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Post by jean on Jul 21, 2018 17:47:55 GMT 1
If you believe this theory, yes you do. I do believe it. You've never said anything to convince me that it's wrong. It makes sense to me. What's bizarre about it? And you think that was when, exactly? The problem you have here, Nick, is that you persist in believing that 'our Western scale', whether chromatic or diatonic, was just there to be discovered. Obviously, all possible sounds exist potentially according to the laws of physics. But the intervals we've decided to divide the octave into are something we made a decision about. That's why we find scales with different numbers of intervals, and our decisions are no more inevitable that those of other traditions. It's also why, within our Western tradition, we find scales where most of the intervals are a tone, but some are a semitone. The diatonic major (to take the example we're most familiar with) has its semitone intervals between the third & fourth notes, and between the seventh & eighth. All other pairs of notes are separated by an interval of a tone. The modes, which are (let's remember) just scales, divide the octave into the same number of steps as the diatonic scales, but their semitones are in different places. Do you understand this simple fact?This is where you started out, and it's as wrong now as it was then. The 'error' was...what, exactly? You know, you've never said. And of course 'No one calculates ratios when they play or write music'. But that's what you seem to want them to do. Otherwise why not leave them to make the necessary adjustments by instict, as they've always done? The scale you believe exists out there somewhere that nobody spotted is not realisable, and never could be. Even Helmholtz knew that.
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Post by jean on Jul 22, 2018 13:40:46 GMT 1
Yes, because if it were larger than the interval of a semitone, it would be notated differently. Nope. Only if it's in the same octave. If it's not - and the vast majority of music of any interest at all is not - then there's no way to notate it differently. Is there? You can do what Irving Berlin did, I suppose - always use the same key, and only compose using the black notes. But anything more complicated than the pentatonic that ranges acorss two or three or more octaves and you soon run into trouble.., ...the Western scale has nothing to do with dividing the octave, into twelve or any other number. I wrote earlier I have no idea what you mean by between octaves. This is new terminology unknown to practising musicians or even musicologists. l have finally realised where you are making your most serious mistake! It seems you do not understand that the need for adjustments doesn’t get more pronounced when you move to the next octave - that’s because the lower and upper notes of each octave are always exactly tuned to each other. It’s the intervals in between that need adjusting. And when you move to the next octave, the adjustments will be exactly the same as the ones you've just been making. That's why this is not a 'simple fact' at all: Let's take a note. Let's call it C. If the variation necessary to accommodate it to its harmonic context were more than a semitone higher than seemed to be indicated by the notation, (which in practice it never is), the note would be written C#. It's that simple. As I said, only if it's in the same octave. In an adjacent octave, the "variation" required is often more than the pitch change between, say, C and C# in the octave you've moved from. This is just a simple fact.
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Post by jean on Jul 22, 2018 19:32:16 GMT 1
Most musicians...don't even bother learning the absurdly inadequate 16th Century notation system - there are plenty of other better systems around, after all. This is something else you've frequently alluded to, but never given any examples of. Please listen to this very elaborate piece of fifteenth-century polyphony: I am sure you'll agree that it would be very difficult to learn such a piece by heart, without a score to help you. Here is the score, in standard notation. But assuming there are better and easier notation systems, I would be very interested to see the piece expressed in one if them. Could you do that? And while you're listening and following the score, could you note where the greatest variations in pitch occur, especially any that are over a semitone from the written pitch?
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Post by alancalverd on Jul 23, 2018 16:30:46 GMT 1
Pearls before swine, I fear.
I too was puzzled by "moving to the next octave". I suspect what the poor fellow means is transposing to another root note, since all scales and intervals are perfectly preserved by an octave shift.
The "problem" of transposition applies to mechanical keyboard and fretted instruments but it's only a problem if you want it to be. The Hammond organ gets around it by having such an entirely individual temperament that everyone expects a surprise in the key changes - great for the "middle eight"in any jazz number but it can cause conniptions in young fogeys if you play a juicy Palestrina passing chord. Brass and woodwind players just choose the least-wrong fingering and a bit of judicious embouchure.
