8 ms·

Toward a Better Music Theory (2013)

110 points by brudgers 4y ago

polotics 4y ago
Totally agreeing with the article, this "supermode" ie in C: all white keys plus Eb, Ab, Bb, is exactly what my rock band's noodles have intuitively followed.
- eunoia 4y ago
  In the context of existing music theory that supermode could be considered Eb/Cm. I’ve been learning a couple pop songs lately that essentially seem to use this supermode by switching between the major and minor on verse/chorus. Seems pretty versatile.
sh4rks 4y ago
I don't see how the supermode can be useful to anyone starting to learn music theory. The hard part is figuring out the rhythm, vocabulary, and phrasing that make those notes sound "good". I still think one of the best ways of learning theory (for guitar at least) is to start with the pentatonic and diatonic scales, then add triads and "colour" notes. I'm curious to know other people's opinions though.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Yeah, I don't quite see what the notion of the "supermode" does for anyone, either. Maybe he's going to elaborate it somewhere else? Or just hoping that someone else does.
  - diydsp 4y ago
    it's a useful device like the circle of fifths but i don't see it displacing existing models.
AlbertCory 4y ago
The title is a bit misleading. I was expecting some polemic about Western music ignoring indigenous peoples, etc. etc. Instead, I kinda liked it. I took some classical piano and my teacher got very impatient with me approaching some pieces like a jazz musician would: assigning chords to measures that were quite obviously melodies over those chords. She was all about plagal cadences and all that stuff she learned at Oberlin. The Bach Prelude in C is especially entertaining to treat that way. There's one bar near the end that it's almost impossible to give a chord symbol to.
- deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
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- ybroze 4y ago
  Yeah, Rameau is the "Louie, Louie" French fellow who was the "Newton of Music" who gave us the Roman numeral notation, while the Germans were still doing counterpoint and harmonics. I very seriously believe there's a link between that, the revolutionary attitudes and kinship of the French and Americans, with the Rock and Roll movement of the 1950s / 1960s.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    > Rameau is the "Louie, Louie" French fellow Another win. I know Rameau and of course I know Louie, Louie, but the connection eludes me. I'm sure you'll tell us.
- ybroze 4y ago
  Plagality is a pretty deep musical concept within tonality, though -- you have to deeply grok counterpoint and tonal harmony first, and then you can start to hear and perceive different aspects of tonal gravity. For plagality, it's the "dark side" of the tritone, specifically with iiø or iv6. Start putting together that tritone with the major standards of vii° or V7, and you're really rolling with the joy of traditional harmony.
adamnemecek 4y ago
jrajav 4y ago
I strongly agree with the article's premise! I also agree with this guidepost for how we should be moving music theory past its highly entrenched and institutional attitudes: > We should be asking: what is it that musicians are doing that sounds good? What patterns can we detect in the broad mass of music being made and enjoyed out there in the world? I would personally add one more leading question: Can we explain music in other ways than by its harmony and chords? A harmonic approach to analysis works fantastic for old European music, and pretty damn well for jazz too. For rock, it starts to oddly leave out important aspects of the music like rhythm, timbre, the way effects like distortion inform the harmony, vocal delivery, etc. And in the modern era, with all the advances and innovations made in the last 30 years in the now dominant genres of hip hop, pop, and electronic music, harmonic analysis is very poorly equipped to make sense of things in any meaningful way. One music theorist who is attempting more competent analysis of contemporary music is https://www.youtube.com/c/12tonevideos https://www.youtube.com/c/12tonevideos. I'd love to see more of this.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  - jrajav 4y ago
    Those genres are far and away the most popular forms of music for an entire generation now, and exhibit a high degree of craftsmanship with techniques never used before them. Whether you personally enjoy the music or not, an honest academic exploration of music would seek to understand and explain what makes those styles of music tick.
    - AlbertCory 4y ago
      If you stick to "popular" I'm fine with it. Tastes change. It's the word "advances" which I object to. There's a value judgment attached to that.
      - pvg 4y ago
xor99 4y ago
I think these basic arguments are valuable and musicians should be focussed on whether a better understanding of music theory actually produces music with desirable qualities such as surprisal (e.g. that moment when Dj Screw slowed the record or groups of monks decided to chant together etc). IMO the answer is a big nope. One reason is that music theory is always explicated in retrospect and contributes little to the invention of new music or enjoyment. It's useful (not devaluing it wholesale) if you want to do x in the style of y (e.g. I want this to sound like Miles Davis!). H/w an accurate picture of musical performance and general cultural activity surrounding would never reduce it all to just that.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  I find it best to think of music theory as a language musicians can use to describe what they just did, not what they are about to do. That's likely to be true even if/when we improve "music theory" to cover much more than 18th century European harmonic forms.
