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Why 13th Chords

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Re: Why 13th Chords

#41

Post by dextorious »

gruseom wrote: post #38
jtheory wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Music THEORY isn't "all about the ears" at all, though. It is the conceptual framework & vocabulary you use to talk about music, not perform it. If kids love performing and listening to music, they'll want to talk about it. And initially they'll be limited to things like "I love that thing it does near the middle when the bass is going baBONG baBONG baBONG then everything suddenly get really quiet and strange". That'…

It's more diverse than that. Some do end up learning theory but many great musicians don't. Here's a delightful example: http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/1090345--video-...

"""Some do end up learning theory but many great musicians don't."""

We're talking about music theory in genres where it is important, i.e where the music is involved and advanced. Three minute fifties rock-n-roll tunes is not where this happens.

Little Richards is great, but not in the musically advanced way Charles Mingus, Miles Davies, etc are great. He's great for the raw fun/energy/danceability impact of his music.

So, not really a counter-example.

Re: Why 13th Chords

#42

Post by dextorious »

scrozier wrote: post #27

Grew up playing classical and pop music, basically 3-4 chords (maj, min, 7th, etc). Went to the best jazz school in the world (U of North Texas) and woke up to jazz...an order of magnitude more harmonically complex than classical. Will spend the rest of my life learning to play jazz. Why is this on HN? Because there is a giant overlap between hackers and musicians. For those of you interested, but confused, go to a m…

"""an order of magnitude more harmonically complex than classical. """

Depends on the classical. There's classical stuff that's harmonically miles beyond jazz music.

Contemporary classical, that is.

Re: Why 13th Chords

#43

Post by dextorious »

jergosh wrote: post #16

WTH is this doing on HN?

From the down-voting count, it looks as if it's your comment that doesn't belong in HN, rather than the musical post.

(And maybe my comment too, but mine is double-meta, so I would understand any down-voting to it).

Re: Why 13th Chords

#44

Post by scrozier »

dextorious wrote: post #42
scrozier wrote: post #27

Grew up playing classical and pop music, basically 3-4 chords (maj, min, 7th, etc). Went to the best jazz school in the world (U of North Texas) and woke up to jazz...an order of magnitude more harmonically complex than classical. Will spend the rest of my life learning to play jazz. Why is this on HN? Because there is a giant overlap between hackers and musicians. For those of you interested, but confused, go to a m…

"""an order of magnitude more harmonically complex than classical. """ Depends on the classical. There's classical stuff that's harmonically miles beyond jazz music. Contemporary classical, that is.

Absolutely, dextorious. Something of a semantic issue. Maybe we should say, "serious" music or "concert music" or some such. I really don't like any of the terms.

In any case, your point is well taken. It would be interesting to trace the parallel development of harmony in "serious" music and jazz. (Which, of course, someone has done.)

Re: Why 13th Chords

#45

Post by scrozier »

Jgrubb wrote: post #39

...And this is what I love about Hacker News. As a 33 year old musician who got the programming/entrepreneurial bug only more recently, it brings me great hope to see things like this on this board. It brings me hope because a lot of times I feel like such a late comer to the party, surrounded by folks younger than me with many more years of experience in the programming realm having conversations about others' techn…

Jgrubb, as a 53-year-old musician/programmer/entrepreneur (formally trained [in parallel, mostly] in the first two), may I posit that you're not a late-comer to anything yet!

Re: Why 13th Chords

#47

Post by cliffbean »

splat wrote: post #26
baddox wrote: post #23

So, why is it called a 13th chord? Am I missing something obvious, or is it just arbitrary convention that "13th" means "with the 6th and 7th added"?

These chords progress in units of 2. So you start with your triad (1st, 3rd, 5th). For the 7th chord you add the 7th, naturally enough. The next chord is then a 9th chord, so you add a 9th interval, but it wraps around modulo 8, so it's really a 2nd interval (since intervals are 1-indexed). Next it's an 11th chord, but the interval is really a 4th, and so on. The idea is to think of them spread out though, as success…

This has always bothered me.

In what's typically called a 13th chord, the 11th is almost always omitted because it either clashes, or it changes the chord into something completely different. Stacking 3rds doesn't actually explain how jazz chords work. And it tends to produce corny voicings.

To make an analogy with computers, it feels like the classical notation is an abstraction layer which has been extended beyond its usefulness.

Re: Why 13th Chords

#48

Post by jaylevitt »

gruseom wrote: post #30
baddox wrote: post #23

So, why is it called a 13th chord? Am I missing something obvious, or is it just arbitrary convention that "13th" means "with the 6th and 7th added"?

I was puzzling over the same question. Some of these words are semantically overloaded, and as far as I can tell there's no single interpretation that makes it all "work out" the way you would require if this were math. There are two meanings to "adding 7": 1. adding 7 arithmetically to obtain the same note an octave higher; 2. adding in a 7th note to whatever chord you are playing. But the way the chords are named i…

Been out of Berklee a few years, but a few nuggets that might shed light:

In Jazz theory, the 7th scale degree is part of the chord. C7 isn't C (C+E+G) plus a B♭; C7 is its own flavor of C chord, C + E + G + B♭.

More generally, the ^3 and the ^7 are the two most important notes in the chord. The ^3 tells you its quality (minor, major) and the ^7 tells you its, uh, seventhness (dominant, diminished, maj7). It's common for players to leave off the 1 and the 5; they're low-information notes, and those fingers are better put to use playing the tensions, which are "chord extensions", the 9th, 11th and 13th. Critically, all three tensions are considered part of the chord, unlike Csus4, which means substitute a 4 for the 3, and don't play the 3.

C9, C11 and C13 can exist, but you won't often find C13 in particular like that. There's a whole set of memorizable rules to tell you which chord scales go with which chords performing which functions; if that C is a I chord in the measure, you're not likely to see a C11. You may see a C7(11), or C7(add11), which is IIRC the C chord plus an 11th note - but not the 9th. Then there's C7(#11), which you'll often find when C is the IV chord, 'cause the IV chord gets a Lydian scale.. but now I forget how that explains anything.

C+E+G+B♭+D+F+A can also be looked at as D-/C7, and often is. That whole "Upper Triad" polychord stuff is a whole semester to itself.

Re: Why 13th Chords

#49

Post by chrisguitarguy »

scrozier wrote: post #44
dextorious wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"""an order of magnitude more harmonically complex than classical. """ Depends on the classical. There's classical stuff that's harmonically miles beyond jazz music. Contemporary classical, that is.

Absolutely, dextorious. Something of a semantic issue. Maybe we should say, "serious" music or "concert music" or some such. I really don't like any of the terms. In any case, your point is well taken. It would be interesting to trace the parallel development of harmony in "serious" music and jazz. (Which, of course, someone has done.)

I always liked the term "art music" to refer to the entire classical music genre. "Classical" implies a certain period to me.

Re: Why 13th Chords

#50

Post by robocop »

Sorry to be pedantic, but a 9th chord actually has a 9th and a _flat_ 7th. For example C9 has the notes C-E-G-Bb-D. 9th chords are part of the dominant group, not the major group.

A chord with a 9th and a 7th is a _major_ 9th. For example, the chord C-E-G-B-D is Cmaj9 (sometimes written C triangle 9).

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