or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
•
"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
•
"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
August 10, 2008
What's Wrong with Western Music? Part II. "Hey, Jude"
By: Bernard Chazelle
Not sure why I'm doing this. I have mountains of work to do; nothing I have to say on the subject of music has any originality whatsoever; and since I am in such a rush and unable to proofread what I am writing, I am likely to get some details wrong. But, hey, with such a friendly audience, why not indulge? The topic fascinates me and, if I can let a few people in on that fascination, it'll be all worthwhile, I guess. Also, the main point of this series of posts is to ask questions, not provide answers. I want to point out something interesting and rarely discussed.
The point I will make is very simple but one that requires a tiny amount of background. This installment, therefore, has zero to offer to anyone who knows anything about music. But maybe not everybody knows the basics. And I need those basics to make my point.
I will explain why all musics are wrong and why the Western variety is the wrongest. Some readers already feel defensive, even before I make my point, and call the exercise silly, banal, offensive, and a waste of time. This is a strangely anti-intellectual reaction. I'll use the word "wrong" in a technical fashion, so there's no reason to be offended. And again all musics are wrong, out of necessity. Why Western music chose to be wrong in the way it did fascinates me. Fermat's Last Theorem fascinates me. Maybe it leaves you cold. Fine, just don't it call it silly.
Or banal. How can something that even 90% of musicians don't understand be banal? Is it "banal" that the only Western scales that make sense (in the cycle of 5ths sense) have a number of notes that is of the form N*(N+1) for N>2? Is that banal? I suspect most music theorists don't even know how to prove that. This result shows, in particular, that of all possible Western systems, Europeans adopted the simplest possible: N=3. Coincidence? No. They did it because it made it easier to learn music. Some Indians made a different choice (often using a 22-note scale). Why? I envy historians and ethographers who have the time to study those things. But it's just a matter of taste. I am the curious kind.
Please don't be offended by the harshness of the word "wrong" in the title. I am not using it for effect: wrong is exactly what it is. (I'll get to that.) I am using this word for two reasons: 1. It is the correct one; 2 It is useful to look at it that way. Art is often about breaking rules. One can simply dismiss the whole notion, but it's a methodological mistake to do so. Resolving tensions and violating rules is an essential part of what goes on in an artist's mind. But if nothing is wrong, then you can't violate anything, and there is no art. The notion of "wrong" is very useful. I don't use the word subversive because that's making assumptions. I say it's wrong, because it violates certain mathematical rules. But it does not in any way denigrate the art itself. Sometimes being wrong can serve a worthwhile purpose. At Yale, for example, I lived right across from Morse College, a weird place with no right angles! It was great "architectural art" no doubt! But the students complained that it was "wrong" because their beds didn't fit against the walls. But who cares about a whiny Yalie when the expression of an architect's genius hangs in the balance? Yet the big bumps the students had on their heads from falling off their beds were also a reminder that something was not quite right.
Well, music is not math or geometry, you'll say.
Except that it is. The great Boethius divided the field of mathematics into 4 subjects: one of them was called "music." And are you going to argue with the great Boethius?
I believe it's possible to get to the core of the issue without math or music theory. Let me try. (Of course, in good blogging tradition, I will greatly oversimplify.)
Musical pleasure is masturbation of the ear. Just like the other kind, it's a physical excitement caused by a periodic motion. Cultural norms then take over and either amplify or kill the feeling of pleasure but the root of the thrill is is universal, like gravity. Music is about air bumping into your ear but there's an easier way to think about it.
Bob and Alice speak together. Bob spells out the word AB repeatedly:
ABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABA...
Alice does the same with A:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA...
What you hear are two infinite words spelled out simultaneously:
ABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABA...
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA...
AXAXAXAXAXAXAXAXAXAXAXAXAXAXAXAXA
(Damn! On some terminals these letters won't line up properly. Just imagine they do.)
When Bob and Alice say BA together, the two sounds produce a big incomprehensible mess. But when they say A simultaneously the two sounds are added together to produce one sound of A at twice the volume. I put A (with X inbetween) to show you where this happens. At each A before X, you, the listener, get a little jolt. That, in turn, will cause your brain great pleasure. Yes, yes!
