Dr. Kit Music

Today I cleaned up the second half of chapter 2, going thru edits that I received several weeks ago. I hope to have more edits of the first half of chapter 2 to work on next week. Right now, Chapter 2 is 46 pages. I probably should do some reading this afternoon, but I might be awhile waiting for edits later in the quarter, and I’ll need something to do.

I also started looking ahead to chapter 4 which I’m very excited about. This is the chapter where I get to do all the weird extensions: chromatic music, jazz, pop, hybrids with Schenker and Neo-Reimannian. There will be a brief section on how all these things work and why, and then I’ll do a sample analysis for each style of thing. Right now I’m looking at Chopin (Neo-Riemannian), Bruckner (chromatic), Mozart or Beethoven (Schenker), and then I have 4 different types of non-V modal dominants I’m trying to cover in jazz/pop, so I’ll need to decide good examples of those soon. I’m glad I’ll get to have a break from straight-up writing and get to do some analysis for a bit for all those projects.

Today’s writing mostly fleshed out the thin bits of the end of chapter 2 and a bunch of layout editing, messing with tabs and spacing etc. so I don’t actually have a new bit of writing to show. I can leave this thought from Charles Smith:

“Harmony is present here not just as a matter of unqualified chord-symbols, but through a filter of functional categories. These FUNCTIONS reflect the normative behavior of chords, not just their identities; many chords will even be qualified as     “non-functional”, because in their particular context they do not behave according to functional norms. You will be encouraged to think primarily in terms of functions, rather than just with the more familiar chord-symbols.”