  - xor99 4y ago
    That makes a lot of sense!
  - sseagull 4y ago
    Pretty much. It helps with giving language and notation to particular sounds. It condenses sounds to something you can write down and communicate, without having to think of each note individually. It’s like design patterns for music. Not necessarily prescriptive (it’s your music, do whatever you want), but helpful for reducing music into something more concrete. It has helped me a lot in learning (classical) music. It’s also kind of like watching a sport where you understand the rules vs. one you don’t - knowing the “rules” helps you engage more, and peek into the composer’s mind, or give you ideas for your own compositions.
- klik99 4y ago
  For me theory is most important as a debugging tool - I write without considering it and if something sounds “off” in a bad way theory will often help me pinpoint why. It’s also useful for analysis when I’m trying to capture a certain sound. Either way it is not a composition tool and shouldn’t taught that way except for exercises to understand theory.
superb-owl 4y ago
The author mentions the data is available, but the link appears to be dead. Anyone know where it might live?
- ksherlock 4y ago
  wayback machine to the rescue: https://web.archive.org/web/20150513214912/http://theory.esm.rochester.edu/rock_corpus/2011_paper/declercq_temperley_2011.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20150513214912/http://theory.esm... https://web.archive.org/web/20120218081940/http://theory.esm.rochester.edu/rock_corpus/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120218081940/http://theory.esm...
khitchdee 4y ago
Based on the standard tuning of a guitar E, A, D, G, B, E and assuming you use E as your tonic, the scale I, 2, 3-flat, 4, 5, 6, 7-flat which translates to E, F#, G, A, B, C#, D should be a base scale. If you strum a guitar open, all the strings fall within this scale. It does have a flat seventh and a corresponding flat third. If you take out the 2 and the 6, this becomes the Minor Pentatonic Scale.
someweirdperson 4y ago
> It would be better to have some hard data on what we all collectively think makes for valid music. "Valid"? As opposed to "invalid music"? > As you’d expect, the tonic I is the most commonly-used chord in the Rolling Stone corpus. If it wouldn't be the most used, would it be used as point of reference and called the tonic? > Rock uses plenty of V-I, but it uses even more IV-I. And the third most common pre-tonic chord in rock is not ii, like you’d expect if you went to music school; it’s bVII, reflecting rock musicians’ love of Mixolydian mode. I-V and IV-V seems to be the same with the point of reference moved to IV. And IV-bVII-V is I-IV-V. Is a fixed point of reference really needed? Doesn't it just add unnecessary complexity?
- spekcular 4y ago
  > If it wouldn't be the most used, would it be used as point of reference and called the tonic? Yes. The tonic is determined by what the key is, not what chord is most used. (It's hard to establish the key without slipping the tonic in somewhere, but that doesn't mean it needs to appear frequently.) > I-V and IV-V seems to be the same with the point of reference moved to IV. And IV-bVII-V is I-IV-V. I don't think this is right. V-I has the root moving by a 5th, while IV-V moves by a second. And the second example can't be right because the relative distances of the roots of the first and last chords are different (again, a second versus a fifth). > Is a fixed point of reference really needed? Doesn't it just add unnecessary complexity? Yes, it's a useful analytical tool.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  > "Valid"? As opposed to "invalid music"? Yes, I think it's clear the author means things we collectively agree fall under the category of music. And the question of what is or is not music is surprisingly complex and disputed, analagous to the question of what is or is not art. E.g. is John Cage's 4'33" [1] music? What about a Spotify track of silence for meditation? Is a purely percussive piece music, or merely rhythm? Is atonal music, well, even music at all? Classical musicians would pretty much all say yes, but a lot of non-musicians might disagree. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3
- elihu 4y ago
nateburke 4y ago
Do not forget that Bach's music needed to feed 20 of his children over the course of his life. (10 survived) I have a hard time believing that he was intentionally carving out the rules of eg _Gradus ad Parnassum_ rather than consistently trying to make music that sounded good with good timbre given the constraints of his living situation and employer. What seems prescriptive to the children is often originally descriptive to the elders.
- spekcular 4y ago
  He was definitely aiming for a certain style, which involved following certain rules. There are surviving draft manuscripts where he makes edits to follow voice-writing rules like avoiding parallel fifths, etc. It seems pretty clear based on this (and his training, and even a cursory study of what he wrote) that his compositional practice was intensely theoretical. The dude was not out there freestyling. In fact, the places where he broke certain fundamental rules are so rare that they form a rather short list, despite his voluminous output: https://www.bach-chorales.com/ConsecutivesInChorales.htm https://www.bach-chorales.com/ConsecutivesInChorales.htm.