We call this kind of masturbation 2:1 because Bob's word (AB) is twice as long as Alice's (A).
The pattern 1:1 would not produce any jolt, no periodic pattern, just a monotonous repeat of the same sound:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
(1:1) is like one note sung by two people. Boring.
(2:1) is like one note C sung by Bob and another one very similar sung by Alice. In fact your brain is so wired that they sound like the same note, just one higher than the other, like two Cs on your piano 7 white keys apart. We call (2:1) an octave.
Octaves are kind of boring, too. How about other patterns? Well, 3:2 would be the most natural to try next: ABC and AD
ABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABC...
ADADADADADADADADADADADADADADADADADADADADADADADADADADAD...
AXXXXXAXXXXXAXXXXXAXXXXXAXXXXXAXXXXXAXXXXXAXXXXXA
Note how the As are spaced every 6 steps now. Remember that these As track duplicates.
We can also try 4:3 with the words ABCD and AEF
ABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDAB...
AEFAEFAEFAEFAEFAEFAEFAEFAEFAEFAEFAEFAEFAEFAEFAEFAEFAEF...
AXXXXXXXXXXXAXXXXXXXXXXXAXXXXXXXXXXXAXXXXXXXXXXXA
Now the spacing between As is 12 steps.
Next is 5:4: (ABCDE) and (AFGH)
ABCDEABCDEABCDEABCDEABCDEABCDEABCDEABCDEABCDEABCDEABCDE...
AFGHAFGHAFGHAFGHAFGHAFGHAFGHAFGHAFGHAFGHAFGHAFGHAFGHAFG...
AXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXAXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXAXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
The spacing is 20.
And so on... we could also try 153735237:126473423 but the problem is that the time between the As (in the row of As and Xs) would be very long and while masturbation based on a single jerking motion every 6 months is not technically impossible, it is equally lame in all cultures. This is a key point. The smaller the spacing between As the more pronounced the masturbation. Let me repeat: everything I am saying here applied to all humans regardless of history or culture. All humans agree on a hierarchy of masturbating pleasures: the shorter the run of Xs the better:
Vigorous masturbation is the way to go!
So we have this ranking:
Number one is 2:1
Number two is 3:2
Number three is 4:3
Number four is 5:4
How do we know no other pattern is better? Just try all small numbers and you'll see. (The cool thing about small numbers is that they are few of them, so it's easy to try them out.)
Ah, but what about 2:2? Well that's like 1:1 and
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
does not get the volume up and down. It's all flat so it doesn't count.
What about 3:1, 4:1, 5:1, 6:1, etc. Ah, gotcha! These form smaller intervals, right? So I lied to you!
Indeed, I did. But here's the thing. You don't need Bob AND Alice to get those patterns. When you pluck a string on your guitar, you get one Bob and many Alices. In fact you get an infinite number of Alices automatically, one for each pattern, 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, 5:1, 6:1, etc.
These are called harmonics. The play a huge role in music. They're the reason a violin sounds different from a cello. Think of instruments as recipes and harmonics as ingredients -- 2:1 is butter; 3:1 is garlic; 4:1 is milk; 5:1 is salt; etc. When you play G on a violin, nature throws in meat in the pan (that's your G) and then adds 5 units of butter, 3 units of garlic, 7 units of milk. Now when you play the same G on a cello, nature plays the same piece of meat in the pan but may add 2 units of butter, 12 units of garlic, 3 units of milk. Same meat, different flavors. If you want the note A, you put in fish in your pan and do the same thing.
If you removed the harmonics, you could not tell the difference between a violin and a cello. (Yes, I know, I am oversimplifying. The physics of a violin is such that harmonics get screwed up a little around the bridge, producing different overtones; drums produce non-harmonic overtones, partials, ... details, details...)
The recipe for a dish is a signature of the instrument. Can't be changed. That's why a violin always sounds like a violin. Of course, your headphones can change the dosages of harmonics, which is why you can hear both a violin and a cello on your iPod.
