Rolling Music Theory Thread

Assume by post-tonal Sund4r was talking about stuff like serialism and tone rows but I'll wait until counterpoint lesson is done to find out.

Only when Marcello mentioned "Holiday" did it occur to me that that song is not in a major-key but in a minor-one, and contains the same denial-of-major-key-tonic as "Teenage Dream". But what does that say about Madonna-songwriter? or Madonna-cultural force? or me, if I wanted to write a song like Madonna's? I dunno.

I think acknowledging that it's interesting can be separate from attempts to answer a lot of questions that require more information to answer.

lol "to answer" twice

Only when Marcello mentioned "Holiday" did it occur to me that that song is not in a major-key but in a minor-one, and contains the same denial-of-major-key-tonic as "Teenage Dream". But what does that say about Madonna-songwriter? or Madonna-cultural force? or me, if I wanted to write a song like Madonna's? I dunno.

Well it depends what you want to know I guess? I mean one person looking at a building might be more interested in the nitty-gritty engineering aspects of it while another might be more interested in the architectural presentation of it. You could probably say that Madonna is an artist whose "artist"ness is less about the harmonic structure of her music than, say, the Beatles, let alone Bach. There's nothing lesser about that kind of artistry imo, it's just primarily a different skillset and presentation. I mean, Madonna's songs still have harmonic and melodic structures that have to serve her purposes well, like any artist, and I don't think she would be what she is without that aspect, but Madonna the icon really dominates the music.

BTW you know Deerhoof is the product of conservatory compositional education right? I always thought you could hear that in their harmonies -- I feel like certain kinds of harmonies just don't "occur" to most rock bands naturally.

Those first three composers all had world-class formal training. Messiaen was a theory professor. Surely Shostakovich had some theoretical understanding of how fugues were put together before he wrote 24 of them. Stravinsky must have been aware of serial methods before he used them, Messiaen knew what an octatonic scale was etc. I would think that Bach was aware of Renaissance principles of counterpoint, Zarlino's rules of dissonance, etc?

I'm not saying that "learning how to do it" is useless, I'm saying that the important lesson to learn is to have that information internalized, the way we all visualize words instead of keystrokes. I picked those three composers because they (famously) had intuitive compositional techniques, both in practice as composers and in teaching as pedagogues. Nadia Boulanger, basically. The famous quote Schoenberg made about Stravinsky "you will always compose at the piano, some composers are like that". That "holistic"? method of teaching has at least been passed down from Boulanger to Corigliano to my teacher Kulesha, and to Glass, and to Copland; Babbitt (I've been told by two students) had attempted to hybridize that method with a more rigorous approach. And all these teachers will, sure, teach you how to write a fugue, teach you 12-tone technique, but only insofar as it suits your requirements as a composer.

Sure Bach heard Palestrina, but whether or not Bach had read Fux is kind of beside the point. I feel like in rock bands there are those have heard Neu! and like it and those who haven't or don't. But, I speak from a specific position of privilege as someone who took a course (and one of ignorance, as I'm only familiar with the classical school of thought, i.e. no jazz). Beyond Bach chorale, which is pretty amazing and applicable stuff to everything, I don't think any chord-to-chord knowledge is particularly useful. Better to play the fugues, unpack them intuitively. (Major exception: orchestration, for which you can never receive enough training.)

Ha, OK, I think that's a little different from "flailing around playing random chords" but I have a better sense of where you're coming from now.

[Again, more tonight]

where is the goodbye yellow brick road piece people are talking about?

It's on Pitchfork, Jayson wrote it and it's beautiful. He says the bVI comes out of nowhere, and to my ears it doesn't, it's already been foreshadowed in the verse with the bVII-V mediant movement (the same relationship as I-bVI), but what does come out of nowhere is that m9 jump! (I feel like it's a chess move: m9!!) I... cannot think of any other songs that have a m9 jump, the only one off the top of my head that has any 9th is "December Will Be Magic Again"-- possibly inspired by Yellow Brick Road? she loves Elton John

found it, thanks!

"Day After Day" by Badfinger has nice 9th (not minor) jump on second line "Every day my MIND is wound around you"

Spotify version of that tune is a rerecord and he couldn't hit the note!

Boulanger to Corigliano to my teacher Kulesha

Hey, Corigliano is at Lehman College. I wonder if he knows Rob Schneiderman from the other thread.

Aargh. Maybe I misremembered about about "Day After Day" maybe the 9th is in a different place or not there at all. I leave it to Tim.

Guitar solo/melody reiteration & embellishment maybe.

Better to play the fugues, unpack them intuitively.

So I'm going to be difficult: there is nothing at all wrong with this approach but why is it better (asks the theory prof who likes writing fugues but, um, doesn't play piano)?

Hurting, you gotta buy that piano pronto. Too many guitar players of various stripes on this thread.

Wish I had the golden ears and fleet fingers of the Martian lutists of old that sang so sweetly, but given this lack it is nice have a little theoretical underpinning to help me think of things I might want to try to play so I don't have to thumb though the chord grimoire for new grips.

I mean, that Schoenberg quote needs to be read with the awareness that he was famously insecure about his inability to play the piano.

You come from this royal lineage of study, yet it seems like you are telling us not to worry about this stuff and just play. With all due respect, a careless reading of your posts might detect an aristocratic brush off : "Let them eat CAGED"

Good thing you're not reading them carelessly, then :) Kulesha is a great guy and I won't speak ill of him, but I learned more from attending a single Bang On A Can marathon than I did from four years in school.

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.