Theory vs. playing by ear

[Chris236]

That's for you to figure out.

Exactly!

[Chris236]

Does anyone know how to permanently unsubscribe to email notifications of replies to threads?

[pamosmusic]

[evil laugh]

[Spook410]

Long thread.. probably already covered. But why does it have to be one or the other? I suppose you could play jazz with only one of the two but that would come with some rather severe limitations. Not to mention missing out on some great aspects of the music.

As for music being so important, of course it's important. However, musicians often overstate their own relative importance and are not to be taken too seriously.

[Bobby Timmons]

Yep, they're not exclusive of each other. There's also a 3rd category of skills that are required to play music well: technical skills. Playing music well is a combo of ear/theory/technical skills.

[macuaig]

If you were learning another language, how would you feel about studying grammar, vs only vocabulary? Some would think studying “rules” is a limitation, some would think it’s empowering. Play your own hand.

[mr. beaumont]

But seriously do Americans beat their chest about their food?

There's not really such a thing as American food, but some regional cultural stuff is as good as or better than anything in the world.

Good Soul Food, for example, is life changing. As is the stuff in New Orleans.

The real joy of U.S. food is that it's so diverse. If you get into a city like Chicago and out of "Murica" you can get 25 different cultures' foods in the same neighborhood.

[Chris236]

Alright, early start!

For those of you that don’t believe there’s an observable nature to things like chord function and the fundamental groups of notes(chord scales) that revolve around them, where do you believe the ‘theory’ arose from if not that observable nature?

Are you able to close your eyes and play guide-tone lines through a tune like Just Friends? If so, what is guiding you? If you say well trodden pathways, maybe intentionally change direction to mix yourself up. Still the same conclusion?

[pamosmusic]

Alright, early start!

For those of you that don’t believe there’s an observable nature to things like chord function and the fundamental groups of notes(chord scales) that revolve around them, where do you believe the ‘theory’ arose from if not that observable nature?

Are you able to close your eyes and play guide-tone lines through a tune like Just Friends? If so, what is guiding you? If you say well trodden pathways, maybe intentionally change direction to mix yourself up. Still the same conclusion?

I am able to do that. Because I’ve practiced that stuff. You’re trying to say that music has natural immutable qualities, but the kind of strange part about it is that you’re sort of also arguing that certain musical qualities are innate to people. That sort of thing is a bit dodgy.

To your point about extremely young students: if they’re old enough to hold a guitar or sit upright at a piano, they’ve had years of exposure to music that you can’t really account for. For example … someone is paying for lessons, so the parents are probably into music. I started playing pretty late. No one in my family was a musician but music was always playing: I remember Woodie Guthrie, Bob Dylan, the Clash, Bach.

If there is a gravity (your word in this case) to quarter tones and micro tones in music of North Africa and the Middle East, then why can’t we innately hear those things and work through those things? It’s because we’ve never listened to that music. It’s not in the water over here.

Since Christian mentioned Plato, there’s a dialogue where Socrates argues that all students contain all knowledge already and that learning is just a matter of “remembering” what he already knows. He then he proceeds to demonstrate this by having a young boy solve a sort of mathematical logical problem. He then states that this is proof of his thesis and everyone is in awe. But it’s kind of absurd to read in a modern context because what he’s doing is clearly teaching, rather than “uncovering the knowledge that already exists.”

It’s an easy fallacy and an understandable one. But it’s a fallacy.

EDIT: there are subtleties to the dialogue and a lot of other interesting things too. But that part is an oddball. It’s The Meno, if anyone is looking to read Plato on a Sunday morning.

[Chris236]

I am able to do that. Because I’ve practiced that stuff. You’re trying to say that music has natural immutable qualities, but the kind of strange part about it is that you’re sort of also arguing that certain musical qualities are innate to people. That sort of thing is a bit dodgy.

