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Ptolemaic pianocentrism

Saturday, 10 September 2005 — 5:09pm | Classical, Jazz, Music, Pianism

If you were expecting a post on the applicability of “Turtle Talk with Crush” as a superstructural blueprint for the Turing Test, precursory omens of why high-definition post-DVD storage media are doomed to failure in the general consumer market, secret schematics of the Nintendo Revolution controller or more invective hilarity induced by a certain undeservedly bestselling author, come back later. This is not the post for you.

What’s better than one blog unlocking the mysteries of music theory? That’s right – two blogs unlocking the mysteries of music theory. Below I respond to Guillaume‘s criticism of the elevation of middle C in the Western European musical tradition, and while I may get on a slightly technical bent, it is my hope that this post will not be wholly inaccessible.

You should read Guillaume’s statements before proceeding, as he presents a concise historical overview of the familiar A to G tonal system as well as a rundown of what he considers to be a problem: that C, and the major and minor keys built upon it as a tonic, is an arbitrarily-selected tonal centre of gravity that is presently overemphasized and overrepresented. Those who are at all familiar with the rhetoric of Marxist or postcolonial literature should at once recognize the tropic structure of his argument, which is the age-old attack on an instance of reification. It runs thus: a) the governing establishment (in this case, a cultural bourgeoisie of tonality) presents an artificial construction (C as the organizing epicentre) as a normative and natural entity; b) the foundations of this construction are arbitrary; therefore, 3) the constructed norm, now revealed, must be disestablished.

Being a neo-imperialistic bourgeois know-it-all, I feel inclined to reject the conclusion that the C “mythology” (to borrow Barthes’ sense of the word), once properly exposed, should necessarily be subjected to demotion. Certainly, I concede that C is an overelevated focal point (and will attempt to explicate it with additional reasons that may ease Mr. Laroche’s bewilderment); and certainly, as a musician, I see the pedagogical value in exposing both students of music and the public at large to the undiscovered country beyond the major-minor system, though I do not envision such instruction as concurrent.

But the battle cry for change is a case of overstated alarmism, and the bizarre suggestion that A would be a suitable alternative makes hardly sense at all. Where it is not based on a circular rationale to do with the order of the Latin alphabet, for crying out loud, it refers to 440Hz as “a nice number, easily divisible into a number of smaller parts.” Here, the menace of the constructed norm rears its ugly head in the other direction. 440Hz was never standardized as the standard acoustic tuning frequency until the ISO 16 specification, dated 1955 and renewed 1975; prior to that, Guillaume’s assumption of a “properly-made tuning fork” was far from a proper existence, as proprietary conventions hovered all over the place.

Furthermore, if we are going to talk about divisibility as a theoretician’s convenience, we must also remember that these numbers are founded on a unit of measurement that is also not a natural entity. The hertz is the inverse of the second, and the authority of the second has no relevance to music in its unquantified form. Now, as soon as you quantify music, the second becomes important – not just in terms of frequency, but also in the dimension of tempo when it comes to variables like prescribed metronome markings – but these are every bit arbitrary conventions in no worse a way than C is a convention. To justify a mathematical convenience with itself is patently tautological.

A system built upon twelve well-tempered semitones to the octave derives its tonality from ratios of resonant frequencies, and the important thing to remember about ratios is that they are relative. Like the Kelvin scale (that would be a scale of temperature, not music), the only absolute is zero. Outside the realm of the theoretical, relative intervalic distances are sufficient.

In sum, arbitrariness is unavoidable. That said, C has a far better claim to its present position as the Ptolemaic do of the solfege in elementary instruction. Yes, this claim is one part retrospective and another part descriptivist, but at least it’s based on something practical, which is more than one can say for Guillaume’s argument for A to take its place. A is no more the sun of western music than C is the Earth.

So let’s examine some possible causes for the prominence of C. I attribute it first and foremost to notation. C Major has no sharps or flats. It tends to be very readable in any clef (and I hasten to point out that the thriving clefs, treble and bass, are founded on G and F respectively). This presumes the authority of the Ionian mode, but it also permits the definition and instruction of other scales in terms of how they differ from it; scales are easier learnt from identifying distinguishing accidentals than from note-to-note intervalic distances.

