Nine Preludes: The Pattern Revealed
Composers of preludes frequently present them in a structured key sequence. The preludes and fugues in Book I of Bach’s
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Poetic Endings: The Major-Major Seventh Chord
At the end of a piece, sometimes we seek something more expressive than a simple tonic triad. Several of my
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Meditation: The Old within the New
The human brain delights in recognizing the familiar in new guises. In music, motives and themes are constantly transformed into
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Romanticism and the Enlightenment
The Declaration of Independence, adopted on July 4, 1776, was one of the greatest highlights of the period in Western
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Music à la Mode
In medieval and Renaissance times, before tonality developed into its modern form, Western music was based on a system of
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The Magic of Octave Displacement
As I pointed out in my very first post to this blog, if two pitches are an octave apart, the
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Time Travel in Music: Rounds and Fugues
Our last two blog posts looked at how two or more distinct melodies can be juxtaposed in counterpoint. But it
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Melody and Countermelody
We saw in the last blog post how the melody “Puff the Magic Dragon” fits neatly in counterpoint with the
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Punctus contra Punctus
One of the most important devices in a good composer’s toolbox is counterpoint, the art of combining two or more
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Directional Tonality
Most tonal pieces start in the “home key” — the “tonic,” as musicians call it — and return to it
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Growing up as a Romantic Composer in an Anti-Romantic Age
I decided at a very young age that I would become a composer and started writing little compositions from age
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The Great Darkness: Romanticism in the Mid-20th Century
Younger Romantic composers today may not understand the virulent anti-Romanticism and opposition to tonal composition that pervaded the musical establishment
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Rachmaninoff and the Twentieth Century
During much of the last century, Romanticism and tonality were held in virtual contempt by most of the musical establishment,
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What is Romanticism?
My music fits squarely within the movement known as Romanticism. Musical Romanticism is customarily associated with the nineteenth century and
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Pieces of Eight
Most musicians are familiar with the seven-tone diatonic set, which determines the pitches for a major scale or a natural
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