Rolling Music Theory Thread

I thought what the Pitchfork writer meant was that the Bb minor chord comes out of nowhere. That's the pivot chord (a borrowed iv in the home key). That's, of course, where that minor ninth occurs.

xp So much of music learning both performance and composition is rooted in listening though, I can't really imagine what music school must be like now that Youtube exists and you can instantly call up a dozen performances of a Webern violin piece. I'd imagine music school has been improved dramatically just by being able to access this shit instead of having to sift through CDs in the library.

@ Tim oh is it a bb-minor? I thought it was a Db-major but I was "on recall" I don't have access to the track

Db in the bass, but I think it's a Bb minor chord. It creates that great parallel with the ii-V-I, which you also already had in the home key.

Ha, you got CDs? Our library still used cassettes where I did undergrad. But yeah, Naxos Music Library does make a big difference, although I don't know that I'd say it's the main reason why music school has been improved dramatically.

Scores were all filed by card :) what a pain. Generally I'd just grab things at random and study them because actually finding anything was so difficult. It's impossible for me to gauge the comparative worth of "education" vs. "post-education" because everything got so great about six years ago.

i'd love to hear a composition by a person who has never heard a note of music but knows everything about the rules of composition via notation. i'm guessing this has already been done with computers though

Aeolian Cadence blog has "Louie Louie" mentioned in its first section about the three chord trick but doesn't seem to point out that the chord is not V but a v with a minor third.

I've been thinking about this paragraph about Trout Mask Replica's wiki a lot the past couple days, with regards to what is imo the best-ever intersection of untrained compositional intuition + training in dictation:

Van Vliet used a piano—an instrument he had never played before—as his main compositional tool. Since he had no experience with the piano and no conventional musical knowledge at all, he was able to experiment with no preconceived ideas of musical form or structure. Beefheart sat at the piano until he found a rhythmic or melodic pattern that he liked. Mike Barnes compared this approach to John Cage's "maverick irreverence toward classical tradition".[11] John French then transcribed this pattern, typically only a measure or two long, into musical notation. After Beefheart was finished French would then piece these fragments together into compositions, reminiscent of the splicing together of disparate source material on Marker's tape. French decided which part would be played on which instrument and taught each player their part, although Van Vliet had final say over the ultimate shape of the product. Band member Bill Harkleroad has remarked on "how haphazardly the individual parts were done, worked on very surgically, stuck together, and then sculpted afterwards." Once completed each song was played in exactly the same way every time, eschewing the improvisation that typifies most popular music in favor of an approach more like a formal, classical composition. Guitarist Fred Frith noted that during this process "forces that usually emerge in improvisation are harnessed and made constant, repeatable."

I'd shrug at Frith and say that all composition is improvisation at the moment of conception, but otherwise.

"Van Vliet used a piano—an instrument he had never played before—as his main compositional tool. Since he had no experience with the piano and no conventional musical knowledge at all, he was able to experiment with no preconceived ideas of musical form or structure."

IMO this is complete bullshit, it's the expressive fallacy.

Complete bullshit? As in the opposite is true?

There's no such thing as a grown man with "no preconceived ideas of musical form or structure"

I agree with that, but I don't see how it makes the entire two sentences you've isolated "complete bullshit". I would not disagree if you said these two sentences are nothing more than a PR'd way of saying "Captain took peyote and banged on a piano".

i'd love to hear a composition by a person who has never heard a note of music but knows everything about the rules of composition via notation. i'm guessing this has already been done with computers though

I have a friend who is completing a PhD in composition with an electroacoustic focus. As part of comprehensive exams in his program, students need to write code on the spot that will algorithmically generate music in a given 20th century style, e.g. "generate music in the style of Satie's Gymnopédies".