A good friend of mine who teaches at Julliard, Mari Kimura, surprised the music world a few years ago by discovering a new harmonic on the violin. You have to coax the instrument quite a bit to produce it. It's quite amazing. She found a new sound from an instrument that's hundreds of years old!
But I digress.
To summmarize, all musics recognize that musical pleasure, like masturbation, comes in repeated patterns. These shapes can be ranked in descending order of pleasure:
2:1 (C-higher C) -- octave
3:2 (C-G) -- dominant
4:3 (C-F) -- subdominant
5:4 (C-E) -- major third
I've added the names of the intervals in English plus how to play them on your piano. These are the good masturbating sounds. When the length of the period goes up, the pleasure seems to go down. This has been proven in many ways. But it's crucial to understand that many intervals are neither good nor bad: they are excruciating! Say you get 3000:2000. That's the same as 3:2 so it's good. Now what if you try 3001:2000? Your ear can't tell the difference so it still sounds fine. But what about 3047:2000? That's enough to make Mozart cry. Because it's far enough from 3:2 that you can hear the difference, but it's close enough to it that you feel it's all wrong. Think of it as a chocolate sundae that sits one inch from your mouth but that you're not allowed to touch. So close to heaven yet so far from it! Excruciating intervals are those that are close enough to good ones to suggest them but far enough to make you realize what you're missing. This should not be confused with "sensitive" notes composers use that cry out for resolution. Some intervals are plain rude.
How to get sequences of notes that produce many great intervals and keep the excruciating ones
at bay while keeping a listener's attention with anticipation and surprise is what music is all about. All musics!
Before I sign off today, let me add one more important point about the dominant interval.
Neuroscientists still don't know precisely why we like 3:2 but they know we do. By "we" I include monkeys. Experiments were made on chimps where classical music was played to them with the dominant sounds removed. By tracking the neuronal response of the monkeys, researchers discovered to their astonishment that the monkeys filled in the missing 3:2 sounds themselves! All babies around the world master the 3:2 and 4:3 intervals before any other! This has also been shown experimentally.
Remember that the brain is trained to think of octaves as the same note, so that if you hear 3:2 you basically hear the same as 6:2 (because 3 and 3*2 sound the same), but 6:2 is 3:1, which is a harmonic. So when you play C on your piano, the instrument also emits the sound of G (the garlic, remember?) By the same token, 3:2 should sound similar to 3:4 (again because 4=2*2 and multiplying a number by two only raises the corresponding sound by one octave). So 3:2 is "like" 3:4. Let's go back to Bob and Alice.
3:4 would be Bob saying ABC and Alice saying ADEF, as in
ABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABC
ADEFADEFADEFADEFADEFADEFADEFADEFADEFADEFAD
But wait! Switch Bob and Alice, you get ADEF and ABC
ADEFADEFADEFADEFADEFADEFADEFADEFADEFADEFAD
ABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABC
But this is precisely the pattern for 3:2 !!!! (renamed with different letters).
This shows that the only difference between 3:2 (dominant) and 4:3 (subdominant) is Bob and Alice switching places (and one raising their voice by an octave).
For this reason, musicians call the subdominant the "inversion" of the dominant.
Much of pop music is based on these two sounds (which are the "same" in disguise).
Hey Jude is a good example of what you can do with these 2 sounds alone (almost).
Next post, I'll show that as soon as you try to put these ideas in practice you're faced with a huge math conundrum, which you can only solve by cutting corners. Tell me how you cut corners and I'll tell you who you are.
Meanwhile, enjoy Paul's music, written for the Lennon kid to help him cope with his parents' divorce.
— Bernard Chazelle
the students complained that it was "wrong" because their beds didn't fit against the walls.
What makes Morse wrong is not the lack of right angles, but the giant lipstick-on-tank-treads sculpture. That is so wrong there is nothing that could ever make Morse right.
Go Stiles!!!!!
Posted by: Jonathan Schwarz at August 10, 2008 04:57 PMOh how true. Ha Ha yes, quite so. Ah yes.
