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Strange that you seem to feel strongly about this... Not sure what it is exactly about Modern Science that has "nothing to do with Music", but surely you can't argue with the fact that Western Music was borne out of some very ancient, and somewhat basic Science (Pythagoras for a start). Stretch a long string across a couple of logs at either end. Place a dividing finger half way along (to yield the 8ve), then in equal 3rd segments (the 5th overtone), then equal 5ths (the 3rd). Bingo, there's your triad. It doesn't matter that further smaller divisions don't perfectly derive the other notes of what was to later become the Ionian mode (I think you'll see a #4th and a b7 before a P5 and a M7 appears). It also doesn't matter that if you stack true perfect 5ths until you reach a higher octave of your starting note, you get a note that's more than a few cents sharper than it is on a tempered piano (Pythagorean Comma). It doesn't negate Science's influence on Western music.
Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Bending the cosmic rules of SHM to create music that sounds tuneful to our ears beyond a single octave (not to mention the 11 other key centres!) does not disprove any relationship between Music and Science. Nor do the ambitious, yet failed experiments of Kepler, Hindemith or Schoenberg etc. My friends, the triad is king in Western music, and good old Physics gave us the effing triad. 'Nuff said. All the rest is just pulling at the margins.
Oh, and as for "Modern Science" (ie post 1950), apart from a few nifty inventions, if by that you mean Modern Physics, well, you could argue that it has nothing to do with anything...
Now here I'd agree, String theory has nothing to do with guitars...
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09-18-2023 02:02 PM
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Our binocular vision enables depth perception. The structure and nature of the receptors in our retinas give us (limited) color vision. But European representational visual art did not always bother to mimic all these features of our visual-sensory machinery until the late medieval/early Renaissance "discovery" of perspective. On the other hand, there are illusionist/trompe-d'oeil wall paintings in the remains of Roman villas. So it's not like our sensory/perceptual setups or the machineries of the natural world absolutely determine how we rearrange things when we make art. Of course, I don't think most painters bother with the electromagnetic spectrum beyond the ultraviolet, even though those colors exist in nature and insects respond to them. (What would honeybee art look like? Or what would dog art sound--and smell--like?)
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It’s easier just to reference articles tbh because no one is saying anything - including me - that hasn’t been debated in great depth by clever people. Originally Posted by princeplanet
Strange that you seem to feel strongly about this... Not sure what it is exactly about Modern Science that has "nothing to do with Music", but surely you can't argue with the fact that Western Music was borne out of some very ancient, and somewhat basic Science (Pythagoras for a start). Stretch a long string across a couple of logs at either end. Place a dividing finger half way along (to yield the 8ve), then in equal 3rd segments (the 5th overtone), then equal 5ths (the 3rd). Bingo, there's your triad. It doesn't matter that further smaller divisions don't perfectly derive the other notes of what was to later become the Ionian mode (I think you'll see a #4th and a b7 before a P5 and a M7 appears). It also doesn't matter that if you stack true perfect 5ths until you reach a higher octave of your starting note, you get a note that's more than a few cents sharper than it is on a tempered piano (Pythagorean Comma). It doesn't negate Science's influence on Western music.
Bending the cosmic rules of SHM to create music that sounds tuneful to our ears beyond a single octave (not to mention the 11 other key centres!) does not disprove any relationship between Music and Science. Nor do the ambitious, yet failed experiments of Kepler, Hindemith or Schoenberg etc. My friends, the triad is king in Western music, and good old Physics gave us the effing triad. 'Nuff said. All the rest is just pulling at the margins.
Oh, and as for "Modern Science" (ie post 1950), apart from a few nifty inventions, if by that you mean Modern Physics, well, you could argue that it has nothing to do with anything... Now here I'd agree, String theory has nothing to do with guitars...
Anyway what you posted is basically what Hindemith said, and what Roger Sessions was responding to. you can find a just intonated major triad in the overtone sequence. You can characterise chords and so on as composite waveforms based on mathematical ratios and so on. No one argues with that. It’s a long journey from that observation to what Hindemith was talking about.
