There is probably a yin yang concept here. In order to break the rules its helpful to have a basic understanding of them at least. Otherwise there is a chance a self professed "visionary" might just be hitting the same notes over and over.

 

The quote is from a book by Stefan Kostka. If you read the whole summary you will understand the quote in its right context.

 

Last edited: Nov 19, 2018

i have to call bullshit on this.
"non-analytic pre-destined weak-structure followers". seriously? you really have a low opinion of other people's minds. Yes lots of pop music is crap, but there is still skill to the process, as much as i hate to admit it...
The level of unfounded elitism shown in your posts annoys me. Give anything outside your one dimensional view of sound a chance!
Do you spend hours looking for new and interesting music from all corners of the globe? Share it with us!
or is there a narrow spectrum of the "right" music?
One persons idea of complexity in music might be noise to another. Timbre is often more important to a listener than pitch. why shouldn't it be? Producers spend a lot of time on it, to get THAT sound....something primal that goes deep....

Auditory Roughness (excerpts from Vassilakis, 2005)
DEFINITION
"The term roughness describes an aural sensation and was introduced in the acoustics and psychoacoustics literature by Helmholtz (end of the nineteenth century) to label harsh, raspy, hoarse sounds. Within the Western musical tradition, auditory roughness constitutes one of the perceptual correlates of the multidimensional [!} concept of dissonance.
Roughness is one aspect of timbre and one of the perceptual manifestations of the energy content of amplitude fluctuation. The reason signals of all harmonic intervals other than unisons exhibit amplitude fluctuations is physical and is related to the phenomenon of interference. The reason why the signals of some of these intervals correspond to rough sounds is physiological and has to do mainly with the mechanical properties of the inner ear."http://musicalgorithms.ewu.edu/learnmore/MoreRoughness.html

Oh well, time to fire up the evil Ableton and make some lowbrowed non-analytic pre-destined weak-structured art........

 

FINALLY

Ok thread author, you should have been more specific. It would have been helpful if you indicated "In regard to tonal music Stefan Kostka states that...."
Then it would not have been so generic and ambiguous.


For some reason I feel like the guy in the move "The wedding singer" when his wife turned up after the wedding from not showing up...
"Information that would have been helpful - yesterday".

 

I would scope that but no time.. this trap kit money isn't going to just jump into my pockets... Hurry up and buy at www.trapmoneyloveyoulongtime4life.com dawg

 

It happens very occasionally and for the historical consciousness not just for myself but for the others too. I don't think it deals a huge blow to anyone.

Yes, but millions of them do exist that you can't even memorize them even in a long time. When you see post-tonal composers and their successors broke or disregarded them and made something unique, strong motives for learning them decline gradually to some point that wobbly feelings dominate and oneself becomes mistrustful of their practicality in new compositions.

 

From that book:
With some important exceptions, jazz does not seem to have exerted much influence on concert music after World War II (i.e., since 1945).

Interpretation:
It indicates that the concert music is not based on improvisation or accident. Now suppose how many people use improvisation or other similar ways as cure-all panacea or magic wand for making music.



This quotation is gold. Why shouldn't I use it when it is better than my heuristic methods of reasoning in some cases?

 

There are two pitches. The prefix di is of Greek origin and implies "double" hence when combined with tonic, gin is added and the Queen is never without a drink. Singing in 13/5 time has been banned since Enrico Caruso attempted an aria at La Scala and his tongue super glued itself to the roof of his mouth. Roofing experts declared the roof unsafe and the shingles were replaced with tiles and from that day on he sang like Dame Nellie Melba imitating a pomeranian during mating.

 

Another good example for clarifying my previous comment. A great supplier.

 

It's possibly worth noting that most of the comments regardless of how accurate or inaccurate they are, only apply to the even-tempered scale.
Enter into the realm of microtones and it is a different ballpark. if anyone wants to look further, fine. If not, as you were.
- Rather than a Wiki link here's a Brittannica link that is a little more accurate:
https://www.britannica.com/art/microtonal-music


If people are going to point out flaws or bonuses from different styles whether isolation of Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique or jazz harmonic concepts, they are still based on even-tempered scale concepts.
Am I saying they are limited? No, you have to decide that for yourself, read the link.

 

What do you think about discarding the pitch aspect of music and focusing on other aspects. Isn't it a smart suggestion?

Many people do it and have a very happy life like this:

 

As somebody wiser than myself once said "talking about music is like dancing about architecture"

 

Any time one is performing or just moving for movements sake or in celebration of the Divine and they are within the boundaries of a man-made structure, technically they are dancing about architecture.

 

my theory is that music theory is just....a theory.
I grudgingly learn bits of it to help with my productions but I find it clunky and counterintuitive and not that relevant to my way of working. I never really enjoyed the whole major/minor thing and with both guitar and production i use modal scales. Well, sort of...[cue random cut and paste from google]
"Modal" and "tonal" both describe works that:

1. have one defined "home" pitch, or "tonal center," around which the melody and harmony are based;
2. have only one tonal center at a time, though that tonal center can change throughout a piece; and
3. use a seven-note diatonic scale as their pitch collections.

