Saturday, July 11, 2015

About my musical background.

I first experienced music in my crib singing, which was considered legendary by my family. My family was a musical family who loved to sing and dance and play their instruments. My father studied piano and organ until the day he died and my mother was very good on the violin, similar to her young grand daughter, who was very good on her violin, my mother rather gave it up to life, to my grandmother's chagrin. My mother was never without her violin that she was given at age 10. It was with her to the day that she died. "Take it with you." She would say to me at the end, but I couldn't bare to take it while she lived.

At three I danced Jazz with my brother. We took from Leon in a Pasadena, California Dance Studio.
At 8 years old I studied the recorder at public school and in the summer piano, private lessons.
At 10 it was tap dancing at Hollywood Professional School.
At 12 years of age I studied Ballet with Madam Etienne. Who was in her sixties at the time.
At 13 years I met my friend Beverly Elias who also came from a home of music. Her father was Lebanese and mother of Jewish descent. In the evenings we would dance folk dances. Beverly was studying the Flamenco guitar with an old Spanish man that lived behind our school on Franklin Ave. I went with her to her lessons with him and she would supplement with added lessons. She taught me Green Sleeves and House of the Raising Sun. Eventually we played together and did some performing for our families. Here we are at Mom's in Malibu, sitting on the patio strumming away.

For three years I sang scales with Glenn Raikes. Then from age 23 to age 28, when my father shipped me the little piano I was singing only religious songs on a weekly basis. The little piano came to us while we were living in the Helman St. house in Ashland, Or. Olivia was a baby and Jessica was somewhere between kindergarten and the second grade. After we (Jessica and I) learned the keyboard the way that I am sharing composition in this blog, Jessica started creating tunes or melodies on the keyboard and writing them out on a score sheet. Watching her I began to wonder about composers and how they went about writing music. I would have lived the rest of my life never wondering about them if my girl hadn't written so many lovely tunes! As an older musician in high school, she went over her early melodies and found them all to written in the key of G major scale.

We moved to the Gresham St. house when Olivia was four years old and Jessica nine or ten. Both Jessica and I studied piano with Julie Borg for a year or so. Both girls and myself studied with Virginia Wickham, Olivia also studied with Jenny and Mrs. Grueling at Lincoln Elementary School.

Counting time in music is a trick. We worked ourselves to the 3rd year John Thompson music book. Then we studied violin with Virginia

Eventually, with both girls in school I had the time to return to college. I had dropped out when I became pregnant with Jessica, in 1970. My focus was fine art but I squeezed music composition classes in there for about four terms. I studied with Dr. Belford, Ellison Glattly and Margaret Evans. I have composition knowledge up to the fugue, which I love above all others. But I enjoy that Louisiana sound, having left folk and Flamenco behind, except for on occasion.

I studied violin with Dr. Palmer.

Wendy Schaller (Martin) age16

playing for friends age 16

Thursday, July 9, 2015

The Basic Ingredients.

First, a keyboard is needed. All the notes are spread out to see and to play. Later these concepts can be applied to another instrument. Then a person needs a muffin tin and a pre-A music book. Cut the letters out, separate them by the segments of the muffin tin and three times a day place them on the corresponding keys on the piano. The A group having four notes: A B G F. The D note group-C D E. Do this three times a day for one month. Apply the letters on each octave. An octave is C to C along the keyboard. Ours had five at the time. Each octave has a name, from lowest sounding to the highest sounding octave.https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/beautiful-piano

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

key board to musical score-a link

When learning the keyboard's relationship to the musical score use colour as a link, in values darkest to lightest. Lowest sounding octave to highest sounding octave. Colour the notes on the scale to their corresponding octave.

Each octave has a name.

But, pitch notation is just one way of referencing notes. Each octave, as well as each C, has its own universal name. These are as follows:

Octave Names (pictured above):

C0 - B0: sub-contra octave (A0 is the lowest pitch on a full piano)

C1 - B1: contra octave

C2 - B2: great octave

C3 - B3: small octave

C4 - B4: one-line octave, or 2nd small octave (contains both middle C and A440)

C5 - B5: two-line octave, or 3rd small octave

C6 - B6: three-line octave, or 4th small octave

C7 - B7: four-line octave, or 5th small octave

C8 - B8: five-line octave, or 6th small octave (C8 is the highest pitch on a full piano)

Names of the C-Notes:

C0: triple pedal C

C1: double pedal C

C2: pedal C

C3: bass C

C4: middle C

C5: treble C

C6: top C or high C

C7: double top C or double high C

C8: triple top C or triple high C

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Counting Time

Counting time means focusing on the concept of time, which is expressed in the music score in the value of the individual notes and signatures, such as 4/4 meaning each quarter note has one beat and there are four beats to the measure. 2/4 time means 2 beats to the measure, each quarter note getting one beat. The top number represents how many beats in a measure and the lower number tells what type of note gets one beat. A quarter note or a half note or an eighth note get one beat in the measure if it is represented as the bottom note in the signature. The top note tells how many beats are in a measure.