The math and physics is certainly NOT irrelevant to music. Temperament is a big deal for example. Well tempered systems in the c18 allowed greater and more ambitious modulation, for instance. I reckon the adoption of equal temperament during the late c19 allowed consonant extended harmony to be used for the first time since the Pythagorean era (up to c15)
But that’s a different position to thinking that music - specifically tonality - is emergent from natural law. If you think about it for five minutes that latter statement is either absurd - because many world cultures do not use western tonality - OR can only be an argument to shore up the idea of Western tonality as ‘most natural’.
The first is muzzy headed new ageism and benign fun imo, the second is actually a bit sinister.
OTOH it is true that many cultures use the overtone sequence in different ways which do not resemble western tonality (and in fact sound strikingly microtonal.)Last edited by Christian Miller; 09-18-2023 at 03:12 PM.
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In the same collection I linked (which has a lot of back and forth on these issues) I think Edgard Varese made an interesting argument in the same collection - which is that music should focus less on grammar and more on the nature of sound informed by physics and mathematics (he was a stem bro iirc). You can see come to fruition that via the spectralist school mentioned by James w above. But it don’t sound like Bach…
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Nah, Sessions vs Hindemith, or even the Western vs non Western music discussion does not convince me that Science had no bearing on music. I say no Pythagoras = no Bach. Besides, at a recent Jazz Jam I asked the guy next to me what kind of music the kids on stage were trying to play. He said " it's Maths Jazz". More evidence...
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Well I don’t disagree with that. Originally Posted by princeplanet
Nah, Sessions vs Hindemith, or even the Western vs non Western music discussion does not convince me that Science had no bearing on music. I say no Pythagoras = no Bach. Besides, at a recent Jazz Jam I asked the guy next to me what kind of music the kids on stage were trying to play. He said " it's Maths Jazz". More evidence...
But that’s not that same thing as saying you think the idiomatic properties of Western tonality come direct from the laws of the natural world. (Which frankly doesn’t make much sense if you play jazz, because what we play is not really common practice harmony anyway. We don’t play the same music as js Bach or whoever.)
So it doesn’t sound like you are making that argument, but rather that maths and acoustics and so on affect music (not that you need to know any of that stuff to be a great player… but nerds are gonna nerd.) So i certainly agree. They are aspects of our art in the same way as colour perception and perspective are in art (as R Letson pointed out) and you can down a basically endless rabbit hole with that stuff. Believe me, I know haha.
But unlike the other Arts, Music used to be Important and Cosmic, one of the four liberal arts of the Quadrividum along with Astronomy, Arithmetic and Geometry. Later on, German philosophers used to bang on about the specialness of music among the Arts… Schopenhauer, Nietzsche…. So we feel a bit slighted perhaps to be put on a level with mere daubers? ;-)
Frankly there’s a lot of pseudoscience in music. I’m fine with airy fairy mystic stuff. I love it in fact, provided no one’s trying to start a cult.
It’s when music theory or aesthetics gets physics envy that my eyes glaze over. Otoh you can believe all this stuff and still be Leonard Bernstein. Or Hindemith. As I say mostly it’s benign, just don’t take it too seriously. (I won’t talk about scientism in music education - I can recommend a good and readable paper on the subject.)
Anyway if you going to mix yer physics and yer music theory (and sadly, as I discovered, to do so will scarcely make one a better player) I think the overtone scale is overrated as a driver of harmonic development.Last edited by Christian Miller; 09-18-2023 at 03:49 PM.
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Also - OI Prince!
cheeky use of ellipsis there in post #1027. You should be in flipping academia mate.
Holy crap, post 1027. My life!
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An important distinction that seems to be flying over many heads is the difference between something HAVING a nature and COMING from nature…..learning to improvise over chords means
(*in part*) getting familiar with the NATURE of harmony…. of which tension and release is part and parcel, as opposed to random, arbitrary abstractions, arrived at by chance and repetition- which seems to be implied by much of what I’m reading here.
Rage against it all you want but a V7 —> Imaj7 is just a simple and diatonic example of that tension and release….and almost like a zen parable you get to know each chords nature in relationship to one another. Does it take good ears? No doubt. Do some have them without training? Yes. More importantly for many - can you strengthen your sensitivity to it? ABSOLUTELY.