The difference between modal and tonal are in the harmonic languages surrounding the tonal center. Tonality implies the system of common-practice harmony well-established by the eighteenth century that uses major and minor keys. The tonal center of a tonal work is the first note of the major or minor scale in use as the pitch collection. The harmonic implications of tonality are more than just the use of major and minor scales, as functional harmony is also a feature of tonal music. The progression from the dominant sonority (a major triad with or without a minor seventh from the triad root based on the fifth note of the major or minor scale in use, or a similar-sounding substitute such as a fully-diminished seventh chord based on the leading tone) to the tonic triad to end a work is just one characteristic of functional harmony. This characteristic is so important that, if the dominant sonority is instead a minor chord (thereby lacking the leading tone), the work no longer sounds tonal. This means that even in a minor key, the seventh note of the scale is very often raised so that it becomes the leading tone.

So.......seems a bit overcomplicated to me when i can just make music and hear relationships between sounds.
Then there's ...[cue random cut and paste from google]
"Psychoacoustics combines the study of acoustics and auditory physiology to determine the relationship between a sound's characteristics and the auditory sensation that it provokes."
Then there's... learning more about Ableton, VSTs, artwork, promotion..,
So if someone can come up with a grand unified theory of music including the above, including rhythm, neurology, the effects of psychoactive substances on sound perception and put it into audiobook form then I might be interested, but 18th century "rules" for music aren't that interesting to me...just a necessary evil because cultural rules for music are conditioned into us from the womb onward.

 

@ICWC

I think about melody and musicality.
You raise a thread without clarification, in this case under "pitch" then criticise someone for staying on topic?

Music is to be played and tooloud nailed it.

 

No, don't get me wrong. Exactly the opposite. I just alluded to the complexity of the subject matter.

As you know there's nothing as unique interpretation in dealing with the pitch combinations and every composer uses them in whatever way he/she likes and causes trouble for the theoreticians to theorize them. This problem seems unsolvable for evermore.

 

There is a simple explanation to all those conflicts :
old vs new
group vs selfish
history and culture vs nihilist present
...
I could keep the list running but you get the point

Humanity migrated from Genos (universal) to Demos (delimited).
At the end of the trip (today), most ppl are just selfish mentally ill individuals.
Me included, of course.
And even there ... there is more division : ppl split themselves into pieces.
Meaning MORE mental illness.


And what ppl call "post modern music" (or similar) is just music made by ppl without past, and so without future.
They wanted their "tabula rasa" from the past ... and they succeeded : no more past, no more present and no more future.

Post modern music is just the final form of nihilist music.
Same with anything only some mentally ill ppl call "art".
Same with democracy just being the final form of dictature

Remember my introduction about "Genos" and "Demos" ?
Genos was "all". So Demos is the opposite : "nothing"

Individuals are divided between each others ... and now divided internally.
It means simply one thing : humanity just become atomized.
Just read this forum to understand

I wonder if Genos will be back, or if humanity is just lost ...

 

But one cannot convey the structure of the Sydney Opera House in words to a person who has not seen it by performing a dance.
Likewise I cannot use words to form a complete tonal image of a Bach fugue to one who has never heard it.
If I asked the dancer to now draw a picture of the Opera House that she had interpreted through dance, I am certain it would look nothing like the real thing.
Same for the Bach fugue.
Could you sing a melody that explains quantum physics?

 

Each era of Western music history has experienced a principal syntactical challenge. For example, the great syntactical challenge of the 8th and 9th centuries was standardizing a vocabulary of pitch and rhythm and a system with which to notate them. The great syntactical challenge of the 15th and 16th centuries was the creation and codification of a the tonal harmonic system.

The great syntactical challenge of the 17th century was the development of opera and extending the dramatic character of opera and operatic compositional techniques to other genres of music. For composers in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the great challenge was (and is) figuring out how to synthesize something of the myriad stylistic languages available into a coherent and personal musical language.




The late 20th century was heavily influenced by the increasingly global nature of our world culture. The fundamental feature of the postmodern age is the diversity that surrounds us. In a global environment, relevance demands that composers synthesize something of the syntactical diversity around them.

Not only did the composers of the late 20th century have the accumulated syntax of 1,000-plus years of Western music to draw on, but for all intents and purposes, they also had available to them music from virtually every part of the planet as well.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Nov 21, 2018

Sorry, I am playing the whippersnapper side-smiling devil here and I snidely apologize...like dancing "about" in the sense of being around or in the vicinity of. It's like a favorite old corny joke I know...When is a boy not a boy? When he turns (walks) into a store!

I'm a dick, I know.