Only fully-synthesised electronic instruments (and trombones) can approach true transposition of scales, and as a result they lack anything that a composer would regard as "key character". I've just been working with a keyboard/vocalist who has a "transpose button" traceable to a national frequency standards laboratory, but she insists on playing piano Dm rather than "C##m" because the latter doesn't sound sufficiently mournful for a delta blues, which really needs guitar temperament.
As for singers, Dolly Parton without demisemitone vibrato would just be a soprano with a wig.
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Post by jean on Jul 23, 2018 19:52:49 GMT 1
I too was puzzled by "moving to the next octave". I suspect what the poor fellow means is transposing to another root note, since all scales and intervals are perfectly preserved by an octave shift. And what does that have to do with Irving Berlin only ever composing in the one key? Surely he used more than one octave?
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Post by alancalverd on Jul 23, 2018 23:46:57 GMT 1
Different constraints apply if you are writing popular songs, musicals or jazz/brass instrumentals. If the lead singer changes, you may have to transpose at least a couple of big numbers and then re-think the linking instrumental in your theatre musical. Filling the stave with sharps and flats won't make you popular with session musicians so it's safest to stick with C,F, Bb or Eb or their associated minors if you are writing for brass and woodwind, or G, D and A for strings. But very few named composers actually produced the full orchestration for Hollywood, where at their peak the orchestras were recording several films a week: the trick was to produce a skeleton piano score and pass it to an orchestrator and copyists to beat it into whatever key the director could persuade the orchestra and singers to compromise on, so the original key wasn't particularly relevant and might as well be whatever Mr Berlin was happy to sing himself.
I was recruited to help out a school production of "Oliver". I showed up for the dress rehearsal to read over the pianist's shoulder and busk a bass accompaniment. The score was almost unecognisable with cuts, repeats and key changes pencilled all over it, after a whole term's "revisions" and cast changes. Next evening, for the actual performance, we were augmented with a violin, a clarinet, and a drummer. Ten seconds before the curtain rose, the pianist said "You all know the tunes, and Lionel Bart's chord sequences are a tribute to the bleedin' obvious. Just listen to my intros for the keys. One, two, three, four...." and we played the whole show (or what was left of it) and several encores, without a hitch. Myxolodian contrapuntalism is all very well, but there is no substitute for 50 years of actually entertaining an audience.
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Post by jean on Jul 24, 2018 9:45:34 GMT 1
Different constraints apply if you are writing popular songs, musicals or jazz/brass instrumentals...Filling the stave with sharps and flats won't make you popular with session musicians so it's safest to stick with C,F, Bb or Eb or their associated minors if you are writing for brass and woodwind, or G, D and A for strings. Goes without saying. But Nick seems to think that it is the wrong theory, and the (wrong) nomenclature that goes with it, that makes things difficult for practising musicians, of whatever sort. He can't entertain the idea that it's just difficult anyway, and it's clever tricks of the sort you outline that make things easier for jobbing session musicians and theoretically-untrained composers (didn't Irving Berlin have a transposing keyboard?) - not a new theory which reformulates what they know by instinct anyway. So I am still waiting for examples of what he assures us is a theory and associated descriptive apparatus that is both simpler and more scientifically accurate. No. But it would be nice to have it acknowledged that the Mixolydian mode actually existed, whether (historically) in the hands of the writers of Gregorian chant (the Mixolydian mode is mode V): or of the great contrapuntalists of the Renaissance: ...Lasso’s last work, the cycle of spiritual madrigals Lagrime di San Pietro, serves as an illustrative example of the mentality of the faithful at the time of the High Renaissance.j
[It] is a composition for seven voices, and numerological symbolism plays a significant role in it. The seven voices represent the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin Mary, and the division into seven parts of the three compositions represents the Holy Trinity seven times. Moreover, Lasso uses symbolically only seven of the church modes, omitting completely the eighth mode (Hypomixolydian). The individual madrigals can be grouped in ascending order as follows: Madrigals 1–4 in the 1st mode, madrigals 5–8 in the 2nd mode, madrigals 9–12 in the 3rd and 4th modes, madrigals 13–15 in 5th mode, madrigals 16–18 in the 6th mode and madrigals 19–20 in the 7th mode. The final motet is in tonus peregrinus, completely outside the usual Renaissance scheme of eight Gregorian modes.(I could find recordings and scores of this work, but Nick is never interested in actual evidence.) I understand it's also used in jazz, but I am not sure what kind of logic it is that makes that use chronologically prior to the medieval and renaissance examples I give here.