To your point about extremely young students: if they’re old enough to hold a guitar or sit upright at a piano, they’ve had years of exposure to music that you can’t really account for. For example … someone is paying for lessons, so the parents are probably into music. I started playing pretty late. No one in my family was a musician but music was always playing: I remember Woodie Guthrie, Bob Dylan, the Clash, Bach.

If there is a gravity (your word in this case) to quarter tones and micro tones in music of North Africa and the Middle East, then why can’t we innately hear those things and work through those things? It’s because we’ve never listened to that music. It’s not in the water over here.

Since Christian mentioned Plato, there’s a dialogue where Socrates argues that all students contain all knowledge already and that learning is just a matter of “remembering” what he already knows. He then he proceeds to demonstrate this by having a young boy solve a sort of mathematical logical problem. He then states that this is proof of his thesis and everyone is in awe. But it’s kind of absurd to read in a modern context because what he’s doing is clearly teaching, rather than “uncovering the knowledge that already exists.”

It’s an easy fallacy and an understandable one. But it’s a fallacy.

EDIT: there are subtleties to the dialogue and a lot of other interesting things too. But that part is an oddball. It’s The Meno, if anyone is looking to read Plato on a Sunday morning.

Nothing ‘dodgy’ about what I’ve written whatsoever - if you believe people don’t have intrinsic and innate musical qualities, we’ve finished before we’ve started.

I’ve spelled my view out clearly and backed it up with real life experience - you can imply it’s invalid if you wish! I can understand why some would.

As for microtones - yeah, the ear has to familiarize itself with the medium it’s working with obviously but, no doubt a ‘nature’ to that as well IMO.

[pamosmusic]

I’ve spelled my view out clearly and backed it up with real life experience - you can imply it’s invalid if you wish! I can understand why some would.

I’m not implying it’s invalid. I’m just restraining myself from applying your conclusion to all of humanity.

As for microtones - yeah, the ear has to familiarize itself with the medium it’s working with obviously…

A good word for this might be …. Conditioning?

[Chris236]

I’m not implying it’s invalid. I’m just restraining myself from applying your conclusion to all of humanity.



A good word for this might be …. Conditioning?

Well, as with every other thing there are ALWAYS people with more or less natural ability.

I wouldn’t call the microtonal thing conditioning in the sense of learned arbitrary rightness or wrongness(which is essentially what you’re saying if you don’t believe theory is born of a reflection from nature)….just familiarizing with parameters.

[princeplanet]

it makes musicians happy to feel music is of some cosmic significance, and this belief has deep cultural roots. It’s a colourful, interesting and (mostly) benign tradition, but it has nothing to do with modern science.

Three words- Simple Harmonic Motion.

[Chris236]

Hey fellas - it’s been fun. Sincerely wish you good luck with your playing and ever evolving understanding!

C

[princeplanet]

No magic - a lot of these folks arrived where they did VERY organically and definitely with the aid of talent. Many ways to skin a cat(feel like I’m hearding them at times) and again Wes is the perfect example of this. Big ears lead to great places. I’ve personally had a few young kids who (despite lacking instrumental proficiency) could hear through complicated changes. Lol. It’s real.

No question there will always be freaks with the "big ears", but you couldn't be Bird, Trane, Shorter, Brecker or even Pat Martino with big ears alone. As Reg said in the 10 year old thread below, you can usually tell the "ear only" players, especially when the music starts to get complicated.

Do "ear only" players sound different?

BTW, I haven't read through this current thread, but I hope the distinction has been made between the ability to read music and the ability to develop complex systems leading to an an advanced understanding of harmonic, rhythmic and melodic concepts. You don't need to read music in order to understand music at a deep level. I think many of the famous ear players like Garner, Getz or Chet Baker etc all developed unique "systems" that they drew from. FWIW, some of these ear players are among my very favourites, but they will never access the really clever stuff that I also really admire in the very best "educated" players.

[Bobby Timmons]

Both Getz and Baker had some formal music study if you read their wiki.

[rpjazzguitar]

American food?

My local taqueria has a Cajun Chicken Burrito on the menu.

