The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #26

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    Quote Originally Posted by Tal_175
    Yeah, I think it's mostly irrelevant whether one thinks the channel is for appreciation or for composition. The reason I posted it is turns out when people listen to rock, back door dominant is just as effective as the standard V-I resolution. This is something I find intuitive. The harmonic conventions are established by repetition rather than implicit psychoacoustic rules. Gradually listeners come to expect certain musical events. The composer can play around with these expectations.
    Ha, I was talking about that with Cliff today.

    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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  3. #27

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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.)

  4. #28

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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.




    -------------------------



    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...




    -------------------------

    And for a current cognitive science approach - the new book by Susan Rogers looks interesting.

  5. #29

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    Quote Originally Posted by stratology
    Theory is not a set of rules that can be used to create music. That's just not how it works.
    You must be joking. Then all music always follows the same guidelines by chance. You obviously don't want to view art as rules, but you still have to follow many customary guidelines to organize sound logically into music. This is one of the most nonsensical things I've ever read.

  6. #30

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
    You must be joking. Then all music always follows the same guidelines by chance. You obviously don't want to view art as rules, but you still have to follow many customary guidelines to organize sound logically into music. This is one of the most nonsensical things I've ever read.

    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.

  7. #31

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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.

  8. #32

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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".

  9. #33

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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).

  10. #34

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    Quote Originally Posted by RLetson

    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.)

    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.

  11. #35

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    Quote Originally Posted by Alter
    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.
    That's false. Theory is used by most players to get fundamental and advanced skills. The proportion of theory to creativity varies by individual but your notion is completely false. My aim isn't to be hostile here, but I'm really baffled at how many in the forum are so invested in these alt facts.

    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.


  12. #36

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    Quote Originally Posted by stratology
    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.
    This is an important part of music education - developing aural competency first and foremost. But for most musicians who don't learn music in the style of a first language, structural understanding is needed too.

  13. #37

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
    ^ 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.

    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.

  14. #38

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
    This is an important part of music education - developing aural competency first and foremost. But for most musicians who don't learn music in the style of a first language, structural understanding is needed too.

    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...

  15. #39

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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.

  16. #40

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    Quote Originally Posted by stratology
    Yeah, Wooten started playing when he was 3, his environment was a musical family.
    Quote Originally Posted by stratology

    Entirely different to how I learned. Probably to how most of us learn...
    Yeah some of the greats were nurtured so they got music more hardwired like a 1st language at an early age. Some musicians get basics down and then have creativity take them the rest of the way, like Cobain who got a few months of guitar lessons. However, most musicians need the structural education in tandem with the aural. Theory certainly isn't after the fact or outright destructive.

  17. #41

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
    That's false. Theory is used by most players to get fundamental and advanced skills. The proportion of theory to creativity varies by individual but your notion is completely false. My aim isn't to be hostile here, but I'm really baffled at how many in the forum are so invested in these alt facts.
    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.

    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?

  18. #42

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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.

  19. #43

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    ^ Don't get mad at melodic minor, study the devices those musicians use that you're interested in.

    Quote Originally Posted by Alter
    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?
    I think so.

    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.
    We're outsiders to the golden age. Jazz education is more formalized now. That doesn't necessarily mean that they didn't rely on some sort of education then. Charlie Parker says so in his interview.

    The same way Bach's family just improvised and played the music at family gatherings, music that have birth to a thousand rules.
    I'm not sure Bach is the best example to argue about practicality trumping theory. Some of Bach's most well known tunes are him literally running arps in a pattern in structured chord progressions lol.

  20. #44
    Quote Originally Posted by Christian Miller
    yeah the overtones thing is pseudoscience. I remember reading some good back and forths from some eminent 20th composers. It basically depended on whether you were in team tonality or not. If I remember right, Paul Hindemith put this forward as an explanation of tonality as being rooted in physics (and Schoenberg iirc, interestingly) but (I’ll look up the names) others debunked the idea effectively.

    Comparative musicology and related fields in the past few decades have apparently evolved a lot and shown that psychoacoustic perception of intervals, dissonance and consonance etc is highly dependent on culture. We wouldn’t expect this to be the case if musical perception was grounded in physics such as the overtone sequence.

    none of which is to say the acoustic overtone sequence isn’t used in music. For instance the overtone notes are used in many musical cultures and it is useful to bear in mind for spacing chords and so on.

    The overtone sequence indeed contains the just major third (5:4) and perfect fifth (3:2); but there also many intervals like the minor third (6:5) and perfect fourths (4:3) that don’t appear in the overtone sequence and yet are just as frequently used in Western music. (The memetastic ‘negative harmony’ concept is an attempt to explain this btw.)

    As a basis for tonality, it is at the least highly questionable.
    But it's not as if people don't know this. 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.

  21. #45

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jimmy blue note
    His argument is essentially that academic harmony is a gross generalization devoid of its ability to form any kind of practical framework in the real world.
    And he demonstrates this by making gross generalizations about harmony devoid of any kind of practical examples to the contrary.
    I love this guy. He's got a good theory.

    And that is his theory.
    wow, I clearly recall this sketch from the distance of quarter century I have last seen it.
    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...

  22. #46

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    Quote Originally Posted by Christian Miller
    Gjerdingen lays it down


    I'm not mad a theory... but maybe be I should be haha!!

    Seriously, I think Gjerdingen may overstate the case but the point about pseudoscience is well made.

    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.

    ***

    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.)

  23. #47
    Quote Originally Posted by Christian Miller
    Gjerdingen lays it down


    I'm not mad a theory... but maybe be I should be haha!!

    Seriously, I think Gjerdingen may overstate the case but the point about pseudoscience is well made.
    I think the problem might not be with the general concept of "theory" per se, but certainly the nonsense that came out of German universities (harmonic function theory, Roman numeral analysis, etc) in the 19th century that attempted to place the artisan craft of music on a pseudo-scientific level with madmen like Hegel.

    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.

  24. #48

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    Quote Originally Posted by stratology
    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.
    A point - Gjerdigen’s work is about rediscovering the ways in which 18th century composers were trained to write music. This type of theory if can be called such is not retrospective in that this is supposedly the toolset used to train the (child) composers of the era.

    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.




    -------------------------



    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...

    if you haven’t already have a read through the back and forth between Ewell and the Schenker society I’d recommend doing so. It’s a lot more nuanced than the culture war dust up presented by media.

    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.

  25. #49

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    Quote Originally Posted by briandavidyork
    But it's not as if people don't know this.
    Maybe they do? I don’t know. Anyway I was responding to Cliff. I do hear the overtone sequence referenced often when teaching the basis of theory. I was taught it. Maybe it’s a useful ‘lie to children.’

    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.
    ha! Yes, lies to children. (To use Cohen, Stewart and Pratchett’s term)

    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.

  26. #50

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    Quote Originally Posted by stratology
    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.
    The analysis of music (or art in general) often reflects more the world view of the person doing the analysis than the music itself.

    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.