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Post by jean on Jul 24, 2018 10:09:38 GMT 1
And have you noticed how while other cultures often choose scales which give more divisions to the octave than we do, 'our Western scale' is just objectively and scientifically there, and unlike the others, was discovered not invented.
That sounds quite racist to me.
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Post by alancalverd on Jul 25, 2018 9:38:29 GMT 1
Actually rather vague. The western convention for dividing an octave into twelve semitones certainly makes it easy to write and read. Come to think of it, I haven't heard much genuinely non-western music played by large bands or choirs: I wonder if the simplification to 12 notes actually derives from the need to get large groups "singing from the same hymn sheet", whereas Chinese quartets or Indian sitar/tabla bands can explore a wider range of assonances?
But back to the plot. Having decided to notate with 12 semitones, the fact remains that certain intervals (e.g. 3,5) from a root note are particularly assonant or (b7) indicative. The problem arises when transposing those intervals to a different root note, and the invented compromise is even temperament.
I have no idea what our correspondent means by "western scale", of which, as you say, there are several that can be approximated by conventional notation.
Here's a heretical thought: music is the most ephemeral art form. If each element of the product didn't immediately disappear, you'd end up with cacophony. Once you start writing music down, turning the ephemeral into the permanent, you have pinned a butterfly. This makes life easy for a butterfly anatomist, but rather destroys the point of a butterfly.
Hence jazz! We use dots and chords to identify the species of butterfly we want to create, but the musician's job is to make it fly off the page.
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Post by jean on Jul 26, 2018 9:16:49 GMT 1
The western convention for dividing an octave into twelve semitones certainly makes it easy to write and read. The division into any particular number of tones/semitones isn't what makes music easy to write and read; that's the invention of a good system of notation. There may be something in that - except that Western notation precedes large choral and instrumental groups by several centuries so that's not the issue. The development of complex polyphony probably is, though. And if you're trying to keep a group together, what's equally important is to devise a system of indicating note and pause length. Plus, the more singers/players you have performing together, the greater the need for a conductor. He is determined to regard 'our western scale' as something mathematically perfect, though he never seems quite sure whether he means the chromatic scale with 12 semitone intervals, or the diatonic major and minor. The difficulty in tuning the smaller intervals in the diatonic scale is entirely down to the scale itself. We did not 'discover' the scale and then mess it up with a misguided notation because we didn't understand the science. Ah, but you're using the notion of 'ephemeral' in two different senses here! 'Writing it down' doesn't prolong the sounding of any note or notes into eternity - rather, it makes it possible to replicate a performance necessarily formed of eohemeral sounds in sequence. Without a system of notation, there was no way of doing this before the invention of sound recording.
An essentially improvisional genre is a different sort of butterfly, I think. And no jazz is ever entirely ephemeral because it does not precede sound recording.
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Post by alancalverd on Jul 26, 2018 14:24:13 GMT 1
The first labelled jazz record was made in 1917, around 20 years after the first named jazz band was formed. Though I guess pianola rolls count as nonephemeral ragtime.
The principal effect of sound recording on popular music was to introduce the "3-minute single", which constrained not only jazz but also military music as Sousa and his cohort wrote for the format, and is still the basis of rock, pop and brass band music today.
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Post by jean on Jul 27, 2018 9:42:29 GMT 1
The first labelled jazz record was made in 1917, around 20 years after the first named jazz band was formed. Though I guess pianola rolls count as nonephemeral ragtime. I think they would. But in any case, 20 years is within the memory of a single generation. Folk songs have been transmitted by oral tradition for centures - but they are much simpler than a Mahler symphony or a piece of renaissance polyphony, or even a jazz band. The urge to document is strong, though. Everyone knows the story of how Mozart managed to notate Allegri's Miserere having heard it in the Sistine Chapel, though Nick revealed his laughable ignorance of music of the period in supposing Mozart's notation included the famous top C. What is beyond doubt is that performers from the 16th to the 19th centuries knew the conventions of ornamenting a score - in the case of the Allegri, it would be ornamented anew every year, though never with that top C until the nineteenth century - those harmonies were just not within the seventeenth-century repertoire). So that butterfly was not broken upon a wheel.
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