rybosome 4y ago
It’s interesting that the article refers to “classical music’s obsession with the major scale”. I was raised on rock guitar, where the minor pentatonic scale was king. For that reason I often thought of keys in terms of their relative minor. Whole heartedly agreed that our current model of theory is excessively academic relative to the music most people are making and consuming (at least in America). All that said, a grounding in theory is still a wonderful thing to have as a musician. Even if you choose to ignore what you’ve learned (and you should sometimes!), it allows you to understand a lot of music more deeply, allowing you to learn it more quickly.
- jrajav 4y ago
  I don't think current music theory is excessively academic, I think it's not academic or rigorous enough. Many institutions languish in studying harmonic theory to the exclusion of many other modes of musical analysis. This leaves them equipped only to study archaic styles of European music and jazz where harmony was one of the defining factors. The expressive power and applicability of music theory would be served best by focusing study on areas that have been underexplored. Those areas are too numerous to even list, but standouts that apply to music more recent than mid-century are rhythm, timbre, movement (as driven by elements other than harmony), instrumentation, electronic techniques, and cultural aspects of music like references and interpolation.
zokier 4y ago
My music theory is very weak, but I have some difficulty understanding the point of supermode; if it includes 10 out of the 12 notes, then does it really function as a scale anymore or would it be just simpler to think in terms of the chromatic scale and abandon modes altogether?
- pschuegr 4y ago
  Not to mention that it excludes the b5, and saying that's not a substantial part of the RS top 500 is laughable. So really what they're saying is b2 can go to hell.
pjbk 4y ago
The main problem I see with (occidental) "music theory" is its historical baggage. Most of it is useful, beautiful by its own merits but, specially if you have a scientific/logic way of looking things, much of its structure and nomenclature really gets in the way. After many years of doing false starts I sat one day, started from scratch, looked at just the facts (= math), and then everything fell together: - The Pythagoreans dealt for centuries with the known conundrum of figuring out irrational numbers. I had a computer so I just run a script for measuring the total error with different bisecting rational quantizations (up to 256 IIRC) of note frequencies in the equal-tempered scale within one octave (2^(1/N) splits). Oh, peaks at 12, 19 at 24 on the low side of the counter. That is why they settled on 12 notes, middle eastern has 24 (just double the resolution) and why 19 also sounds good [1]. 12 seems like the minimum acceptable then. Ok, 10 minutes, move on. - Since we know we can only approximate to irrationals and our brain tries to makes things even, moving through scales with increasing intervals (2^(n/12)) will normally accumulate "tension". Half notes sound spooky. Whole notes are a bit better. Too bad sound perception is logarithmic (= tempered scale) and has non-linear compression on both amplitude and frequency (Fletcher-Munson, etc). Double the frequency is an octave. Perfect fit, brain happy (2^(12/12)). Try to split an octave in half? Again, fitting a peg in the only wrong hole available when using half-note resolution. Welcome to accidentals and the Circle of Fifths. "Try", because of course you can't: 2^(7/12) = 1.498307.... Close to 150%, but no cigar. Close enough for a crippled monkey brain that can only hear up to 20kHz or so. They even named it "Perfect". Moving up: F to C, G to D, A to E... - Music would be very dull and inadequate if we cannot shift notes up or down. However our brain still recognizes the patterns. We can even play those patterns at the same time, even on different instruments. So that pattern with the same scale on a G sounds good with the other guy playing C (harmonies). What if the guy playing the C wants to play like the guy on the G? Enter modes... Oh yeah, cool Myxolydian tunes. And minor scale too - don't forget that looks THE SAME as an Aeolian. - Your new singer cannot hit that low notes. What about now moving everything up then? Transpose. We have "physical instruments" like a guitar. Easy, just play the same pattern some frets up. Done. Poor piano player who has a "logical instrument" with notes separated nicely in two different kinds based on half notes and that ugly 1.498307 fraction. Good that he is also good at math. So that C scale becomes a D. He just replaces on the fly some white keys with black keys... F# and C#. But wait a sec. Didn't the Circle of Fifths also moved F to C too? Does it continue like that for all notes? Yes it does! Transposing has the same structure as modes the other way around! So what if instead of moving up we move down, or play the same pattern in the original C scale? For every raised (sharp) accidental we get it's complement lowered (flat) one. Of course, since 7 + 5 = 12! The Circle of Fifth is complete. B to E, A to D, G to C... That G pattern moved down to C? G major scale (aka Ionian) has one accidental: F#. The first