Rolling Music Theory Thread

Can anyone recommend good books or videos or articles on the music theory of John Coltrane that goes a little beyond just “here’s how giant steps changes work” ?

Good question. Not me, sorry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbj6bn6mZto

Been waiting for him to finish this book for years.

Was just working on BWV 38.6 with James Redd:
https://www.bach-chorales.com/BWV0038_6.htm
https://open.spotify.com/track/6tgIyDZKQ3i4G2kOMNR7Q2?si=I13lPCy_RgWqYfY9pn6MqQ
http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Texts/Chorale085-Eng3.htm

It's probably the most dramatic example I've seen of a chorale where Bach has tried to graft a functional harmonization onto a modal hymn melody. The melody is very obviously in E Phrygian but Bach has harmonized it in A minor despite the fact that only the third phrase of the melody lends itself at all to a tonal centre on A. The hymn begins on a B and ends on an E. The first, second, and final (!) phrases all end with half cadences on E (V in A minor). The third is the only one that ends with an authentic cadence. The fourth modulates to G, which is obv the relative major of E minor but is an unusual key change for a piece that is otherwise in A minor. I'm not sure it even works completely but it is interesting that we get the only authentic cadence in the home key on "He alone is the good shepherd"; we also get an authentic cadence in G on "who can free Israel" but are denied resolution on "from all his sings".

*The third is the only one that ends with an authentic cadence in A minor.

The discussion of which also made me think of this quote for some reason: rolling enlightenment music discussion thread

Now I've got my kid's piano teacher involved in this.

WIkipedia agrees about the Phrygian nature of this section:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aus_tiefer_Not_schrei_ich_zu_dir,_BWV_38

But not this gentlemen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1VFPJj-950

The hymn melody itself is an E Phrygian melody but the Bach chorale functions (if somewhat awkwardly) in A minor because of the way it's harmonized.

Unless that guy is using some notation system I've never come across, his harmonic analysis seems wrong? I've never heard of anyone writing Roman numerals based on the relative major key for a minor-key piece and can't imagine why you would want to - he also makes no distinctions between different chord qualities or inversions.

Notable that Gs are always natural in the melody but G#s are used in the harmony parts to make it function in A minor.

Yup.

Somehow this controversy is not lighting up the borad in quite the same way as “Sweet Home Alabama” vs. “Werewolves of London.”

Is there a controversy? I just thought it was an interesting example.

Ha, no, was just making a joke, I agree.

Right now though it seems to just be a folie à deux. #OneThread.

I just came across this, but am too tired to even read, so I am putting it here:

The basic texture of these settings seems to have been adapted from the Calvinist psalters, but the melody is placed consistently in the soprano part rather than the tenor, so that a listening congregation could the more easily sing along by ear, as the title recommends. The idea of transposing the cantus firmus to the soprano may have merely been an obvious solution to a practical problem, but it may also reflect the influence of the villanella or other Italian song styles that were making their way in Germany thanks to the book trade. In any case, Osiander’s were the first “Bach chorales.” They not only show the antecedents of the practice that J. S. Bach would bring to its stylistic peak a century and a half later, but they also give some idea of the extreme utilitarianism and stylistic conservatism of the atmosphere in which Bach would work his compositional miracles.

Taruskin, Richard. Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century: The Oxford History of Western Music . Oxford University Press.

Can anyone recommend good books or videos or articles on the music theory of John Coltrane that goes a little beyond just “here’s how giant steps changes work” ?

I actually just started reading Lewis Porter's article "John Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme': Jazz Improvisation as Composition" from the Autumn 1985 issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society when listening to ALS tonight and working out what's going on.

It seems pretty thorough.

I have his Coltrane bio, which is quite good.

Nobody: "Are academic music theorists above Navy SEAL copypasta?"

