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Originally Posted by Tal_175
go back far enough (16th century and before) and you’ll find this cadence was also very popular back then…
I tend to side with the convention explanation.
There’s a lot encoded from history in Western music, for instance... the historical aspect seems to carry more weight than the mathematical, when it comes to musical language, at least to me.Last edited by Christian Miller; 02-08-2023 at 06:41 PM.
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02-08-2023 06:10 PM
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A lot to unpick in Gjerdingen's take on what goes on in a university course, and I find myself returning (again) to what I think is a primal distinction: knowing-how and knowing-that. The latter is descriptive, but the former is not necessarily prescriptive--though plenty of teachers and coaches offer plenty of thou-shalt-nots and thou-shalts along the way to practical competence.
The thing about practical competence is that it is about doing (knowing-how), while most "theory" is about understanding (knowing-that)--and some knowing-that is not about imperishable truths (e.g., how a vibrating string produces various frequencies) but about variable matters (what constitutes scalar divisions that are interesting/plesing in a given culture or tradition). Discussions of temperament would belong to the latter group of "theoretical" topics, but for me as a guitarist, it was of interest mainly as an explanation of why I felt the need to tweak the tuning of some strings when playing in different keys.
On the other hand, notions such as inversions and the harmonized major scale helped me to hear what's going on in a tune--and to navigate playing it and maybe explain to another player what I (thought I was) doing.
I've mentioned before that I spent a couple decades teaching college English, which meant offering students information about how language works (grammar, semantics, semiotics, rhetoric, logic, various presentational conventions), trying to get them to read in a way that revealed those workings, and to apply that understanding to their own writing. The part of the process that generates copy, word by word and sentence by sentence, remains a bit of a mystery--I can't see it in myself, though I can feel it in operation and I do understand the various practices that surround and enable it. And I understand that knowing-how is mostly a matter of doing (and doing, and doing), with knowing-that hovering over and commenting on the doing. (That process has been operating throughout the drafting and finishing of this post.)
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He talks about 'making harmony'.
Which means that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of harmony and theory.
Theory is an attempt to understand music that has been played before. An attempt to discover rules and mechanisms.
It is always specific to the type of music that is investigated. Meaning - different types, from different time periods, have different mechanisms. 'Dissonance' means entirely different things for Gregorian Chants vs. Beethoven vs. Bartok vs. Ornette Coleman.
Theory is not a set of rules that can be used to create music. That's just not how it works.
I believe that the main reason that there is so much emphasis on 'music theory' and 'harmony' in education is that it's so easy to teach and understand.
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As for a general view of music theory, I found this one by Adam Neely quite insightful - more depth than the rant about college harmony classes in the video above...
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And for a current cognitive science approach - the new book by Susan Rogers looks interesting.
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Originally Posted by stratology
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Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
No innovative music - none whatsoever - was ever created by following guidelines. Charlie Parker did not create Bebop by applying his figured bass knowledge.
Bartok's compositions break every rule that was established by Bach's music. He did the opposite of following the 'guidelines'.
Don't get me wrong - a mechanistic approach is perfectly valid for some, albeit limited, understanding of music that was played before.
And that understanding can be helpful in creating new music.
But it is extremely limited. I'll give an example: some time ago, I saw a YouTube video that 'analysed' Bohemian Rhapsody.
At one stage, Freddie Mercury sings 'send shivers down my spine', and in response to it, Brian May plays the shivers on guitar.
The idiot who did the analysis blabbed something about a 'sophisticated arpeggio'. He did not understand at all what was actually going on in the music, because his world view was limited to reducing music to a bunch of harmonic rules and techniques.
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^ That isn't true again. Innovative music both follows convention and uses creativity to break new ground. Like 99.99% of music is convention and creativity. It isn't pure creativity and theory follows. Does every musician reinvent 1,2,3,4? Lol Or do they reinvent the tonal center? Come on now.
