Welcome to this day to day sharing of insights into music. My thoughts and my playing reflect my lifelong drive to integrate primary reactions to sounds with a sense of playfulness open to lyricism as to intellectual game-playing - the level of musical response endangered if not already extinct due to the endemic compilations of sameness that make up our soundworld.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
This morning I watched a sixteen-year-old become increasingly fascinated by the modal scales in the Clementi Exercise in B-flat from Preludes and Exercises. I was struck by my memory of boredom with scales rendered overly stable by simplistic harmonic reduction. The modal scales are nothing short of pure magic because in every transposition the black keys fall in different places, throwing them into imbalance.