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Can anybody name a culturally significant piece of music written using this "system"?

Never seen an answer to that question, which means there probably isn't one.
 
Nick Batzdorf said:
I had the books for a while (I was going to study EIS but never did). There are probably some things you can figure out from the books, but this is not a self-study course - and I'm not a beginner.
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Then write a real book! I will be one of the first to buy it.
 
vgamer1982 said:
Can anybody name a culturally significant piece of music written using this "system"?

Never seen an answer to that question, which means there probably isn't one.
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I don't know what you count as culturally significant.
Series like Samurai Jack, Films like Scary Movie 3-5? Reality TV series? Jazz Albums? All stuff that EIS students and graduates have written.

But the question really is what you deem as culturally significant.

And to make it clear, it's not a system that makes you sound the same always (the examples are proof enough I think).
 
Nick Batzdorf said:
I had the books for a while (I was going to study EIS but never did). There are probably some things you can figure out from the books, but this is not a self-study course - and I'm not a beginner.
Click to expand...

I self-studied total serialism, permuted set classes, combinatoriality and cross-partitioning techniques, so I'd suggest that for myself and many people that's bull. "it's not able to be self-studied" as an excuse for making big claims for a musical idea and then not explaining them in the public domain is a bizarre appeal to the supposed ignorance or assumed capabilities of others.....
 
MatFluor said:
I don't know what you count as culturally significant.
Series like Samurai Jack, Films like Scary Movie 3-5? Reality TV series? Jazz Albums? All stuff that EIS students and graduates have written.
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That would be a no, then. None of those things have music that is considered technically significant by really, almost anybody. They may have perfectly nice pieces of music but let's get real.
 
I don't remember anybody noting Scary Movie 5 for its use of harmonic technique.......I'm sure the music is fine, but really, if that's how low the bar is set....
 
vgamer1982 said:
That would be a no, then. None of those things have music that is considered technically significant by really, almost anybody. They may have perfectly nice pieces of music but let's get real.
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Then, really out of curiosity, what do you mean by cultutral significance and technical significance? I just picked some random stuff.
 
though I do have to say that I have the Schillinger books...and... never was ever to make any sense out of them personally... Well I haven't tried that hard I guess. I guess I would have needed to be mentored by Schillinger or Gershwin or someone that actually got private lessons on it..the books were simply never really written very well...they were more like notes that his posterity put together into a book eventually. Sound familiar? His ideas did eventually seep into Berklee and maybe other places from there... Maybe Spud's ideas will too eventually. For now, its private lesson food.
 
MatFluor said:
Then, really out of curiosity, what do you mean by cultutral significance and technical significance? I just picked some random stuff.
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Well, if you want to claim a significant advance in harmonic technique, you're up against all the things I mentioned of recent years. Even Schoenberg's Harmonielehre yielded both eponymous and other works inspired by it. Harmonically significant pieces of music? Depends on so much....I mean few would argue the technical relevance of Rite of Spring, Gruppen, Akhnaten, Moses Und Aron, Powder Her Face, Tristan, Density 21.5, and so on and so forth...just to flit around 19th and 20th century orchestral music
 
Nor are any of the few examples of the "system" especially impressive or even that harmonically coherent, nor is it any way apparent what the system even is from the music. You could reverse engineer the tone-rows in Marteau Sans Maitre, for example. You might not like the music, but it's a masterpiece of architecture.
 
That's not to say they're bad bits of music.......but only is said in the context of analyzing the claims of a System with Many Capitals in the Description, and even an acronym (EIS)...which clearly is in the goal of trying to make it sound like an Authoritative course that can only be Taught by Teachers etc. etc. etc.

That there is a supposed technique leading to someone writing great music that is proprietary and secret and can only be taught by specific teachers, none of whom are of particularly enormous stature...taught in paid lessons and cannot supposedly be self-studied......is an extraordinary claim requiring of extraordinary evidence that is entirely lacking. Hence the question of "what significant piece of music exists in the world that wouldn't exist without this?". Yes, it's fuzzy what significant is, but I don't think anything proposed here or anywhere else for this "system" meets any reasonable definition of "significant" at all.

Maybe it's a huge revolution in harmony but....there's zero evidence of that.
 
Ah alright. I don't know the works of Students or graduates enough in the academic area, so I can't help you there (or it would take me too long to look all the names up).

Well, as said, it's not a system that dictates you how to write (like tone rows or Fugues are). It's not meant to be that - it's also not made to wow any academics. And yes, it is not "apparent in any way what the system is" - because it doesn't dictate you any styles you have to write and no "signature moves".

If you define validity by the ability to write a PhD thesis about it, that's your criteria. If you are looking for that, go put your money into a proper University that is focused on that. EIS probably isn't for you then. It's about writing music, if you walk new harmonic grounds and get to be the new academic in-guy, that's totally up to you. Can EIS help? Yes. Can a top-notch conservatory help? Yes. Can musictheory.net help? Yes.
 
Validity can be defined many ways depending on circumstance. The problem is none of that matches up with the claims being made about it. I mean it even has a long overblown name "System of Horizontal Composition Based on Equal Intervals". So what you're saying doesn't match up with what it's apparently claiming.