But, one might object, even if you accept the Ionian as the organizing mode of western music, you could establish it on any scale – and the readability of C Major doesn’t correspond to the ease of its playability on a given instrument. So how is it that C-oriented musical notation set foot in composition and performance?

Answer: keyboards.

The keyboard configuration of black keys and white keys is a direct visual isomorphism of musical notation, a representational mapping from sight to sound – albeit not a lossless one, due to the limitation that enharmonic equivalences like A# and Bb (or more tellingly, B# and C) are indistinguishable. Middle C is easier to grasp than, say, a hypothetical middle A, because only hitting the white keys with C as the tonic delivers an entire major tonality, just as hitting only the black keys delivers a pentatonic spectrum.

This isn’t something to be prescribed to the serious aspiring pianist, as it has the potential to lead to fingering habits that are undesirable in the long run as the keyboardist progresses to more complex pieces; Chopin famously trained his piano students starting with the B Major scale to avoid exactly that pitfall. But basic keyboard literacy is nowadays fundamental to any performer, and familiarity with the black-and-white layout is often a requirement for intermediate musical studies in any instrument. For them, keyboard technique is a secondary consideration, ranking behind the layout’s usefulness as a theoretical aid.

I’ve coined what I think is a clever word for this phenomenon, which I do not believe has been employed in a theoretical context: pianocentrism.

The continued entrenchment of C as a de facto “starting note” since the fifteenth century is a pianocentric result; the black-and-white alternation first emerged in exactly that period. The keyboard has historically been, and persists to be, the reinforcing mechanism for what Philip Tagg, in his paper on the semiotics of popular music, refers to notational centricity. Any way you swing it, notation has restricted much of our tonal cognition to a discrete twelve-step cycle, when pitch in the abstract is a continuous domain. Fred Lerdahl’s work on formal grammars of music outlines this conception in a generalized framework; the pianocentric orbit around C Major that I am here identifying is a specific, if popular case.

There exists a solid objection to this, and it is one that Guillaume implicitly posits when he defends his preference for A based on its suitability to the Aeolian mode – that is to say, the natural minor on the sharpless and flatless staff, executable on white keys alone. The idea is that if we reverted to an A-oriented model, which brings us back to how A-to-G notation was alphabetized in the first place, natural minors and not majors would be the new point of origin in a coordinate system that remains diatonic.

In other words, the dominance of C is a direct product of the dominance of the major scale. The utility of teaching the major scale first is what leads us to a descriptivist argument: simply put, it permits the beginning performer easy access to what we now call small-c classical music as well as a plentiful repository of nursery rhymes. In the dungeons of tonality, the major scale is the Big Key.

Is it limiting that the major-minor system – and as a result, C Major – indoctrinates society with traditional prejudices of consonance and dissonance? Yes, in the same way that the limitations of Euclidean geometry are prejudiced against hyperbolic surfaces. Yes, in the same way that the limitations of Newtonian physics make no allowances for wave-particle duality on the atomic level. It is no coincidence that Arnold Schoenberg (and every time I mention him, I just know Guillaume is going to jump all over my flagrant misunderstandings of serialism) described his twelve-tone system as being to music what relativity was to classical physics.

By this I mean that tonal prejudices, reified as they are, hold for a reason. Like the postulates of Euclid and Newton – although a better analogy would be to Northrop Frye’s theory of archetypes in English literature – tonality defined around the major scale is a theoretical approximation that only works under certain assumptions, but its utility is sufficiently justified by the breadth of observable phenomena it envelops.

Of course, music performance is one thing, and composition is quite a different matter; in that regard, it has been some time now that composers have dispensed with pianocentricity in the key of C, not to mention every other rudiment in the unwritten classical rulebook. This is by no means confined to atonal experimentation, nor has it failed to elicit popular consumption.

