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At 3:47 PM -0400 4/9/02, Liebig, Steuart A. wrote: >** funny thing is that with wagner onward (through debussy, etc.), >harmony starts to be much more coloristic and loses its >*functionality* . . . One story has it that Debussy was greatly inspired by hearing gamelan music at the Exposition of 1885 and tried to emulate those timbres orchestrally. With Wagner especially, sonic "objects" started to attain symbolic significance. My favorite example of a composer moving beyond functional harmony is Varese. >** yeah, i was thinking abou the fact that most of us (coming from >music that has been dominant since the baroque era) tend to think >"chordally" first. In my early songwriting days I typically started by strumming a chord progression and then roamed around vocally in search of a suitable melody. Later on I started composing away from an instrument and would occasionally create entire songs before harmonizing the tunes. >jean phillipe rameau, who theorized that melody was driven by >harmony, not the other way around. Yeah, blame it on Rameau! That's been pretty much the pattern in art and scholarship: first the intuitive artists put it together and then the analysts take it apart. Finally, the poor students have to emulate the masters by rule-based exercises, and most of them get throttled in the process. -- ______________________________________________________________ Richard Zvonar, PhD (818) 788-2202 http://www.zvonar.com http://RZCybernetics.com http://www.cybmotion.com/aliaszone http://www.live365.com/cgi-bin/directory.cgi?autostart=rz