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I wonder if he's ever had an audience that hit the chord properly when he spread his legs out on 1-3, and then what he would have done with that!
by WilliamLP 17y ago
I wonder if he's ever had an audience that hit the chord properly when he spread his legs out on 1-3, and then what he would have done with that!
- jerf 17y agoIf someone was really interested in turning this into performance art, I strongly suspect that it wouldn't have taken more than another 10 seconds to tell half the audience to follow one leg and half the other.
- Aron 17y agoI think even more interestingly, if he had simply repeated the attempt a few times I think the audience would have self-corrected.
- tumult 17y agothat's not a full chord, it's a major 3rd interval.
- WilliamLP 17y agoThat's a battle of pedantry that you lost a long time ago, and you will win it sometime after "begging the question" gets used correctly most of the time. It's a good example of a picky use of language that adds nothing whatsoever to the understanding of the subject. "Interval" has connotations I didn't want, namely that it's the same no matter what degree of the scale you start on. I really did mean "I, III" specifically. As far as I know, there's no term in music for that, but "chord", namely a major I chord (only without the fifth) seems to fit what I wanted to say better than "interval" to me.
- tumult 17y agowhy? that's the right term for it. it's not anywhere close to a major I chord without the fifth! never underestimate what other kinds of nerds you may encounter in the wild :]
- alextp 17y agoTechnically it can be a major I chord even without the tonic (listen to some schoenberg, he likes to do this), it is just difficult to get right.
- WilliamLP 17y agoA major I chord without the fifth is two pitches, the first and third degrees of the major scale. That's what I meant. Why is that not anywhere close, or even not precisely the same? I did not mean a major third interval. They could have sung the correct interval, but the wrong pitches. For what I did mean, I do insist that in the limited terminology of music, chord is a better fit because it implies the pitch where interval doesn't. This necessitates terms like "Power Chord". Pedants are going to say this is wrong. (And oh yeah a Koala Bear isn't really a Bear either.) But it does get around a limitation of the language.
- Goladus 17y agoThe fifth is hardly essential to achieve the sound of a major I chord. Fifths are omitted all the time in classical music to avoid parallel voice-leading.
- Goladus 17y agoWithout more context it's really impossible to say whether that was a major I or not. It would be the only functional harmony in the entire pattern, so it seems unlikely it was a I. A pentatonic melody by itself doesn't infer much in the way of harmonic progression. The only reason we hear C# as tonic is because he starts there and emphasizes it with repetition and mini-cadences that are primarily rhythmic in nature. There aren't any IV or V chords available with those pitches (or iii or vii for that matter, you can imply a ii but not very well). I would actually argue that interval actually is the most accurate term in this case. (Not that I didn't understand what was meant by the term "chord" though, and certainly wouldn't have been bothered by it)
- SwellJoe 17y agoCalm down, folks. Just words, and I think we all understood what he meant by "chord". There is a technically correct term for two notes played simultaneously (double stop also works for stringed instruments): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyad_(music) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyad_(music) Of course, his instrument included a hundred or more voices, and several of them were on different octaves. So, I think one can say this was a "chord" by the general definition of "three or more notes from a key played simultaneously". And, musicians do frequently refer to dyads as chords, as long as the third is there. The fifth has less harmonic weight (and never changes from major to minor) and the whole chord can be implied with just the first and the third. While pianists may mostly always have easy access to the fifth, stringed instrument players generally think of the fifth as the note you drop when you can't pick them all up.
- Flankk 17y agoYes, and a power chord is the root note and the fifth. Calling an interval a chord is nothing more than semantics.
- Goladus 17y agoSemantics are important. What's not important is correcting a term that was good enough for its intended purpose and derails an otherwise fruitful discussion into nitpicking about the meaning of words being used. In this case I don't think it was really a big deal either way. Discussion about the major 3rd in the video wasn't really harmed much, and a few mildly interesting posts about semantics resulted.