Quote:
Originally Posted by Daniel
Voice leading also seems to weaken the music in some places. Again, just an example:
bar 61 - look at just the violin and the piano left hand (i.e., soprano and bass). Why did you use a Db in the violin? It causes a succession of two tritones between soprano and bass. Then there is a direct fifth between the last note of b.61 and the first note of the next one. These pass along almost unnoticed, due to the speed of the notes, but they are awkward to my ears, and definitely have a deleterious effect on the music.
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I think here, with the violin and cello, I was aiming to emphasize a sequence moving upward in a diminished 7th, while the piano was playing motivic material in the background. I think the Db in the violin/cello is necessary to preserve the sequence; however you do bring up a good point about the voice-leading, and I am considering giving the piano a G# there instead. Unfortunately, this seems only marginally if at all stronger, because the tritone then resolves to a rather unstable perfect 5th. Thoughts on that change?
As for the direct 5th, it's really a tough call, because of the conflict between horizontal motivic integrity and vertical voice-leading rules. I realize it's especially exposed in a passage that has just two voices, but hoped that the stepwise movement of one of the voices (even if it was the lower voice, it was arguably of equal importance as both voices are doubled at the octave and have different timbres) would mitigate the effect some.
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Andrew Hsieh
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The piano quartet is COMPLETE!!!
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