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Re: Horace Silver RE: Mathematics, Prime Numbers, & Looping with the EDP



Since I used the term, I'll define it.

A "rosalia" is a so-called "infinite canon" (basically, like a round).
A mensural canon is a canon where the follower voices (the 'comes')
are in some rhythmic expansion or contraction of the lead voice (the
'dux'). So, since the piece is built around a short loop and has the
same melody repeated as rhythmic expansions, I termed it a mensural
rosalia.

Although, after just writing the above, I looked for confirmation of
my definition of rosalia. The one definition I did find confirmed the
repeating melody aspect, but tacked on an additional bit about each
repetition being transposed by a half-step or whole-step from the
previous repetition. Since there's no transposition in my piece, i
guess it's not technically a rosalia, but since there are fugues in
the 20th century that don't follow the "tonic subject, dominant
answer" scheme, I guess I can still call it a rosalia. Well, a
mensural rosalia.

Hope I didn't muddy the waters too much...

Cheers,

Jon Southwood  

On 6/22/05, Edwin Hurwitz <edwin@indra.com> wrote:
> PS What's a "mensural rosalia"? When I googled it, google asked me if
> I meant "menstrual rosalia".
> --
> 
> Edwin Hurwitz
> Boulder CO
> http://www.indra.com/~edwin
> http://www.cafemontalban.com Location Recording Services
> 
>