4llen C4dwallader:

whoops, didn't properly edit out emails last time, let's try again https://t.co/Ioi0VjcO0t pic.twitter.com/KOPeu6IEqJ

— Megan Lavengood (@meganlavengood) February 25, 2021

Every time I see the name "Cadwallader" I think about that Twilight Zone episode

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_Clause

Click the link to "Mr. Cadwallader", wiki can be quite eloquent

Haha

Haha Wikipedia has Megan's back (for now): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Cadwallader

Apologies for more ILE but I somehow missed that Timothy Jackson is suing his whole department, the Board of Regents, and a grad student for conducting an investigation, "criticisms of 'the review and editorial practices' of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies", and "threats to remove [ him ] from the Journal":

For anyone interested, here are pdfs of the complaint and exhibits: https://t.co/2cmBIuzV88

Tl;dr: Jackson, represented by Michael Allen and Jonathan Mitchell, is suing under 1983 for violation of 1st and 14th Am. rights as well as state law defamation for calling him racist

— Nick Curry (@ncurr) January 15, 2021

its not always entirely clear to me what the ultimate goal or purpose is with a lot of academic analysis of popular music, aside from sheer scholarly interest (and lines on the CV, ha). With guitar mags, it's usually clear that the articles are there for people to learn specific techniques from. With the analysis of art music, it's easy for me to see how the work is useful for people who want to compose and/or play art music (who are the usual audience for these journals). While I still disagree with him that Radiohead (or, say, "Close to the Edge") is too easy to parse for someone with art music training, it's not 100% clear to me what the readers are going to gain from the exercise: it does not seem that this is going to have the direct benefit of helping (most) people learn how to write and play rock music.

Rereading this old discussion now, this no longer seems outlandish, given how many people in rock and popular music do have a formal musical education these days, and how much pop gets taught academically.

Whoa, for a second I thought that Momus had rejoined us.

For some actual music theory, I started reading Lavengood's article in the current MTO issue on timbral analysis in 80s pop music, looking particularly at DX7 presets: https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.20.26.3/mto.20.26.3.lavengood.html

Not totally sure what I think yet.

Ned posted this link somewhere-else:

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/decolonizing-electronic-music-starts-with-its-software/

When I first saw the headline I thought "oh good! they're making DAWs free?" But then I realized it was about alternate tunings-- AND the DAW is also free :)

It occurred to me tho "withdrawing from Western systems of tuning" is only half the work, we need somebody to design malleable grids in the sequencing software, get actual rhythms happening instead of the metric stuff we have now

Fgti, I'm very curious what you mean by actual rhythms or what you're envisioning here?

I'm all for non-Western approaches getting baked into DAWs, but even with say West African music, I still think of it as being 'on a grid', even if you can't notate the 8th note feel/swing of it. But I feel like you can get there with most DAWs by turning quantization off and adjusting things within the 1/4 note grid, or have a swing/shuffle function that's adjustable by %, etc. And there are tempo maps for the overall bpm.

My idea is this: that one can make a template, somehow-- by beat mapping a sample, for example-- and that the resultant flex-y data could be turned into a stable grid. That, with this template, you'd have fluctuating tempo every sixteenth, every eighth or whatever, and it would simply play things back as such. You're programming on a grid that will lock to a tempo that is constantly breathing to match the desired rhythm. You could theoretically create these templates, work from them, share them, and build tracks very simply with them, snapping to grid, and being able to achieve rhythms that are far more complicated than "16 steps and a swing variable; you gotta nudge to find the groove".

Imagine for example that you could automatically perform a loop, have the DAW recognize all the deviations of your performance, snap your grid to them, but NOT be dealing with "tempo changes every sixteenth note"? Instead have some other system of programming that parsed out the information? (I don't know if you've ever worked with projects where the tempo shifts every beat, or less, but they are massive RAM sucks, to begin with).

I have been so into "the feel" of certain songs that I've beatmapped them and asked session players to learn to play to the always-changing click. When you get into compound time, too, it's RIDICULOUS how flexible the feel is. You cannot recreate the feel of, say, "Hwwambo" without switching to 6/8 and having the tempo adjust +/- 30bpm every 16th note. The idea of being able to create a grid in this way, that you could easily shift from global tempo to global tempo, idk it sounds very useful to me.

Already it is so difficult to use DAWs in anything other than simple time. Idk, I think the whole concept of "time" could be massively overhauled within DAWs in extremely positive ways

Wow, I just think of these things totally differently. To me it has nothing to do with tempo - like "Hwwambo" (assuming you're talking about the DJ NF track) is locked to 130 bpm. Tempo changes would mean the quarter note is slowing down or speeding up, everything in between is just feel.

In between every quarter note is a world of note placement choices that include the standard gridded 8th/16th/32nd/triplets/etc but also everything in between. And we can think of those as however we want (as 8th notes that are swung more or less, or pushed/pulled), but that's really where the feel and the folklore is. For example, attempts to accurately notate a New Orleans snare drum part kinda bother me, since it doesn't square with Western notation and you just need to use your ears.