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Hmm. Originally Posted by Chris236
I get that the whole discussion of the music of the spheres and whatnot has drifted afield from what you were saying.
But to be clear … you’re saying that music has absolute characteristics that are universal and that people identify with them because they are facts of harmony rather than because people are conditioned to hear them in culture.
So you’re also splitting hairs a bit here. You’re using the word nature as in “inherent characteristics” but if music’s inherent characteristics don’t come from our being conditioned to hear them that way, then they must come from …. not nature?
I don’t think you need to tap into the whole music of the spheres angle to see where that gets a little tough. Bach was amazing because Bach tapped into music’s inherent nature. But what about Palestrina that doesn’t follow the same rules of harmony? What about folk music that doesn’t really have much harmonic sophistication at all? What about middle eastern or Indian classical music that uses a very different pitch system?
At some point you’re saying either that some of those musics are invalid because the people who wrote them aren’t tapping into musics inherent nature (i don’t think you’re saying that). Or maybe you’re saying they all also tap into musics inherent nature, at which point the inherent tendencies of music are so varied and diverse that arguing that there is absolute nature to music seems a little pointless.
For me this just seems like a weird hill to die on.
Your music would be just as beautiful if it were just working with and manipulating a set of expectations shared by your audience based on their common cultural experience. Actually—considering the alternative—I think that might even be more beautiful.
Sitting down at a jazz show in New York and seeing all the tourists and different people there to listen is nice not because everyone has learned to appreciate this pure beautiful thing, perfectly rendered. But because there’s something they’ve all heard or experienced that makes that music resonate with them. Which is significantly cooler in my book.
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Was the sound of a C major scale, over a C major chord beat into our consciousness over thousands of years for it to sound right, or do you think it was pretty fundamental right from the beginning? I obviously say fundamental….and likewise to all the other chord/scale relationships that arose over time as harmony advanced…as opposed to arbitrary, randomness that was haphazardly arrived at, then agreed upon enough to be repeated incessantly until becoming tradition, in turn conditioning our ears to it. That’s silliness IMO.
Can great music be ‘organized’ (or not) both outside of what westerners consider modern harmony in completely different harmonic and non harmonic contexts? Do I really need say it? **ABSOLUTELY** Never once did I say it couldn’t be, although it’s been eluded to for reasons unknown.
In jazz itself there is frequently an aversion to those fundamental notes in a good players lines. Gotta be well aware of them to defy, miss with precision or adept enough to imply an alternate ‘reality’ though.
Anyway, don’t want to argue - this is my perspective as opposed to any sort of disingenuous, regurgitation. I’m sure you’ll say chicken or egg and we know where that goes. Have at it.
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I know where you're coming from, and of course we have to agree that too much has been made of the interrelationship re music and the cosmos, they shoulda just stopped at the triad Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Well I don’t disagree with that.
But that’s not that same thing as saying you think the idiomatic properties of Western tonality come direct from the laws of the natural world. (Which frankly doesn’t make much sense if you play jazz, because what we play is not really common practice harmony anyway. We don’t play the same music as js Bach or whoever.)
So it doesn’t sound like you are making that argument, but rather that maths and acoustics and so on affect music (not that you need to know any of that stuff to be a great player… but nerds are gonna nerd.) So i certainly agree. They are aspects of our art in the same way as colour perception and perspective are in art (as R Letson pointed out) and you can down a basically endless rabbit hole with that stuff. Believe me, I know haha.
But unlike the other Arts, Music used to be Important and Cosmic, one of the four liberal arts of the Quadrividum along with Astronomy, Arithmetic and Geometry. Later on, German philosophers used to bang on about the specialness of music among the Arts… Schopenhauer, Nietzsche…. So we feel a bit slighted perhaps to be put on a level with mere daubers? ;-)
Frankly there’s a lot of pseudoscience in music. I’m fine with airy fairy mystic stuff. I love it in fact, provided no one’s trying to start a cult.
