be.jazz comments
I think both tin pan alley and jazz are derived from parade band music to a great extent either directly or indirectly. Blues and Gospel strike me as pretty different, especially rhythmically, but harmonically, too, except when they're not. People keep mixing styles, always have, always will. And then there's country music.
I think Western music is unique because it's highly developed harmonically, and I think this has a lot to do with the European rationalism that allowed Europe to bypass the rest of the world technologically half a millenium ago. Sophisticated rhythm is largely a matter of performance. It comes from your body; it's correct if it feels right. The rhythms that can be notated are extremely simple.
I think your posts about the rhythmic rigidity of rock and the manipulativity (word?) of electronic dance "music" were pretty spot on. The modern ear is less attuned to melody, without doubt, but also less attuned to rhythm. What it's attuned to is crap.
I've just realised that for some reason, the conclusion to the post is cut off... I can't remember specifically what I wrote in it, so so be it...
"I think Western music is unique because it's highly developed harmonically"
Are there no other examples of highly-developed harmonic music?
"I think this has a lot to do with the European rationalism that allowed Europe to bypass the rest of the world technologically half a millenium ago"
I often think of the tempered scale as a result of this too (even if apparently, like so many other things, the Chinese were theorising it first).
"Sophisticated rhythm is largely a matter of performance. It comes from your body; it's correct if it feels right."
This makes me think of Ornette Coleman's "on-the-fly" approach to harmony, where harmony is determined in the performance. What do you think?
"The modern ear is less attuned to melody, without doubt, but also less attuned to rhythm. What it's attuned to is crap."
I'm a believer in the historical stability of the crap rate. I see it differently.
I don't know whether the number of musicians is going up or down, but my impression is that for non-musicians, music is becoming something to be recieved in an increasingly passive fashion. Maybe material for a subsequent post.
[Aside: funny enough, a TextAd titled "Lefties got you down?" was followed up by one sub-titled "Lefty's Unite!-because there's more to it than Fox tells you"]
slow responding, kuz busy, getting sick, replacing my ancient mac with a slightly less ancient used mac.
"Are there no other examples of highly-developed harmonic music?"
Nothing approaching European, as far as I know, unless their European influenced, like jazz.
"I often think of the tempered scale as a result of this too (even if apparently, like so many other things, the Chinese were theorising it first)."
Oh, my god, I've heard a lot of Chinese music in my life, and I really really really don't like it, especially that stuff they play in the Buddhist vegetarian restaurants. 5 notes. No half steps. No tension. No release. The Chinese tended to invent stuff but left it to the Europeans to develop.
"I'm a believer in the historical stability of the crap rate. I see it differently. "
I just happened to be looking at Brad Delong's online book Slouching Towards Utopia?: The Economic History of the Twentieth Century
, and a paragraph from chapter 3 struck me as relevant:
And there are times of retrogression. Go to the Musee de Cluny in Paris and look at the crowns of the Visigoths. The Visigoths were a tribe of barbarians that conquered and ruled what is now Spain for more than two centuries at the end of the Roman Empire and before the Muslim invasion of Iberia. Their crowns show pathetically poor workmanship: the Visigoths in 600 A.D. could not find any goldsmiths in Spain capable of doing work even one-tenth as competent as was routinely done in the Iberian city of New Carthage--now Cartagena--800 years before.
Actually, I don't think there happens to be any paucity of good stuff right now, rather an unusually high proportion of listeners seems to prefer crap, especially here in LaLa land, which is why I can hear so much good music for free. As you might imagine, I've got an elaborate theory about this which I can explain if you're truly interested.
"The Chinese tended to invent stuff but left it to the Europeans to develop."
Like fireworks powder...
OK, what's the theory? The more elaborate the better.
Actually, I'm currently too sick and lazy to even remember what I was thinking about, sorry.
