Music Theory

When we talk about ‘balancing’ a chord, we usually think of this as a metaphor to express the optimum volume relationships between its constituent notes. I’ve been thinking recently, though, that we could take the metaphor a little more seriously and replace the discourse of amplitude with that of whose job it is to anchor the chord in place – which is the load-bearing part, perhaps.

I recently came across a post on the Dilbert Blog in which Scott Adams was toying with the idea of developing a theory of flavour analogous with musical structures of pitch:

I believe that flavor can also be reduced to a set of engineering guidelines. Specifically, I think you could categorize most flavors the way you categorize music, with high notes and low notes. Garlic and onions and pepper feel like low notes to me, whereas lemon and cilantro are like high notes. I've noticed that the best food has a combination of both, just like music. I'll bet an experienced chef could categorize most flavors in a way that would allow you to know if you were breaking any rules, such as cooking with all low notes. And I'll bet the high notes can't be more than say 10% of what you experience, in some subjective sense, without overwhelming the flavor.

Now I found this interesting in several dimensions.

When I was about 12 I was flicking through the textbook we were using in our music class at school when I should have been doing something else, and found a diagram that looked a bit like this:

I think it was in a chapter about Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, though the thing that I found interesting was that it also described the shape of the Clementi sonatina I was learning at the time. I don’t recall what I was supposed to be learning in that lesson, but the revelation that you could represent an entire piece of music in a one-page picture continues to be useful to this day.

The Romantic idealOne of the aesthetic truisms that I absorbed during my undergraduate education, and have spent the subsequent years questioning,* is that great music has the quality of unity. This was purported to arrive in the music as the unconscious result of the composer’s genius, but could be uncovered via technical analysis. There were different dimensions in which you could identify this unity, Schenkerian tonal coherence and more or less hidden motivic connection in the manner of Réti being chief among them.

Even as a student, I was faintly perplexed by the equation of a spiritual attribute with concrete, technical details. I had a composer friend who was deeply taken by this aesthetic, and I used to ask him why, if the point about unity in great music was that it was created unconsciously, did he spend so much conscious effort constructing the motivic structure of his music? (He, on the other hand, felt I wasn’t taking our art sufficiently seriously when I upheld a valid role for whim in the compositional process.)

When I first started singing lessons at age 14, I was introduced to those standards of voice training, Vaccai’s exercises and Schirmer’s collection of 24 Italian songs and arias. At this stage, I was singing Italian phonetically – I knew the general gist of the words from the translations, but in expressive terms it was much like playing Mozart arias on the clarinet (which I also did around that age). Then at university I took Italian classes for 3 hours a week for a year, thinking it would be useful for someone taking voice lessons (and actually, interesting for someone who liked studying languages).

It was some years later again when I returned to the old Schirmer volume to revisit songs I had learned in my teens and had the bizarre experience of going through the motor actions I had learned to create the sounds, but now understanding the words I was singing. Bizarre and rather fun, I should add – I always enjoy the sensation when bits of my brain that hadn’t really connected before discover they have something in common.

A rather nice way of showing vocal ranges visually, from PhonatureThis week saw the addition to my arrangements catalogue of information about the ranges for each part. It took quite a long time to work through all parts of every arrangement, but I’m hoping it will save you time in emailing me to ask, and me time in answering. And the process gave me lots of opportunity to reflect on the meaning and usefulness of this information.

At the most basic level, range is the primary criterion for deciding on an arrangement’s suitability for a particular ensemble. If the person singing that part doesn’t have notes used at either top or bottom, there’s no point attempting the song, as it will always over-stretch the group – and at key musical points, too. (Extremes of high and low notes never appear casually or en passant.)

But range doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about how a song lies on the voices.

Henry CowardI have been re-reading Henry Coward’s Choral Technique and Interpretation and it does not get less fascinating on re-acquaintance. Written in 1914, it is simultaneously a fascinating document of the musical practices and cultural values of his time, and a timeless statement of good practice for performing musicians. It is both intensely practical and deeply thought-through. Coward’s own character shines through as both strong-minded and idiosyncratic in all sorts of ways. He must have been wonderful to sing for.

The chapter on musical expression lays down a series of rules for beauty, at first in terms of painting (he credits Ruskin with putting him on this track), and then articulated as musical guidelines.

Regular readers will have noticed that I like to draw on the ideas of Leonard B. Meyer when I think about music. I was first introduced to his work in my first year at university, and it had quite a big impact on me, as it was my first real encounter with the act of theorising music. Hitherto most of the writing about music I had seen simply described what was going on, whereas this introduced me to the possibilities of explaining it.

(This early encounter also provided the occasion for possibly the most useful thing anyone ever said to me during my education. My tutor, Alan Rump, had sent me away to read some Meyer, and I came back saying tentatively that I found it very interesting but wasn’t sure that I agreed with it. ‘Good God, woman,’ he roared, ‘You’re not supposed to agree with books, you’re supposed to think about them.’)

Anyway, some recent listening experiences got me thinking about his implication-realisation model of musical meaning again.