5:56 "Andre Gedalge says that.. well, he tells you what harmony is about in the European tradition and that is every stable chord is 1/3/5 or 1/3/6, and everything else is a dissonance or something that has to move toward a stable chord. It is a profound piece of knowledge, it's true for Palestrina and it's true for the fugue exams at the Paris Conservatory in 1899 and in 1905. I mean, we have lost sight of the art of harmony.."
I went through undergrad for composition over 30 years ago, even took a directed study in Fux counterpoint; but it wasn't until i was a TA in grad school and had to actually *teach others* to understand the foundations of harmony that the hard truths being revealed here really hit me. Partimento was nowhere to be found back then, and the best my wits could come up with was to include "guided score studies" during my theory lectures, to give the poor hapless freshmen some "life experience" in how harmony and counterpoint actually worked! In retrospect, I just can't believe that counterpoint wasn't even offered as a regular course, much less as any requirement for a composition degree...
My former academy used to have these pointless exam exercises where you'd have to play an 'advanced' cadence. With a typical German academy background, this will always be a challenging task to fulfill. Knowing the Regola, it's a task as easy as you can possibly imagine. We used to have these theory courses that mostly consisted of Fux counterpoint, Bach chorale, Bach fugue and Riemannian chord analysis. No schemata, no Regola, no Partimento, nothing. Just try to write a two-minute piece of baroque or romantic music (not even to speak of a half-decent fugue) after two years of that. Thank god that this has actually changed a lot since I started my studies.
I would understand that but how did other students able to compose music when they've taken the same courses at universities, including jazz composers? Only a few learned improvisation on their own.
Thank you Robert Gjerdigen for proclaiming the truth. Universities will have to change when students start to learn more from UA-cam videos and online lessons than from paying 100 times as much to earn a music degree. IJZERMAN’s book Harmony, Counterpoint and Partimento is just the beginning of a wonderful new trend as well as all of the wonderful books and resources by the scholars Nikhil interviews. You are a pivotal force in this crusade Nikhil. Thank you!
I could listen to this all day. I'm trying to enlighten my collegues about these ideas. Some are receptive but a majority dismiss it as musical language from specific period and not relevant to today.
2:27 I don't understand what it can mean to say that harmony *doesn't* have a physical basis. When we play a seventh interval at the piano, we feel and hear a 'beating' due to the interference of the two pitches. What is 'non-physical' about harmony?
Prog Gjerdingen is my musician's soul angel and saviour. I went thru all the classical education, in Eastern EU it's government funded. And I never ever could understand the harmony that my (very lousy I must say unfortunately) professors tried and insisted on to instill. I mean, never. I was so bad at understanding the principles....that never existed... Then after music academy and all that torture I had opportunities to work outside of the classical rsalm and I learned tremendously about 'real' music functioning, including the classical...thru playing by ear mostly. And I never could understand how can the jazz or folk musicians improvise without constraint and classical musicians are grabbed by their b...so to speak. Then finally Prof. Gjerdingen's book and videos came my way and I experienced enlightenment about all my musical worries of the twenty years of education... So, yes, we certainly need to go change the direction, but even amongst the young people I feel quite the resistance, they just don't grasp the concept. And btw, here they do the same damage to the counterpoint lessons in which they pretend to do a whole lot of work, and in the end you're barely capable to sing freres Jacques, let alone understand anything. Or invent, God forbid. And if you even try to fantasize about the conclusions that counterpoint precedes or leads to harmony, you've just signed your death sentence...that's how cruel they are (them composers mostly).
I actually prefer the traditional Italian hexachordal version of solfeggio as practiced by the Neapolitan conservatories and Catholic Church and re-discovered by Professor Nicholas Baragwanath in his relatively recent book, "The Solfeggio Tradition".
@Will Brooksy it's a fantastic book but there's also the "Art of Solfeggio" Facebook group where the community gathers and Prof. Baragwanath curates. More practical tutorials and exercises are being developed since the book's release. It really needs a private or group lesson to get the hang of it better.
