Saying things like "I write all my songs in Minor keys...only very few major"

Discussion in 'Education' started by samsome, Jul 12, 2021.

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  1. BaSsDuDe

    BaSsDuDe Audiosexual

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    That was good but it falls down on a potential oxymoron.
    Lets say he was 100% correct. Then he becomes a wise man imparting wisdom through his understanding of the knowledge he has gleaned from his beliefs of the human tendency to misinterpret what wisdom is. He became the very thing he bemoans. Wisdom is something gained over time and experience. Knowledge can lead to wisdom but not always the other way around.

    In the simplest terms a dog can be wise. One day it goes up to an electric fence and pisses on it and gets zapped. It knows not to piss on it again because it will get zapped. The knowledge it will get zapped has given it wisdom to not piss on the fence again.

    There are more than thousands of documented cases of humans in history knowing something really dangerous existed in their immediate path (knowledge) and they still went ahead and did it because they lacked the foresight to weigh up all the consequences (wisdom).

    The difference between great technicians (knowledge) in music and great technicians who are exceptional musicians is how they use the gift they were given (wisdom) in practice. Talent is cheap, it's what you do with that talent and that has nothing to do with knowledge. There are 9-14 year olds these days who can play the shit out of their instrument as sure as Mozart existed. Talent is very cheap today and millions of people know a lot about theory but far less know how to put the knowledge they gleaned into practice.
     
    Last edited: Nov 1, 2021
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  2. Riviera

    Riviera Member

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    Misinformation leads to Misconception
    &
    Misconception leads into Misinterpretation
    &
    Misinterpretation leads to wrong genres.


    Many contemporary genres of music are the products of wrong knowledge.


    The important issue is not the conversion of knowledge into practice. The main thing for now is the right knowledge. Misinformation can't turn into the right practice. If that happens, it's going to be what we're seeing today.:)
     
  3. Rockseller

    Rockseller Platinum Record

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    i can only repeat what already as been said. it is a good thing to learn to play an instrument.
     
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  4. MMJ2017

    MMJ2017 Audiosexual

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    There is only one human being
    ( out of the history of humanity)
    To think and say this ,

    FOSTER !!
     
  5. MMJ2017

    MMJ2017 Audiosexual

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    Music is a complex topic .

    In terms a particular individual making music
    There are several important dimensions involved regarding their specific path of musical development.

    These are equally important as each other .

    Intuition
    Knowledge
    Creativity
    Communication

    ( its false that reality is simple enough ,that one of those is more important than another .
    :(
     
    Last edited: Nov 2, 2021
  6. Riviera

    Riviera Member

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    One of the composers of the 20th century has a famous sentence:
    There is no theory; pleasure is the only law.

    This sentence permits everything. This means:
    • We can think as we want.
    • We can do whatever we want.
    • We can use anything we want.
    • We can ignore anything we don't like or we can give price to anything we want.
    .
    .
    .
    1. It's easy to say these things in words and dreams but does in reality, human nature bear everything?
    2. Is it possible to find a place in physical reality where there are no laws?
     
  7. Ad Heesive

    Ad Heesive Audiosexual

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    The comment that you (mis)quote is from Debussy and is also mentioned in this article.
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-velvet-revolution-of-claude-debussy

    Below are some extracts from that article. Why have I bothered to list them here? :dunno:
    It is just another attempt to enourage you to realise that there is something wholly inadequate about your understanding of 'music rules' and your attitude towards 'music rules'. Also, your misunderstanding and misuse of the word law is no better than juvenile.

    So, I provide a mini rant first - then I invite you to read about Debussy from the extracts below and from the original article.
    Heaven forbid you might actually learn something.

    If you don't want to read the rant or the articles then just consider this practical experiment...
    A practical visceral reminder - just listen carefully to Claire de Lune
    and after listening - remember that the composer of this beautiful masterpiece said...
    “There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.”

    Seriously ask yourself, do you really dare to assume that you are in any way qualified to contradict him? :dunno:
    If so, then please, I implore you, give us your rule-based composition that eclipses Claire de Lune.

    Good luck!

    The Rant
    Point 1.
    First you need to see this really obvious point. Look at the contrast between [1] and [2] below
    [1] When an ignorant critic tells you "how you should think about music" then just laugh at them.
    They are simply behaving as a stupid authoritarian. Typically they just trying to compensate for their own inadequacies.
    [2] When a talent like Debussy delivers musical masterpieces and invites you to "understand how he thinks about music" then you are a bloody fool to ignore the opportunity to learn.

