![]() ![]() There are too many other wonderful moments for a full taxonomy. The basses go to the right note, but they are displaced by an octave and enter as the rhythmically displaced voice. The suspension is prepared, but then there is a rest. Look at the clever way he moves from m.9 to 10. I could show you ten scores on my piano that would voice those same sonorities as a parallel motion. ![]() The ingenious way that he voices the 5th measure is a perfect example. There are athletic leaps that somehow effortlessly find their way into a surprisingly perfect location. He’s writing modern music that is informed by ancient principles. I don’t mean to suggest that he is somehow writing ancient music. His Ave Verum Corpus from his Mass of the Americas is a profoundly beautiful work written by someone who has thought very deeply about all of the problems of voice leading. Right when I am at my point of deepest solipsistic despair, in walks Frank La Rocca. Vertical leaps are placed in willy-nilly without care for the singer or player. “Suspensions” are just a vertical sonority that they learned from popular music, so they don’t need to be treated with care. I read through music all the time by composers - even well-known ones- that don’t seem to care about or think about music in this way. You have to do the exercises - more than once -so that you can think about the problems for yourself. The problem is, even when I’m trying to adumbrate what I’m talking about with words, it’s not the same. It teaches you how to prepare dissonance in such a way that it doesn’t suddenly appear out of context and create a vertical sonority that interrupts the horizontal line. It teaches you the subtle difference in meaning between different kinds of consonance. It teaches you how to balance vertical energy of a leap with a gradually descending line. The great value in this manner of training is that it forces you to think very deeply about the way music is structured. ![]() The Gradus is a codification of the 16th century counterpoint practices that every composer was supposed to master. It used to be that composers were trained with a set of exercises called the Gradus ad Parnassum. Most of you will never understand what I’m talking about when I try to explain my admiration for Frank La Rocca’s writing. Appendix B contains a full transcription of the notebook.I have recently come to terms with something. From the 1910s to the 1960s he disseminated the technique through his writing, composing, and teaching, and thus provided a life for dissonant counterpoint in American musical culture through the end of the twentieth century. These traits account for Cowell's continued advocacy on behalf of dissonant counterpoint that extended well beyond the time he compiled his notebook. He also placed a strong emphasis on the practical application of new ideas in addition to their theoretical development. He was a systematic and tenacious innovator who revered tradition as well as experimental techniques. The notebook also provides evidence of Cowell's work habits and values that challenge current scholarly depictions of the composer as an undisciplined bohemian. Beyond providing information about the technique during its early development (1914–17), the archival source documents Cowell's active involvement in devising a compositional practice that has heretofore been exclusively attributed to Charles Seeger. Housed in the Henry Cowell Papers at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts is Cowell's unpublished notebook that comprises written instructions for using “dissonant counterpoint” along with forty-three exercises. ![]()
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