Think Leonard Bernstein. Or, for that matter, Danny Elfman’s title theme to The Simpsons. Or John Williams, probably the most popular symphonic composer of modern times. Although a good many of his lavish and bombastic leitmotifs that are now as firm a part of the cultural fabric as Wagner was a century ago are strongly major or minor, much of his work is not: the contrapuntal dialogue between keyboard and spaceship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the exemplary cue, but consider the echoes of Stravinsky in The Empire Strikes Back (both its incidental music and the thunderous “Imperial March”), the “Scherzo for Motorcycle and Orchestra” in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and a good chunk of Jaws. In video games, the Japanese RPG music of composers like Nobuo Uematsu and Yasunori Mitsuda was heavily modal (particularly in the Aeolian and Dorian); notice the frequency with which they resolve cadences from minor dominant chords, putting a whole tone of space between the leading note and the tonic.

Guillaume also makes an interesting observation that I feel should be quoted directly:

The reason kids don’t appreciate Messiaen’s sense of tonality (he argues that it’s there in his Technique de mon language musical, I tend to agree based on my definition of what tonality should be…) is partially because from the beginning we have them play nice little pieces in C+ that shy away from dissonance. We teach them that dissonance is bad because these cute little pieces alternate between the chords of I, IV and V, and anything outside that is a minor chord and thus to be avoided. If a minor chord is to be avoided, how are we supposed to appreciate the beauty of an augmented chord with a minor 9th added on top? Even on the other side of the musical learning, that thing called jazz, most books teach the chords and progressions and techniques from a base of C. How unoriginal.

(“Aha!” sayeth Nick as he espies a mention of his own personal field of quasi-expertise, “a chance for Faramir, Captain of Gondor, to show his quality!”)

This is an interesting passage, partly because jazz harmony is almost exclusively founded on 9th, 11th and 13th extensions when it is not busy mucking about with overlapping inversions and funky pedal points. In fact, I speculate that is precisely why illustrations of leadsheet chord symbols are presented by example with C as the root: the accidentals on the staff explicitly signify how these harmonies fit into or differ from the diatonic sequence of the major scale.

In practice, the situation is quite different. Chord substitution and voicing revolve around emphasizing the traditionally discouraged tritone, often using it as a diametric pivot across the circle of fifths. Melodic improvisation is one big exercise in the convergence of modes and blues scales. New syntheses of these scales with the vocabulary of underlying extended chords are happening all the time, and complete conversions to a modal framework are old news; Miles Davis was doing it half a century ago in “So What”.

In my own experience, C is not the most comfortable of keys for the jazz pianist, as the white-key correspondence to the diatonic major becomes almost a hindrance and a distraction once one has found tactile comfort in a roughly equal proportion of black and white landings. I much prefer Eb, as the proximities surrounding it lend themselves to some very interesting progressions that feel a lot more natural to the fingers.

The ideal standard of performance in any genre, of course, is equal and balanced proficiency starting on any note. But for most purposes, C is as good a place to start as any.

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The falafels we ate last summer

Tuesday, 28 June 2005 — 4:14pm | Jazz, Music

At some point in your life you’ve probably heard some controversy about this thing called “love at first sight,” which to me is neither that compelling an issue nor at all fair to blind people. It even arises in the hypothetical reality embedded in literature, as do most debates that circle around the kind of representational silliness that abounds when misattributing to fiction the false responsibility of corresponding to the human condition.

You don’t hear so much about love at first listen, probably because it’s systematically demonstrable and there is no reason to doubt its operation whatsoever. To take someone at face-value is subject to being considered shallow, but to take someone at voice-value is a different matter entirely, because the voice says something. And this ambiguous something is not limited to the words and utterances it produces; consider someone who speaks in another language, where that is not at all a factor. This is a “how” property that lies in tone and melody. I venture I am not the only one who never understood all the hype about Marilyn Monroe until that scene in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot where she punctuates “I Wanna Be Loved By You” with that meaningless little poo-poo bee-doo. That – not the Coca-Cola pin-up look or the Kennedy affair – that’s what made Miss Norma Jeane a legend.

