The "Science" of Musical Harmony was Aspirational, not Actual (Robert O. Gjerdingen)
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- Опубліковано 5 лют 2025
- Full interview: • 177: Robert O. Gjerdin...
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I wish I could get in dialogue with you, Mr. Hogan. Quite often throughout history, things are "settled" through polemics between rival schools. Everyone loses when one side wins. My methodology is to deal with, to the extent that this is possible, pre-cultural or extra-cultural approaches to the nature of the interactions between musical sounds.
Tonal Harmony seems Political even more than Aspirational.
Goethe's Theory of Color was influential on Josef Hauer, and there is some evidence to support the idea that Schoenberg at least knew about it as well (possibly from Hauer). The way AS very specifically indicates the progression of colors he wanted in lighting changes in Erwartung and Die Gluckliche Hand are very close to passages in the Goethe.
It's also worth pointing out that Schoenberg, somewhere in his Harmonielehre, says essentially that cadences aren't necessarily harmonic. Otherwise an unaccompanied drummer could never stop playing.
I have a lot to say about this but will only discuss one point here. A friend of mine attended a lecture given by Edwin Land and told me about it. Land had been experimenting with three projectors in his early research. Each projector sourced one of the so-called primary colors. At one point, one of the three projectors stopped working. Since Land was focused more on the screen rather than the projectors, he didn't realize what was happening. He then discovered that he could produce all colors from two colors and that was the basis of the Land camera. Land ended his discussion by telling the students that they should not believe everything they are told.
Super interesting!
I mean the pachelbel seems clearly discernible on the downbeats: I-vi-IV-V
His argument seems to be that schemas are merely 'arbitrary conventions' and therefore theories of harmony are pseudoscience, but why I feel harmony theory suggests otherwise has less to do with Rameau (or the harmonic series) than efficient voice leadings between chords, which seem to me to be mathematically immutable, especially taking various other limitations into consideration (acoustic consonance, scales & modes, etc).
Whichever way I, IV & V are 'discovered', they're still the only major triads that are formed by the major scale and whose roots lie at P5ths. It's not so much 'scientific' as geometrically inevitable. Adding a b7th to V gives a tritone from its 3rd degree that resolves most efficiently (by semitones) to the 3rd & 1st of the tonic chord, which 'incidentally', are also related by P5ths (e.g. in C major, the E & B and the F & C).
Mike George has a YT channel and he uses colours and shapes to explain the circle of fifths and harmony.
Robert said they haven't found a similar system to rods and cones in the ear? What about vibrations and the inner ear? I'm not a singer but had signed up for a Beginner Singing class in university, but it was a futile effort. But the teacher tried to teach me about singing a scale, and she said I should feel the vibrations bounced off the nasal bone. Funny that the olfactory system is linked with the oldest part of the brain. And the inner ear is one of the most complex parts of the brain.
I attended a TMJ conferece and a French oral surgeon made an outrageous claim about using a simple neurological test. An Italian neurologist started a lecture after lunch about pathways, and it was long and boring.
He managed to put us to sleep halfway through, and he stopped and turned up the lights. He explained that this was meant to be boring since he said that if the simple test was positive, the next step was to find out the culprit using these pathways, so he told everyone that thought a simple test was simple was dangerous.
What kind of vibrations are created with cadences? Is there a satisfaction factor in Indian, Chinese or other music harmonies?