Dovetailing

I’ve been looking at Vincent Persichetti’s 8th Symphony recently and his transitions are fascinating to me. They’re so incredibly smooth that you don’t even realize you’ve been transported to a new section of music until you’re halfway through it.

One fairly easy way to start creating more seamless transitions is by dovetailing you’re music.

Dovetailing is when you overlap pieces of your music.

For example of the flutes are playing a melody and you want the violins to pick up playing that melody, you can dovetail the last note and make it a smoother transition. Even one beat of dovetailing can smooth out a transition a lot.

This way you have the beat before with the melody just played by the flutes. Then you hear one beat with both flute and violin. After that you hear just the violins playing the melody.

That will be a much smoother transition than just hearing the flutes play the melody and having it switch immediately, without any dovetailing, to the violins playing the melody. That won’t sound like there’s any transition. It’ll sound pretty abrupt, and honestly a little awkward most of the time.

But you can easily dovetail some transitions to make them smoother.

All it takes is to add a few extra notes before and/or after the transition.

ISJ