Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.
-Sauce unknown
Oh, very impressive! What could be an equivalent example in musical notation?
Just to make sure I understand (Please correct me. The italicised parts are unclear to me):
I have a spelling checker.
It came with my PC.
It plainly marks for my review
mistakes I cannot see.
I strike a key and type a word,
and wait for it to say
whether I am wrong or right.
It shows me straight a way.
As soon as a mistake is made, it knows before too long,
And I can put the error right.
It’s rarely ever wrong. I have run this poem through it.
I am sure you’re pleased to know It’s letter perfect all the way.
My checker told me so.
-Source unknown
I am more accustomed to musical notation, including enharmonic spelling, than English, but I must honestly confess that your enharmonic notation example is harder to encode than your English poem example. I am shocked!
To move back towards the original topic, just imagine if you had do a visual check for parallel 5ths and 8ths in a 4-part vocal piece where all four parts were written enharmonically at every available opportunity. To do so would be a very tedious task. Such an extreme example is one where I would probably prefer to let software assist.
Well, the parallel / anti-parallel 5ths and 8ths tool would be useful for the students, or for self-teaching enthusiasts.
The problem here is, such a tool will work okey-ish only in four part writing. How it will be able to differ doublings from parallels?!
Often the hidden parallels are allowed especially in the inner voices.
The folk music, the medieval ars antiqua are full of parallels… and they are not considered wrong in the context of these genres…
Very often the parallels are used to bring an ancient and epic feeling to the music.
So, I’m not sure how such a tool / plug-in will be built in order to work properly?!
I agree concerning my choir pieces and have also learned a lot from copying favourite orchestral pieces and opera excerpts into Dorico although I’m not sure my own compositions (mostly songs) reflect the learning that has taken place! Regardless, I get a lot of enjoyment out of looking closely at the composition idiosyncrasies of composers I love.
A parallels checker would be great if it acted like notes out of range, i.e. colored parallels while entering the notes, WYSIWYG style. That’s opposed to a script that analyzes after the fact.
Compare it to a slide rule, calculator, spell checker, grammar checker, VS code editor that displays coding errors in real time, and many other tools that speed up making a quality product.
Those who think it’s beneath them or write in a style where its acceptable can turn it off like color by voice or color by out-of-range. The real elite score writers don’t even need transposing instrument features and can read 4 kinds of C clefs upside down. They can also write crab canons in their head. But not all score writers are that good. Some of us use pens instead of pencils, many use software that plays back the music. Hey, it’s all good. There’s no write or rong.
Students are using Musescore plugins to do check for parallels, so that cat has been out of the bag for years.
If you choose to double cello and bass with piccolo, use parallel checking as another good check to ensure intentional doubling.
For my harpsichord I am now bringing in the Toccatas and other Bach stuff in Dorico. I can confirm that certainly you can learn a lot of all the voices and contrapuntal things he uses.
In the manual notation one could do as one likes, but if you try to put that in computer notation in a consistent manner which justifies as well the musical context and the digital rules, that is another thing.
Very enlightning!
the whole point of the theory of lumping together parallel 5ths and octaves as I understand it is that they both imply the disappearance of a voice with the 5th also sounding insufficiently contrasted. Anyway, counterpoint is not always running with all four (assuming 4 for the sake of argument) voices so what does it matter providing the effect is calculated?
I’ve already made it clear what I think of the value of the whole theory but, fwiw, I have absolutely no objection to Dorico implementing such a check as there are plainly those who want such a feature and the competition like Sibelius or Musescore has it. To be honest, that’s the most pressing argument.
There are many interesting cases where great composers of the past have made obvious changes to eliminate parallel 5ths and octaves, mostly for the better, but occasionally out of guilt and for the worse. And numerous examples where they left them in for valid reasons. As I think I mentioned above, Brahms made a collection of such with comments, and Schenker published this with further explanations. This little volume makes very interesting reading in the English translation by Paul Mast to be found in vol. 5 of The Music Forum (Columbia University Press 1980)
Here are couple of parallel octave examples by Beethoven that Brahms found “unpleasant”:
Ben, do you mean a voice disappears in the tenor part between m. 25, bb. 1 and 2, or among the tenor and bass parts over the barline between mm. 25 and 26?
The penultimate tenor note. That ‘device’ is very common in 16th/17th-century music, as is introducing a crotchet rest just to break the consecutive-ness.
Thanks @dko22 I didn’t realize that IMSLP had the original Schenker edition. The English translation I mentioned has a lot of additional and very helpful material.
Oops, that’s the spot I meant when I said “over the barline” (I was thinking of the cadence in its entirety). Yeah, I’ve run across a lot of those “drop the fifth early” parts — common in Monteverdi too, often one voice above whatever’s serving as bass at the time. I’d argue they don’t sound like a disappearing voice out loud nearly as much as they appear so in score. We still hear the linear motion of each vocal line, and the searing power of the unison while waiting for the bass to drop its own fifth can create a special, captivating kind of tension!
Another bugbear of mine is when the composer has ‘got round’ the parallel motion by crossing the parts, so that the Alto goes below the Tenor. When you write a keyboard reduction (which traditionally just doubles the voices), the consecutives appear. (And it can be contested whether just switching the stems makes or breaks the rules.)
And of course, it doesn’t really sound any different!
