There's a lot in here for me to think about, but I want to push back hard on something: when I say, “I never heard this thing mentioned in class”, I meant to imply that I never heard this thing mentioned in class. The idea that I meant to imply “it is not taught” exists in the imagination of people reading the tweet. It is my fault for phrasing some of my statements vaguely enough to be misinterpreted. I know people talk about how harmony works in repetitive music. But after being extensively berated by music theorists, the only reference anyone provided to the particular phenomenon I was talking about was in an as-yet-unpublished paper.
I don't choose my words as carefully on Twitter as I do in "serious" writing, so I do want to clarify something. When I say that random clusters sound good over the Funky Drummer, I mean "surprisingly good given the expectations of that roomful of American undergrads." That isn't a claim about universal human aesthetic experience, but I do think it's a reasonable prediction about what other roomfuls of American undergrads will experience. When I say that "V-I cadences sound bad over the Funky Drummer", I mean, surprisingly bad given how good they sound in other contexts. There's a profound point here about how a looped groove affects listeners' expectations, about how it changes our sense of what makes sense and doesn't. I'm a specialist in music education, not in theory per se, so I don't have (and have never claimed to have) a comprehensive grasp on what music theorists are talking about. But I do have a good idea of what music education majors are learning in their required theory courses, and it is vanishingly rare for them to make contact with funk, hip-hop or dance music there. Since music ed majors take the same theory courses as all other music majors, that is cause for concern for me.
Great list. Surprised how interesting books exist even reading music all these years. Thnx
There's a lot in here for me to think about, but I want to push back hard on something: when I say, “I never heard this thing mentioned in class”, I meant to imply that I never heard this thing mentioned in class. The idea that I meant to imply “it is not taught” exists in the imagination of people reading the tweet. It is my fault for phrasing some of my statements vaguely enough to be misinterpreted. I know people talk about how harmony works in repetitive music. But after being extensively berated by music theorists, the only reference anyone provided to the particular phenomenon I was talking about was in an as-yet-unpublished paper.
I don't choose my words as carefully on Twitter as I do in "serious" writing, so I do want to clarify something. When I say that random clusters sound good over the Funky Drummer, I mean "surprisingly good given the expectations of that roomful of American undergrads." That isn't a claim about universal human aesthetic experience, but I do think it's a reasonable prediction about what other roomfuls of American undergrads will experience. When I say that "V-I cadences sound bad over the Funky Drummer", I mean, surprisingly bad given how good they sound in other contexts. There's a profound point here about how a looped groove affects listeners' expectations, about how it changes our sense of what makes sense and doesn't. I'm a specialist in music education, not in theory per se, so I don't have (and have never claimed to have) a comprehensive grasp on what music theorists are talking about. But I do have a good idea of what music education majors are learning in their required theory courses, and it is vanishingly rare for them to make contact with funk, hip-hop or dance music there. Since music ed majors take the same theory courses as all other music majors, that is cause for concern for me.