Re: "Hatikvah" and "La Mantovana"

[Hope Ehn Dennis Ehn <ehn...>]

I *don't* consider myself a composer, and wasn't making any such claims.
I'm a pretty good arranger and ornamenter, though. I attempted the canon
in the first place out of curiosity. Having had a good course in Canon and
Fugue with Harold Shapero, I do know how these forms are constructed, and
the "harmonic structure" (an anacronistic notion) of "La Mantovana"
suggested that it might be possible to make something work.

Amon the things I discovered, on the way to putting together a 3-voice
piece that's far from strict canon (and that may violate Renaissance rules
in a couple of places), is that it helps immensely to simplify the
"ornamentation" of the first cadence, removing the f just before the tonic
d. That makes the measure before the tonic entirely "dominant"  (another
anacronistic term) with a single passing dissonance. I did manage,
however, to get each phrase in unchanged at least once.

(The last phrase comes unchanged (with the f) only at the very end, after
the other two voices have finished with the tune. My inspiration for that
was probably anacronistic also -- a "smoke and mirrors" trick by Mozart.
Everyone who took more than the most superficial music history course has
probably been told that the last movement of the "Jupiter" Symphony (#41)
has five themes going at once. But that's actually not so, as I discovered
once when I sat down with the score and five different-colored
highlighters. He actually puts only the first four themes together, after
which you hear only the fifth one. But having heard the others all
together, one tends to assume that the fifth was in there too, and had
simply gone unheard until after the others stopped.)

Now, changing the tune brought up another problem -- that of the
composer's intentions.  If a composer starts with a pre-existent tune, and
then makes minor changes in it in order to make his piece work, is it the
same tune? I would argue that it is. Certainly, a couple of changes don't
alter the fact that he *started* from that particular tune. Of course, if
he makes enough changes to render the tune unrecognizable, its
relationship to the may be concealed. In that case, one can argue,
perhaps, that he has "violated" the tune in some essential way -- but he
still may have begun with it.

Hope Ehn                  <ehn (at) world(dot)std(dot)com>

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Dennis and Hope Ehn are 2 different people sharing one account.
Hope is the author of "On-Line Resources for Classical & Academic Musicians."
Dennis does programming (mostly C++).
PLEASE don't get us confused!                                 :-)
<ehn (at) world(dot)std(dot)com>
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