Posted by: Yalie McYale Yale at August 10, 2008 05:27 PMWow. You're not going for a laugh. You're being serious.
Do your parents ever regret not having sent you to a trade school?
Posted by: J Lum at August 10, 2008 06:00 PMWell, I at least had never thought of music in these terms and am glad to be doing it now. And now I think I understand what you meant by "wrong" in your last post--I wasn't one of those who was angered by it, but I was confused. Can't wait for part three.
Posted by: ethan at August 10, 2008 06:17 PMYalie McYale Yale,
Dude, getting to make little remarks like this is the only thing I got out of going there. Cut me some slack.
J Lum,
This type of comment deeply irritates me. Please present yourself differently or hold your peace.
ethan,
Agreed. I don't know how anyone can fail to be interested in this subject, but then I don't know a lot of things.
Posted by: Jonathan Schwarz at August 10, 2008 06:42 PMhmmm... you may be barking up the right tree but you still haven't got off the ground. i suspect the problem is that you either don't know enough about masturbating and/or you don't know enough about non-orchestral music. here is my rebuttal: go look/listen to Foxy Lady by Jimi Hendrix (as an immediate example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqQOaA2LPRo). According to your argument, the 11th that Hendrix plays every second beat should make people NOT feel like masturbating. Look at Hendrix and the crowd and tell me if you still believe that....
Posted by: oslo grumpus at August 10, 2008 07:10 PMI thought that it was the secret subliminal Satanic backmasked messages in the music that made me want to masturbate! Turn me on dead man...
Posted by: Duncan at August 10, 2008 07:41 PMOh, that's what you meant.
I'm pretty sure the secret for Western music is that (3/2)^{12} is approximately 129.75, which in turn is pretty close to 2^7 = 128.
I hope you're not suggesting that timbre is dependent on the harmonics, because my understanding is that it's not.
As for wrongness, what of e.g. slendro (a gamelan tuning system), which has five pitches per octave (octaves aren't exactly 2:1, though), approximately equidistant? Or am I still misunderstanding?
Posted by: StO at August 10, 2008 08:26 PMYeah, I thought that "Hey Jude" was wrong. Now "MacArthur Park," that was a good song.
On the topic of music, there's a new documentary on Arthur Lee and Love called "Love Story." Great if you liked the band. Gives a good feeling of the Sunset Strip scene in the sixties.
Posted by: Bob In Pacifica at August 10, 2008 08:28 PMThis argument may founder tangentially on the subtle but unmistakable differences between masturbation and actual coitus.
Posted by: roy belmont at August 10, 2008 08:37 PMoslo:
1. hendrix is sex, not masturbation.
2. 11th??? you mean the tritone b7#9. the sharp 9 was hendrix's signature chord. i think you're confusing jimi with the indigo girls.
Thanks much for taking time to post this. I have always wondered why music has the effect it does. Practical theory does not really explain the mystery of music it is more like a road map or a recipe for what is known to work.
How to get sequences of notes that produce many great intervals and keep the excruciating ones at bay while keeping a listener's attention with anticipation and surprise is what music is all about. All musics!
Yes, that sounds logical in fact one of the problems an improviser faces is the balance of constructing a melody that is balanced between resolving in a way that the listener expects and resolving in an unexpected way. If you play too predictably the listener becomes bored quickly and the same holds true for playing too unpredictably, the listener becomes bored and looses interest so the problem is to find a balance between the two.
On harmonics that is quite true concerning why instruments sound the way they do. The flute has fewer harmonic than an oboe. So the oboe has a rather nasal sound because it has more harmonics while the flute has rounder more hollow sound. This can be a great source of frustration for sax players trying to find a mouthpiece that suits them. Some mouthpieces produce more harmonics than others changing the basic sound. I used to play in a band where one of the sax players would show up with half a dozen mouthpieces which he kept changing and trying which drove him crazy because he couldn’t decide which one he liked best, hilarious. Another time he showed up with band aids placed all over his horn claiming he had improved the intonation of his horn though he ended up ripping them all off in frustration.
