mwh wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 2:07 am
Heptachords? He doesn't mean heptatonic? Evidently he's not inferring tetrachords, conjunct or disjunct.
What the blazes is Dorian
rhythm? (Well, we can see, but where does he get it from?)
And he seems to defy the accents, whatever they may have been.
GMH describes 'Dorian rhythm' in
another letter to Bridges a few pages earlier, p.233 "I added two metrical schemes..." to half way down p.234. Immediately after that (pp.234-235) he describes what he means by heptachords. He concedes at the end of the letter that "The above is not lucid nor perhaps all true." I think he's spot on.
By
Dorian rhythm he seems to mean any metrical unit where there are four syllables in the space of three long syllables i.e. two longs two shorts in different orders. Hence his 2 short bar-lines per measure. Joel is right that this seems to have some relationship with his reading of Schmidt, who gets a name check on p.233. I leave any further analysis of the metrical merits and demerits to the experts, although it seems to be characteristically GMH in his reach exceeding his grasp.
Heptachord - he describes this with reference to another piece of music he has written to accompany some lines from the Antigone, apparently in some key of G from his description (Sol = D, La = E), probably major. This whole passage seems a bit confused.
This is my best effort at tracing what GMH is saying here (not in the same order he presents it):
1. The dominant seventh is traditionally built on the fifth scale degree (Sol).
2. GMH feels that he has devised an alternative musical system (!) in which it is built on the sixth scale degree (La). This is the 'heptachord', beginning on La (6th) and ending on Sol (5th) of the next octave (e.g. ABCDEFG)
3. The heptachord is conjunct, consisting of Whole Half Whole steps twice, with a common tone in the middle (so a total of seven notes). In contrast with the major scale starting on Do, which is disjunct Whole Whole Half x2, with no common tone (so eight notes).
4. GMH wants to write music which effectively modulates between the scale based on the tonic at Do (e.g. C major) and the 'heptachord' on a tonic at La, so the listener experiences shifts between major and minor. He suggests that the piece should end on the minor tonic at La, which his music for Sappho 1 does.
I can't really see what the difference is between this and a sort of chaotic modulation (although modulation is not quite the right word here) between a major key and its relative minor (e.g. C major / A minor), which is what seems to be happening in the Ode to Aphrodite I posted above. Perhaps a musicologist would make more hay with this.
mwh wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 2:07 am
Is this meant to be sprung rhythm?
Interestingly, in
another letter to Bridges from a few years before this one, he said
"I wish I could pursue music, for I have invented a new style, something standing to ordinary music as sprung rhythm to common rhythm: it employs quarter tones." This doesn't seem to be the same thing as the 'heptachord'. He seems to have fallen out with anyone who tried to teach him music because they didn't appreciate his revolutionary impulses.