Reviews for Modal music composition

The average rating for Modal music composition based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-06-19 00:00:00 Rick Tarnutzer A very dry and encyclopedic book. Dr. Cormier is not a professional musicologist, but I had high hopes for him initially. Still, he did not deliver. A bulk of the book is devoted to repetitively listing features of the different modes, with few comments and helpful advice into how a composer can incorporate them into a composition. Cormier's central idea, that we can group six of the modes (all except Locrian) into three modal pairings or dyads (i.e., Ionian - Aeolian, Lydian - Dorian, and Mixolydian-Phrygian), analogous to the major-minor pairing in traditional harmony, is a very interesting one. But even poring over the separate chapters he devotes to each dyad, there is little musical insight and advice offered. Instead we just get more and more dry, repetitive descriptions with few convincing musical examples. There are a lot of short musical passages in the book that are actually recorded in the CD, but majority of these are just monotonic chord progressions. It would have been much more helpful if Cormier had found or composed examples where the chord progressions are used in short passages of actual music. Composing musical examples is indeed something Cormier does try to do in the second part of the book, where there is a full-length "study composition" for each of the modal dyad chapters. Listening to each of them however, it becomes really apparent that Cormier is not a very good composer. He is articulate in describing what happens in the compositions, but they themselves make little aural sense. Without the descriptions, the music simply sounds weird, disjunct, and ambiguous. His choice of scoring the compositions for a choir of clarinet-family instruments, which he claims is to prevent timbre and texture to affect our understanding of how the modes work, actually detracts from the appreciation of the examples themselves. The "study compositions" become incomprehensible, boring, and dry, and require gargantuan willpower for one to keep studying them earnestly. Besides these weaknesses, Cormier also has a tendency to sound very verbose, with constant name-dropping of famous musical trends, figures, and styles, perhaps in an attempt to show his erudition despite him not being a professional scholar. This, however, only bogs down the book. A good book on music is always well-served by quotations of actual musical works whenever something is being discussed, and these are very rare. This would be a much better book if it is converted from a dry text to workbook-style. Trim down the paragraphs on historical context, condense the repetitive features of the modes into tables, and add in more actual CONTENT of how to compose modal music. In the end, I felt that I learned very little of how to write modal music by reading this book. I did learn about Cormier's interesting idea of the modal dyads, but I believe that it is up to me to develop them on my own, because Cormier himself doesn't seem to have succeeded in creating a coherent compositional language using that idea.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-08-15 00:00:00 Zdbahri Dbahri whoa.