New answers tagged history
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I'm not sure, whether I understand smooth correctly, but would like to add some remarks:
In middle age and renaissance the instrumental spectrum was far wider, some of those can be certainly described as "less smooth". I vividly remember hearing a Wikipedia: Rauschpfeife, video at youtube, so I don't think this is mainly a geographic issue.
Given that the ...
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I'm gonna take a wild swing at this, with absolutely nothing to back me up but 'intuition'… bear with me.
Engineering
The West had the Industrial Revolution across the 18th century.
Engineering became king. There was no problem that couldn't be solved by engineering, be it bridges, iron ships, spinning wheels & looms or… musical instruments.
If ...
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Echo (see Collins dictionary) derives from the Greek word ἠχώ, and means a softer, delayed repetition of the same sound, in the physical sense caused by reflection. So it does not relate to a dance.
Bach was apparently fond of that effect, since the Christmas oratorio (wikipedia) has an extra echo soprano repeating, what the first soprano sung before.
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Echo pieces usually have, as in this one, a short praise that is repeated, often softer, as if an echo. In Bach's piece the repeat is not literal. You will hear it at the end of longer praises when the last beat is repeated softer and without harmony. Bach cleverly messes with the metre during these echo moments.
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"For the majority of players, the right hand is used for most tasks that require exacting manipulation: writing, throwing, etc."
What defines "exacting manipulation"? This is ambiguous.
"However, guitar, violin, lute, etc., use the right hand for plucking the strings – often with a pick – and the left hand is required to do the more exacting work of ...
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You can think of making music in two dimensions: sound production (pitch) and the nuance of the sounds (phrasing). The first is something of a blunt instrument - you either hit the desired pitch or you don't. The second is the fine detail that makes the sound musical... and that's something that requires more control.
With some instruments, like piano or ...
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I can see that there are already many answers to this question at this point, but I think I can add some more information on this matter.
D Mac wrote:
Why does conventional playing style give the string manipulation to the left hand?
The left hand prepares the note, the right hand plays the note. Thus you are in control of playing with the right hand ...
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If you consider harp or piano, both hands are work to both select pitches and rhythmically "strike" notes. Both of those instruments are fixed pitch with one string per pitch.
Moving to guitar and violin the first thing to point out is they aren't fixed pitch. You can stop the strings along the neck. That's a new job to do with one of the hands.
Let's not ...
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When you first learn to play a song then fretting can seem more complicated than the strumming but after you have learned to play the song without error then you focus on making the song sound good by making your playing expressive which is largely driven by the strumming hand (think of the difference between hearing a midi player play a song vs a real ...
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There's a little ambiguity in what constitutes the "very first modes." There were ancient scale systems in many ancient cultures, which had structures we might call modes in India, China, etc. But I'm assuming the question is asking where the "Western music" modes come from. And the scale for them really comes from Ancient Greece.
To expand a bit on ...
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The modes of the middle age church are derived from the antic Greek modes and these are developed from tetrachords, and yes it is something with history ...
Early Greek treatises describe three interrelated concepts that are related to the later, medieval idea of "mode": (1) scales (or "systems"), (2) tonos—pl. tonoi—(the more usual term used in medieval ...
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Jean-Philippe Rameau ( 1683-1764 ) in France , may have originated the use of Roman Numerals in the early 1720's when he published his "Treatise on Harmony" which was published in 1722.
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