It gets interesting when it comes to programming on a computer, but I basically feel the same way about it. My DAW doesn't have a great swing/shuffle function, but I think others do, and I can imagine dialing in the amount of swing on a sliding scale to get pretty close to how a drummer would play it. That's how I visualize it when I'm playing, anyway. And when I am programming it on a computer, I just turn off the quantization and move notes/samples around in between the quarter notes to get the feel I want.

I get that it would be more laborious if you're not using loops, and that DAWs should have more support for rhythms that don't fit neatly on a straight 8th or triplet grid. But what you're talking about sounds like a crazy workaround to me - it seems like it would be easier to get a session player who's familiar with playing Brazilian or African music. :)

My idea is this: that one can make a template, somehow-- by beat mapping a sample, for example-- and that the resultant flex-y data could be turned into a stable grid. That, with this template, you'd have fluctuating tempo every sixteenth, every eighth or whatever, and it would simply play things back as such. You're programming on a grid that will lock to a tempo that is constantly breathing to match the desired rhythm

iiuc you can already do exactly this in logic if you pick a region and go to 'make groove template' in the quantize dropdown, it will create a quantization preset based on the exact timing fluctuations of whatever midi you give it.

I’m a rank amateur and a non-music maker but I do wonder what you knowledgeable folks make of this piece:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/08/the-musicological-zest-of-switched-on-pop

@ Jordan, considering the work re: Allami's adjustments to tuning, and that there are already existing workarounds (you can just load up a preprogrammed scale, ne?), and my own stumbling blocks in music creation, it just occurred to me that rebuilding the way DAWs address "time" would be (in my view) a good contribution to serving Allami's thesis. "Hwwambo" is far more complicated, in my view, than you've described! Already, dealing with compound time (the track is in 6/8 or 3/4, depending if you're prioritizing the hook or the beat) makes swing functions weird and nigh-unusable...

but @ esby, if these methods exist already and I just haven't read the manual, then... I'm gonna read the manual :)

That's probably true re: the swing function getting confused. But still, if I want to make a beat like that I would start by programming most of those parts as 1/4 note triplets over a 4/4 grid, turn off quantize/snap to grid, and then slide the notes around until it felt right. Personally I don't know that I'd ever trust a DAW with that because I know what I want to hear and I'm used to these types of rhythms, but sure, it would be great if it was natively supported!

I wonder how that track was actually produced...my guess is that he based it on a sampled hand drum loop, and manually played/triggered the rest of the samples and synths over that? But it could have been sliding one-shot samples and midi notes around with a mouse (how I would do it), who knows.

Yeah I would guess that's the case! I know it was made in FL that's all I know

What did you think, pom? I've never listened to Switched on Pop, in part because I'm not into podcasts and would rather read a transcript every time. I really hated their Vox piece about Beethoven but I gather from the Ross piece that the actual podcast was better and more nuanced? I tried to follow Asaf Peres's Top 40 Theory for a little while but I just don't share his passion for contemporary chart pop and don't really have a professional reason to keep up anymore. (He at least actually works with songwriters and producers from what I understand.) I do appreciate really deep dives like the things that MTO publishes and it's fun and sometimes helpful to break down these things once in a while e.g. on here, among other repertoire.

Yeah, I'm with you on all that. These podcasts have much to teach me due to my lack of musical training, but I just can't bring myself to sink even an extra second into contemporary chart pop.

*washes hands*

Haha. Pom, are you just looking for some music appreciation/analytical listening material? There must be lots out there on classical and progressive or heavy rock, surely? Have you read John Covach?

I can't read sheet music so if Covach is layman-friendly, I'd be interested in checking out his writings, sure.

(Sorry for shitting up this thread btw. I am a dreamer of dreams but not a music-maker.)

I'll look for things.

Is something like this layman-friendly?: http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/AWP/ct.shtml

I'd say so, yeah (it helps that I owned a guitar when I was a teenager). Thanks!

Pollack analysed every Beatles song that way.

This is one of my favourite papers. I think it's pretty readable without needing to read notation, although being able to read rhythms would help: https://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.09.15.5/mto.09.15.5.adams.html . MTO provides audio and video examples with the articles, which also gives you some of what the podcasts can provide.

I do get what's going on when there are audio samples. Tbh I could probably learn to read notation if I set my mind to it, and I've been meaning to for ages, it's just very time-consuming. But I'll get there soon enough.