Posted by: Rob Payne at August 10, 2008 09:31 PM"This type of comment deeply irritates me. Please present yourself differently or hold your peace".
Da-du-dum-dum
Da-du-dum-dum-DUM...(Theme to Dragnet).
Mr Schwarz, you seem pretty damn right to me. Unlike music!!!!
Posted by: ethan at August 11, 2008 03:41 AMThis is a strangely anti-intellectual reaction.
How strange can this be? You're asking people to stop believing in Santa and The Easter Bunny. It's like the confounding of pundits that people vote based on emotional manipulation rather than self-serving logic.
Between you intellectually dissecting music, Mike of Angle intellectually dissecting comedy, and Jonathan dissecting politics and media, the baby Jesus surely cries himself to sleep every night.
I hope you three are happy with yourselves. (Don't get me wrong: On politics, the baby Jesus should cry.)
@J Lum: I found your comment slightly funny.
@Jon: I know that you're the host but some friction ain't half bad. I learned more from the to and fro -- Bernard/StO/Payne -- of previous arguments than from the actual posts.
Posted by: Labiche at August 11, 2008 08:09 AMOK, it's a valid critique of music to challenge its being based on harmonic organization, for which it will not be difficult for you to demonstrate its 'wrongness' and to show how other cultures have achieved less wrong (and/or differently wrong) harmonic organizations. We'll also soon see what you meant earlier about 'cheating'. (And when you get there can you say how you feel about specific methods of cheating, like the Lehman Bach tuning?)
But it's really equally if not more 'wrong' to presume that appeals to primate research and observations about "all babies around the world" constitute any kind of proof of inherent nature of music.
Bernard since you're aware that you're far from first to make these observations ("nothing I have to say on the subject of music has any originality"), do you think you go too far in such generalizations as 'all Western music?'
After all, it has now been a Very Long Time since John Cage (for example) said "We must ask, was Beethoven right or was he wrong?" and answered "Beethoven was wrong," precisely in regard to the issue you are raising (although for a very different reason). And in that Very Long Time there have been many musicians who have essentially given up harmonic organization of sound. The standard responses are a) they don't count because they're still a tiny minority of music overall, and b) they don't count because what they're doing isn't music. What say you?
Posted by: ROYT at August 11, 2008 09:14 AMWhen the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake.
Posted by: joel hanes at August 11, 2008 10:51 AMMy comment was intended to be the opposite of anti-intellectual. I not sure I understand why you would want to characterize an intellectual disagreement as anti-intellectual. I'd also like to point out that I in no way feel as if I have lost something; there is no need to defend Western music, even if it were to turn out to be the most objectively and fantastically wrong music on earth. What most people in the West (broadly defined) call music is just one set of rules about how to produce pleasurable and organized noise. Hopefully I can explain my position more clearly below.
One, it is not even remotely difficult to understand harmonics and its relation to Western temperaments (harmony and tone, if not all of music, is math, as you point out). Suggesting otherwise is disingenuous and condescending. You yourself, in a blog post of all things, have done an excellent job explaining key elements of it structure.
Two, you continue to say that Western music is somehow more wrong than others, but you still haven't even tried to explain how it is that other equally arbitrary divisions of the octave (all the pentatonic scales, for instance) are less wrong. (A side point, the fact that some monkeys might prefer some intervals to others does less work here for you than you seem to hope. Do you think it establishes your Platonic music as a physical fact, and that will let you rank the wrongness of various musics?)
