Re: Tools for harmonic analysis (Riemann style)

[Lukas-Fabian Moser]

Hi,

> > but I have to some degree lost track of
> > much of the discussion of the last 20 years, and when I actively worked
> > with that kind of written harmonic analysis (while at the
> > Musikhochschule) I didn't have much of a scholarly mind-set. So in fact.
> > I was *not* aware of all this...
> at the Musikhochschule Mannheim, we were only taught some basic roman
> numeral stuff. IMO, that's a shame. Now being a high school teacher, I know
> what I was missing back then.
> OK, enough complaining...  ;-)

If this was a "Schulmusik" course (music education for aspiring high 
school teachers), at least your instructors probably could assume a 
fairly even-distributed amount and flavour of prerequisites in the 
participants, so it was easy for them: They could simply teach the style 
the liked most :-). Not that I would endorse this...

(I'd be interested in what you're missing and at which point in your 
high school teaching you feel the need for the respective harmonic 
analysis tools, but maybe that's a matter for a private conversation.)

In my teaching for students majoring in their respective instruments, I 
almost always have very international classes, and I make a habit of 
letting them explain to me the way they learned harmony in their 
respective home countries. The general tendency seems to be that in most 
countries, roman numerals are used (with differences with respect to 
whether there's an upper-/lowercase distinction and how inversions are 
being expressed - IIb vs. II6 vs. ii6 and so on), and that people from 
German-speaking countries have either i) no previous knowledge at all or 
ii) are acquainted with "German" (Malerian) function symbols. But 
there's lots of other variants - a student from China once showed me 
"his" symbols that were something like S ii 56 (hence, combining 
functional analysis, roman numeral and figured bass symbols in one huge 
symbol), and someone from the Baltic states showed my a flavour of 
"Riemannian" functional symbols with lots of juxtapositions ("ST" with 
strikethrough) that I never saw anywhere else...


Back to topic: I think it would be a reasonable first step to try and 
get an overview of some important existing variaties of analysis symbols 
and try to decide which of them should be supported in what way. This is 
a project I'd volunteer to be involved in - but I warn that, at least in 
Germany, each author tends to invent his/her special symbols...

Lukas