flat is Bb. C scale with B lowered to Bb... Yep, Myxolydian indeed! - We can also use those interval numbers to name chords when we play notes together. We can also name the scales when adding and removing notes, maybe borrowing from other scales. Sounds pentatonic or exotic. The sky is the limit. - Piano player now teases the guitar player. Now it's her turn to do the math. Looks like "physical" and "logical" instruments are also complementary. What is easy on one needs thinking on the other, and vice-versa. Win-win. Honestly, that covers like 95% of practical music note theory. Of course there is much more to it (note, rhythm, history, etc). If they have just started explaining it like that without all the mumbo-jumbo it would have made sense since day #1 and I would have saved many years of my life hitting my head in the wall and trying to learn things I forgot within a week. Perhaps the main issue is that not many music teachers are good at math or they would think their students would get scared if they told them it's all math underneath? [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_equal_temperament https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_equal_temperament
ybroze 4y ago
Coming from this field personally, this feels like typical Temperley and de Clerq sorts of things. Davie Temperley was in David Huron's lab once upon a time, I believe. The systematic musicology world, especially the portion doing corpus studies, often is just doing descriptive research. The article linked is a bit more prescriptive. The best book on music theory ever written, IMO, is David Huron's "Voice Leading -- The Science Behind a Musical Art." Definitely recommend. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08BT17M4S/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08BT17M4S/ref=dbs_a_def_r...
- ybroze 4y ago
  This article is about "we should change things because we know more!" Huron has always been more about "we should know more!" For me, I'm with the latter.
- ybroze 4y ago
  This is my corpus study. https://online.ucpress.edu/mp/article-abstract/31/1/32/62590/Diachronic-Changes-in-Jazz-HarmonyA-Cognitive?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://online.ucpress.edu/mp/article-abstract/31/1/32/62590...
spekcular 4y ago
I have a more conservative critique of traditional music theory, along the same lines. Forget pop, jazz, and rock - standard music theory courses don't even equip students to properly analyze Western art from music the late romantic period, including things like impressionism. Most voice leading textbooks have very little material on post 1850-ish classical music, and some have essentially nothing. They seem to focus on Mozart, Beehoven, Haydn, etc., or aspects of later music amendable to the analytical tools they develop for those classical period composers. Here's an exercise you can try. Choose a more harmonically adventurous French or Russian composer from around the turn of the 20th century (perhaps Debussy, Ravel, Scriabian, maybe even Shostakovitch), and get some sheet music for a solo piano piece off the internet. Grab any of the standard college harmony textbooks and attempt to write down a harmonic analysis of that piece. You're going to have trouble.
- ybroze 4y ago
  Maybe -- but the context to understand what Debussy and Ravel were doing (maybe not Scriabin) is to get the Bach / Haydn / Mozart / Beethoven / Schubert under your belt. Source: I've taught this at university.
  - spekcular 4y ago
    I agree! But it seems that the books all stop at 1850. Or they toss in a few cursory chapters at the end. (If there's some text that doesn't do this, I'd love to read it.)
    - ybroze 4y ago
      I'm going to keep plugging https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08BT17M4S/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08BT17M4S/ Answers all the questions, TBH.
      - xhevahir 4y ago
        I've looked at that book before, and while I agree that it's probably worth reading it sure doesn't answer all the questions. It just talks about voice leading and gives scientific explanations for why the 18th century rules of part writing reliably turn out pleasing music. It doesn't account for all the music that satisfies listeners somehow even while violating some of those conventions. Nor does it cover anything aside from tonality, from what I remember.
waffletower 4y ago
This article reveals conflicting goals: "...we should take an ethnomusicological approach" vs. "It would be better to have some hard data on what we all collectively think makes for valid music" Embracing musical balkanization akin to Los Angeles in contrast to distilling musical practice akin to the melting pot of New York City. I am much more supportive of the former approach yet it is impractical when representing musical form in a rightly finite curriculum. It requires a more decentralized effort, and students receive a scatterplot of perspectives. Perhaps sharing the extraordinary depth of theory and musicology focussed on canonical artists such as Beethoven isn't so bad after all. Though I have personally challenged professors who dished it to me repeatedly. I think there are serious feasibility issues with effectively addressing timbre as a musical dimension; this is problematic for adequate theories of music given the centrality of timbre in many forms of modern music. However, it remains embarrassing for the academy not to be able to coherently address what is so obviously saturating their students ears.