It’s when music theory or aesthetics gets physics envy that my eyes glaze over. Otoh you can believe all this stuff and still be Leonard Bernstein. Or Hindemith. As I say mostly it’s benign, just don’t take it too seriously. (I won’t talk about scientism in music education - I can recommend a good and readable paper on the subject.)
Anyway if you going to mix yer physics and yer music theory (and sadly, as I discovered, to do so will scarcely make one a better player) I think the overtone scale is overrated as a driver of harmonic development.
... I guess because we like things to have neat solutions, people have tried to force all things musical to be somehow explainable with equations. In reality, as you have shown, its only a very small part of music that owes anything at all to equations, but it's an important part!
And yes, many a long bow has been drawn in an attempt to shoehorn the laws of music into a subset of the cosmic laws, and although admirable, all the 20thC attempts indeed have failed, I think. But then, George Russell's LCC seems to be still hanging around halls of Academia like a bad smell....
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hehe, thought I almost got away with that... Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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As much as it may sound like a strawman position, people argued exactly for that position and their theories still wield considerable influence. I see it as a pitfall of getting too invested in ones own ideas… Originally Posted by princeplanet
I know where you're coming from, and of course we have to agree that too much has been made of the interrelationship re music and the cosmos, they shoulda just stopped at the triad... I guess because we like things to have neat solutions, people have tried to force all things musical to be somehow explainable with equations. In reality, as you have shown, its only a very small part of music that owes anything at all to equations, but it's an important part!
And yes, many a long bow has been drawn in an attempt to shoehorn the laws of music into a subset of the cosmic laws, and although admirable, all the 20thC attempts indeed have failed, I think. But then, George Russell's LCC seems to be still hanging around halls of Academia like a bad smell....
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I think there’s a bit of grey area between these two positions Originally Posted by Chris236
- music had an aesthetic inherent to the nature of sound etc
- music has no basis in maths, acoustics etc
as far as I can see none of us subscribe to either of those. However, the rhetoric might point us in one direction or the other.
But I think I was fairly clear when I said that music represents a cultural response to the physical nature of sound (or something). Music is chiefly a cultural activity even as our resources are grounded in the nature of sound and number.
It’s interesting that I think there’s a cultural resistance to the idea of viewing musical perception as cultural among musicians. This culturally deep rooted. Music is meant to be the universal language.
So, for example… It is mathematically determinable that C7b9 had a more complex waveform than C (especially in equal temperament haha) and therefore can be said to be ‘more dissonant’ but on the other hand in Western music alone the perception of what that C chord was changed. Medieval musicians regarded the major third as an ‘imperfect interval’ for example, not a true consonance like the 5th or 8ve.
Whether this was a perception that followed the use of Pythagorean temperament with its complex major thirds is a subject of debate. Eventually it was accepted as a consonant chord at the end of a piece, but the minor triads acceptance as a final chord took longer, and so on.
OTOH c14 music is full of parallel fifths, but by the late C15 these became forbidden on polyphony as fauxbourdon started to become fashionable in the Low Countries. The third became accepted more as a consonance and the parallel fifths and octaves of the old French style were eliminated (a principle thta is still taught in counterpoint today.) there may be sound acoustic reasons for this (it undermines independence of parts) but the flowering of early modern polyphony is the product of a subjective aesthetic preference for polyphonic music… and later the pendulum swung back with Debussy etc.
This is all highly subjective and cultural. We now think of a drop 2 root position. Cmajor7 chord as consonant but I know some classical musician who really struggle to hear it that way. And so on.
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Here's an example of aural subjectivity. So I'm learning the first two part invention by Bach. There's this pattern (which comes back a few times in various forms)- it's in piano score BTW
Now, to me it's very hard NOT to hear this as C, Dm, Em, F#o G arpeggiated, all root position
How ever this contains extremely obvious parallel fifths in between the bass and top line, right?
This is because as a modern musician and a guitarist, I hear broken chords here.
This is clearly not how Bach heard it. He must have heard the second note on each bass as a new melodic note, creating contrary motion with the next beat. Which guides ones fingerings obviously, one might choose to finger the top notes along one string for instance. Indeed when you finger the phrase to take account of this, the implied parallel fifths no longer jump out.
