Bragatyr wrote:You know, augmentedfourth, it's weird, but I always find the more dissonant moments in music to be the most difficult to transcribe. I don't know if it's because the tones are really close together, in certain cases, just making them more difficult to distinguish, or what, but that always trips me up. My mind wants to kind of "correct" the tone to the more predictable one, usually, in those cases (which has often proven to be trouble!).
Oh,
absolutely. One of the reasons I loved studying (and later teaching) music theory so much is because it reveals so much about how much we, as people having grown up listening to the conventions of Western music, already subconsciously know about structure and tonality. My favorite example of this is teaching the different types of cadences - it doesn't matter what you know about chords and inversions or what not. You can tell whether or not something sounds "finished", and based on that, you already know two types of standard cadences (half and authentic). Some dissonances are common, even if we're not really paying attention to them - like if you take a dominant 7 chord and break it down into its four notes, you'll find a tritone (or augmented fourth
) in there. On its own, it can sound jarring, but when you add in the other two notes, it sounds like the harmonious dominant 7 chord we all know and love. (And if you think you don't know it, yes, you do.)
In pieces like this, the dissonances aren't as common and they go against what our Western ears
want to hear. Because the melodies/chords aren't going in the direction that we want them to, that makes it a lot harder to transcribe.
Funny anecdote (that everyone else can skim over) - as I've said, I love music theory, but I was dumb and took a 7-week elective in it during one of my busiest semesters of college. The name of the course was Advanced Aural skills, and the name didn't lie. I was already stressed out about the million other things I had going on in the middle of the semester, which is when I had to do the final multi-part project for the class. One of the components of the final was to listen to an excerpt of a Stravinsky (your favorite!
) wind quartet and transcribe the melody and the bass line. I was getting all stressed and twitchy over it because it was challenging, and the kicker was that the bass line was played by the bassoon, my instrument. I was sitting at my desk with the speakers blaring, muttering "I can't hear the bass line. The bass line is in the bassoon. WHY CAN'T I HEAR THE BASS LINE?!?" for a while before I had to stand up and walk away to avoid having a mental snap. Damn Stravinsky. It's always his fault.