Assume by post-tonal Sund4r was talking about stuff like serialism and tone rows

I'm referring to any Western art music that no longer follows CPP tonal and harmonic conventions. Serialism is one specific method. Pitch-class set theory is a more general system that is useful to analyse pitch organization in post-tonal music. (It is helpful with writing as well.) This is a good book (by a CUNY Graduate Center theorist) to learn the basics of it: http://books.google.ca/books/about/Introduction_to_post_tonal_theory.html?id=9WQJAQAAMAAJ

On a broader scale, it is helpful to understand sorts of pitch collections, harmonic structures, voice-leading patterns, etc that could be used. This is a pretty good introduction: http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/product/Materials-and-Techniques-of-PostTonal-Music/9780205794553.page

(xxp)At least he didn't add "and utter" in the middle.

Kind of thought this thread would be a nuanced discussion of what kind of theoretical approaches people found more useful and which less useful. Saying the equivalent of "Musicians of the world, throw off your shackles and create!" is a noble statement but isn't necessarily useful in this context.

I just suggested some!

Thanks, Sund4r, will take a look. Wasn't talking to you in my last post. Was still taking a dig a fgti. But he seems like a nice guy so should stop. For myself and I assume for Hurting, "theory" is usually taken in the context of Jazz studies which has build up a substantial body of literaturestudy aids over the years, from Berklee or the Jamey Aebersold play-a-long material to the Mark Levine Jazz Theory book. The problem is that this stuff ends up being kind of long-winded, there are more efficient ways to describe what you need to know. If one can describe it more concisely, there is still the need to practice, but the more organized your way of thinking about it is, the less painful it is. Never even thought about looking in depth into those kind of compositional techniques but am willing to read about that stuff if we can come to this thread for you to correct our misunderstandings between lesson plans;)

actually I learned most of my jazz theory in bits in pieces directly from various teachers. FWIW I hate the Jamey Aebersold method, I think it's the bane of jazz and results in horrible, unmusical playing.

Yeah, I know I wasn't really recommending it, although some will. I guess my point is that if you just go about it naively you will just be doing Chord Scale Theory at its worst: "I see this chord symbol, I play that scale." A little more understanding gives you more choices. Two good things I've come upon in recent years are Mick Goodrick's The Advancing Guitarist and David Berkman's The Jazz Musician's Guide to Creative Practicing.

Saying the equivalent of "Musicians of the world, throw off your shackles and create!" is a noble statement but isn't necessarily useful in this context.

I think it's a chicken/egg thing tbh. "How did s/he do that?" is a better usage for music theory than "learn these things now before creating" ime. People who ask me how they should go about learning how to get into scored music, basically, if they know chords and can read music, I tell them to pick their favourite piece of scored music and painstakingly recreate it in Sibelius. You learn how to use the program, you get used to the relationship between MIDI sound and real sound, you follow the composers thought process step at a time. Does that make sense? I'm not shitting on music theory in any way I just think it's important to recognize that it is reverse-engineering

But trying to reverse engineer Captain Beefheart using any kind of music theory seems like a fool's errand. I look at him more as some kind of creative inspiration rather somebody who can be studied and imitated. I guess the way I think of him is that no matter how far out he got there was always his uncanny Howlin Wolf imitation to hang your hat on.

Also seems to me that reverse engineering -which nobody is denying, Tim has been doing it all along with his Raspberries exegeses- is only one of the purposes a theory might have. Another is to allow you to compose an original, perhaps unorthodox music. Another is to allow you to train yourself to access the myriad notes available to you to improvise quickly in various styles and assess their insideness or outsideness.

Yeah, writing generic pastiche chorales or inventions (which is essentially what you do in harmony and counterpoint classes) can help to train your compositional skills and craftsmanship in the way that playing scales helps to train your playing skills. It can actually strengthen your analytical ('reverse-engineering'?) abilities as well: having to write standard progressions and melodic lines helps you recognize them in pieces in the literature. And, besides, the majority of students in theory classes are not composers. People who play and conduct the repertoire also benefit from this understanding.

(I don't see how recreating a score in Sibelius is following the composer's thought process step by step btw, although I can see the value of the exercise: my compositional thought process is definitely not based on writing a completed piece bar-by-bar from start to finish.)

