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Fascinating, well-written piece. Thanks for sharing! I plan to revisit it more closely when I free up (probably while listening to A Love Supreme -- arguably the greatest jazz album of all time).
You meant to say "Kind of Blue", I'm sure. Else: Deringers at noon. Bring your second.
Fascinating, well-written piece. Thanks for sharing! I plan to revisit it more closely when I free up (probably while listening to A Love Supreme -- arguably the greatest jazz album of all time).
You meant to say "Kind of Blue", I'm sure. Else: Deringers at noon. Bring your second.
towards my craving for instant gratification with sound and lights I found a well produced video by Vox on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62tIvfP9A2w
He is using the right "words" or "concepts" (tetrachord, hexachord) but these words have been mutilated by "musicology" and "music theory" to the point that they don't have any "useful" meaning at all anymore. The tetrachords and hexachords he mentions just are no tetra-/hexachords. If this fundamental building block is wrong, everything else down the line has to be, too.
How do I know?
Well, a colleague of mine (fellow professor) has found the Bach manuscript and I have found the Coltrane manuscript where BOTH of them lay out the whole of "music theory" in half a page.
If the two greatest masters of music used the SAME system, it should be ok for you and me. Just stay away from all the crap coming out of "music theory" or "musicology" or YouTube videos or websites made by "experts" or "non-experts". They just don't know.
Instead take any piece of classical music (e.g. WTK 1) or any Coltrane improvisation (from 1960 on) and look for the smallest "building block" - WITHOUT any priors!
That's difficult, I know, but that separates the men from the boys. These priors are "scales" (there is no C-C seven-note scale), or "harmonies" (there is no "dominant", Bach wouldn't know what you were talking about, and Coltrane just used it to be able to communicate with the rest of the world), or wrong tetra- and hexachords.
So just LOOK at the page or transcription! No priors! Then it will become obvious to you, too, especially in Coltrane's later improvisations, e.g. Live at the Half Note, and Bach made it abundantly clear in the first two fugues of the WTK 1.
That's why he wrote it in the first place (read the title page).
It's there for all of us to see and understand and - much more importantly - to use!
Nothing upper-middle class people love more than worshiping dead black Americans, while treating their descendants like dangerous parasites. They were so cool, such genius! I can't wait to be the authority on them, and make more on redefining them than they ever saw in their lives, or to buy the new product that no black American makes a dime from. One day, every black American will be gone, and all that will be left…
> Nothing upper-middle class people love more than worshiping dead black Americans, while treating their descendants like dangerous parasites. I know, right? It's those Dutch folks living in Bulgaria hating black American descendants again, eh? /s So, to be serious, do you have evidence that Roelant Hollanderr is treating black American descendants as "dangerous parasites"? Those are pretty hefty accusations. I haven…
Fascinating, well-written piece. Thanks for sharing! I plan to revisit it more closely when I free up (probably while listening to A Love Supreme -- arguably the greatest jazz album of all time).
Although the author puts a disclaimer up front ("no expert") it is still astounding how wrong one can be (taking all his honest effort into account). It's not that he´s wrong "by choice", but if your priors are wrong there's just no other possible outcome. He is using the right "words" or "concepts" (tetrachord, hexachord) but these words have been mutilated by "musicology" and "music theory" to the point that they d…
Also what are the manuscripts that lay out their approach to music theory in half a page?
Genuinely curious. I personally think I probably agree and music theory is often misunderstood as prescriptive rather than descriptive.
See also: Arcana V. Music, Magic & Mysticism . Ed: John Zorn, Hips Road 2010 https://archive.org/details/zorn-john-ed.-arcana-v.-musician...
Any particular chapter in this issue of Arcana?
Chapter 25 - Music and Mysticism, Rhythm and Form: A Blues Romance in 12 Parts - Adam Rudolph
This is a better scanned copy: https://archive.org/download/zorn-john-ed.-arcana-v.-musicia... (PDF)
There is a premise hidden in those speculations that there is some strong connection between the structure of the universe itself and the structures humans find pleasing when listening to music. And I detect a suggestion that studying the output of our most genius musicians might reveal some kind of hidden information about the universe, specifically related to some kind of "spirituality".
This was a sentiment shared, in some sense, by the deists of the enlightenment. They rejected the scriptures and instead believed that studying the physical universe might reveal the "mind of God".
If we are looking for correspondences between these things - why limit ourselves to Euclidean geometry? Modern physics leans on Riemannian geometry, symmetry, and topology. It appears the topology of the universe, under a wide array of experiments, is way more complicated than the old geometric ideas. Most physicists talk about Lie Groups, fiber bundles, etc.
If you take "as above, so below" seriously and you want to find connections between cosmology and music, I believe you have to use modern mathematical tools. I think we need to expand beyond geometry and embrace topology. Can we think of the chromatic scale tones as a Group? What operators would we need? etc.
It's interesting to try to get into the head of a guy like Coltrane and his mathematical approach, but perhaps we could be pushing new boundaries based on new understanding.