I suspect this is a fairly obvious example, I'm sure pianists and classical guitarists are coached in this type of thing, but I do think it shows how subjective the effect of apparently simple music can be
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Exactly. Nail + head. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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So Bach used parallel 5ths, and supposedly that was a dissonant sound at the time, but you believe he found it acceptable because the harmony was arpeggiated? Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Here's an example of aural subjectivity. So I'm learning the first two part invention by Bach. There's this pattern (which comes back a few times in various forms)- it's in piano score BTW
Now, to me it's very hard NOT to hear this as C, Dm, Em, F#o G arpeggiated, all root position
How ever this contains extremely obvious parallel fifths in between the bass and top line, right?
This is because as a modern musician and a guitarist, I hear broken chords here.
This is clearly not how Bach heard it. He must have heard the second note on each bass as a new melodic note, creating contrary motion with the next beat. Which guides ones fingerings obviously, one might choose to finger the top notes along one string for instance. Indeed when you finger the phrase to take account of this, the implied parallel fifths no longer jump out.
I suspect this is a fairly obvious example, I'm sure pianists and classical guitarists are coached in this type of thing, but I do think it shows how subjective the effect of apparently simple music can be
Yes - what our ears find acceptable over time definitely broadens but that’s not indicative of what I’m saying not being true I’m afraid, just a sign of the technology of the time.
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So music evolves toward more perfect representations of its fundamental nature? Originally Posted by Chris236
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A culture may explore a certain avenue of harmony(I’m limiting my discussion to that) but I don’t believe that the harmony owes its nature to that culture any more than any other discovery might. It evolved and pushed forward *through* a nature. An observable one that led people to conclusions like ‘that’s dissonant’ or ‘that’s consonant’. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
There is always a resistance to that which is new, and music is no different - as the technology (musically speaking) broadened, so did our ears…or quite possibly the other way around. At any rate, as our ears opened more and more to once perceived ‘dissonance’, more of that nature is exposed and common place, so to speak.
Anyway, I’m not particularly interested in music history tbh. In my opinion theory is most valuable to a person at the level they can observe(hear) it at. There’s a case to be made for it being a useful roadmap, but it would still require the traveler to visit the destinations in a real way to understand.
So, theory vs playing by ear? Theory is observed and actually UNDERSTOOD from the ears. Otherwise it’s just mathematical abstraction.
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Complete might be a better choice of words. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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I feel like you should note here that you’re making statements about the role of culture in forming our conception of consonance and dissonance (which are words that aren’t even applicable in other musical traditions) but then following that up by saying that you’re not really interested in music history. Originally Posted by Chris236
The reason I think that you’re wrong is that your view doesn’t really jive with the way music has evolved historically.
To take it back to my earlier (dumb) analogy … my experience tells me that pizza and bagged salad are fundamental to the human palate and that taste and cuisine have absolute natures and that pizza and bagged salad are part of that nature. Humans need certain nutrients and we seek those nutrients out, so here we are. Someone might point out that large parts of the world didn’t have access to cows milk, let alone cheese, for most of human history and that it’s a far from inevitable consequence of various cultural forces that we eat so much now, let alone everything that came together to form pizza, let alone everything that came together to make that pizza into something that could be sold at several thousand identical pizza chains. And I might tell that person that I’m not terribly interested in history, but that would be …… a little odd.
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Which means that older music is less complete. Which means that music which still employs those older ideas is less complete. Originally Posted by Chris236
I don’t know man. That’s kind of a weird position to have. You’re probably going to say that what I said is a misrepresentation of what you mean, but it would follow from what you’re saying.
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I’m only using the word culture in the loosest sense - without SOMEONE to observe and cultivate, there’s nothing to grow! Originally Posted by pamosmusic
You’re welcome to believe I’m wrong. If you think what we find acceptable in music is solely conditioning, I think you’re wrong too.
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well, is an old car less of a representation of technological possibilities than a new one? They both still move from point A to to point B. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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This is obviously qualitatively different. A car is a technology. Which is a word you’ve used to describe the way people hear. So that is maybe something you really think—that composition and the way we hear are technologies in service of some clearly defined and end goal? Originally Posted by Chris236
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