Newbie question about some exercises in Piston's Harmony

Hello! I started to self-study this book a few weeks ago and the progress isn't great. My sense and imagination of pitch is not good though I‘m trying to improve this doing solfege exercises on an app. I have a hard time utilizing 4-part harmony principles (which is more charting than intuition for me) and feels more and more insecure about my answer. 

After a little bit of searching, I understand that the standard key to the exercises are hard to obtain.

My confusion is from the exercise of the 4th lesson: give the tonalities and modes of these progressions

question b: if i regard this as in A Gypsy, then it's conflicted with C# & F#

question e: if I regard this as in A min with IV# & VI#, or C maj with II# & IV#, then there's no such mode mentioned earlier in this book. if I regard this as in B Phrygian then there's the D#.

Of course, there's a generalized passage about how parallel modes had became more and more interchangeable, but not specifics about these situations mentioned above. And these deviations are not made on "modal degrees" either.

Could anyone kindly explain these questions to me?

I think you have to go to the simplest solution first. Example b is in E major and example e is in E harmonic minor.

yeah, you are right, e's in e harmonic minor, i didn't thought of that.

but in b there's a B#

Hi @hyperaticism,

4 hours ago, hyperaticism said:

but in b there's a B#

For b it will be in C# minor (which is my favourite key!!) It will be a VI-iv-V progression in C# harmonic minor. Or if it can be modal then a G# Locrian. (No!!!) 

P.S. No I am wrong. It can’t be in G# Locrian! I am the happiest man now!
 

Henry

The answer seems so simple yet so elusive!

32 minutes ago, Henry Ng Tsz Kiu said:

For b it will be in C# minor (which is my favourite key!!) It will be a VI-iv-V progression in C# harmonic minor. Or if it can be modal then a G# Locrian. (No!!!) 

By the way, just curious, are you also from China? Apart from your name, the programmatic aspect of your works (and the way you spell names of Chinese poets in pinyin) feels Mainland Chinese among other Chinese speaking nations.

17 minutes ago, hyperaticism said:

By the way, just curious, are you also from China? Apart from your name, the programmatic aspect of your works (and the way you spell names of Chinese poets in pinyin) feels Mainland Chinese among other Chinese speaking nations.

I am a Chinese but I speak Cantonese since I live in Hong Kong. But isn't it the same way to spell names of Chinese poets in pinyin from all those Chinese speaking nations?

1 minute ago, Henry Ng Tsz Kiu said:

I am a Chinese but I speak Cantonese since I live in Hong Kong.

So my guess is close. I'm from Zhejiang.

2 minutes ago, Henry Ng Tsz Kiu said:

But isn't it the same way to spell names of Chinese poets in pinyin from all those Chinese speaking nations?

Well, when I was typing this I was thinking that a non-Chinese speaker would usually use some kind of weird transliteration to refer to ancient Chinese poets, so that part is not all that consequential.😁

However poetry is not one of my interests, and I generally avoid vocal music.

Just now, hyperaticism said:

However poetry is not one of my interests, and I generally avoid vocal music.

I love Chinese poetry!! And I love vocal music except operas. But I have never composed vocal music haha.

2 minutes ago, hyperaticism said:

So my guess is close. I'm from Zhejiang.

Nice to meet you here!