After two years of working mostly with existing material, I’m happy to be writing songs again. This one took me over completely for a few days, and then I spent another couple of weeks recording it and animating it on the lattice. Be Love is a simpler song than Flying Dream, and I think it…
An interval, in music, is the difference in pitch between two notes. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition: In music theory, an interval is the difference between two pitches. An interval may be described as horizontal, linear, or melodic if it refers to successively sounding tones, such as two adjacent pitches in a melody, and vertical or harmonic…
A cadence is a chord progression that gives a sense of arrival or resolution. One particular cadence, the V-I (or V7-I) is especially powerful. In classical music, a V-I cadence is practically mandatory at the end of a piece, and it is the biggest gun in the composer’s arsenal when changing keys, or modulating. The following…
I believe that the great driving force in tonal music, that creates the drama and story of the music itself (independently of any lyrics), is the longing for home. Home is the tonic. If a song is in the key of A, all the A’s in their various octaves will sound like home. Although there are…
Almost all Western music, including my own, lives in the world of tonal harmony. This means: There can be, and usually are, multiple notes playing at the same time. There is a key center, or tonic, around which the notes are arranged. The tonic doesn’t always sound — it’s an intangible presence, the home from which you leave on your…
The picture to the right shows the lattice of fifths and thirds, a map of untempered harmonic space, extending to infinity. The map shows how to venture farther and farther from home, the tonic, and stay perfectly in tune no matter how far you roam. Every single note in this infinite matrix is tuned to a different…
The lattice goes on forever in every direction. It starts with the tonic, the 1, the Big Bang of the musical universe. Multiplying and dividing the tonic by 3 generates the horizontal axis. This is the familiar circle of fifths, although in just intonation, it doesn’t quite come out exact. If you multiply by 3,…
One more comma shows up in the central portion of the lattice. In equal temperament, three major thirds adds up to an octave. The major third is an interval of four piano keys (out of 12) or 400 cents. Three of them is 1200 cents, exactly an octave. In just intonation, this is not the…
One of the beautiful qualities of the lattice is that the patterns repeat everywhere. Notes that are in the same relationship to each other on the lattice will always have the same difference in pitch, no matter how where you go. For example, a move of one space to the right will always be a…