A quick scan of Google’s 3,630 results for “love at first listen” reveals that it is almost exclusively used in reference to recording artists, from whom one can be detached in all other respects, and for whom melody is what feeds the kids. While I do think the possibility of the concept transcends this medium of delivery and is active in day-to-day personal interaction, I am not going to deviate from this pattern.

This most prolific of strains is the kind of FALAFEL (Far-Away Love At First Enchanting Listen) where listening to a certain vocalist for the first time – it might only be a track, though a fraction thereof is occasionally sufficient – sells you on their albums on the spot. Let’s call the most extreme case the Ella Effect, not because this immediate rush was what accompanied my first encounter with Ella Fitzgerald, but because if you didn’t react the same way the first time you heard her sing, you’re deaf.

The Ella Effect manifests an aural holiness of the highest and most elusive order. It’s a rare gem. In nerdier terms than I dare manage, we’re talking Alpha Edition Black Lotus rare. Lady Ella herself aside, you’re about as likely to be washed over by this whopper of a falafel as you are to stumble upon the Chris Houlihan room on a hot summer’s day. Hear it once, and that’s a songbird you’ll be listening to for the rest of your life.

And I think I’ve found the Ella Effect once more.

Meet Emilie-Claire Barlow. A few weeks ago I awoke to a CBC broadcast of her take on “The Things We Did Last Summer” from her superb new self-arranged album Like A Lover, which was released this month. The setup was about as minimalistic as you could get – just ECB singing over a walking upright bass, already of interest by itself given that writing bass lines and playing them on a so-so Clavinova sample is something I’ve been trying to pick up for some time. But the track title is a bit of a misnomer, because far from being that old Cahn/Styne jingle by its lonely little self, it’s a framing device for a vocalese trip around the sun, a scatty-wah collage of about a dozen standards of a seasonal bent.

It’s the kind of chart that makes you want to shell out for the record right now – which I couldn’t at the time, because it wasn’t released yet. But now I’ve acquired the disc along with her 2003 release Happy Feet, and she’s phenomenal.

The written word fails to provide an adequately lossless isomorphism that captures her sound, but I’ll do my best and describe her tone as… open, cheerful, happy. Lady may sing the blues, but boy, will they ever bring a smile to your face. She channels that excitable flavour of brightness that veers a sharp left on the cute-sexy spectrum, and this day in age when Canada flies the flags of Diana Krall’s moody alto and Molly Johnson’s, uh, being Billie Holiday, Emilie-Claire’s is the road less travelled. She also uses little or no piano, so the albums are pleasant to comp over if like yours truly, you’re an ivoryman who fancies to pretend that a chanteuse of her calibre would have anything to do with you.

Of all the jazz singers recording today, I think she’s my new favourite. It’s unfortunate that her upcoming performance schedule is limited to Ontario and Quebec, and makes nary a mention of us alienated provinces.

Ms. Barlow also keeps a blog. Here we return to what I said earlier about how voice-value says something: after listening to her recordings, her fruity, lighthearted bubblegum writing style should come as a surprise to nobody. And if a weblog isn’t a metric of personal disposition, then what is?

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The immortal Lady Diana

Sunday, 2 May 2004 — 10:09pm | Jazz, Music

So I just returned from the first performance of Diana Krall on her latest Canadian tour at the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium, where she will be for another two shows. Suffice to say, she places pretty high on the list of people Nick wants to be – and while I’m halfway there piano-wise, the vocals have a long way to go. (Observe Steve as he takes the preceding statement as a cue to pose a similarly self-indulgent question to himself on his blog concerning people whom he wants to be, proceeds to laud Joe Clark and Paul Simon – not necessarily in that order – and receives a boatload of comments from his readership while the responses to this here post remains strictly in the single-digits.)