110 points by brudgers 4y ago

Totally agreeing with the article, this "supermode" ie in C: all white keys plus Eb, Ab, Bb, is exactly what my rock band's noodles have intuitively followed.

eunoia 4y ago
In the context of existing music theory that supermode could be considered Eb/Cm. I’ve been learning a couple pop songs lately that essentially seem to use this supermode by switching between the major and minor on verse/chorus. Seems pretty versatile.

sh4rks 4y ago

I don't see how the supermode can be useful to anyone starting to learn music theory. The hard part is figuring out the rhythm, vocabulary, and phrasing that make those notes sound "good". I still think one of the best ways of learning theory (for guitar at least) is to start with the pentatonic and diatonic scales, then add triads and "colour" notes. I'm curious to know other people's opinions though.

AlbertCory 4y ago
Yeah, I don't quite see what the notion of the "supermode" does for anyone, either. Maybe he's going to elaborate it somewhere else? Or just hoping that someone else does.
- diydsp 4y ago
  it's a useful device like the circle of fifths but i don't see it displacing existing models.

AlbertCory 4y ago

The title is a bit misleading. I was expecting some polemic about Western music ignoring indigenous peoples, etc. etc. Instead, I kinda liked it. I took some classical piano and my teacher got very impatient with me approaching some pieces like a jazz musician would: assigning chords to measures that were quite obviously melodies over those chords. She was all about plagal cadences and all that stuff she learned at Oberlin. The Bach Prelude in C is especially entertaining to treat that way. There's one bar near the end that it's almost impossible to give a chord symbol to.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ybroze 4y ago
Yeah, Rameau is the "Louie, Louie" French fellow who was the "Newton of Music" who gave us the Roman numeral notation, while the Germans were still doing counterpoint and harmonics. I very seriously believe there's a link between that, the revolutionary attitudes and kinship of the French and Americans, with the Rock and Roll movement of the 1950s / 1960s.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  > Rameau is the "Louie, Louie" French fellow Another win. I know Rameau and of course I know Louie, Louie, but the connection eludes me. I'm sure you'll tell us.
ybroze 4y ago
Plagality is a pretty deep musical concept within tonality, though -- you have to deeply grok counterpoint and tonal harmony first, and then you can start to hear and perceive different aspects of tonal gravity. For plagality, it's the "dark side" of the tritone, specifically with iiø or iv6. Start putting together that tritone with the major standards of vii° or V7, and you're really rolling with the joy of traditional harmony.

adamnemecek 4y ago

jrajav 4y ago

I strongly agree with the article's premise! I also agree with this guidepost for how we should be moving music theory past its highly entrenched and institutional attitudes: > We should be asking: what is it that musicians are doing that sounds good? What patterns can we detect in the broad mass of music being made and enjoyed out there in the world? I would personally add one more leading question: Can we explain music in other ways than by its harmony and chords? A harmonic approach to analysis works fantastic for old European music, and pretty damn well for jazz too. For rock, it starts to oddly leave out important aspects of the music like rhythm, timbre, the way effects like distortion inform the harmony, vocal delivery, etc. And in the modern era, with all the advances and innovations made in the last 30 years in the now dominant genres of hip hop, pop, and electronic music, harmonic analysis is very poorly equipped to make sense of things in any meaningful way. One music theorist who is attempting more competent analysis of contemporary music is https://www.youtube.com/c/12tonevideos https://www.youtube.com/c/12tonevideos. I'd love to see more of this.

AlbertCory 4y ago
- jrajav 4y ago
  Those genres are far and away the most popular forms of music for an entire generation now, and exhibit a high degree of craftsmanship with techniques never used before them. Whether you personally enjoy the music or not, an honest academic exploration of music would seek to understand and explain what makes those styles of music tick.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    If you stick to "popular" I'm fine with it. Tastes change. It's the word "advances" which I object to. There's a value judgment attached to that.
    - pvg 4y ago

