I love the reeds, and the ending is perfect. I have a ton of inspiration.
2 Likes
Re: Edit 4.
Travelling thirds and sixths are precisely what you get when you play the hexachord and its transposition at the fifth in close imitation. The hexachord scale is a fugue subject, so the piece is contrapuntal out the wazoo, but… the subject and answer together in stretto make a slow homophonic background for the play of suspensions and other contrapuntal devices above and/or below them.
2 Likes
What can I say, you’ve got taste.
Hell yeah!
1 Like
I have a ton of work to get me chops back up to speed. A couple years, to be frank.
Honestly a good use of my time would likely be to just practice out of hymnals. A lot of tunes have well structured counterpoint, which similar to calisthenics strengthen your (musical) core.
3 Likes
Harmonising chorale melodies and figured basses is good practice. I sometimes arrange voice-and-figured bass pieces for keyboard to stay in practice. (Keeping everything within the hands is a really good challenge.)
These pieces had been originally written for melody and figured bass alone.
2 Likes
Oh, the first piece, that drawn out pause is so rewarding 
1 Like
Both pieces I could go on and on. That’s not the point.
The 1 5 1 ending of the second piece was spot on. Precisely what it begged for. I am a huge fan of trills (Mozart’s trill techniques, amirite?), and to end a piece in the way you did shows both respect, awareness, and levity to the art form. More to come in a moment.
1 Like
This may be out of left field, and I apologise if it sounds reductionist. Heh, my fingers don’t work as well as they did, but I have my ears :). I am a huge fan of the modes, inversions, and novel techniques.
Again, forgive me, what I keep hearing is a really powerful dirge or requiem. The tempo, the contra, the veiled humor.
Have you written a requiem?
1 Like
No, not yet. I have contemplated it - I suspect that my sense of melody and counterpoint is suitable for choral music.
A lot of what is written in those two arrangements is straight from Purcell and Lully. I have kept the melodies and bass lines intact, except for a certain amount of added ornamentation (which is native to the Baroque style to an extent). In the Lully, I held over the chaconne bass to add a coda which conflated the opening bars with the closing bars to arrive at the final cadence. It sounds like the piece is going to start another repeat, but it goes to the end.
This is the thing, though: even though those two arrangements keep the bass and melody, there’s a lot of me showing up in the pieces, because the inner voices I added do a lot to establish the expression of the pieces. That’s the value of such exercises.
2 Likes
This thread might be of interest for new musical inspiration:
I plunked a few chords on the piano the other day, but I grabbed a guitar and sang a few tunes this afternoon. Man, my voice has never been even reasonable, and it was worse today, but I powered through.
It felt good,sounded bad, but ya don’t get better by stop trying. Jean Ritchie blue diamond mines kick my vocal chords in the rear 
5 Likes
It’s no secret that I love to sing, but what I’m trying to do now is solidify my singing voice.
My solid range is something like A3-C5; those are the notes that I can consistently hit and make sound good. On a good day, I can hit D3-G5 (although that’s using my falsetto) and sound good; on extraordinary days, I can push even farther (with both my full voice and my falsetto).
Piecing together all that I’ve heard and read, the picture I’m getting is that the key to consistency is tied to my vibrato. The way I’ve heard it said is “you can’t hit the highest notes of your full range without vibrato,” but that sounds bass-ackwards to me. When I hit these notes cleanly, it’s almost never with vibrato; it’s with power, which typically kills my vibrato. And I’ve come to think that that’s the problem.
Again, this is just from what I’ve heard and read, but it sounds like vibrato is not a prerequisite for anything; it’s just something that won’t happen unless you have good form. So, it’s not my vibrato that I need to work on in order to solidify my range; it’s my overall technique. Which makes a lot more sense, as I can readily believe I’ve accidentally stumbled upon better form while trying to hit these high notes, more than I believe that I somehow introduced vibrato into then without knowing.
That said, vibrato being an indicator rather than a cause gives me something to work with. I can do it, but I lose it if I add too much power, or if I hold the note too long. And, again, that speaks to the fact that I’m doing something wrong (probably pushing from the wrong place in both cases).
