Early yesterday morning, we left the land of Yugo. As we crossed the border into Italy, Sarah no longer needed fear a slight tap on the shoulder whenever I spotted one of those cute little cars. She stopped playing after about one day in Belgrade, so I only feared losing her ire at me for having her shoulder poked every few minutes.

We’re back in Paris, hanging out with the cat, and slowly unpacking. Over the next few days, I will hopefully transcribe and pep up my travel journal entries related to music, and post them here. Besides that, October is going to be a rough month for the blog. There’s a lot of music to write, a lot of paperwork to take care of, and a lot of classes to attend…

Tomorrow morning, the special lady and I fly to Istanbul. On Sept. 29, we catch an overnight train from Trieste back to Paris. In between, we intend to take in a bit of Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and maybe a touch of Montenegro. Photos when we get back…

In the mean time, have a listen and look at the Tour St-Jacques, and weigh in on the brilliant argument about Chopin going on at Scott Spiegelberg’s musicology site. To be fair, here’s James Cook, the instigator. My quick 2¢ - the essence of tonal music is the unification of harmony and counterpoint. The hierarchy of pitch that tonality (functional harmony) creates obliges that the independent contrapuntal voices work within the framework of that hierarchy. Studying and reproducing Bachian counterpoint is complicated because the “independent” voices aren’t that independent. You can’t just write any collection of pitches - even if they’re consonant, even if they produce triads - and expect the harmonic motion to continue. No matter how much you might want to write a iii6 or a iv6 chord, or to follow a V with a IV in order to satisfy your linear counterpoint, you can’t because it doesn’t drive the harmony. The beauty of Bach’s work is the constant push forward.

This gets more complicated post-Bach as harmony becomes more chromatic, but the Classicists and Romantics were breaking the rules to get there, and what’s interesting about highly chromatic harmony is precisely that it is breaking the rules by using tricky voice-leading to subvert the harmonies we expected to hear. Ultimately, I think you’re amiss if you try to analyze tonal music with only one or the other. It’s true that counterpoint gets the short end of the stick in harmony + counterpoint courses, but that’s no reason to abandon harmony altogether…

Ok, enough. Gotta go pack!