Music literature

He uses extensive harmonic overlays, weird instrumentation, etc. but none of it is at all interesting. Photorealism is technically impressive in a painting but the result is often artistically worthless. It’s hard to put into words, but he wasn’t blessed with the melodic gift which graced all the actual greats.

>whats wrong with Jacob Collier, havent heard his stuff yet
This is a really easy question to answer, all you have to do is listen to a song and no further explanation is necessary.
>but i heard he was a prodigy of some kind
He's a multi-instrumentalist and musically educated, but that's it. In reality, he's 100% a nepo baby. The amount of interviews, videos, collaborations with hundreds of musicians etc. should already prove this, but
>His mother, Suzie Collier, is a violinist, conductor, and professor at the Royal Academy of Music's Junior Academy.
>His maternal grandfather, Derek Collier, was a violinist who also taught at the Royal Academy and performed with orchestras around the world.

Two things to remember. One is that Collier mostly makes jazz fusion, which is a very specific genre of music. Not all of it is this bad, but a lot of it is just as wanky. I've heard some TERRIBLE music from Chick Corea, for example.
Secondly, technical knowledge (of music theory*) doesn't suddenly turn you into a competent composer, which also requires balance and having something interesting to say. Collier seems to just make music for the sake of it, none of it feels sincere even when there is a story or narrative, he's very excessive in everything he does, and his sense of aesthetics is... I mean just look at him. His music sounds EXACTLY like he looks.
*I really have to say that this idea that he's some sort of music theory genius is just another result of him being a nepo baby. Any serious music major/composer is just as educated as him on this stuff. People associate him most (or even credit him) with negative harmony, which he made a lot of videos about, and that's what impressed everyone at first, but what the vast majority of people don't know, even though I believe Collier actually told everyone, is that a guy named Ernst Levy wrote a book called A Theory of Harmony in which he coined the term and explained it. In 1985.

>Ernst Levy
Literally just Riemannian dualism, which he first wrote about in the 1880s, Partch also made contributions with his concepts of otonality and utonality. "Jazz" composer Steve Coleman has also been working practically with this stuff since the mid-1980s.

Why? There has been a trend since the medieval era of increased tolerance for dissonance. In jazz 9th and 11th chords are treated like consonances for example. In the Romantic era you could treat 7ths like consonances. Schoenberg thought he was continuing the natural path of music I suppose (although ironically, atonal music is where the Public checked out and music became an academic circle jerk, since it stopped sounding good).

Say what you will about modern music, but popular genres like folk, rock, and pop, have always been tonal. So they're better than Schoenberg's atonal crap at least.

>natural order of harmony
>was created by humans
john cage was closer to divinity than mozart btw

The harmonic series, and consonances and dissonances are created by God, not man

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Good picks

but why does classical music inherently sound as one anon says 'closer to divinity' than lets say pop music like taylor swift. Partly for me is due to preference but cant help but feel like classical music is just inherently better than alot of modern music, mind you, i do not care for elitist attitudes, however i cannot deny that chopin nocturnes, Handels symphonies, bach fugues, Tchaikovsky's melodies and much more have moved my soul more than anything?

thanks for the insight anon. btw, who are y'all guys favourite musicians and why?

>Ornette Coleman
Started listening to him recently while playing vidya. Never been a jazz guy but he scratches an itch I didn't know I had.

Kenshi

I'd say that it's due to classical music having faster harmonic rhythm, more adventurous and less repetitive harmonies in general, and most importantly, counterpoint. Counterpoint is the secret sauce for divine music. It's why Bach is considered the GOAT

Also adding to this, modern music typically has less music. The focus is more on the beat, the timbre, and the lyrics than on the actual melodies. Very basic harmony over a beat with some lyrics is a pretty low standard, but that's how a lot of Taylor Swift's music is made. You almost never hear good counterpoint in modern music. The last time it was in style was the 1960s. The Beatles had good vocal counterpoint, as did the Beach Boys.