So what I need to do is hover on the edge of where I typically lose the vibrato, and try to figure what about my technique is changing at that point. I think if I can grasp that, and learn to feel and correct whatever I’m doing wrong, then I can fix it – eventually, perhaps, without even trying.
2 Likes
Vibrato, at least a certain amount, is fairly normal - the vocal chords are more complex acoustically than simple strings. That being said, it speaks well of your pitch centering if you can produce weiss notes in alt - vibrato (and melisma) is frequently used as a kind of crutch, because it is easy to “slip through” a certain pitch insecurity.
However… it sounds like you have the range, but there is a certain danger of blowing out your vocal chords if you have to force, so yes, I think technique is the problem, but I am not a singer, haven’t been since my choirboy days. (And I got into instrumental music as soon as I possibly could, joined the recorder group. I sing reasonably well, but instrumental music suits my personality better.)
I think that this article is at least tangentially relevant to what you’re looking for:
4 Likes
I’m sorry, can you explain this? I’ve never heard this terminology, and Google is coming up empty.
1 Like
White notes = no vibrato.
Edit: In alt is in the highest range.
2 Likes
Ah, cool, thanks. Yeah, there’s something happening in my voice at that range, but I wouldn’t call it vibrato. Either my voice cracks or fries trying to hit the note, or I’m off-pitch, or I just lose it entirely.
ETA: The only way I’ve found through the above is to apply more force, which wreaks havoc with my ability to tell whether I’m hitting the right note, and leaves my throat feeling, by the end, like I’ve been gargling iron filings.
1 Like
I think the ladies in the article are onto something. Relaxed technique matters. If you play piano and get RSI in the wrist, you don’t get surgery and then go back to the very technique that caused the injury: you learn to keep the hands relaxed, no sudden movements, hands open when moving from open position to open position, etc.
As it applies to you, I think you are verging on blowing out your vocal chords.
2 Likes
Blowing out? Probably not. I am a very quiet person by nature, and I haven’t been in theatre or a choir in a long time. I sing when the mood strikes me, but that isn’t necessarily often, and I only belt very rarely.
That’s not to say that you’re wrong about my technique being the type that could or would blow out my voice; judging by that article, by what you’ve said, and by the results I got when I did sing regularly, that seems to be exactly the case. To the point where I’m thinking that playing with my vibrato (which requires me to sing a bit quieter than even the volume of my normal speaking voice) is a really good idea because it’ll keep me away from that kind of damage.
Even so, the total time I spend singing in a week won’t exceed a few hours, and even that would only be the case if I’m driving for most of that time. While I will probably store my belting voice in my back pocket for awhile out of an abundance of caution, I don’t think I get enough use out of my voice that I should be particularly concerned about wear and tear.
But, in all earnestness, thank you for the concern.
1 Like
You’re welcome. Try breathing the way they found the old diva breathing, no gasping for air, breathing as if she were in a conversation. I have generally two vocal levels, quite soft and an RSM parade ground level (a very loud RSM parade ground level), and I don’t recall ever having to strain at the latter: I just sort of resonated.
This was rather handy when I was skipping in curling. My normal habit was to call sweeping with a quick series of yeses and nos at slightly above conversational level so that I could walk the rock into its target (a kind of successive approximation, and yes, I was very good at calling sweep). If my calls were being buried by a skip enamoured of his own voice (if you’ve watched the game at all, you will know the type: “Sweeeep!!! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!”), I’d raise my voice, and all the sweepers on every sheet in the barn would follow my instructions, whether it was what their skips wanted or not. It got my point across very well. 
Now, don’t ask me for more detail on how I do that. I’m just aware that every part of me seems to vibrate (well, it seems that way ), and that I need very little more air to do that. This is anecdotal evidence from a different activity, but it does suggest that the ladies are on the right track.
2 Likes
Bearing in mind that I have very little formal instruction: it’s probably just increasing the size of the resonance chambers. That is, first standing up straight and inflating your chest, while using your diaphragm to breathe, which gives you a larger resonance chamber in your chest; and second, making full use of the natural megaphone that is your mouth (and, to a lesser extent, your nasal cavity).
Certainly, that was the net effect of the lessons I did get, which largely consisted of taking deep breaths, using the diaphragm as the source of air while singing, and “sing with your head voice.”
2 Likes