Third, there is a long history of completely self-conscious theorizing about the nature of harmony and its relation to the conventional scales used since the late 17th century. It would not have been news to Mozart or Beethoven, and certainly not Bach (whose well-tempered clavier was not necessarily even-tempered). This is a good example of technical, non-parochial and sophisticated discussion of Western harmony:
http://www.amazon.com/Theory-Harmony-California-Library-Reprint/dp/0520049446/ref=pd_sim_b_6
Fourth, I was not calling the issue of harmonics, temperament, Western music's history, and music theory banal or silly, I was calling your treatment of it banal or silly. To insist that "wrong" does not carry any possible negative meaning while at the same time claiming (without a defense) that Western music is more wrong is asinine. It is completely conventional and well-recognized by all serious students of Western music that its "classical" harmonic rules are a distortion of acoustic reality. This was evident at the beginning to musicians since at least the 16th century. What you seem to leave out is that this "error" allows a much greater complexity in the treatment of harmony which allowed this music to invent sounds that otherwise would not have been possible. You may well find this to be an unfortunate choice (and you would not be alone in that), but I stress again that this is only "wrong" in an either banal (that is, if every music is so, it is a useless term) or parochial (again, if you can show rather than assert how some choices are more wrong than others, please do so) sense.
Finally, I find it curious (as hinted at in a comment above) that your theory of music seems to be entirely missing concepts of texture, timbre, rhythm, duration, etc. Does Paul's voice not matter? Was Van Morrison's choice of guitar irrelevant? Once you have attempted to argue (rather than assert) why your use of the term " most wrong" is justified by letting us see some other tradition that you find to be non-pejoratively and less "wrong," I would be interested to learn if you consider the acoustic phenomena above to be part of music or accidental to it.
Posted by: Brian at August 11, 2008 01:01 PMBernard, Rob, Brian, ROYT, et al --
This is the best discussion about anything ever on this site, and not just because it hasn't required any effort on my part. I really appreciate it.
Posted by: Jonathan Schwarz at August 11, 2008 01:28 PMJon, I thought the huge argument you had with that "Arsenal of Democracy" chap was pretty enlightening.
Bernard, I'm still not sure what makes the twelve-tone scale (say, well-tempered) wronger than a pentatonic scale, so I'm waiting on that.
If you'd included just two sentences to the effect that the "wrongness" (non-judgmental) that you were describing had to do with division of the octave, all my bilious blather in your prior post would be obviated.
Posted by: Save the Oocytes at August 11, 2008 02:15 PM"hendrix is sex"?.. maybe so, but your blog is clearly masturbation.... the "sharp 9th" which you seem so proud to identify is, in fact, an 11th in the video i linked to. hendrix bends the string up (as you can see and hear) and that's why foxy lady doesn't sound like, for example, the predominant chord in purple haze. regardless, the sound hendrix is making is clearly a dissonance and not a unison, an octave, a third or a fifth. according to your post there is something asexual about this sound. according to hendrix there is something sexual about it. hmmm, welcome to life as a computer scientist... sometimes even great theories can be refuted by getting out of the lab a bit...
Posted by: oslo at August 11, 2008 05:09 PMbrian:
>>
It is completely conventional and well-recognized by all serious students of Western music that its "classical" harmonic rules are a distortion of acoustic reality.
i'm sorry i bored people on this blog with such trivialities. you're right, i should try to be less "completely conventional."
oslo:
nope, it's a sharp 9. you don't bend from a sharp 9 to an 11th, anyway. furthermore, your point makes no sense, because if it were an 11th, then that would be a subdominant an octave up, so it would NOT be a dissonance. you'd leave out the 3rd and you'd be golden. in other words, your post is a contradiction. i suspect you don't know much about rock guitar, do you? but then why do you bother making these technical points when you seem not to have a clue?
thanks for suggesting that i should get out of the lab more often. i've done that by playing rock and blues guitar in garage and college bands for 20 years.
> your blog is clearly masturbation
i do what i can to get by.
Thanks, Bernard. This is great news.
All these years I've been under the impression that it was my playing that was wrong. Now I find out it's THE SYSTEM!!
Finally! There's something that's not my fault!!
I can rest easy now, although I won't stop practicing. ;-)
Posted by: Winter at August 11, 2008 07:08 PMlet's go through the argument step by step in order of relevance (which i will prioritize).
- (83% relevance) - the main thrust of your original post was that dissonances are not sexual sounds. I disagree. i say that comment runs the range from meaningless to wrong. given all the other elements involved in music it is meaningless to say that a combination of notes or tones in and of themselves are sexual or not. and if you choose to ignore that point and bypass all the other elements of music and just listen to how dissonances are used in song then your point is simply wrong. I contend dissonances can be used for sexual music. I chose the example of Hendrix' Foxy Lady which we both agree employs a dissonance.
