Greetings comrades
I've been going through the Rimsky Korsakov orchestration course at northernsounds.com and I just got up to the harmony section, and I'm a little confused about a few things:
1. at the start of the "general observations" chapter (
http://www.northernsounds.com/forum/...ad.php?t=46968), it talks about duplication of parts to get 5, 6, 7 or 8 part writing, which makes sense to me, but many of the examples of chords later in the chapter don't seem to fit into this "system", they don't seem to be (eg for widely spaced part writing) duplicating first the alto, then the soprano, above that and then the alto again above that. It seems more arbitrary than that. So is this duplication "system" just a guide then?
2. about widely spaced harmony, I don't quite get the whole doubling the bass bit:
Quote:
Professor Belkin Comments: This is an important principle, often forgotten: While the bass may be doubled (rarely in more than ONE octave), if the higher octave crosses into the other middle parts, the bass line loses its clarity.
no music, since this kind of spacing is (necessarily) typical of piano writing.
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so the bass can be doubled "in one octave" does that mean it can be doubled one octave higher or one octave lower? And is the basic point they're making that one shouldn't put anything between the two lowest notes of a chord if those two notes are the bass and it's octave?
3. at the very end of the "general observations" chapter, there are two "schematic examples" of progression in contrary motion. Are Rimsky and Belkin saying these examples are bad because voices are being added or subtracted? That wasn't very clear to me
OK, thats all for now, thanks very much in advance