There is also a vocabulary (usually written in Italian).that tells the vocalist or instrumentalist how quickly or slowly or with what feeling the piece or a particular section of the piece was intended to be played. Some common are.....adagio-slowly...appassionato-passionately...gustoso-with happy emphasis an forcefulness. There are hundreds. These are stated in the beginning measure or atop the score or inside.

Take a piece of music from John Thompson 1, in fact, use the entire book and starting from the beginning, place the music on the table and use a pencil to tap out the time to the entire piece. One and two and three and four. Or one and two and three and one and two and three and-how ever the time signature at the start of the piece of music tells you to do. Go to the next John Thompson book, Book 2 and the next. It makes very good practice.

Notes are of the same value or a different value. The following copied from Wikipedia.

Note	British name / American name	Rest
	Large (Latin: Maxima) / Octuple whole note (or octuple note)
	Long / Quadruple whole note (or quadruple note)
	Breve / Double whole note (or double note)
	Semibreve / Whole note
	Minim / Half note
	Crotchet / Quarter note
	Quaver / Eighth note For notes of this length and shorter, the note has the same number of flags (or hooks) as the rest has branches.
	Semiquaver / Sixteenth note
	Demisemiquaver / Thirty-second note
	Hemidemisemiquaver / Sixty-fourth note
	Semihemidemisemiquaver / Hundred twenty-eighth note
	Demisemihemidemisemiquaver / Two hundred fifty-sixth note
	Beamed notes Beams connect eighth notes (quavers) and notes of shorter value, and are equivalent in value to flags. In metered music, beams reflect the rhythmic grouping of notes. They may also be used to group short phrases of notes of the same value, regardless of the meter; this is more common in ametrical passages. In older printings of vocal music, beams are often only used when several notes are to be sung on one syllable of the text – melismatic singing; modern notation encourages the use of beaming in a consistent manner with instrumental engraving, and the presence of beams or flags no longer informs the singer. Today, due to the body of music in which traditional metric states are not always assumed, beaming is at the discretion of the composer or arranger and irregular beams are often used to place emphasis on a particular rhythmic pattern.
	Dotted note Placing a dot to the right of a notehead lengthens the note's duration by one-half. Additional dots lengthen the previous dot instead of the original note, thus a note with one dot is one and one half its original value, a note with two dots is one and three quarters, a note with three dots is one and seven eighths, and so on. Rests can be dotted in the same manner as notes. In other words, n dots lengthen the note's or rest's original d duration to $d\times(2-2^{-n})$ .
	Multi-measure rest Indicates the number of measures in a resting part without a change in meter, used to conserve space and to simplify notation. Also called "gathered rest" or "multi-bar rest".

Durations shorter than the 64th are rare but not unknown. 128th notes are used by Mozart and Beethoven; 256th notes occur in works by Vivaldi, Mozart and Beethoven. An extreme case is the Toccata Grande Cromatica by early-19th-century American composer Anthony Philip Heinrich, which uses note values as short as 2,048ths; however, the context shows clearly^{[original research?]} that these notes have one beam more than intended, so they should really be 1,024th notes.
The name of very short notes can be found with this formula:

\text{Name} = 2^{n+2}\text{th}

note, where

n

is the number of flags on the note.

Breaks

	Breath mark In a score, this symbol tells the performer or singer to take a breath (or make a slight pause for non-wind instruments). This pause usually does not affect the overall tempo. For bowed instruments, it indicates to lift the bow and play the next note with a downward (or upward, if marked) bow.
	Caesura Indicates a brief, silent pause, during which time is not counted. In ensemble playing, time resumes when the conductor or leader indicates.

Friday, March 6, 2015

CHARLES IVES

Charles Ives

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the New Zealand international football (soccer) player, see Charles Ives (footballer).

