The Hidden Symmetry Of The 43 Octatonic Scales And 43 Tetrachords

In The Hidden Symmetry of 43 Octatonic Scales and 43 Tetrachords, Creamer provides an extensive explanation and analysis of his system of octatonic (eight-note) harmonizations and melodic organization as well as a series of exercises, complete musical examples and original compositions utilizing the system. While the book includes the diminished scale and all of the eight-note bebop scales, Creamer goes well beyond their traditional use in a jazz context and introduces a vast new musical language where all eight notes are utilized as scale tones creating thousands of chord combinations, tonal colors and melodic possibilities that can be used by improvisers and composers in any musical context for generating new ideas and expanding traditional harmonic and melodic approaches. Guitarists will also benefit from the inherit symmetrical fingerings of the system (eight-notes-per-two-strings) as well as full tablature for all examples have been provided. Much more than a series of possible mathematical combinations, the book is presented as a complete system, and while a thorough theoretical framework is presented for contextual understanding, the music is first and foremost the focus of the work as articulated in the book’s Foreward by Tuck Andress. Perhaps not since George Russell’s book, Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, has a book had such tremendous potential for modern composers and musicians.

Jack Boss presents detailed analyses of Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone pieces, bringing the composer's 'musical idea' - problem, elaboration, solution - to life.

Ton de Leeuw was a truly groundbreaking composer. As evidenced by his pioneering study of compositional methods that melded Eastern traditional music with Western musical theory, he had a profound understanding of the complex and often divisive history of twentieth-century music. Now his renowned chronicle Music of the Twentieth Century is offered here in a newly revised English-language edition. Music of the Twentieth Century goes beyond a historical survey with its lucid and impassioned discussion of the elements, structures, compositional principles, and terminologies of twentieth-century music. De Leeuw draws on his experience as a composer, teacher, and music scholar of non-European music traditions, including Indian, Indonesian, and Japanese music, to examine how musical innovations that developed during the twentieth century transformed musical theory, composition, and scholarly thought around the globe.

Portrays Schoenberg's atonal music as successions of motives and pitch-class sets that flesh out 'musical idea' and 'basic image' frameworks.

Over the course of an astonishingly long career, Elliott Carter has engaged with many musical developments of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries - from his early neo-classic music of the interwar period, to his modernist works of conflict and opposition in the 1960s and 1970s, to the reshaping of a modernist aesthetic in his latest compositions. Elliott Carter Studies throws new light on these many facets of Carter's extensive musical oeuvre. This collection of essays presents historic, philosophic, philological and theoretical points of departure for in-depth investigations of individual compositions, stylistic periods in Carter's output and his contributions to a variety of genres, including vocal music, the string quartet and the concerto. The first multi-authored book to appear on Carter's music, it brings together research from a distinguished team of leading international Carter scholars, providing the reader with a wide range of perspectives on an extraordinary musical life.

The basic principles of progression and the means by which tonality is established in Bartók's music remain problematical to many theorists. Elliott Antokoletz here demonstrates that the remarkable continuity of style in Bartók's evolution is founded upon an all-encompassing system of pitch relations in which one can draw together the diverse pitch formations in his music under one unified set of principles.

A highly sophisticated theoretical-analytical study of Debussy's oeuvre, probably the most influential in modern music. Using set- theoretic and Schenkerian approaches, Parks (music, U. of Western Ontario) examines the nature of Debussy's musical medium and resources, and how they are employed to generate his musical surfaces in all their richness and diversity. Annotation(c) 2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)