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Years back I was interacting with a theory and analysis Phd student and we were discussing the possible differential between an analysis and a composer's intention and thought process. He had just gotten back from a theory conference and he told me that a presenter there said something along the lines of:
"Once the composer's ink dries, the composition is mine and I don't care what the composer was thinking".
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In any environment, theory is an after the fact documentation and analysis of what's happening. We use it to understand it, teach it, and develop it further.
The way I see it, Jazz is a mixture of European and African music. And European music has a lot of mathematics and theory in it, and a long tradition of teaching and carrying the music with it.
For the average listener and player, learning theory will be a great help and asset. Can you play jazz without it? Of course you can, and in idioms like Gypsy Jazz that used to be the norm. I know I couldn't really figure out what's going on in Jazz before learning theory, and every single thing i learned has helped me become a better musician.
Jazz has developed a lot since 30s musicals, and for better or worse, the theoretical part is now a huge thing in modern Jazz playing, composition, teaching, etc. (Too much if you ask me, I much prefer the less academic way the music sounded in the sixties).
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Originally Posted by RLetson
Victor Wooten suggests to teach music by the same method that small kids use to learn language. They don't learn the alphabet, they don't learn any grammar, they just imitate the older, better 'players', who encourage them, and allow them to make lots of mistakes, and have fun with it. They can still convey thoughts, and get better at it over time. The skill to communicate thoughts grows in parallel with the complexity of the thoughts.
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Originally Posted by Alter
I tell this story a lot, but apparently noone remembers it, so I'll keep telling it. So I'm taking lessons with Tony Monaco who is now the most prominent jazz organist in the entire world after Joey died. He came up right after the golden age in the 70s. His music is ridiculously organized. If I go about my playing and practicing and think I should be happy about doing any component just willy nilly, I need to correct that thought. Every aspect of his playing is organized and he's ridiculously musical!
This is my favorite original of his. Bruce Forman on guitar.
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Originally Posted by stratology
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Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
I remember, many years ago, after watching an absolutely wild, brilliant free jazz concert - no tonal centres anywhere in sight - a drummer friend of mine commented that the musicians 'didn't play a single wrong note'. Wise observation.
I don't think your point of view and mine are really that far apart. Understanding tonal centers intellectually, and using them intuitively, when creating music is part of the process (for some styles of music, where that's relevant).
But - if someone knows about tonal centres, and starts to construct music based on that as a starting point - "You could make more money as a butcher" - to put it harshly, and quote Zappa.
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Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
Yeah, Wooten started playing when he was 3, his environment was a musical family.
Entirely different to how I learned. Probably to how most of us learn...
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Someone who lives on Benefit Street can speak English and read and write it to some degree. But that doesn't compare with a person who's had higher education, is studied, widely read, cultured, and all the rest of it. Of course the Benefit person will say 'I don't need all that, I get by all right', and they're probably right, but there's no doubt about who has the advantage.
Same with theory, the more you know the better equipped you are.
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Originally Posted by stratologyOriginally Posted by stratology
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Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
American Jazz of course had a lot of theory since its beginning, at least compared to genres like Gypsy Jazz or Flamenco, etc. Isn't it essentially Blues and Gospel music, married with classical harmony and theory?
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I don't bother with theory when I strum Kumbaya, I go to theory when I want to play something clever. Depends what you want.
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^ Don't get mad at melodic minor, study the devices those musicians use that you're interested in.
Originally Posted by Alter
Don't forget that pretty much all of us today are "outsiders" at learning Jazz music, at least compared to how most players learned from other musicians in the 50s and 60s. They were much less theoretical and much more practical than music students today.
The same way Bach's family just improvised and played the music at family gatherings, music that have birth to a thousand rules.
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Granted, no undergrad theory class is teaching Partch, but still. It's not that theory is the problem, necessarily. You can't really learn anything about any subject in 14 weeks. That's not unique to music theory. Someone who takes a single course in philosophy will not be literate in the subject. He'll just have a bunch of useful fictions that help him begin to conceptualize a very complicated field of work. It seems like the same thing happens in music theory courses.