Charles Ives

Background information
Birth name	Charles Edward Ives
Born	October 20, 1874 Danbury, Connecticut
Died	May 19, 1954 (aged 79) New York, New York
Occupation(s)	composer, insurance agent

Charles Edward Ives (/aɪvz/; October 20, 1874 – May 19, 1954) was an American modernist^[1] composer. He is one of the first American composers of international renown,^[2] though his music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Over time, he came to be regarded as an "American original".^[3]^{[dubious – discuss]} Ives combined the American popular and church-music traditions of his youth with European art music, and was among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatoric elements, and quarter tones,^[4] foreshadowing many musical innovations of the 20th century.
Sources of Ives' tonal imagery are hymn tunes and traditional songs, the town band at holiday parade, the fiddlers at Saturday night dances, patriotic songs, sentimental parlor ballads, and the melodies of Stephen Foster.

JOHN CAGE CONTEMPORARY COMPOSER

John Cage

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the composer. For other uses, see John Cage (disambiguation).

John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, music theorist, writer, and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century.^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4] He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.^[5]^[6]
Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is not "four minutes and 33 seconds of silence," as is sometimes assumed, but rather the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance.^[7]^[8] The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance. Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces. The best known of these is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).^[9]
His teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35), both known for their radical innovations in music, but Cage's major influences lay in various East and South Asian cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of aleatoric or chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951.^[10] The I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic text on changing events, became Cage's standard composition tool for the rest of his life. In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, he described music as "a purposeless play" which is "an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living".^[11]

STOCKHAUSEN CONTEMPORARY COMPOSER

A guide to Karlheinz Stockhausen's music

Our contemporary composers series ends with the most divisive figure of them all: Stockhausen

GERMANY-STOCKHAUSEN — Out of this world … literally? Karlheinz Stockhausen photographed in Hamburg in 2001. Photograph: Soeren Stache/EPA

Tom Service

Tuesday 7 May 2013 12.40 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 21 May 2014 16.00 EDT

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Comments

Karlheinz Stockhausen has arguably done more to transform 20th- and 21st-century music than any other single composer: from serialism to electronic music, from consciousness-expanding musical happenings to cycles of pieces for every day of the week and every hour of the day, from a musical mantra to some hallucinogenic Cosmic Pulses.
But with Stockhausen – as Wagner or possibly Beethoven – you're dealing immediately as much with myth as with reality. Firstly, there's the caricature of his music, from those who either haven't heard it or who are ideologically opposed to it (Thomas Beecham is alleged to have quipped when asked if he had heard any Stockhausen: "No, but I believe I may have trodden in some."). Then there's the apparent eccentricity of the man: those orange jumpers; his life with his two muses/life partners; his apparently obsessive control of his publishing, performing and recording rights; and not forgetting the small matter of his claims to come not from Earth but from the star Sirius – a statement that made many see him as a kind of musical-mystical crank.

MOONDOG COMPOSER

Moondog, born Louis Thomas Hardin (May 26, 1916 – September 8, 1999), was an American composer, musician, poet and inventor of several musical instruments. He was blind from the age of 16. In New York from the late 1940s until he left in 1972, he could often be found on 6th Avenue between 52nd and 55th Street wearing a cloak and Viking-style helmet, sometimes busking or selling music, but often just standing silent and still. He was widely recognized as "the Viking of 6th Avenue" by thousands of passersby and residents who had no idea that this seemingly homeless eccentric standing on "Moondog's corner" was a respected and recorded composer and musician.^[1]

Thursday, February 26, 2015

choral music by wendy martin

Thursday, January 29, 2015

COUNTERPOINT-the next effort, follow instructions-this couldn't be that hard could it?

Monday, January 26, 2015

I still dream of writing a fugue

http://youtu.be/QZM4yxbE0ZE

Sunday, January 25, 2015

chord progression

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Building triads, chord progression and doubling notes. Adding parts for soprano, alto and tenor voices. This 18th century harmony leads through choral music and other forms which eventually lead to the classical symphony.

Major Triads     I ii iii IV V vi vii

Notes in the first measure: F,C G,D A,A G,G F,F E,E D,D   Notes in the second measure: G,D    A,A   B,G   C,F   B,E   Notes in the third measure:   A,A   B,G   C,F   A,E   B,F   A,G   A,A   Notes in the fourth measure:   G,G   A   C   B   A,A

E      #F      #G      A      B      #C    D
#C    D    E    #F    #G    A    B
A    B    #C    D    E    #F    #G
I    ii    iii    IV    V    vi    vii*

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

second little melody with harmony

http://www.noteflight.com/scores/view/1fb020624f46e99857c0e602472d5c6f1ddbb4e6
By clicking this, you will bring up noteflight page that will let you see the music and click play and the software will play the piece also.

I haven't bothered with 18 century harmonics but just used my ear and the visual contour of the score. This is really fun. I do want to get into half-steps, whole steps, intervals, triads and 7th chords eventually. But that is very 18th century and it might be fun just to let my ear do the work.

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