I don't think anyone can convincingly dismiss harmony having acoustic foundations. Surely, root position tonic chords sound 'at rest' because the fundamental frequency supports the root note in the bass (also making fundamentals an obvious choice to classify chords). Then there's the 'picardy 3rd' in the final tonic chord of minor key pieces. Why doesn't it similarly sound right to end a major piece on a minor chord? Perhaps because it's not supported acoustically compared to a major chord (or a final chord with no 3rd, or with no 3rd or 5th). I don't see how this is explained contrapuntally. Also... if we play closed major triads in the lower register of a piano, for instance, they sound rough or harsh because of the audible overtones conflicting, the same way a P4th is a 'conditional consonance' because from a bass tone, the upper note can clash with our expectancy of the P5th (3rd harmonic) and other harmonics of the lower, but this is not so between the soprano & alto or tenor & alto. He also mentions that the 1:7 harmonic ratio doesn't explain the dominant 7th, but it might explain its preference in the final tonic chord Barbershop quartets, for instance, ...I mean they actually sing the (sharper) harmonic not a derivative b7th on a piano. Acoustically, the only absolutely true consonances exist between sine tones that correspond to a fundamental and its harmonics.
I am also puzzled by this. One can feel consonance and dissonance without even hearing anything by feeling the piano. Surely harmony does have a physical basis.
You two completely missed the point, no one denies the basic phenomena of consonance and dissonance of intervals and they also do not deny that this phenomenon has had a great impact in the way western harmony has developed. What they deny is that all of western harmony can be derived from this, wich can be unequivocally proved by the fact that experiments have been made with people who have never heard western music in their lives and consequently do not feel any notion of tonality or "gravity" that these theories claim to be absolute, therefore they are false, and there is literally no way around this. Going from "the way the brain works has had an influence in westen musical conventions" to "western musical conventions are not even conventions because they are engraved in our brains" is incredibly illogical and it is exactly the reasoning you two are endorsing.
06:50 "After two years of harmony in an elite institution, you could not make harmony at a professional level". Ok, but it is not the problem of traditional harmony. It is the problem of elite institutions, right? I learned harmony for 6 years (as a slave in the conservatory 🤓) - harmonised soprano and basses, played chords and sequences at the keyboard, modulated to any key within an 8-bars structure, composed baroque suites, classical sonatas, late Romantic preludes, 12-tone compositions, and did other crazy things🤪. Now I am interested in partimento, as an alternative method of understanding harmony. As for me, partimento and traditional harmony methods are not in contradiction, they complement and enrich each other.
No it is the problem of current "Harmony and tonal function" teachings. These are false theories and do not allow anyone to write new music well, even when being an expert in them. Tonal function is not ever used when improvising in real time. Even professional composers say they do not use it to write on paper because it does not help.
@@conservatory_2.0 yes and yes and yes although note the context the word 'partimento' in that use really means the entire method, not just 'the numbered partimenti' which are essentially C.F.'s (cantus's) . but personally i think Wagner's music should be buried in a time capsule for 300 years and never played or read again by anyone until then, due to his horrible racism.
Gjerdingen’s musical schemata theory is highly respected, and that cannot be overstated in any way. However, since then, he has been devoting so much energy to the products of the French academy (as well as the Italian conservatories) without realising that those same lines became distant from the authentic artistic creations of their time by their demerits. We all love the fugue thanks essentially to Bach's sponsorship, and the model for understanding his art - still mostly mysterious - is a far cry from the conservatory approach of the 18th and 19th centuries. (And, in saying this, one does not offend all the work of generations, but one shows one loves it by seeing it as a step towards higher heights) In my opinion, Gjerdingen could have chosen to raise something precarious as a model; his condemnation of the current academy may not be as worthy as his previous works.
Maybe he is just elevating something from history that worked for beginners. He isn't aiming to systematize an entire pedagogy himself but rebuilding the foundation of the past, paving the way for a larger present community.
Could you give me some sources to dispel this myth that the dominant seventh chord is derived from a series of overtones? Or expand on the topic in the future? BTW your channel is great, thank you!
@@DeeCeeHaich No one denies this, what the video claims is that this doesn't necessarily imply anything about the "function" of a given chord or that the notes themselves are more important than the intervals wich form the chord that vary with inversions. There is zero evidence to claim that and in that the video is right.
@@marcossidoruk8033 yeah. It's judt coincidence. Also it's not like the "dominant 7th chord" even has the domiannt function in most use cases, it's just coincidentally so in the classical style due to the presence of 2 modified tones in the V7 chord.