    So, a critic telling you how to think about music rules will lead you astray.
    Debussy inviting you to consider how he thinks about music rules might nourish you.

    Point 2.
    Do you even know what you mean when you use the word rules? Your comments regularly suggest that you think music rules are laws of nature rather than human conventions. Go back to philosophy basics and see the difference. The word law has multiple (confusing) uses.
    [1] Gravity: objects with mass attract each other. This is (kind-of) a rule. You can call it a LAW of nature if you like but that does not mean there's some enforcer making sure that objects obey the law. It just means that gravity is a universally observed regularity in nature with no (as yet) known exceptions.
    [2] Decorum: It is probably a law in your country that you should wear clothes when in public places. This is (kind-of) a rule. You can call it a LAW and there probably will be people in uniforms that insist on enforcing your compliance with this law. This is an entirely human made convention. If your entire village insists on wearing a suit and tie on Sundays then that is a pseudo-law that may be stifling you and is begging to be challenged by anyone that wants to think outside the box.

    Point 3.
    Are music rules useful? Are they like Gravity or are they like Decorum?
    Very few rules in music are like Gravity (only the basic physics of audio phenomena qualify)
    The vast majority of rules in music are like Decoroum; they are merely transient cultural artefacts.
    The value of music rules is a huge and sometimes contentious debate but the bottom line is 'never assume that creative talents need to think explicitly about rules'.
    Knowledge of music and knowledge of rules about music are not the same thing.
    This is analogous to knowing how to speak, write, use language (essential) and knowing about linguistics (optional, desirable).
    Debussy had both kinds of knowledge in bucket loads (knowledge of music and knowledge of music theory) but clearly preferred to engage with music directly and passionately and definitely preferred to not be stifled by past conventions.

    Every time you accuse musicians of being stupid for not adhering to laws you make a huge comical mistake.
    You seem to assume they are fighting against gravity - they are not. They are overturning conventions which may have served their purpose well in the past, but which may now be past their expiry date and starting to smell a bit stale.

    So, do read the extracts (below) about Debussy. They include the (mis)quote you used
    “There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.”

    If you understood the points 1,2,3 made above, you might already see how your attempt to ridicule by quoting out of context just exposes your 'ignorant critic' mentality.

    Good luck!

    Miscellaneous extracts from an article about Debussy
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-velvet-revolution-of-claude-debussy

    Claude Debussy died a century ago, but his music has not grown old. Bound only lightly to the past, it floats in time. As it coalesces, bar by bar, it appears to be improvising itself into being - which is the effect Debussy wanted. After a rehearsal of his orchestral suite “Images,” he said, with satisfaction, “This has the air of not having been written down.” In a conversation with one of his former teachers, he declared, “There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.”

    It is best to start where Pierre Boulez said modern music was born: with the ethereal first notes of the orchestral tone poem “Prelude to ‘The Afternoon of a Faun.’” Debussy wrote it between 1892 and 1894, in response to the famous poem by Mallarmé. The score begins with what looks like an uncertain doodle on the part of the composer. A solo flute slithers down from C-sharp to G-natural, then slithers back up; the same figure recurs; then there is a songful turn around the notes of the E-major triad. Yet, in the fourth bar, when more instruments enter—two oboes, two clarinets, a horn, and a rippling harp—they ignore the flute’s offering of E. Instead, they recline into a lovely chord of nowhere, a half-diminished seventh of the type that Wagner placed at the outset of “Tristan und Isolde.” This leads to a lush dominant seventh on B-flat, which ought to resolve to E-flat, but doesn’t. Harmonies distant from one another intermingle in an open space. Most striking is the presence of silence. The B-flat harmonies are framed by bar-long voids. This is sound in repose, listening to its own echo.

    Debussy accomplished something that happens very rarely, and not in every lifetime: he brought a new kind of beauty into the world. In 1894, when “Faun” was first performed, its language was startling but not shocking: it caused no scandal, and was accepted by the public almost at once. Debussy engineered a velvet revolution, overturning the extant order without upheaval. His influence proved to be vast, not only for successive waves of twentieth-century modernists but also in jazz, in popular song, and in Hollywood. When both the severe Boulez and the suave Duke Ellington cite you as a precursor, you have done something singular.