Beefheart's music isn't so far out that it resists analysis. It's a lot more structured and logical than people usually give it credit for, and it's basically built out of a bunch of blues riffs strung together along with a more expanded tonal ideas from free jazz. Analyzing his free blowing on the sax might be pointless but the overall compositions could be easily transcribed and understood. With some of the more dissonant tone clusters on a song like say Dali's Car it might not make sense to think of them as functioning in any kind of traditional harmonic sense but that's ok.

Knowing how it was composed helps understand it better as well and I think it would be just as easy to write a trout mask pastiche (of the composition, not necessarily the performances) as doing an exercise in a harmony class. I tried to learn a couple of trout mask songs on guitar years ago and some parts were pretty difficult to play but now I realize that of course they were playing in different tunings. I bet if you sat down and tried to play all of the trout mask riffs and melodies on a piano you would find little obvious patterns and shapes that he was using, similar to how the guitar parts probably would have made more sense to me if I had played them in the correct tunings.

xp to Ken: fwiw I know there are lots of people who use chord-scale theory very well, just for me it always seemed like a backwards way of learning to play jazz, almost like learning to cook by first memorizing a ridiculously elaborate system of relationships between ingredients and flavors without any guidance as to proportions, cooking techniques, etc. Of course I suppose you could, ideally, do both at the same time. The reason I hate the Aebersold books is because they pretty much just say "you play this scale over this chord," and then inexperienced musicians take them and just kind of meander around the notes of that scale over the chord with no thought given to voice-leading, what notes to play on strong vs weak beats, etc. There it's less a case of rules being bad for jazz improvisation, but more that the "rule" here does not do a good job of describing what actually "works," (or has worked, traditionally) and is kind of misleading without other guidance.

The thing is I am generally more in the Owen camp on this stuff -- I have always been an intuitive and by-ear musician first, and when it came to jazz improv I always preferred to figure out what sounded good to me or what I wanted to hear, and then figure out how to make it happen. I found theory useful for that sometimes, either as "reverse engineering" or as a kind of shorthand to help me remember. It does also open options that you might not have already "heard" though, and I think it's good for that too as long as you maintain trust in your ear and don't play things solely because a book says you can/should.

(I don't see how recreating a score in Sibelius is following the composer's thought process step by step btw, although I can see the value of the exercise: my compositional thought process is definitely not based on writing a completed piece bar-by-bar from start to finish.)

I wouldn't equate it to following the composer's thought process per se, but wasn't copying scores by hand a big part of the early musical education for a lot of common practice-era composers?

People who play and conduct the repertoire also benefit from this understanding.

A big truth and something I've been forgetting.

I think it's good for that too as long as you maintain trust in your ear and don't play things solely because a book says you can/should.

When confronted with a theory one can:

• ignore it
• accept it as dogma
• dismiss it as dogma
• ask: "What is a theory anyway?"
• ask: "Is this 'Theory' in fact a coherent theory?"
• spend all your time on theory instead of practice
• Concentrate on a subarea of the theory until either makes sense or you give up, at which point you move on to a new subarea, or a new theory of give up on theory altogether.

Forgot:

• "Here is a counter-example to your precious theory. Or is it?"

"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is." -Bob MarleyYogi Berra

No idea whether this site is useful or not, just saw a link to it: http://it-www.teoria.com/

Think what I was trying to get to before the March of the Rubber Strawmen started was that learning theory by itself delivers diminishing returns if you don't have a way to incorporate it efficiently into you playing, should you so desire. The Mick Goodrick and David Berkman books were more "Creative Practice" books -the latter has this in the title- and starts of with a "Lighting Tour of Theory" to get it out of the way. I admire the self-professed "intuitive" musicians in this book, but aren't we all intuitive musicians when we start, well many of us, at least in the key of G, at least in first position. What about when you either need to learn something new or more likely, when the well runs dry? Owen is still young and on a roll and involved in all kinds of different creative situations, but Josh, in a few more years...

