What is really a "music theory"?

[jancivil]

ask: so "WHAT is music? Or, why there are people for whom it is important to throat sing even singing different notes with different vocal cords, something I could never do, nor do I find that sound pleasant, I'd call it "noise", and yet for Tuva singers it is beautiful music, now explain that... etc...

I don't have to. I find it beautiful myself. Objectively.

To call it "noise" is easily explained as prejudice, preconceptions and a heavy filter from a certain experience and a certain willingness to dismiss. It seems peculiar to see that on a forum where discussion of synthesis techniques is so common. So with vocal chords doing something which is very like and sounds very like opening and closing a filter, which opens up and then diminishes harmonic distortion, it must mean that you have an expectation 'there should be this limit, and doggone it there isn't'. it's closing your mind, I don't know why that seems like the thing to do. Not that I'd be too interested in studying on it.

Long thread here years back which had some real contentious stuff going on, music vs noise.
I never read much about John Cage until last month, and it's still a bit of a slog for me because there is so much philosophy, but before I really considered to be a composer I decided that definitions of music, like of art, are made by individuals and there is no objective definition. What is art? It's when you place that frame around it, figuratively or literally. I can experience noise in the street as music by conceptualizing it. The frame can be as basic as start and stop of a recording of it. The light bulb moment here was provided by 4'33" by Cage, of course; the pianist doesn't do anything, the piece of music is the ambient noise right then, right there.

[goldenhelix]

... meet the subjects and ask: so "WHAT is music? Or, why there are people for whom it is important to throat sing even singing different notes with different vocal cords, something I could never do, nor do I find that sound pleasant, I'd call it "noise", and yet for Tuva singers it is beautiful music, now explain that... etc...

To call it "noise" is easily explained as prejudice, preconceptions and a heavy filter from a certain experience and a certain willingness to dismiss. It seems peculiar to see that on a forum where discussion of synthesis techniques is so common. So with vocal chords doing something which is very like and sounds very like opening and closing a filter, which opens up and then diminishes harmonic distortion, it must mean that you have an expectation 'there should be this limit, and doggone it there isn't'. it's closing your mind, I don't know why that seems like the thing to do. Not that I'd be too interested in studying on it.

Long thread here years back which had some real contentious stuff going on, music vs noise.
I never read much about John Cage until last month, and it's still a bit of a slog for me because there is so much philosophy, but before I really considered to be a composer I decided that definitions of music, like of art, are made by individuals and there is no objective definition. What is art? It's when you place that frame around it, figuratively or literally. I can experience noise in the street as music by conceptualizing it. The frame can be as basic as start and stop of a recording of it. The light bulb moment here was provided by 4'33" by Cage, of course; the pianist doesn't do anything, the piece of music is the ambient noise right then, right there.

Well in the case of Cage's piece in question it is more than just the silence. In fact, most authentically "experimental" music is not just about the sound or lack of sound but, more accurately, about breaking down the relationship between the performance and the observer. As you say, art comes about when you place a frame around it - to this I can more or less agree. It follows that what really defines art of any kind, as universally as I believe is possible, is that it is what causes an observer to think artistically about something. This is, of course, a circular definition, but I believe in that regard it is ideally suited for describing something that cannot easily be defined. The work of Cage and others like him cause you, as the observer, to think about the performance and experience it in a very raw way, stripped of as much as one can possibly strip away. If you are watching the piece performed, it is certainly about the silence but it is as much about the pianist seating himself at the piano, the sound of the bench sliding, the creak of the lid being taken off the keys, his/her mannerisms, the sound of the audience, etc. It is all part of it. Hearing a recording, of course, some aspects of this are lost but some of it is still there. It is also about symbols - can a piece of music be a written thing, even if that written thing basically says "don't play"? I think you get the idea. There are so many dimensions to it.

Anyways, I'm not trying to correct you for the sake of being a jerk, I just figured you'd be interested in that other aspect to it. If you haven't already, I highly recommend the book "Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond" by the composer Michael Nyman.

[StudioDave]

... I highly recommend the book "Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond" by the composer Michael Nyman.

Excellent recommendation, a great favorite. I'd be surprised if jancivil doesn't already know this one by heart.

