Corpus evidence — top 10 passages

Most-relevant passages from the entire indexed corpus (67,286 paragraph chunks across YouTube transcripts, PubMed, arXiv, archive.org, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, OpenAlex, and more) ranked by semantic similarity (bge-small-en-v1.5).

1. 01 · yt0.850

   But it's due first of all to a conditioning of B-minor per se, which is a two-sharp key relationship with D major. It is also due to a conditioning of the fundamental note B, which in terms of our English national anthem reference is a pretty sexy key, B major. Now, if you put this together, you get in B minor a kind of, what can I say, lofty directness.You get a confluence of two capabilities: one the capability to be relatively fundamental and basic and world-concerned, as in D major, which is a simple two sharp key; the other a much more complicated tendency to introduce accidentals, to int…

   yt/pEofHxgpoaE-glenn-gould-well-tempered-polymath/transcript.txt

2. 02 · yt0.822

   Certainly all of the elaborate melodic techniques which Bach used were essentially those which had been developed, and in some cases perfected, by the great masters of the late Renaissance. In fact, Bach's linear devices, his vast resources of fugue and canon, were essentially techniques that required the widest possible harmonic references - techniques which would necessarily find the stringent economy of eighteenth-century tonality a challenging but infuriating discipline. And one of the qualities which gives Bach's work its extraordinary poignancy is the fact that we can practically see him…

   yt/pEofHxgpoaE-glenn-gould-well-tempered-polymath/transcript.txt

3. 03 · archive0.819

   same, for the time scale is unalterable, whereas the scale of volume of tone is for Bach a mere accident of material. In order to trans- late from the solo violin or ’cello to an organ and orchestra we need, not the technical skill to fill out harmonies and interpret ambiguities, but the imagination to conceive the whole work as if it had never existed in the earlier medium. In the history of art there is no greater example of the power of mind over matter.

   archive/in.ernet.dli.2015.28890/2015.28890.Essays-In-Musical-Analysis-Vol-vi_djvu.txt

4. 04 · yt0.800

   Sometimes fruitful analogies may arise from the most unexpected of sources. Music theorists typically recognize Botheus for his translations into Latin that help preserve ancient Greek music theory. But it was his consolations of philosophy in 524 that inspired my conjectures on basic attributes of a robust subjectivity that would have been understood by educated composers and hence available for potential compositional staging a thousand years before the modern subjectivity attributed variously as first emerging in the music of the 16th or 17th centuries. Five. In conclusion, the usefulness o…

   yt/W4IPWH5pMyk-prof-robert-hatten-fruitful-intersections-between-music-semi/transcript.txt

5. 05 · yt0.799

   This would seem to lead to what used to be called "form without content", or form at the expense of content –structuralism for its own sake. That's exactly what Schoenberg is accused of, for example, in the Soviet Union. <i>Formalism</i>, they call it there, and is strictly forbidden to the Soviet composer. We know that Schoenberg never meant anything of the kind; he was just too musical to hold such an attitude, too much of a music-lover. And no matter how much emphasis he placed on logical structure, that structure is still derived from the same twelve tones of the harmonic serie…

   yt/RI123H9R-68-bernstein-the-unanswered-question-norton-lectures-5-the-twen/transcript.txt

6. 06 · yt0.797

   What’s even more extraordinary is that in the course of the immediately ensuing fugal answer, Bach automatically picks up the three remaining tones. So that within these few bars, all twelve tones are present and accounted for. It’s not a Schoenberg row, but it’s remarkably close. And what about this spooky passage from Mozart’s Don Giovanni? <i>Tu m’invistasti a cena,</i> (You invited me to dinner, <i>Il tuo dover or sai.</i> now you know your duty) But all twelve notes are in there, all twelve of them. Clear as day. Although the effect is very nocturnal. And in fact, …

   yt/RI123H9R-68-bernstein-the-unanswered-question-norton-lectures-5-the-twen/transcript.txt

7. 07 · yt0.790

   But throughout it all, those strings have maintained their diatonic serenity imperturbable and when the trumpet asks his question for the last time whither music, there’s no further answer except for those strings quietly prolonging their pure D major triad into eternity. Is that luminous final triad the answer? Is tonality eternal? Immortal? Many have thought so and some still do, and yet that trumpet’s question hangs in the air, unresolved, troubling our calm. You see how clearly this piece spells out the dilemma of the new century, the dichotomy that was to define the shape of musical life …

   yt/RI123H9R-68-bernstein-the-unanswered-question-norton-lectures-5-the-twen/transcript.txt

8. 08 · gutenberg0.789

   But Forkel’s monograph is notable on other grounds. It was the first to claim for Bach a place among the divinities. It used him to stimulate a national sense in his own people. Bach’s is the first great voice from out of Germany since Luther. Of Germany’s own Kisorgimento, patently initiated by Goethe a generation after Johann Sebastian’s death, Bach himself is the harbinger. In his assertion of a distinctive German musical art he set an example followed in turn by Mozart, Weber, and Wagner. “With Bach,” wrote Wagner, “the German Spirit was born anew.” It is Forkel’s perpetual distinction tha…

   gutenberg/PG-35041-johann-sebastian-bach-his-life-art-and-work/PG-35041.txt

9. 09 · pubmed0.789

   This study of memory for music presented listeners with the first half of a short piano piece, O. Messiaen's Mode de valeurs et d'intensités. The piece is written according to a unique compositional principle that rigidly couples values of pitch (chroma and octave), duration, and dynamics. Listeners heard test excerpts, which were judged in terms of whether or not they might have come from the piece (either from the part they had heard or from the remainder of the piece). Even in the first block of trials, listeners were able to recognize segments from the part of the piece they had heard, sug…

   pubmed/PMID-1895950-memory-for-musical-surface/info.md

10. 10 · openalex-fanout0.786

    - (2002) **Tonality** — Brian Hyer — cited 86x - (2002) **Dualist tonal space and transformation in nineteenth-century musical thought** — Henry Klumpenhouwer — cited 61x - (2002) **Nineteenth-century harmonic theory: the Austro-German legacy** — David W. Bernstein — cited 47x - (2014) **A Robust Parser-Interpreter for Jazz Chord Sequences** — Mark Granroth-Wilding, Mark Steedman — cited 44x - (2008) **P<scp>aradoxes of</scp>P<scp>itch</scp>S<scp>pace</scp>** — Candace Brower — cited 43x - (2011) **The Tonic as Triad: Key Profiles as Pitch Salience Profiles of Tonic Triads** — Richard Parncutt…

    openalex-fanout/W3185449560-ideen-zu-einer-lehre-von-den-tonvorstellungen/info.md