I was first introduced to Ms. Krall – or would that be Mrs. Costello? – back in 1997 or so when she released Love Scenes, which was being promoted on Bravo!, which I watched all the time because it was the only station at the time carrying Red Dwarf. As Dirk Gently would point out, everything’s connected, see. But I digress. Now, back then I had yet to become the jazz-head I am today, with the swing rhythms permanently hardwired into my brain and the corresponding pen-drumming and whatnot. In the past few years I have really come to appreciate her work, and it was a pleasure to finally see her perform live.

I won’t pretend for a moment that the Grammys (should be “Grammies”) and the like are very often legitimate, but if ever there was a deserving artist in recent years, it’s Diana Krall. It’s impressive what a controlled pianist she is when, often at the same time, she sings with one of the most recognizable voices in modern jazz, a sultry alto with an enunciation that could be described as smooth – not that my description counts for much, because she really speaks (sings?) for herself. Watching a jazz musician of her calibre – not to mention the diversity of her repertoire: everything from Irving Berlin to Joni Mitchell to her husband – is an experience in itself, in the sense that she and her band play with such professionalism, but by the very nature of their music seem as laid back as ever.

If she’s coming by you on your tour, you owe it to yourself to try and get tickets – though I warn you, that is in itself a difficult and expensive proposition. But I guarantee you it will be worth it, and even if you are not quite into contemporary jazz, this would make a more than fitting introduction.

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Fifteen Minutes Keyboard Rambling

Tuesday, 13 April 2004 — 10:54pm | Jazz, Music, Pianism

So for the first time this playoff season, I miss a Flames game, and it turns out to be a very watchable 4-0 drubbing in their favour. But if they keep on playing like this, I will have plenty of chances to watch them again.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is running a massive online poll in preparation for a future television feature, asking: Who is the Greatest Canadian? I may be alone in this, but my pick is Oscar Peterson. It really comes down to this: who, as a person, would I most like to be? Among the profiled suggestions, it has to go to the greatest jazz pianist of all time and all time yet to come. But lest that be the only consideration, let’s keep this in mind: who else, of everybody there, so completely and singularly defines his art? In hockey, you have cultural icons over several generations – Richard, Gretzky, Howe – even Paul Henderson is listed entirely on the basis of his goal in the Summit Series. In politics, you may have Pierre Trudeau, but by no means was he the sole contributor to everything significant in Canadian governance today; think Diefenbaker, MacDonald, Kim Campbell – well, not Campbell, unless you are the National Geographic Society. International war and peace? Dallaire, Pearson, the list goes on. Literature? Richler, Findley, Atwood – as much as they all stand out, none of them can claim to dominate the field. Even when it comes to music, as much as we all like to quote Leonard Cohen and put our heads on Paul Anka’s shoulder, there’s a world of difference between the talent that distinguishes them in the oversaturated history of popular music and the kind I’m talking about.

But Oscar Peterson: he’s a giant among giants. When it comes to musical-technical prowess, you have Glenn Gould, who basically defined how to play Bach – and he is why one should fall short of calling O.P. the greatest Canadian pianist, period – but the latter did define how to both play and arrange the likes of Berlin, Gershwin, and Rodgers. From the age of fifteen he was already an established Canadian entertainer, performing on the CBC as well as his own Montreal radio program, “Fifteen Minutes Piano Rambling”. As far as Canadian contributions go, look no further than his Canadiana Suite. There’s an anecdote that when he was young, Oscar listened to an Art Tatum record for the first time and was so intimidated he took a month off the the ivories; call it transitivity, but that’s what it’s like to listen to him today. Sometimes it’s easy to pick up a book, admire a visual work of art or listen to a recording and tell yourself, “I can do that.” With Oscar Peterson, no you can’t.

When it comes to other Canadian heroes, I would mention former Scrabble World Champion and overall freakishly good player Joel Wapnick, but sadly enough, competitive Scrabble’s cultural penetration has insofar been rather limited. He does play the piano, though. But if we are looking simply at cultural iconism, one can’t ignore Lucy Maud Montgomery, who put Prince Edward Island on the map, and the unlisted Tim Horton, who puts coffee in me to this day.

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