The person you are replying to is a moron who pisses himself when he hears a tone cluster

Because of some kind of idea of progress in music. He (and others, mostly from the German lands) worshipped Wagner who went further than anyone with his extended tonality and tonal ambiguity, so naturally they thought the next logical step would be breaking the entire thing to start with. Harmony and form are intertwined, so no harmonic hierarchy also meant the old forms are out of the window. They named this the "emancipation of dissonance", which is then anachronistically applied to other styles from outside Germany or previous eras. For example, Beethoven is more dissonant/ambiguous than Haydn, Schumann is more dissonant/ambiguous than Beethoven, Brahms is more dissonant/ambiguous than Schumann, and so on, and this is interpreted as dissonance slowly freeing itself from the shackles of tonality.
Similarly, some think of French (and some Russian) composers doing something similar, although in a less abrasive way and with the addition of modality and "exotic" musical or extramusical influences (like Debussy's gamelan).
Funnily enough, Schoenberg and co. soon discovered that this freedom from tonality wasn't a good thing. They had to limit themselves somehow, so they fell back on classical forms, like the baroque suite or classical sonata (sonatas, symphonies, concertos). Now they could also further legitimize their music by saying it follows tradition. Not everybody buys it, but Schoenberg and his students applied this system differently. Berg is thought of as a romantic who "hid" tonality in his music (like writing tone rows that spell out series of major and minor chords, quoting Bach, implying tonality), while Webern is thought of as a precursor to serialism.

[...]
By rejecting tonality, one rejects the natural order of harmony and spits in the face of God's creation

Did medieval and renaissance composers "reject the natural order of harmony and spit in the face of God's creation" by using modality?

but why does classical music inherently sound as one anon says 'closer to divinity' than lets say pop music like taylor swift. Partly for me is due to preference but cant help but feel like classical music is just inherently better than alot of modern music, mind you, i do not care for elitist attitudes, however i cannot deny that chopin nocturnes, Handels symphonies, bach fugues, Tchaikovsky's melodies and much more have moved my soul more than anything?

What anon here

I'd say that it's due to classical music having faster harmonic rhythm, more adventurous and less repetitive harmonies in general, and most importantly, counterpoint. Counterpoint is the secret sauce for divine music. It's why Bach is considered the GOAT

failed to mention, and what is actually a staple of classical music, is the development/permutation of motifs (short musical ideas), which creates unity (the work becomes self-contained), as well as a sense of narration and drama. With this, even instrumental (absolute) music that isn't about a particular thing and has a generic title, e.g. sonata, becomes extremely vivid. I think this is something that elevates it above all other music.

Yes, however it should be stated that jazz is usually tonal (I consider modal to also be a form of tonal music since it has a clear key center). Jazz harmony is certainly more adventurous than classical, more willing to use enharmonic relations and borrowed chords/crazy modulations, but I rarely hear truly atonal jazz. Circle of fifths progression is ubiquitous in jazz standards, and that progress is as tonal as it gets

I see what you mean. Regardless, the harmonic languages of jazz and classical music are essentially the same. The differences are primarily stylistic, not harmonic. They both rely on functional harmony.

To elaborate on this a bit more, the rise of tonality is really the rise of the piano which is the only instrument that really does well with it, the other stringed keyboard instruments do alright but lack the dynamics and expressiveness of the piano. Every other classical instrument has to go against its own nature to play in 12tet. Piano is kind of played out at this point, atonality gave it a second lease on life but tonality and the piano have probably run their course and something else is likely to take center stage in the not too distant future. This could be a move towards 12edo and the rise of the fretted instruments or the rise of justly tuned instruments favoring the brass/woodwinds or micro tonality favoring the strings.

Established itself but due to the wide variety of temperaments it was a very different beast and did not become what it is until early romantic when 12tet became the standard. Pianoforte is a piano and the first record of it is 1700. You are thinking modern piano which technically is a pianoforte but along the way we dropped the forte and when modern piano came about the forte got brought back to refer to the early pianos. Modern piano being one of three primary types, upright, spinet or grand with loads of variations of each and sometimes spinet being considered a variation of an upright and in general an ambiguous term that gets applied to small organs and harpsichords as well.

Big part of the reason for the push for the development of the piano was to have a solo instrument actually capable of exploiting 12tet and the developing harmony without the expressive limitations of the clavichord and harpsichord or the physical limitations/expense of the pipe organ which has great expressiveness but only at great cost and size.

First record of his piano is 1700. If memory serves the few of his surviving pianos are all from the 1720s. But even if that is what you are talking about you are still wrong.