    The music is easy to love but hard to explain. The shelf of books about Debussy is not large, and every scholar who addresses him faces the challenge of analyzing an artist to whom analysis was abhorrent.

    The latest addition to that shelf is Stephen Walsh’s “Debussy: A Painter in Sound” (Knopf), which places proper emphasis on Debussy’s myriad links to other art forms. The composer may have been the first in history to become a fully modern-minded artist, joining a community of writers and painters, borrowing ideas and lending them in turn.

    Debussy was receptive. He saw, he read, he pondered, and he transformed the ineffable into sound.

    At the conservatory, Debussy was a restless student, exasperating his teachers and fascinating his schoolmates. When confronted with the fundamentals of harmony and form, he asked why any systems were needed. He had little trouble mastering academic exercises, and, after two attempts, he won the Prix de Rome, a traditional stepping stone to a successful compositional career. But in his early vocal pieces, and in his legendarily mesmerizing improvisations at the piano, he jettisoned rules that had been in place for hundreds of years. Familiar chords appeared in unfamiliar sequences. Melodies followed the contours of ancient or exotic scales. Forms dissolved into textures and moods. An academic evaluation accused him of indulging in Impressionism - a label that stuck.

    Perhaps Debussy’s central insight was about the constricting effect of the standard major and minor scales. Why not use the old modes of medieval church music? Or the differently arrayed and tuned scales found in non-Western traditions? Or the whole-tone scale, which divided the octave into equal intervals? Debussy had a particular fondness for the natural harmonic series - the spectrum of overtones that arise from a vibrating string. If you pinch a taut string in the middle, its pitch goes up an octave. If you pinch it at successively smaller fractions, the basic intervals of conventional Western harmony emerge. So far, so good: but what about the notes further out in the series? These are more difficult to assimilate. In the chain of intervals derived from a C, you encounter a tone somewhere near B-flat and another in the vicinity of F-sharp. Debussy favored a mode that has become known as the acoustic scale, which mimics the overtone series by raising the fourth degree (F-sharp) and lowering the seventh (B-flat). That those notes correspond to blue notes helps to explain Debussy’s appeal to jazz musicians.

    Debussy had the prejudices typical of his time, and never thought too deeply about the cultures that he sampled. Nevertheless, he knew to look outside the classical sphere for nourishment. At the Paris Exposition of 1889, he heard a gamelan ensemble, which made Western harmonies sound to him like “empty phantoms of use to clever little children.”

    Debussy’s rejection of the musical status quo was fuelled by his jealous love of poetry and painting...
    Poetry spurred Debussy’s earliest breakthroughs....
    The visual arts proved an equally important fund of inspiration...

    In this period, Debussy took up a second career, as a music critic... Debussy was attacking the tendency to worship the past at the expense of the present.

    Debussy is often stereotyped as an artist of motionless atmospheres, but he was a radical in rhythm as well as in harmony...
     
    Last edited: Nov 3, 2021
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  8. BaSsDuDe

    BaSsDuDe Audiosexual

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    Great.
    A point of note of one of Juliard's past entrance requirements for conducting, which they have made simpler now.
    The entrant had two phases to pass.
    The first, they were given a Debussy piece in four clefs they had to sight read. If they passed, they were given the second opportunity which was to briefly look over the score, then conduct the Orchestra. If they failed the first they were not allowed to do the second. If they failed the second they were not accepted. It did ensure only an exceptional musician was accepted. On average there were 3-5 per year, rarely more.
    The point being Debussy is like any great composer, timeless.
    (some of his late piano Preludes are challenging).
     
    Last edited: Nov 3, 2021
  9. Paul Pi

    Paul Pi Audiosexual

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    "wrong genres"?!!! And only you of course can define the 'right' ones... Damn, that's bigotted BS and you didn't even drop a courtesy "imho" beforehand. :bash:

    Oh i dunno - @Riviera often does a solid job of being repellent. It's the hot air probably.
     
    Last edited: Nov 3, 2021
  10. MMJ2017

    MMJ2017 Audiosexual

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    Debussy is a great example of a musician who had
    Developed equal parts

    Intuition
    Knowledge
    Creativity
    Communication

    Lol

    When you listen to his music ,
    Do you get the impression of a man solely organized around chaos?

    No.

    Indeed , a man with equal footing in the two worlds of order and chaos .
     
  11. Olymoon

    Olymoon MODERATOR Staff Member

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    Rivera trolling again, and you guys got caught again... When will you learn?

    Closed.
     
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