xor99 4y ago

I think these basic arguments are valuable and musicians should be focussed on whether a better understanding of music theory actually produces music with desirable qualities such as surprisal (e.g. that moment when Dj Screw slowed the record or groups of monks decided to chant together etc). IMO the answer is a big nope. One reason is that music theory is always explicated in retrospect and contributes little to the invention of new music or enjoyment. It's useful (not devaluing it wholesale) if you want to do x in the style of y (e.g. I want this to sound like Miles Davis!). H/w an accurate picture of musical performance and general cultural activity surrounding would never reduce it all to just that.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
I find it best to think of music theory as a language musicians can use to describe what they just did, not what they are about to do. That's likely to be true even if/when we improve "music theory" to cover much more than 18th century European harmonic forms.
- xor99 4y ago
  That makes a lot of sense!
- sseagull 4y ago
  Pretty much. It helps with giving language and notation to particular sounds. It condenses sounds to something you can write down and communicate, without having to think of each note individually. It’s like design patterns for music. Not necessarily prescriptive (it’s your music, do whatever you want), but helpful for reducing music into something more concrete. It has helped me a lot in learning (classical) music. It’s also kind of like watching a sport where you understand the rules vs. one you don’t - knowing the “rules” helps you engage more, and peek into the composer’s mind, or give you ideas for your own compositions.
klik99 4y ago
For me theory is most important as a debugging tool - I write without considering it and if something sounds “off” in a bad way theory will often help me pinpoint why. It’s also useful for analysis when I’m trying to capture a certain sound. Either way it is not a composition tool and shouldn’t taught that way except for exercises to understand theory.

superb-owl 4y ago

The author mentions the data is available, but the link appears to be dead. Anyone know where it might live?

ksherlock 4y ago
wayback machine to the rescue: https://web.archive.org/web/20150513214912/http://theory.esm.rochester.edu/rock_corpus/2011_paper/declercq_temperley_2011.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20150513214912/http://theory.esm... https://web.archive.org/web/20120218081940/http://theory.esm.rochester.edu/rock_corpus/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120218081940/http://theory.esm...

khitchdee 4y ago

Based on the standard tuning of a guitar E, A, D, G, B, E and assuming you use E as your tonic, the scale I, 2, 3-flat, 4, 5, 6, 7-flat which translates to E, F#, G, A, B, C#, D should be a base scale. If you strum a guitar open, all the strings fall within this scale. It does have a flat seventh and a corresponding flat third. If you take out the 2 and the 6, this becomes the Minor Pentatonic Scale.

someweirdperson 4y ago

> It would be better to have some hard data on what we all collectively think makes for valid music. "Valid"? As opposed to "invalid music"? > As you’d expect, the tonic I is the most commonly-used chord in the Rolling Stone corpus. If it wouldn't be the most used, would it be used as point of reference and called the tonic? > Rock uses plenty of V-I, but it uses even more IV-I. And the third most common pre-tonic chord in rock is not ii, like you’d expect if you went to music school; it’s bVII, reflecting rock musicians’ love of Mixolydian mode. I-V and IV-V seems to be the same with the point of reference moved to IV. And IV-bVII-V is I-IV-V. Is a fixed point of reference really needed? Doesn't it just add unnecessary complexity?

spekcular 4y ago
> If it wouldn't be the most used, would it be used as point of reference and called the tonic? Yes. The tonic is determined by what the key is, not what chord is most used. (It's hard to establish the key without slipping the tonic in somewhere, but that doesn't mean it needs to appear frequently.) > I-V and IV-V seems to be the same with the point of reference moved to IV. And IV-bVII-V is I-IV-V. I don't think this is right. V-I has the root moving by a 5th, while IV-V moves by a second. And the second example can't be right because the relative distances of the roots of the first and last chords are different (again, a second versus a fifth). > Is a fixed point of reference really needed? Doesn't it just add unnecessary complexity? Yes, it's a useful analytical tool.
crazygringo 4y ago
> "Valid"? As opposed to "invalid music"? Yes, I think it's clear the author means things we collectively agree fall under the category of music. And the question of what is or is not music is surprisingly complex and disputed, analagous to the question of what is or is not art. E.g. is John Cage's 4'33" [1] music? What about a Spotify track of silence for meditation? Is a purely percussive piece music, or merely rhythm? Is atonal music, well, even music at all? Classical musicians would pretty much all say yes, but a lot of non-musicians might disagree. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3
elihu 4y ago

nateburke 4y ago

Do not forget that Bach's music needed to feed 20 of his children over the course of his life. (10 survived) I have a hard time believing that he was intentionally carving out the rules of eg _Gradus ad Parnassum_ rather than consistently trying to make music that sounded good with good timbre given the constraints of his living situation and employer. What seems prescriptive to the children is often originally descriptive to the elders.

spekcular 4y ago
He was definitely aiming for a certain style, which involved following certain rules. There are surviving draft manuscripts where he makes edits to follow voice-writing rules like avoiding parallel fifths, etc. It seems pretty clear based on this (and his training, and even a cursory study of what he wrote) that his compositional practice was intensely theoretical. The dude was not out there freestyling. In fact, the places where he broke certain fundamental rules are so rare that they form a rather short list, despite his voluminous output: https://www.bach-chorales.com/ConsecutivesInChorales.htm https://www.bach-chorales.com/ConsecutivesInChorales.htm.

