turnermoran -> RE: Music theory is way too complicated (Nov. 16 2010 9:02:30)
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Indeed, music theory is complicated, but much of what I've read in the thread is really based on a "vertical" way of thinking. Which is probably the most complicated, and the most mathematically involved. Most, if not all, is correct, but it's very..for lack of a better word: jazz like. In other words, when Charlie Parker and the be-boppers came along in the 1940's, jazz - and the music theory used to explain it - became all about vertical stacks of notes, and how melodies fit against those stacks, as a way of explaining if a given pitch sounded consonant or dissonant against the sound of the underlying chord. Thus we talk of Amin(maj7)9/13, etc etc and whether a melodic minor fits better than a dorian-add major 7 scale, etc etc Which, IMO, is a complicated way to get into harmony for the uninitiated. Yes, sooner or later you have to study chords, and intervals, and all that. But personally, I'm a fan of looking at it this way: the first instrument is the voice "music", in the very beginning, was probably just rhythm (banging rocks, natural objects, etc), and melody, in the form of the voice and despite the fact that 1000's of years past between the cavemen and classical music, where much happened, what we have ended up with (in Western music; as opposed to Indian classical for example) is The Major Scale. And the major scale has 2 important features: If you go Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti.... and stop right there on Ti... it sounds off. It wants to to all the way and stop at Do, one octave above the starting point. A similar thing happens with Fa and Mi (although less intense). In other words, the 1/2 steps in the scales have tendencies to want to resolve. The 4th note of the scale (Fa) wants to go to the 3rd (Mi), and the 7th note (Ti) wants to go to home to the 8th (Do). If you look at the V7 chord, you can see that it wants to go to the I chord because the scale tones of a V7 are Sol+Ti+Re+Fa (5th, 7th, 2nd, 4th), and the scale tones of the I are Do+Mi+Sol (1st, 3rd, 5th). The 4th and 7th, contained in the V7 chord, resolve to the 1st and 3rd, contained in the I chord. All "harmony" does is play with this, either by using it directly, or by playing with our expectations and conditioned ideas of what sounds resolved, unresolved, dissonant or consonant. I think every aspect of our musical system can be traced back to this. Secondary dominants, false resolutions, modes and modal music, atonal music. Now, I'll confess that saying it's all about melody is a simplification, because the interval created between the 4th and 7th of the scale (contained in the V7) is just that: a interval. a stack. not a melody. And that interval (the #4/b5) - and how it resolves to a major 3rd interval - is chord based. But I still think it's melody based, since the first chords were probably created by 2 singers, who thought they were each creating melodies...or thinking melodically at least. But that's pure conjecture for sure! So is any of this babble relevant to defining what a Adim7 is? No. But if we make harmony the pursuit of naming big stacks of chords without looking at the melodies created by the notes in the stacks and how the notes move from chord to chord, then harmony is really just a bunch of math, and "play this on that", "make this chord by stacking this on that". To me, harmony is just a lot of melodies, moving at the same time. But that's just me..
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