Truth bombs! Wonder if things will ever change. There is a big market and money to be made from teaching music theory the roman numeral way. I try to express to colleagues the problems with it but am met with blank stares and silence.
Coming from a musician background and family, my perspective is that all these techniques are just hand waived away as 'genius'. How did Bach and Mozart write that music? No point in even asking, they were geniuses, we could never understand. That sort of thing.
Is anyone ignoring functional harmony? I think music education has gotten into more trouble insisting on its mindset also where it does not belong. Functional harmony is one way of thinking, and a very important one in western classical music and jazz, but there are many other ways to go about it.
@@eyvindjr people very much are ignorant to functional harmony. A great majority of people's understanding of functional harmony is entirely limited by dumbed down, bullet-point explanations such as V=dominant, IV=sundominant. Which, while true, is only like 1%, and it is completely missing the fact that V=Tonic, Subdominant *and* Dominant. In fact, the majority of people you would ask are clueless that a chord can have more than one function depending on context. The simple reason for that, is while a lot of people have elementary knowledge of harmonic function. Very few actually use their ears to *understand* harmonic function. Also the people in this video, because of their ignorance to functional harmony, and the vain practicality of partimento, decide that functional harmony is simply wrong. When all they are is ignorantly throwing away one of the most important aspects of music composition.
5:56 "Andre Gedalge says that.. well, he tells you what harmony is about in the European tradition and that is every stable chord is 1/3/5 or 1/3/6, and everything else is a dissonance or something that has to move toward a stable chord. It is a profound piece of knowledge, it's true for Palestrina and it's true for the fugue exams at the Paris Conservatory in 1899 and in 1905. I mean, we have lost sight of the art of harmony.."
Such a poignant statement!
I went through undergrad for composition over 30 years ago, even took a directed study in Fux counterpoint; but it wasn't until i was a TA in grad school and had to actually *teach others* to understand the foundations of harmony that the hard truths being revealed here really hit me. Partimento was nowhere to be found back then, and the best my wits could come up with was to include "guided score studies" during my theory lectures, to give the poor hapless freshmen some "life experience" in how harmony and counterpoint actually worked!
In retrospect, I just can't believe that counterpoint wasn't even offered as a regular course, much less as any requirement for a composition degree...
My former academy used to have these pointless exam exercises where you'd have to play an 'advanced' cadence. With a typical German academy background, this will always be a challenging task to fulfill. Knowing the Regola, it's a task as easy as you can possibly imagine.
We used to have these theory courses that mostly consisted of Fux counterpoint, Bach chorale, Bach fugue and Riemannian chord analysis. No schemata, no Regola, no Partimento, nothing. Just try to write a two-minute piece of baroque or romantic music (not even to speak of a half-decent fugue) after two years of that. Thank god that this has actually changed a lot since I started my studies.
As a freshman music student in university, I couldn’t agree more with Dr. Gjerdingen’s statement.
I would understand that but how did other students able to compose music when they've taken the same courses at universities, including jazz composers? Only a few learned improvisation on their own.
It takes studying and analyzation. Open your book lol
Thank you Robert Gjerdigen for proclaiming the truth. Universities will have to change when students start to learn more from UA-cam videos and online lessons than from paying 100 times as much to earn a music degree. IJZERMAN’s book Harmony, Counterpoint and Partimento is just the beginning of a wonderful new trend as well as all of the wonderful books and resources by the scholars Nikhil interviews. You are a pivotal force in this crusade Nikhil. Thank you!
Thank you so much, Angela!
I agree with all, but function is still also the key to understand form and romantic music
Gjerdingen going scorched earth 😂 I love it
Nikhil, this was a fantastic program !!!!
I could listen to this all day. I'm trying to enlighten my collegues about these ideas. Some are receptive but a majority dismiss it as musical language from specific period and not relevant to today.
2:27 I don't understand what it can mean to say that harmony *doesn't* have a physical basis. When we play a seventh interval at the piano, we feel and hear a 'beating' due to the interference of the two pitches. What is 'non-physical' about harmony?