- (10% relevance)- you (in desperation?) said that "hendrix is sex, not masturbation"... Duh, wha??? Not sure what that means or how it relates to my point that Hendrix used dissonances to create sexual music. but if you actually meant something of significance in this statement and i just couldn't figure it out, it might warrant a 10% relevance so i gave you the benefit of the doubt.
- (5% relevance) - we both agree that in the song Foxy Lady, Hendrix uses a dissonance. I say that in the link I sent you he bends the note frequently thus making the tone go up (btw, i personally can bend a string up a step and a half. i suspect there are many, many others who can do the same. nonetheless, i give this point 0 relevance). I absolutely concede that an 11th is not a dissonance and I apologize for that mistake. But a note bent up through sounds that are not on a Western scale (which are sounds that the process of bending a string necessarily must pass through) definitely sound irregular and that is what Hendrix is doing. (And yet, again more relevantly, it is my believe that the song sounds and was intended to sound sexual)
- (2%)- I intimated that you are kind of a nerdy professor type. You contend that is not the case! And you cite your 20 years of garage rocker experience as evidence. I'm not sure these points (nerdy professor versus guy who spends 20 years playing in low level rock bands) are in contention. But i am willing and happy to concede this point as it only distracts from the more relevant issues (as well as the fact that you have demonstrated feisty, sex and rock-n-roll strewn, arguing tactics).
Rock on!
Posted by: oslo at August 11, 2008 07:55 PMSorry, Oslo, but what's your problem? Why do you have to be so hostile from the get-go? You make a technical point, which happens to be flat wrong, and then you accuse me of general ignorance " about non-orchestral music" in your very first post.
Why can't you be a little more civil? Wouldn't life be better for everyone?
well, hold on a sec...
if i had known i was wrong in my first post, obviously i wouldn't have accused you of general ignorance of non-orchestral music. it wasn't an insult but (i think) a fair explanation to how you came up with the part of your initial post i still disagree with. it was after you pointed out my mistake to me that i apologized (see above) without sarcasm, moved on, and re-affirmed (with sarcasm) my central point - that dissonances can be sexual in spite of your argument (more or less) to the contrary.
your very first post to me walked right by this main point and suggested i was mistaking sex for masturbation and didn't know hendrix from the indigo girls. i thought your pose was funny and responded in similar tone (i thought).
so, to close down the issue, i'll leave you with these two thoughts:
- maybe you're funnier than i am, or maybe i'm just thicker skinned than you are but i didn't and don't have a problem with the tone of your posts or mine. as it's your forum though, i'm going to bow out because my intention is not to bug you, but was to get a rebuttal to my initial and main point.
- and i still contend (as i have every post) and would enjoy hearing - mean that sincerely, btw - how you reconcile the fact that music with dissonance in it can be interpreted as sexual in light of what you said in your initial post?
Posted by: oslo at August 12, 2008 02:58 PMI enjoyed the explanation. I am not sure I understand how the harmonics work, but I guess you had to simplify something. I was under the impression that the eight-note scale was designed to allow a variety of different "musical-sounding" notes and still be easy to learn. I have heard people say that the 10-note and 12-note scales allow more self-referencing harmony, but are substantially harder to learn. The 10-note songs I have heard sound bad to me, but it may be that I simply don't like that particular composer.
To me, the ultimate test is still whether it makes me feel good. Mozart Horn Concertos make me feel good. Could he have written something in a 10-note-scale system that also makes me feel good? I suppose so, but I would want to listen to it and pass my own judgement.
I have heard people say that in cultures where they only ever hear 12-note-scale songs from birth, American music sounds like trash to them. Yet a few decades later, the 12-note-scale is their "grandfather's music", and they are happily recording Elvis rip-offs.
Is this true, or is this simply a Western fantasy created by the imperialist pop music industry? Hopefully, someone with your background can fill me in.
Posted by: FutureDave at August 13, 2008 08:05 AM