Codified sure, some of it. I never said anything otherwise. Without the piano it is very possible tonality would have ended up like counterpoint.

I said their rise went hand in hand. Without an instrument that could effectively use it tonality could have stayed baroque.

Not really a fiction reader but I liked the synopsis of PKDs "A Scanner Darkly"

For nonfiction i guess The Sacred Canopy by Peter L. Berger i picked up recently. Fun fact: his last name is one letter off from my mine.

William Leavitt's Reading studies for guitar (two volumes) are what you want for learning to read music, designed to deal with all those guitarists going to music school who never learned to read music or theory. These books are great exercises in general even after you learn to read music.

Learning theory on the guitar largely sucks. The above books will internalize much of harmony but does not explain it but if you work through them a few times before starting in on theory it will help a great deal. The Complete Musician is the best book I have found for self study, getting a cheap keyboard of some sort will help since much of theory just seems pointless and nonsensical on guitar but are effortless and sensible on a keyboard.

Leavitt's books in general are great, he has a few others like The Reading Studies books (melodic studies and improv) which are also great, maybe a few others, I forget. These books have become standard warmup for me, they cover most everything a guitarist needs his fingers to just do automatically without thought.

4 part harmony is not bad on guitar, just use your voice as well or some friends or get a looper pedal. There are limitations but a guitarist needs to learn those limitations and how to work around them anyways. But things like triads and the circle of fifths make almost immediate sense on a keyboard and almost seem like pointless academic cleverness on a guitar when you start out.

William Leavitt's Reading studies for guitar (two volumes) are what you want for learning to read music, designed to deal with all those guitarists going to music school who never learned to read music or theory. These books are great exercises in general even after you learn to read music.

Learning theory on the guitar largely sucks. The above books will internalize much of harmony but does not explain it but if you work through them a few times before starting in on theory it will help a great deal. The Complete Musician is the best book I have found for self study, getting a cheap keyboard of some sort will help since much of theory just seems pointless and nonsensical on guitar but are effortless and sensible on a keyboard.

Leavitt's books in general are great, he has a few others like The Reading Studies books (melodic studies and improv) which are also great, maybe a few others, I forget. These books have become standard warmup for me, they cover most everything a guitarist needs his fingers to just do automatically without thought.

https://i.imgur.com/p8cKdXb.jpg

A tip for reading sheet music. Remember the origins of the clefs. The clefs point you to a landmark note

Treble Clef: it's a fancy "G". The standard treble clef loops around the second line from the bottom which is G. (eGbdf)

Bass clef: it's an "F". The 2 dots are the two horizontal lines of a capital F. The two dots go around the F line, second from the top (gbdFa)

Grand staff (treble + bass, the standard for piano music): there is a symmetry around the note C. See attached picture. The red notes are all Cs Eventually you will learn to read the grand staff as if it's a single clef.

C clefs (soprano, alto, tenor): the clef points to which line is middle C. Not common clefs to encounter unless you like to read from old manuscripts (or if you play cello or viola).

Great advice. Definitely learn to read music on guitar, but save the theory for piano. 4 part harmony with standard/cliché voice leading is difficult on guitar but easy on piano. Guitar lends itself best to 2-3 voice textures, it doesn't handle 4 voice textures easily (unless you're playing modern music and you don't give a shit about voice leading, then you just strum all 6 strings, parallel fifths and octaves be damned)

odd intervals of a note on the line will also be on the line; even intervals of a note will switch it being between the lines
That should be enough to have you figure out whether something's a 2nd or a 3rd; or a 4th or a 5th, &c.
3rd, 5ths and 7ths's distances to the base note are all quite distinctive, so get a feel for that

Wow, thanks guys. I appreciate it.

I tune it myself. What you're hearing is a combination of a few months having passed from the last tuning, and the key of the piece.

I tune to well temperament instead of equal temperament. The first piece is in D minor which is more in tune in this tuning. The second piece is Eb major, which has more out of tune thirds. Some out of tune sound is to be expected in keys with a lot of sharps or flats (although again, it's been months since I tuned the piano, so it's a bit more sour than it should be)

The piano is about 60 years old, it doesn't hold a tuning all that well.

Good to know, thanks

Missed this. It is more the second and third strings being out that is the issue, couldn't even hear the temperament.