Prog Gjerdingen is my musician's soul angel and saviour. I went thru all the classical education, in Eastern EU it's government funded. And I never ever could understand the harmony that my (very lousy I must say unfortunately) professors tried and insisted on to instill. I mean, never. I was so bad at understanding the principles....that never existed... Then after music academy and all that torture I had opportunities to work outside of the classical rsalm and I learned tremendously about 'real' music functioning, including the classical...thru playing by ear mostly. And I never could understand how can the jazz or folk musicians improvise without constraint and classical musicians are grabbed by their b...so to speak. Then finally Prof. Gjerdingen's book and videos came my way and I experienced enlightenment about all my musical worries of the twenty years of education... So, yes, we certainly need to go change the direction, but even amongst the young people I feel quite the resistance, they just don't grasp the concept.
And btw, here they do the same damage to the counterpoint lessons in which they pretend to do a whole lot of work, and in the end you're barely capable to sing freres Jacques, let alone understand anything. Or invent, God forbid. And if you even try to fantasize about the conclusions that counterpoint precedes or leads to harmony, you've just signed your death sentence...that's how cruel they are (them composers mostly).
Omg I can't wait for the video, release it now! 😭🤣
So, Professor. What's the solution?
Great video! Happy I found this channel. As someone who is planning to go to school for composition what sofege would you recommend. Fixed or movable
I actually prefer the traditional Italian hexachordal version of solfeggio as practiced by the Neapolitan conservatories and Catholic Church and re-discovered by Professor Nicholas Baragwanath in his relatively recent book, "The Solfeggio Tradition".
@@NikhilHoganShow does that book give exercises to practice and learn etc?
@Will Brooksy it's a fantastic book but there's also the "Art of Solfeggio" Facebook group where the community gathers and Prof. Baragwanath curates. More practical tutorials and exercises are being developed since the book's release. It really needs a private or group lesson to get the hang of it better.
I don't think anyone can convincingly dismiss harmony having acoustic foundations. Surely, root position tonic chords sound 'at rest' because the fundamental frequency supports the root note in the bass (also making fundamentals an obvious choice to classify chords). Then there's the 'picardy 3rd' in the final tonic chord of minor key pieces. Why doesn't it similarly sound right to end a major piece on a minor chord? Perhaps because it's not supported acoustically compared to a major chord (or a final chord with no 3rd, or with no 3rd or 5th). I don't see how this is explained contrapuntally. Also... if we play closed major triads in the lower register of a piano, for instance, they sound rough or harsh because of the audible overtones conflicting, the same way a P4th is a 'conditional consonance' because from a bass tone, the upper note can clash with our expectancy of the P5th (3rd harmonic) and other harmonics of the lower, but this is not so between the soprano & alto or tenor & alto. He also mentions that the 1:7 harmonic ratio doesn't explain the dominant 7th, but it might explain its preference in the final tonic chord Barbershop quartets, for instance, ...I mean they actually sing the (sharper) harmonic not a derivative b7th on a piano. Acoustically, the only absolutely true consonances exist between sine tones that correspond to a fundamental and its harmonics.
I am also puzzled by this. One can feel consonance and dissonance without even hearing anything by feeling the piano. Surely harmony does have a physical basis.
You two completely missed the point, no one denies the basic phenomena of consonance and dissonance of intervals and they also do not deny that this phenomenon has had a great impact in the way western harmony has developed. What they deny is that all of western harmony can be derived from this, wich can be unequivocally proved by the fact that experiments have been made with people who have never heard western music in their lives and consequently do not feel any notion of tonality or "gravity" that these theories claim to be absolute, therefore they are false, and there is literally no way around this.
Going from "the way the brain works has had an influence in westen musical conventions" to "western musical conventions are not even conventions because they are engraved in our brains" is incredibly illogical and it is exactly the reasoning you two are endorsing.
06:50 "After two years of harmony in an elite institution, you could not make harmony at a professional level". Ok, but it is not the problem of traditional harmony. It is the problem of elite institutions, right?
I learned harmony for 6 years (as a slave in the conservatory 🤓) - harmonised soprano and basses, played chords and sequences at the keyboard, modulated to any key within an 8-bars structure, composed baroque suites, classical sonatas, late Romantic preludes, 12-tone compositions, and did other crazy things🤪. Now I am interested in partimento, as an alternative method of understanding harmony. As for me, partimento and traditional harmony methods are not in contradiction, they complement and enrich each other.
