otherwise, yeah, twin redheads would pretty much be my ultimate fantasy. LOL!

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Sonata One in E Minor III: Scherzo in G Major

The first two posts in this series are here and here respectively.

This is the third of four movements, which are Toccata, Sonata, Scherzo, and Fugue. The order of composition for these pieces, as far as completing them is concerned, was however, the Sonata first, the Fugue second, then the Scherzo, and finally the Toccata.

As for the beginnings of the pieces though, this Scherzo has by far the earliest point of origin. I actually wrote the melody of this tune back when I was twenty-one years old, which would have been sometime in 1979 (!). It was an assignment given to me by Jackie King when I was studying with him at The Guitar Institute of the Southwest - later the Southwest Guitar Conservatory - in San Antonio. This was the year before I started at Berklee in the fall of 1980. The assignment was to write a swing tune to a pre-existing chord progression from a jazz standard, and what I came up with totally knocked Jackie and my classmates out, so I kept it around. BTW, I cannot for the life of me remember what the standard was, but it was something out of the old, and illegal, Real Book.

Fast forward twenty-six years (!) to 2005, and I dragged the piece out of my archives to make an arrangement of it for two of my students, who had a jazz guitar duo. While working on that project, I noticed that the compass of the melody would allow for a single guitar to play the melody along with a contrapuntal bass line. I had the idea to write counterpoint in a legit, straight ahead jazz swing style for many years, but I was thinking about using a Charlie Parker tune like Donna Lee for the project. Needless to say, this was an exciting discovery for me, and a very fortuitous event, so I first wrote a contrapuntal bass line to the melody in late 2005, and then the "trio" section, which is like a jazz soloist improvising for a chorus, sometime in 2006. I didn't even have to change the original key, and it fit into the key plan for the sonata perfectly!

So, this piece only took me 27 years to compose. LOL!

Here is the MIDI to MP3 conversion of the piece I made in iTunes: Scherzo in G Major.

As usual, clicking on the blue playTagger icon will allow you to listen to the MP3 in this window, while clicking on the link will play the MP3 in a new window or tab, depending on your prefs.

The word scherzo translates into English as jest or joke, so a scherzo is supposed to be a humorous piece: What could possibly be a better or cooler joke for a multi-movement sonata than to have the scherzo be a swing tune written in two-part counterpoint?! Yes, I love this little piece, and it's all the way up to #3 on my to-do list now, so I ought to be performing it by next year at this time. Technically, it's really not that virtuosic. Not any more than one of the more challenging Bach Lute Suite pieces, anyway, and Bach was actually the inspiration for this piece: I just asked myself, "What would Bach be writing if he were alive today." A highly speculative question, to be sure, but I reckon he'd be doing exactly the same thing today as he did then: Writing highly sophisticated pieces in popular styles - Bourrees and Sarabandes were the pop tunes of his day, just like swing tunes are in the jazz world.

I actually did a technical analysis of this piece for a much earlier post on this blog, so I won't have to offer a blow-by-blow description today. Here is just the original tune and counterpoint, with the chord progression I wrote it to above the staves, and the resulting progressions that the contrapuntal bass line created below:



The chords indicated above the staves are exactly what I had on the ancient manuscript I pulled out of my archives, as is the melody, so it was originally just a jazz lead sheet. I did change the time signature from 4/4 to 12/8, however, so that the swing would be correctly written out and properly played back via MIDI.

Since the melody is in a legit straight ahead jazz swing style, I wanted the bass line to be as well. I've heard some other composers attempt things they call jazz counterpoint, but none of them sounded legit to me: This does, since the bass line is exactly like something Ray Brown might come up with. As you can see from the analysis, that bass line implies much more interesting harmonies than the original lead sheet had.

This has lead to a much more high tech method of writing for me: I can compose a pure harmonic continuity now with well ordered root progressions that has all of the structural modulations worked out within, then I can write a very colorful melody over that chord progression, and finally, I can compose a contrapuntal bass line that raises the musical interest level even more.

As I've written about before, the traditional way of teaching counterpoint is quite tiresome and inefficient. Basically, the rule sets that are taught as seventeenth and eighteenth century counterpoint are burdened with rules that basically describe the styles of Palestrina and Bach respectively, but the underlying fundamental laws are never given.

There is only one prescriptive law of pure counterpoint:

1) Only imperfect consonances may move together in parallel stepwise motion.

From this, we can deduce the two proscriptive laws of counterpoint:

2) Perfect consonances may not move together in parallel stepwise motion.

3) Dissonances may not move together in parallel stepwise motion.

Then, from these three fundamental laws of contrapuntal motion, we can deduce the three exceptive laws:

4) Imperfect consonances may move in parallel stepwise motion into perfect consonances or dissonances.

5) Perfect consonances may move in parallel stepwise motion into imperfect consonances or dissonances.

6) Dissonances may move in parallel stepwise motion into perfect or imperfect consonances.

Finally, the true law concerning the "emancipation of the dissonance":

7) Dissonances require no preparation or resolution.

So far as the issue of parallel perfect fourths being allowed in so-called "simple counterpoint" is concerned, simple counterpoint is not pure counterpoint: All pure counterpoint is invertible at the octave, so parallel perfect fourths - since they invert to perfect fifths - are not allowed.

When you purge the teaching of counterpoint of all of the niggling rules which just describe stylistic aspects of Palestrina's and Bach's compositional practices, this is what you get. Counterpoint is much simpler than harmony - which is why it appeared first in western musical evolution - it's just that it is not taught properly because the simple underlying laws were not distilled out until, well, I did it.

So, though I treat dissonance quite freely in this piece - dissonances require no preparation or resolution (!) - there is only one parallel stepwise dissonance here - into the second beat of measure six, which I corrected in the final version - or perfect consonances (in the final version), so this is perfectly pure counterpoint, it's just in the jazz style of swing.

Here's the final version of the "menuetto" with that single correction:



As you can see, by simply changing the B-flat to D-flat in measure six, I got rid of the illegal parallel dissonance. This is one of only two changes I made to the melody that I wrote back when I was twenty-one; the other is the note G on the third eighth of measure nineteen, which was an E-flat previously. I made that change simply so that the figure wouldn't be an exact repeat of the previous one just heard.

For the "trio" section, I wanted to have an analog to the jazz practice of having a soloist improvise for a chorus. It took me a while to come up with the approach for this, but I finally decided to keep the original bass line as a cantus firmus, and just progressively elaborate on the original melody until I worked up to constant eighth notes for the internal repeat - which is here written out, of course. Since jazz improvisation actually began with soloists ornamenting the original melody, this is actually seriously old school. LOL!



For the return of the "menuetto" section, I just used the repeat, which gives the whole piece a nice proportionality to it.



I end the piece with a stylistically apropos 6/9 chord, which is a nice parting shot for this particular musical joke.

So, as you can see, counterpoint can be written perfectly well and legitimately in styles quite distantly departed from anything resembling Baroque or classical music... if you understand what the fundamental laws actually are, and are not hung up on a bunch of arbitrary rules that just pertain to to the expressive stylizations of Palestrina or Bach.



Beautiful face, natural blond, no makeup: A perfect ten (She'd "go up to eleven" if her hair was naturally red. LOL!).

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