I’ve been reading through and trying to parse this interesting six-year “thread” that strikes me as being “frayed” in multiple dimensions.
At the risk of falling into being overly pedantic, I sketched up a quick chart to try and wrap my brain around it (obviously there’s a fair amount of “bleeding across the boundaries”):
What started six years ago as a very straightforward practical question (upper left cell) soon moved into (ahem) parallel territories. I offer…
…a few thoughts:
- It seems to me that the Steinberg/Dorico team would benefit most from having the feature-request kinds of questions and responses in a separate dedicated thread.
- Pedagogical questions are really significant for anyone having students notate counterpoint and 4-part chorale-style exercises in Dorico. For anyone interested, David Huron — Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the School of Music and at the Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the The Ohio State University — has written an excellent book titled Voice Leading: The Science behind a Musical Art, which takes a deep, science-based, dive into the question of the pedagogical value of continuing the emphasis on those historical-stylistic practices. Using research in psychoacoustics and cognition, he makes a strong case for continuing it to foster the development of musicianship.
- In the 24 years I taught counterpoint and 4-part exercises, I always found that the simple detection of parallels was, while necessary, only the smallest and least interesting and compositionally meaningful part of the learning process. What blossoms out of those detections is rich conversation about what happened before/after that might have created the problem, and — even more interesting! — what are the paradigmatic melodic/harmonic patterns that avoid the problem in the first place. (I used to joke with students that any intro-level monkey could be trained to spot parallels, but if it stopped there they’d be as statistically likely as the proverbial Shakespeare-typers to get rid of them effectively.) To that end, then, I’m not sure how bothered I would be by the automation of detection, but I would not want “the machine” doing AI correction — unless the goal of the exercise was for the student to be able to explain how the different treatments either brought about or avoided the parallels.
- From a(n) (ethno-)musicological perspective, calling parallel 5s/8s “wrong” is quite obviously absurd. Whether it’s Debussy engulfing a cathedral, McCoy Tyner chasin’ the Trane, Nirvana smelling like teen spirit, or countless other examples, those parallels clearly are (ahem) fundamental to the sound of that music.
- From an aesthetic standpoint, calling music without parallel 5s/8s “better” is a judgement I will avoid. If, if, IF losing a voice is musically undesirable, then such parallels are best avoided. If losing a voice is musically irrelevant, well, then…the point is moot.