Nyman is a fine composer himself, btw.

Best,

dp

[goldenhelix]

... I highly recommend the book "Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond" by the composer Michael Nyman.

Excellent recommendation, a great favorite. I'd be surprised if jancivil doesn't already know this one by heart.

Nyman is a fine composer himself, btw.

Best,

dp

Indeed!

[jancivil]

Long thread here years back which had some real contentious stuff going on, music vs noise.
I never read much about John Cage until last month, and it's still a bit of a slog for me because there is so much philosophy, but before I really considered to be a composer I decided that definitions of music, like of art, are made by individuals and there is no objective definition. What is art? It's when you place that frame around it, figuratively or literally. I can experience noise in the street as music by conceptualizing it. The frame can be as basic as start and stop of a recording of it. The light bulb moment here was provided by 4'33" by Cage, of course; the pianist doesn't do anything, the piece of music is the ambient noise right then, right there.

Well in the case of Cage's piece in question it is more than just the silence. In fact, most authentically "experimental" music is not just about the sound or lack of sound but, more accurately, about breaking down the relationship between the performance and the observer. As you say, art comes about when you place a frame around it - to this I can more or less agree. It follows that what really defines art of any kind, as universally as I believe is possible, is that it is what causes an observer to think artistically about something. This is, of course, a circular definition, but I believe in that regard it is ideally suited for describing something that cannot easily be defined. The work of Cage and others like him cause you, as the observer, to think about the performance and experience it in a very raw way, stripped of as much as one can possibly strip away. If you are watching the piece performed, it is certainly about the silence but it is as much about the pianist seating himself at the piano, the sound of the bench sliding, the creak of the lid being taken off the keys, his/her mannerisms, the sound of the audience, etc. It is all part of it. Hearing a recording, of course, some aspects of this are lost but some of it is still there. It is also about symbols - can a piece of music be a written thing, even if that written thing basically says "don't play"? I think you get the idea. There are so many dimensions to it.

... I just figured you'd be interested in that other aspect to it.

I'm not very interested in that tbh. Like I said the book on Cage was a bit of a slog for me because of all the philosophical considerations. As a young person I will've been more interested in that.

I have messed with the considerations of what an audience will do with the work. I am not an optimist nor a pessimist. My expectations of a classical music audience is not particularly higher than of a rock music audience. This at one time was disillusioning.

I have not had the experience personally of an 'art' audience really, other than something I pulled off at SF MOMA way back in the day, and the political aspect of this show plus my country sangin' added to the entertainment value for the audience which gave us a standing ovation in the end. But this was a mixture of people there for Franz Kline's opening and people we pulled normally and the people who were there for the free LSD.

Once I did an art project which located specifically in the Authentic, in C&W music and that milieu but messed with that in numerous ways. The only venue for us was rock shows in little clubs. But it was an Art Project. Unbeknownst to the pedal steel player who was that guy if you get my drift. So we wound up thru our local rock venue connections with a support slot for THE MENTORS. We actually were considering how difficult and expensive would a chicken wire fence around the stage be, as part of the "art", part of the entertainment factore and for actual protection (you'd have to know from The Mentors to get that). But I cut the end of my middle finger off in an accident holding a work party together when a window broke so we did not get to find out. But this other stuff would be reading about people and is kind of a high-falutin' reading a magazine consideration for me.

I'm interested in music qua music and qua sound.

I found this [interview with Morton Feldman] which I really find agreeable:

MF: [...] I think that unlike most music the processes involved are more directly related to the persons who are doing it, [...]

C: Following on from this, do you think that indeterminate music, your music, is for yourself or for everybody?

MF: I think it is for everybody; I think that all art has its special audience. You have the certain types of faces that you see at a Renaissance concert, at a Wagner concert. It has its audience as well as any other music has its audience. All audiences are departmentalised; so I think it is a kind of fantasy to think of a "serial" audience. I met someone who could only listen to Mendelssohn: he was an audience of one.

L: As long as you have an audience, no matter how large or small it is, your music has a reason.

MF: Well, one is a majority of one!

L: Do you think of your music in any way as experimental, or is it something in itself?