"Learn all your scales, then forget 'em all and just play." - Kurt VonnegutCharlie Parker

I definitely went through the "meandering through the notes" business when I took jazz improv in college. What I was unable to get to was the point of real thematic construction and elaboration.

i feel like i have totally different mindsets for 'theory' and 'making music', it's weird. like figuring out chords and melodies that work is the necessary evil that must be done so i can get to the fun part (texture, sounds, arrangement, sampling, rhythm, etc). and once i'm done with the raw material i have no idea what it is (note-wise) when i come back to it, it might as well have been written by someone else.

this is because i'm a dumb drummer who never had to really deal with harmonic stuff in years of practicing/playing, and only started writing to make electronic music.

I wouldn't equate it to following the composer's thought process per se, but wasn't copying scores by hand a big part of the early musical education for a lot of common practice-era composers?

Many largely passive or rote learning methods were highly favoured in the past. Some people do advocate this exercise, although I don't think it's a common practice at most institutions of higher education in the US or Canada today. I think it's useful to the same extent that typing Hamlet into MS Word is a useful exercise. In my undiplomatic opinion, analysis and model composition exercises engage more higher-order creative and critical thinking skills, allow for more meaningful feedback/evaluation, allow a student to produce something that is actually their work, AND probably get someone closer to understanding a composer's thought process. There's no reason why someone couldn't use Sibelius or Finale in the process. (It is required at some schools.)

I recommend this exercise because 95% of "composers" do not know how to use Sibelius/Finale at a rate that is required for any professional activity

probably get someone closer to understanding a composer's thought process

If this is truly your goal, though, you would probably want to do some biographical research.

xpost

Well, yeah, it's a good way to learn notation software.

There is nothing more important for "people looking to create scored music" than learning how to effectively and quickly use the software

Some professional composers who work at a high level still write scores by hand! But this (learning the software) was why I said I could see the value of the exercise. What I questioned originally was that it helped someone follow a composer's thought process.

I... feel like you're being deliberately obtuse in saying that it might not? Dissecting the specifics of the orchestration? Forcing yourself to acknowledge and enter every bowing and "a2" or whatever? Seeing first hand how s/he's doubled the bassoon with a piccolo? How those wind-gestures are all c+p or how they are not and puzzling as to why? Or, if you're so inclined, hearing the specific relationship between "this portion of aleatoric notation and what it sounds like" and attempting to spell it out yourself and wondering if this aleatoric notation is useful? (or quarter-tone or whatever?)

I'm not saying that it couldn't (and someone would probably learn something if they typed out Hamlet too). I'm saying that imo if the goal is for someone to learn these things, analysis and model composition seem like more efficient and effective methods for the reasons I gave above.

Erf, I've had a nightmarish airline experience over the last couple of days and might be overly grumpy, sorry. I'll revisit this tomorrow.

And I disagree with you on this point and kick against that method of pedagogy. "Installing my set of keyboard shortcuts for Sibelius and teaching you how to use them" has far more practical usage than writing hauptschrifts on a score. We're not talking about "typing out Hamlet", it's more like "learning how to program in C"

And no need to apologize Sund4r you aren't coming off as grumpy at all, I hope I'm not either

You two guys seem to be behaving quite civilly and getting along just fine.

Discussion about software reminds me to ask Tim if he is still using MuseScore,

Random comments on skimming through the thread in the cold light of about a week later

Grove on musicology fwiw (they don't have a "music theory" article!):
Misread this as "Groove on musicology." Didn't know if this was the name of a publication, a command, or a first person declaration with the subject missing.

Looking at that MTO rock issue- The "Jailhouse Rock" examples crashes Quicktime. "Gloria" video works though.

In the Guitar Voicings article, the author talks about an "embellishing chromatic mediant" while analyzing, among other things, a Jimi Hendrix tune. Now I think he is talking about a chord but when I first saw it I thought he meant the sharp 9/flat 3 that is added to a 7th chord to turn it into 'The Hendrix chord."

In the article on The Beatles and Voice Leading came across "Walter Everett’s Statement–Restatement–Departure–Conclusion (SRDC) phrase structure" which seems like a useful terminology.