No it is the problem of current "Harmony and tonal function" teachings. These are false theories and do not allow anyone to write new music well, even when being an expert in them. Tonal function is not ever used when improvising in real time. Even professional composers say they do not use it to write on paper because it does not help.
@@superblondeDotOrg Can partimento improve this situation and prepare students to understand Wagner's music or improvise in Tchaikovsky's style?
@@conservatory_2.0 yes and yes and yes although note the context the word 'partimento' in that use really means the entire method, not just 'the numbered partimenti' which are essentially C.F.'s (cantus's) . but personally i think Wagner's music should be buried in a time capsule for 300 years and never played or read again by anyone until then, due to his horrible racism.
Damn I which I was taught all of that.
Gjerdingen’s musical schemata theory is highly respected, and that cannot be overstated in any way.
However, since then, he has been devoting so much energy to the products of the French academy (as well as the Italian conservatories) without realising that those same lines became distant from the authentic artistic creations of their time by their demerits.
We all love the fugue thanks essentially to Bach's sponsorship, and the model for understanding his art - still mostly mysterious - is a far cry from the conservatory approach of the 18th and 19th centuries. (And, in saying this, one does not offend all the work of generations, but
one shows one loves it by seeing it as a step towards higher heights)
In my opinion, Gjerdingen could have chosen to raise something precarious as a model; his condemnation of the current academy may not be as worthy as his previous works.
Maybe he is just elevating something from history that worked for beginners. He isn't aiming to systematize an entire pedagogy himself but rebuilding the foundation of the past, paving the way for a larger present community.
Nice theory.
Could you give me some sources to dispel this myth that the dominant seventh chord is derived from a series of overtones? Or expand on the topic in the future? BTW your channel is great, thank you!
Thank you! Maybe someone more familiar with the research can help.
there is no source for it, the dominant 7th chord includes the first 4 unique notes of the overtone series
@@DeeCeeHaich No one denies this, what the video claims is that this doesn't necessarily imply anything about the "function" of a given chord or that the notes themselves are more important than the intervals wich form the chord that vary with inversions. There is zero evidence to claim that and in that the video is right.
@@marcossidoruk8033 yeah. It's judt coincidence. Also it's not like the "dominant 7th chord" even has the domiannt function in most use cases, it's just coincidentally so in the classical style due to the presence of 2 modified tones in the V7 chord.
Truth bombs! Wonder if things will ever change. There is a big market and money to be made from teaching music theory the roman numeral way. I try to express to colleagues the problems with it but am met with blank stares and silence.
Coming from a musician background and family, my perspective is that all these techniques are just hand waived away as 'genius'. How did Bach and Mozart write that music? No point in even asking, they were geniuses, we could never understand. That sort of thing.
the problem is the education system not the root of the education itself. Ignorance to functional harmony is just ignorance.
Is anyone ignoring functional harmony? I think music education has gotten into more trouble insisting on its mindset also where it does not belong. Functional harmony is one way of thinking, and a very important one in western classical music and jazz, but there are many other ways to go about it.
@@eyvindjr people very much are ignorant to functional harmony. A great majority of people's understanding of functional harmony is entirely limited by dumbed down, bullet-point explanations such as V=dominant, IV=sundominant. Which, while true, is only like 1%, and it is completely missing the fact that V=Tonic, Subdominant *and* Dominant.
In fact, the majority of people you would ask are clueless that a chord can have more than one function depending on context.
The simple reason for that, is while a lot of people have elementary knowledge of harmonic function. Very few actually use their ears to *understand* harmonic function.
Also the people in this video, because of their ignorance to functional harmony, and the vain practicality of partimento, decide that functional harmony is simply wrong. When all they are is ignorantly throwing away one of the most important aspects of music composition.
the last sentence can´t be highlighted
enough: the system CAN´T be good for artesanal knowledge and skills
my marriage was saved by partimento
Parole sante
i'm so happy i never went to music school, it looks more like religious indoctrination than education
Schola Cantorum in Basel seems pretty awesome.
way to go criticising pseudoscience in the music world, by arguing using conspiracy theory lol