My high school served Pizza Bagels for lunch.

I was once poisoned by a Chicken Fried Steak at a roadside place in Wyoming.

[Christian Miller]

I fear the Pizza Bagel

and yet… it fascinates me…

[rpjazzguitar]

I fear the Pizza Bagel

and yet… it fascinates me…

Did you read down as far as the poisoning?

[Spook410]

Did you read down as far as the poisoning?

When they said 'aged beef' you probably thought they meant something else..

[Bobby Timmons]

Why don't you weirdos just use the food thread for talking about food?

Food

[RLetson]

I would think that any discussion of music would need to start with its material bases: the sources of sounds and the human auditory sensory-perceptual systems. In the case of the latter, what is "natural" would be the limits of reception and discrimination, which are individually variable but statistically describable: most people can detect frequencies between X and Y; some fraction of that population can easily discriminate between frequencies A and B; and so on. Perception is the result of the processing of sensory data, and perceptions can be trained, so "hearing" (or maybe "listening") is not simply natural or universal in the way that primal sensory detection is. (Detection being a function of the physical structures of reception and the nerve paths that carry the signals--I'm sure that audiologists have mapped this terrritory.)

If music is the activity of generating and organizing sounds in ways that we find interesting or pleasing, then the mechanisms that generate the sounds are the other half of the primal equation. The output of every instrument (including the voice) is rooted in physics, so in a sense we make the music that our instruments permit--and we seem to be endlessly inventive in extending and varying the sounds instruments can produce. And the new sounds suggest new ways of organizing them in interesting/pleasing ways. Whoda thunk that something like Tuvan throat-singing could be an artistic Thing? Or that the ability to produce continuously-variable pitches (independent of the overtone series of, say, an open tube) could wind up embedded in an instrumental tradition where microtones are significant? (The human voice, of course, produces microtones without any special physical adaptation.)

The more I hear of different musical traditions, the more I marvel at our collective ingenuity at exploiting the properties of naturally-occurring materials--and of remaking those materials in order to produce and manipulate new sounds. It seems to me that, beyond the material bases of instruments and the human hearing apparatus, the particulars of music are not universal or inevitable or "natural" but instead are constructed. Otherwise, Broadway tunes would be full of microtones and prime-number time signatures and gamelan would be full of ii-V-I cadences.

[princeplanet]

Both Getz and Baker had some formal music study if you read their wiki.

OK, well I'm not surprised, especially in relation to Getz. His concept seemed to be pretty deep!

[pauln]

[Christian Miller]

Three words- Simple Harmonic Motion.

Ooh look harmonic resonances in the rings of Saturn!! cOsMiC bAcH

You can draw similarities with the science of acoustics but you can’t derive tonality from the laws of sound. Many great musicians - Jp Rameau, Hindemith, Leonard Bernstein - thought you could, but these arguments try to add 2 + 2 and get 5. I regard this as a modern spin on ‘the music of the spheres’, an ancient concept.

As I say it’s a popular view among musicians with a long and somewhat illustrious intellectual history - Johannes Kepler, Pythagoras, even Newton (ever wonder why we have seven colours in the rainbow? It’s to mirror the diatonic scale, but can you really discern ‘indigo’?). But you could say the same thing about alchemy. I don’t expect musicians to be scientists or philosophers in any case.

Science forgets Keplers notion of cosmic polyphony even as Hindemith enshrined them in a (very boring?) opera, Die Harmonie der Welt. It also forgets Newtons writings on alchemy, or that Tycho Brahe cast horoscopes. These ideas are irrelevant to science.

As a counter argument regarding the ‘naturalness’ of tonality I can’t put it better than Roger Sessions did in his article ‘The Musical Impulse.’ This is collected in this edition, which also includes Hindemith’s article on the subject Amazon.co.uk

there’s not reason based on ethnomusicology and psychological experiment to assume that Sessions is wrong, and zero evidence to supports Hindemith’s view.

Music is a cultural activity.