rybosome 4y ago

It’s interesting that the article refers to “classical music’s obsession with the major scale”. I was raised on rock guitar, where the minor pentatonic scale was king. For that reason I often thought of keys in terms of their relative minor. Whole heartedly agreed that our current model of theory is excessively academic relative to the music most people are making and consuming (at least in America). All that said, a grounding in theory is still a wonderful thing to have as a musician. Even if you choose to ignore what you’ve learned (and you should sometimes!), it allows you to understand a lot of music more deeply, allowing you to learn it more quickly.

jrajav 4y ago
I don't think current music theory is excessively academic, I think it's not academic or rigorous enough. Many institutions languish in studying harmonic theory to the exclusion of many other modes of musical analysis. This leaves them equipped only to study archaic styles of European music and jazz where harmony was one of the defining factors. The expressive power and applicability of music theory would be served best by focusing study on areas that have been underexplored. Those areas are too numerous to even list, but standouts that apply to music more recent than mid-century are rhythm, timbre, movement (as driven by elements other than harmony), instrumentation, electronic techniques, and cultural aspects of music like references and interpolation.

zokier 4y ago

My music theory is very weak, but I have some difficulty understanding the point of supermode; if it includes 10 out of the 12 notes, then does it really function as a scale anymore or would it be just simpler to think in terms of the chromatic scale and abandon modes altogether?

pschuegr 4y ago
Not to mention that it excludes the b5, and saying that's not a substantial part of the RS top 500 is laughable. So really what they're saying is b2 can go to hell.

pjbk 4y ago

The main problem I see with (occidental) "music theory" is its historical baggage. Most of it is useful, beautiful by its own merits but, specially if you have a scientific/logic way of looking things, much of its structure and nomenclature really gets in the way. After many years of doing false starts I sat one day, started from scratch, looked at just the facts (= math), and then everything fell together: - The Pythagoreans dealt for centuries with the known conundrum of figuring out irrational numbers. I had a computer so I just run a script for measuring the total error with different bisecting rational quantizations (up to 256 IIRC) of note frequencies in the equal-tempered scale within one octave (2^(1/N) splits). Oh, peaks at 12, 19 at 24 on the low side of the counter. That is why they settled on 12 notes, middle eastern has 24 (just double the resolution) and why 19 also sounds good [1]. 12 seems like the minimum acceptable then. Ok, 10 minutes, move on. - Since we know we can only approximate to irrationals and our brain tries to makes things even, moving through scales with increasing intervals (2^(n/12)) will normally accumulate "tension". Half notes sound spooky. Whole notes are a bit better. Too bad sound perception is logarithmic (= tempered scale) and has non-linear compression on both amplitude and frequency (Fletcher-Munson, etc). Double the frequency is an octave. Perfect fit, brain happy (2^(12/12)). Try to split an octave in half? Again, fitting a peg in the only wrong hole available when using half-note resolution. Welcome to accidentals and the Circle of Fifths. "Try", because of course you can't: 2^(7/12) = 1.498307.... Close to 150%, but no cigar. Close enough for a crippled monkey brain that can only hear up to 20kHz or so. They even named it "Perfect". Moving up: F to C, G to D, A to E... - Music would be very dull and inadequate if we cannot shift notes up or down. However our brain still recognizes the patterns. We can even play those patterns at the same time, even on different instruments. So that pattern with the same scale on a G sounds good with the other guy playing C (harmonies). What if the guy playing the C wants to play like the guy on the G? Enter modes... Oh yeah, cool Myxolydian tunes. And minor scale too - don't forget that looks THE SAME as an Aeolian. - Your new singer cannot hit that low notes. What about now moving everything up then? Transpose. We have "physical instruments" like a guitar. Easy, just play the same pattern some frets up. Done. Poor piano player who has a "logical instrument" with notes separated nicely in two different kinds based on half notes and that ugly 1.498307 fraction. Good that he is also good at math. So that C scale becomes a D. He just replaces on the fly some white keys with black keys... F# and C#. But wait a sec. Didn't the Circle of Fifths also moved F to C too? Does it continue like that for all notes? Yes it does! Transposing has the same structure as modes the other way around! So what if instead of moving up we move down, or play the same pattern in the original C scale? For every raised (sharp) accidental we get it's complement lowered (flat) one. Of course, since 7 + 5 = 12! The Circle of Fifth is complete. B to E, A to D, G to C... That G pattern moved down to C? G major scale (aka Ionian) has one accidental: F#. The first flat is Bb. C scale with B lowered to Bb... Yep, Myxolydian indeed! - We can also use those interval numbers to name chords when we play notes together. We can also name the scales when adding and removing notes, maybe borrowing from other scales. Sounds pentatonic or exotic. The sky is the limit. - Piano player now teases the guitar player. Now it's her turn to do the math. Looks like "physical" and "logical" instruments are also complementary. What is easy on one needs thinking on the other, and vice-versa. Win-win. Honestly, that covers like 95% of practical music note theory. Of course there is much more to it (note, rhythm, history, etc). If they have just started explaining it like that without all the mumbo-jumbo it would have made sense since day #1 and I would have saved many years of my life hitting my head in the wall and trying to learn things I forgot within a week. Perhaps the main issue is that not many music teachers are good at math or they would think their students would get scared if they told them it's all math underneath? [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_equal_temperament https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_equal_temperament

