The Shock Of The New, Even When It's Old

I've been spending a lot of time watching classical music videos on YouTube recently, and something I find very hard to ignore is the comments. People hate classical music, at least if it's less than 100 years old. Modernism remains deeply traumatic. It gives me hope.

Scriabin's "Extase" Chord and Some Relatives

Early twentieth century harmony was characterised by (among other things) the whole-tone scale. Here I consider one idea, from Alexander Scriabin's Poem of Ecstacy, involving some chords that will be familiar to jazz musicians but in a somewhat different context, and of course expanding the idea to see where it takes us.

Parking the Orbiter and Inserting into Randy's Revenge

Here are two things I just figured out about the Earthquaker Interstellar Orbiter and Fairfield Circuitry's Randy's Revenge. I don't usually do gear posts here and maybe they're obvious to everyone else but I see some confusion about the former online and the latter took me a bit of effort to work out.

Triple Diminished Ideas

Here are some ideas based on my very imperfect understanding of Yusef Lateef's "triple diminished" approach to 12-tone improvisation. I'm not sure how he improvised with it in real time (though it seems from what I've read that he did) but the results certainly sound interesting and usable.

Minor 3-Major 2 Patterns

The common pentatonic scale has only two kinds of interval between its notes: each pair is separated by either a minor third (three frets) or a major second (two frets). Of course, this scale counds very familiar, not only because of its use in rock music but also from its very different uses in music by the likes of Debussy and Ravel. So it's interesting to look at what happens when we navigate the total chromatic using those two intervals.

Karnatic Etudes

Two big twentieth century studies of Carnatic scales by Western composers are now available in full on YouTube. If nothing else, I think we Western musicians can benefit from hearing these scales "in our own accent" rather than solely in the context of South Indian music. They also prove that these "exotic" scales can make excellent music in a Western style, in case that still needs to be proved to anyone.

Balanced Steps

Just a quick note on something funny I noticed in Richard Cohn's Audacious Euphony that led me to a mild (and daft) reharm of Giant Steps.

Chords from Sucharitra

I haven't played much with Sucharitra but today I worked out a few basic harmonizations -- in thirds, fourths and seconds, basically -- and I liked the sounds.

Some Messiaen-like Chords

I've always enjoyed Messiaen's chords without really knowing what's going on with them, so today I looked at an article about them and cooked up some chords of my own inspired by it.

The "Minor Up A Minor Third" Trick

OK it's not really a "trick" but I've been using this a lot lately so I thought it was worth a note. The idea is that on a C minor you can pivot to Eb minor, and in general substituting "the minor up the minor third" sounds nice and unexpected.