The Structure of Romance
The romance genre is by nature lyrical, and the two themes in my Romance for Oboe and Piano both fit
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Music Theory
A is for Ambiguity
An intriguing feature of my Romance for Oboe and Piano is the ambiguity between A-natural and A-flat. In the piece’s home
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Rhapsodic Harmonies
Harmonically, a typical classical work begins by defining the tonality to the listener, through the use of tonic flanked by
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Equal Divisions of the Octave
A significant feature of the chromatic harmony in late Romantic music is the use of nontraditional harmonies to convey subdominant
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Fearful Symmetry
“What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” — William Blake Based on the principle of octave equivalence,
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Music of the Night
We usually think of piano nocturnes as tranquil pieces, typically featuring a lyrical melody over left-hand arpeggios. Yet some of
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The Elided Second Degree
Many years ago I performed Rachmaninoff’s Etude-Tableau op. 39/5, and it remains one of my favorite works by the composer.
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Waxing Rhapsodic within Tonality
My Rhapsody for Woodwinds and Piano is harmonically adventurous in places, even flirting with exoticisms such as octatonic, but the
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Prelude No. 6: Unity within Diversity
The human mind thrives on perceiving unity in the midst of diversity, and that perception is at the core of
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The “Arch”-itecture of a Rhapsody
One might expect a “rhapsody” to be a sprawling affair in which new ideas are invented in the enthusiasm of
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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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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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