And it's a colossal and commonplace misnomer that fugues or tone rows dictate how you write - fugues fundamentally work because they play on expectations, tension and release, for example, but because people study them in a parrot fashion way they think writing a fugue is restrictive - it's not. It never was. Nor harmony. Bach wasn't doing technical exercises. Counterpoint arose and developed, and the various rules are actually practicalities - we avoid parallel fifths within Bach chorale style harmonization not because of any "rule" but because fifths interact in a different way in terms of balance of line to other intervals due to the nature of the harmonic series....so parallel fifths sound weak unless done consistently as in organum/conductus. It was referred to as "motion of perfect consonances" because it was recognized as sounding intrinsically different to the balance of other intervals. That was first recognized well over 600 years ago.
 
Thank you @MatFluor and other EIS students/teachers for the time you're putting into responses here.
Not only for shedding even just a tiny bit of light on the 'mystery' that is EIS, but for giving other members the opportunity to vent their grumbles that they clearly and sorely need.
 
vgamer1982 said:
I self-studied total serialism, permuted set classes, combinatoriality and cross-partitioning techniques, so I'd suggest that for myself and many people that's bull. "it's not able to be self-studied" as an excuse for making big claims for a musical idea and then not explaining them in the public domain is a bizarre appeal to the supposed ignorance or assumed capabilities of others.....
Click to expand...

It sounds like you're far too intelligent for the course anyway.
 
vgamer1982 said:
I self-studied total serialism, permuted set classes, combinatoriality and cross-partitioning techniques, so I'd suggest that for myself and many people that's bull. "it's not able to be self-studied" as an excuse for making big claims for a musical idea and then not explaining them in the public domain is a bizarre appeal to the supposed ignorance or assumed capabilities of others.....
Click to expand...

From the list of techniques above, it sounds like you have more than enough ammunition/vocabulary to write music for years, which is great! For you, EIS might be unnecessary.

At the end of the day, I think that all of these various systems (EIS, Schillinger, Schoenberg, Hindemith, Mark Levine's Jazz Theory) are codified methods to help composers either write better and faster, or understand how others wrote. Whatever system works for each individual, and helps them write better or faster; I think *that's* the right system for them.

For me and for others, EIS is the system that keeps writing fresh for me, keeps it fun, and allows me to grow as a composer. For others, it's Hindemith's Craft of Musical Composition. For others, Jazz Theory (I'm partial to Mark Levine's texts on it).

In my opinion, as long as the system(s) you are studying and using help make your composing faster, more fun, and more successful, then that's a win in my book.

Mike
 
I think vgamer 1981 made some good points. It is of course a factor, that you can nowadays download a copy of Schönbergs Harmonierlehre for free and know , how many culturally important composers have studied from it. On the other hand, I would consider some Jazz musicians culturally just as important, so one point for Spud as well! :)
But I really don't want to continue criticising here. I suppose the herd mentality of all the students here trying to defend it pushed me towards that.
But - just out of curiosity - have one question to you and I would love to get an honest answer on it:
I wrote about it earlier ... TC Jones offers his MIT (musical interval theory). As I said, I know one or two things more about it, as a friend of mine took his week-long seminar on the whole thing at The Hollywood Workshop in Vienna. From what I read and what he told me and the little things I know about EIS, it seems, he has adopted the same EIS principles, changed some things and now offers them has his own theory. Is that true?
 
FriFlo said:
I think vgamer 1981 made some good points. It is of course a factor, that you can nowadays download a copy of Schönbergs Harmonierlehre for free and know , how many culturally important composers have studied from it. On the other hand, I would consider some Jazz musicians culturally just as important, so one point for Spud as well! :)
But I really don't want to continue criticising here. I suppose the herd mentality of all the students here trying to defend it pushed me towards that.
But - just out of curiosity - have one question to you and I would love to get an honest answer on it:
I wrote about it earlier ... TC Jones offers his MIT (musical interval theory). As I said, I know one or two things more about it, as a friend of mine took his week-long seminar on the whole thing at The Hollywood Workshop in Vienna. From what I read and what he told me and the little things I know about EIS, it seems, he has adopted the same EIS principles, changed some things and now offers them has his own theory. Is that true?
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Personally, I have no idea. I know nothing about the MITA course. *HOWEVER*, one of the founders (Frank/Blackster) directly said in a post (link below) that MITA was in no way related to EIS. Here's the quote from the thread:

"Let me chime in as people don't really seem to know what MITA is! MITA is a complete course on its own that is not related to the other course in any case! Yes, my co-founder and myself are graduates of the other course but your statement about "the full fledged thing" is not true. You've admitted that you don't know what MITA is about, yet you do a comparison. And MITA offers 1-on-1 teaching, that's the only option how to learn MITA right now. :)"

And the thread link below.

https://vi-control.net/community/threads/best-online-courses-for-composing.64195/page-2#post-4184358

So, Friflo, I can't answer to it, but according to one of the founders, MITA is in no way related to EIS. Please correct me if I misread that thread.

Mike
 
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