MF: No, I don't think of my music as experimental: I think of Beethoven as experimental, because he was really looking for something; he was looking to break the Bechstein because it didn't have enough tone; I am not looking for anything.

So when I see the term 'experimental' I'm reminded always of Varèse who said his music was certainly not experimental, he did his experimenting before composing the thing. I have things I couldn't explain to anyone but I scanned my mind for an instance I would call experimental that I have in my published oeuvre but the one thing which is arguably that, I managed to push things around to where it all works kind of to spec.

[jancivil]

Morton Feldman interview some more

I like that particular type of music that does not push. I spent the weekend with Karlheinz Stockhausen, and he had a lot of my scores, and he took them to his room and said goodnight. And he came down in the morning and he said, "I know you have no system, but what is your secret?" And I said to him, "Well, Karlheinz, I have no secret but if I could say anything to you, I advise you to leave the sounds alone; don't push them; because they're very much like human beings - if you push them, they push you back. So if I have a secret it would be, 'don't push the sounds'." And he leaned over me and he said, "Not even a little bit?"

- http://www.cnvill.net/mfopus2.htm

[jancivil]

In the baroque context, the V-IV progression is somewhat surprising, whereas in the context of reggae, the same V-IV progression is commonplace. If the listener is to correctly anticipate the progression of acoustical events, she must somehow bracket or segregate two different sets of expectations . . . It is the ability of brains to form multiple schemas that provides the psychological foundation for distinguishing different styles and genres. Without this foundation, baroque and reggae would meld into a single general musical schema. Our experiences with baroque harmony would interfere with our ability to accurately predict harmonic progressions in reggae, and vice versa.

This made me laugh out loud. A couple of times. I don't know what 'Huron' is trying to accomplish, so if I lack the requisite something something don't mind me, I'm an idiot. He's saying 'we can in fact walk and chew gum at the same time because we have teh brain for it.'? That's reductive, I know.

Reggae doesn't care about the V to IV 'problem'. I don't have the requisite thing to talk about reggae much but it isn't going to be very different than blues going V to IV I don't reckon. It's not a 'listener, to correctly anticipate the progression of acoustical events' problem, it's CONVENTION. The 'baroque context' is probably that V is your dominant harmony, a convention. V going to IV, the main subdominant harmony in the convention is going backwards, because the convention is all about propulsion to its necessary conclusion, I. Drive to I. Subdominant harmony is kind of a waystation to the Dominant harmony which is satisfied finally only by return to Tonic harmony, I. V - I.

Blues, and one does suppose this reggae 'progression' isn't worried about V - I like that. Conventional 12-bar blues is basically I - IV - I; V - IV - I. Why that is may interest some people, but that isn't 'Music Theory'. "Music Theory" doesn't involve theories, it's a misnomer. It's descriptive of known moves and principles which work to make a style that style; and to some extent prescriptive as it gets known and in the western world written in books because it's known to produce that result, which is said to be good. So the Music Theory of music that's based in The Blues may cross the Theory of Baroque Music (whatever that means) in a Venn Diagram, but it's not made to give the same result.

So, yeah, the fifth is mo' less omnipresent acoustically so it's going to come up in a lot of musics. V - I is about tension-resolution and tends to bring in teh V7 which is a stronger tension (why? why does the chicken cross the road?) rather than a problem of the listener sorting 'acoustical events'.
The V to IV is, I don't know why that is either. It's conventional. And I for one, with my half-formed brain when I was... pretty young, found this the case.

Susan McClary did some thinking on the motivations in her book Feminine Endings; a primary premise here is that your <V - I> was wrapped up in the male sexual drive, and the word Dominant, iirc, figures in here somewhere. I didn't read the whole book and what I did read was a while ago. It's of passing interest to me and deals in the why a bit, in order to spin off from that and say something in the realm of Aesthetics. And so, as far as I can tell it's got more on the ball than that quote up there.
It's more 'music theory' than some of this other jazz. If <music theory> was actually 'theory', I wouldn't care a lot about it, but the 'music theory course' may be quite useful to a practical musician. Take what you need and leave the rest kind of thing, maybe.


Ben Watson in The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play asserted that Zappa proves McClary's thesis by the Classical Section in Easy Meat.