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Originally Posted by Jimmy blue note
I love it so much, I am regularly use this phrase as self-irony "...my theory of my own..."
however back to the OP, I think this sketch is not about pseudoscience, instead personality flaws, still you are right there similarities...
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
I am still processing this thread... good one.
I have to confess, the "professor's" very first sentences alone blew the fuse in my head. What a waste demagogy in *multiple layers* , a cheap popularism, a shallow reasoning and leading the audience to completely forget any reasonable thinking. and all that in 3-4 sentences. This is art. (of politics)
- they do no give you a rocket, and they do not travel you to the space, haha..So what? After a history course: do they send you back in time to French revolution? How on earth this implies that history a pseudoscience? After a quantum mechanics course you also do not have a takeaway a bunch of bosons, so lets everybody skip it, end of learning, and of thinking.
- Just because we can not do something today, why would it imply that do not worth to learn and got an understanding about that in the current level? the issues what are waiting to solve, etc? We do not know either how to build a fusion reactor, this does not mean that it would be pseudoscience. This is a very retrograde, toxic thinking.
The rest of his thoughts can not produce such an intense level of bullshit, those are just simply cloudy I mean his deduction methods and conclusions.
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There are impostors, and there are group of impostors around a particular topic this is a cliche, the professor should say something new.
(Also true, that music theory does not make us musician, best case it helps us to make better, but not for everyone. I agree, theory is way secondary after getting into music, listening it, doing it, and loving it.)
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Certainly theorists like Guido, Zarlino, the Basso Continuo revolution, the Neapolitans, Bolognese and the Faculty at the Paris Conservatory in the 19th century knew what they were doing in music theoretically and took it to very high levels of craftsmanship.
but I get the point.
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Originally Posted by stratology
It is always specific to the type of music that is investigated. Meaning - different types, from different time periods, have different mechanisms. 'Dissonance' means entirely different things for Gregorian Chants vs. Beethoven vs. Bartok vs. Ornette Coleman.
Theory is not a set of rules that can be used to create music. That's just not how it works.
I believe that the main reason that there is so much emphasis on 'music theory' and 'harmony' in education is that it's so easy to teach and understand.
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As for a general view of music theory, I found this one by Adam Neely quite insightful - more depth than the rant about college harmony classes in the video above...
In general Adam’s video conflates several related, but seperate issues. In any case Schenkerian analysis is a 20th century theory and has little to do with how 18th century music was actually written. This is G’s area of interest.
Furthermore, Schenker was as much a German supremacist as he was a white supremacist. We can see the German dominance in narratives about the history of music generally and how Italian composers of the c18 (who were the leading figures of the time, like Paisiello, Durante and Salieri) have been minimised in the histories (and popular culture) in favour of Mozart, Bach, Haydn etc. I’m sure Gjerdingen and his colleagues would argue this has distorted our idea of music history.Last edited by Christian Miller; 02-09-2023 at 05:14 AM.
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Originally Posted by briandavidyork
People like Harry Partch do make a real attempt to use the overtone series as the basis of scale, and they end up with really cool results. His student Ben Johnston wrote some of the best classical music in the last 50 years, in my opinion.
Granted, no undergrad theory class is teaching Partch, but still. It's not that theory is the problem, necessarily. You can't really learn anything about any subject in 14 weeks. That's not unique to music theory. Someone who takes a single course in philosophy will not be literate in the subject. He'll just have a bunch of useful fictions that help him begin to conceptualize a very complicated field of work. It seems like the same thing happens in music theory courses.
but if you are interested in learning how to do 18th century music as opposed to learning about it, Gjerdingens work is worth a look.
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Originally Posted by stratology
Actually the Western Canon has been a victim of this as much if not more than any other tradition. We can’t understand c18 music as it was in the c18 because we don’t live in that world. Our understanding of Mozart would no doubt miss a lot things that Mozart would take as read from his contemporary audiences. Same with Charlie Parker.
Transcriber wanted
Today, 04:35 PM in Improvisation