Anyways, some time ago I read a little book called Makers of China, mainly because it had a chapter about Li Shihlin, whom one of my ESL students had named as an example of a “good Emperor.” The book was a collaborator between a Chinese and an Briton, consisting of a mixture of history, folklore and Cultural Revolution propoganda, written when many Westerners were Snowed (as in Edgar) by the latter, and a running theme was how much more technologically had been China had been than the West until not too long ago. A similar idea ran through a dull bit of Chinese cinematic jingoism called “The Opium Wars,” which I saw a few years ago. In one memorably silly scene, a character opined that chopsticks were superior to Western cutlery, since you can use the former with one hand.
I thought all this was pretty effectively skewered by David S. Landes’ The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, in which Landes gives example after example of the Chinese stumbling across potentially useful ideas, and failing to see their use. He also shows how, in their arrogance, they rejected the technologies that the West had developed, and he contrasts this with Meiji Japan, which began a national crusade to master Western technologies and science.
I don't know what you're referring to when you say that the Chinese theorized about the tempered scale. Please explain. It does occur to me that the pentatonic music I've heard played on the pipa sounds quite a lot more like Western intonation than what you hear in most non-Western music, but I associate just intonation with the chromatic scale, which the Chinese certainly developed it. Indeed, they never even got to 7-note scales, which is to say that their music is less advanced than, say, Gregorian Chant.
I trust you can decipher what I meant out of what I actually typed.
"I don't know what you're referring to when you say that the Chinese theorized about the tempered scale."
I can't remember where I read about it (or even if it was in print or online), but apparently they started theorising about it a bit before the Europeans did.
From earlier on:
"Oh, my god, I've heard a lot of Chinese music in my life, and I really really really don't like it, especially that stuff they play in the Buddhist vegetarian restaurants."
Is that really representative?
No, it just encapsulates what's worst of it. I spent about 4 years in Taiwan and never had a moment's relief from the pentatonic scale. Or firecrackers. I do like their vegetarian food, however.
I also did develop a perverse taste for the Ayleresque clangor of their funeral parades. Still pentatonic, though.
Incidentally, another thought that I've had was that one of the big changes of the 60s was that the basis for black popular music changed from jazz and blues to secularized gospel i.e. soul and its offspring. Generally jazz and blues, all the parts serve a rhythmic function, and there is a fairly close relationship between harmony and melody (the idea of swinging and playing changes is there in rudimentary form in a country blues singer/guitarist). In gospel, the chords and rhythms would tend to lock in the vocalist were he to follow them; however, the tendency is to wail over them ecstatically (you might say, symbolically, to transcend them), with little reference to the underlying rhythm or harmony. Again, I realize that I generalize. It also occurs to me that, while the cliche about rock’n’roll is that it’s white people ripping off the blues, a lot of the rock beginning in the ‘60s, e.g. most of the Stones, sound more to me like white trying to play soul.
So are we saying that harmonic complexity is an historical anomaly?
I'm loving your multi-posting style, BTW. Boosts my numbers, too.
If you mean the royal "we," meaning "I", in other words you, then I dunno, but if you mean "you," meaning me, then yeah.
However, lots of cultures managed to get past the pentatonic, although I think a lot of the "folk" or "synthetic" scales, especially if they use weird intonation, don't lend themselves quite as naturally to harmony and counterpoint as western scales.
You are aware that it's kuz there's a 1000 word limit, non?
On second thought, our point was not that harmony is an anomaly, but that developed harmony is. Similarly, there have been a number of styles that involved improvising over song forms, but none developed as far as jazz. Now, we don't know about you, but we really need some sleep.
It was the fanciful "we" as in you as leading this thread's collective opinion.
I'm aware of the word limit, but several of your posts are well below it. I'm not complaining, though.
"Similarly, there have been a number of styles that involved improvising over song forms, but none developed as far as jazz."
I've been thinking about that recently. Other forms of improvisation I know of seem to be modal, thus eliminating a lot of difficulties and making it more song-like. Maybe I'll start a discussion about it on Jazz Corner.
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