ybroze 4y ago

Coming from this field personally, this feels like typical Temperley and de Clerq sorts of things. Davie Temperley was in David Huron's lab once upon a time, I believe. The systematic musicology world, especially the portion doing corpus studies, often is just doing descriptive research. The article linked is a bit more prescriptive. The best book on music theory ever written, IMO, is David Huron's "Voice Leading -- The Science Behind a Musical Art." Definitely recommend. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08BT17M4S/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08BT17M4S/ref=dbs_a_def_r...

ybroze 4y ago
This article is about "we should change things because we know more!" Huron has always been more about "we should know more!" For me, I'm with the latter.
ybroze 4y ago
This is my corpus study. https://online.ucpress.edu/mp/article-abstract/31/1/32/62590/Diachronic-Changes-in-Jazz-HarmonyA-Cognitive?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://online.ucpress.edu/mp/article-abstract/31/1/32/62590...

spekcular 4y ago

I have a more conservative critique of traditional music theory, along the same lines. Forget pop, jazz, and rock - standard music theory courses don't even equip students to properly analyze Western art from music the late romantic period, including things like impressionism. Most voice leading textbooks have very little material on post 1850-ish classical music, and some have essentially nothing. They seem to focus on Mozart, Beehoven, Haydn, etc., or aspects of later music amendable to the analytical tools they develop for those classical period composers. Here's an exercise you can try. Choose a more harmonically adventurous French or Russian composer from around the turn of the 20th century (perhaps Debussy, Ravel, Scriabian, maybe even Shostakovitch), and get some sheet music for a solo piano piece off the internet. Grab any of the standard college harmony textbooks and attempt to write down a harmonic analysis of that piece. You're going to have trouble.

ybroze 4y ago
Maybe -- but the context to understand what Debussy and Ravel were doing (maybe not Scriabin) is to get the Bach / Haydn / Mozart / Beethoven / Schubert under your belt. Source: I've taught this at university.
- spekcular 4y ago
  I agree! But it seems that the books all stop at 1850. Or they toss in a few cursory chapters at the end. (If there's some text that doesn't do this, I'd love to read it.)
  - ybroze 4y ago
    I'm going to keep plugging https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08BT17M4S/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08BT17M4S/ Answers all the questions, TBH.
    - xhevahir 4y ago
      I've looked at that book before, and while I agree that it's probably worth reading it sure doesn't answer all the questions. It just talks about voice leading and gives scientific explanations for why the 18th century rules of part writing reliably turn out pleasing music. It doesn't account for all the music that satisfies listeners somehow even while violating some of those conventions. Nor does it cover anything aside from tonality, from what I remember.

waffletower 4y ago

This article reveals conflicting goals: "...we should take an ethnomusicological approach" vs. "It would be better to have some hard data on what we all collectively think makes for valid music" Embracing musical balkanization akin to Los Angeles in contrast to distilling musical practice akin to the melting pot of New York City. I am much more supportive of the former approach yet it is impractical when representing musical form in a rightly finite curriculum. It requires a more decentralized effort, and students receive a scatterplot of perspectives. Perhaps sharing the extraordinary depth of theory and musicology focussed on canonical artists such as Beethoven isn't so bad after all. Though I have personally challenged professors who dished it to me repeatedly. I think there are serious feasibility issues with effectively addressing timbre as a musical dimension; this is problematic for adequate theories of music given the centrality of timbre in many forms of modern music. However, it remains embarrassing for the academy not to be able to coherently address what is so obviously saturating their students ears.