Ntuple Indemnity

What’s worse than listening to a tinny Casio electronic keyboard with a MIDI-quality timbre, muddy pedal effect, miscalibrated tuning dial and spring-loaded keys that offer no tactile response whatsoever?

Answer: playing a tinny Casio electronic keyboard with a MIDI-quality timbre, muddy pedal effect, miscalibrated tuning dial and spring-loaded keys that offer no tactile response whatsoever.

There is a very good reason why I refer to myself as a pianist and not a keyboardist. In fact, I will turn down very good money in the event that someone attempts to secure me for a gig in a venue that lacks a piano. Seriously, why even bother?

Nobody can sound good on these things. In fact, when it comes to jazz harmonies, it’s likely you’ll sound outright terrible. Improvised harmonic voicings depend heavily on a habitually-developed ear for resonances, overtones and the flavours you get from the spaces and clusters associated with a given register. That’s not even accounting for pedal technique, where you are not only sustaining notes, but considering how they cohere. While there’s a whole spectrum of quality from the living-room upright to the nine-foot concert grand, the same principles apply: you are still fundamentally triggering hammers on strings, and that comes with specific tactile and aural expectations.

Yes, I am aware that there are acoustic pianists out there who somehow manage to sound incredibly good on electric instruments. They go by names like Herbie Hancock and Doug Riley, and even they use proper electric instruments that don’t pretend to be low-fat synthesized substitutes for real pianos.

I don’t care if Donovan Bailey can sprint a hundred metres in 9.84 seconds: he can’t do dick-all in a pair of Wellingtons. This is no different.

(As for the circumstance in question, I cast no blame; a booking oversight landed the choir that I accompany in an abandoned-cinema-turned-church instead of the usual haunt at Convocation Hall. I would suggest to the gallery, for future reference, that “Do you have a piano?” is an essential question when selecting a venue. If you accept budget synthesizers as a placebo, you do it at your own risk, and I take no responsibility for sounding as uneven and insipid as a Michael Ignatieff speech on the Friday night of a leadership convention.)

What mean I by unrecognitis? I believe it’s a Stu Goldman coinage, and it describes a curious but common phenomenon that afflicted me tonight, when Bill Payne bingoed out with RESTATES in an improbable location I had neglected to block. “Restate?” I thought, “What’s a restate? Sounds like some kind of residual chemical compound… it looks familiar, so I think it’s good, unless I’m thinking of TESTATE.” But hey – the game was over, so I challenged the darned thing anyway (which is always a good idea on the last turn, since you have nothing to lose).

Naturally, it was acceptable, and Bill scraped so many points from the play that I ended up winning by a narrow margin (423-406) in spite of dominating the game until the last few turns. To keep things in perspective, that’s one whopper of an aggregate score between the two of us. One doesn’t often lose with a score over 400.

Ten minutes later: “Oh! Re-state!”

I haven’t posted here lately, but if I had, it would have been about sport. However, I’ve been reading about it instead (hockey and footy, anyhow), and that’s my alibi.

Enough excuses and distractions, though. Here’s a treat for your patience: a live jazz trio playing the Super Mario Bros. theme. That’s the wine-bearing Darryl Meyer on drums, the lovely Aleks Argals on bass, and yours truly on the crazy eighty-eights. Share and enjoy.

I’ve been thinking about words.

I’m unabashedly a word-lover. One of the consequent afflictions of word-loving, though, is a passion for cute little alphabetic clumps that extends so far beyond their utility as meaning-carrying units that this utility becomes fully detachable. And as soon as one accepts that language can be beautiful in and of itself without having to communicate anything, one begins to see all kinds of instances where language in its meaningful state is intrusive and wholly unnecessary.

This is going to turn into a post where I make fun of hip-hop; but first, a few words about Tolkien.

I have, on one occasion or another, heard someone dismiss The Lord of the Rings on the grounds that Tolkien merely intended the mythology of Middle-Earth to serve as a playground for his invented languages. While not strictly untrue, this is an oversimplification and a misunderstanding. The way I read it, what Tolkien had claimed from the beginning is that the sound-patterns of a language – which would naturally include invented ones, since the meanings of individual lexical units are to some extent arbitrary – are able to contain and reflect the cultural history of a people, even a hypothetical people.

And so you have the Elves, whose unvoiced consonants slip and slide off the labiodental oh-so-gently, whereas the Orcs speak in abrasive, glottal coughs and hacks. In both the physical world and the speech-world, the Elves dance lightly, the Dwarves weigh themselves down; and the language and nomenclature of Rohan are lifted straight from Old English, so there’s no question about where that places them in Tolkien’s cosmos. (Allegorical conclusion: the French are beautiful and the Germans are ugly.) But the important thing is this: the mimetic position of each culture is discernible before meaning is introduced in the form of definitions.

This observation, and the illusion of authenticity that it permits when it comes to an invented tongue, separate Tolkien from all the cheap imitators who think dropping unpronounceable apostrophes everywhere is sufficient. For one thing, it makes no sense for an English-language narrator to anglicize everything except for the funny names, especially in a quasi-medieval setting reflecting an order of society organized around appropriation and homogeneity. I like to think of this as a case of contradictory suspensions of disbelief: how is it that English narrators speaking of a world in which English does not exist are somehow incapable of transliteration? Did they never have Peking Duck at the Turin Olympics?

But enough about bad fantasy. After all, this isn’t my area of special expertise. Talk to Wolf Wikeley, or better yet, watch My Fair Lady. Me, I just play keys.

At this juncture, I want to talk about what inspired this post in the first place. About three weeks ago, I comped a chart featuring my old schoolmate Ian Keteku, who now frolics on the Edmonton rap scene and goes by “Emcee E”. It was a surreal experience, and while in rehearsal, the pair of vocalists coordinating the shindig had to remind me on several occasions to keep the harmonies simple and not swing the time. It’s a struggle to let go of the upper structures and blue notes once you’ve internalized them, and I have no idea how Herbie Hancock ever managed to not only do it, but go on to record a hit single with Christina Aguilera. Then again, he’s Herbie Hancock.

Curiously, the last time Ian and I shared a stage was when he passed the microphone to me at my high school graduation banquet – a legendary evening that, roughly an hour later, went down in history (or down in flames). But the really bizarre thing about this whole scenario is somewhat more transparent.

Jazz guy. Rap guy. We’re not supposed to get along. Think of the Capulets and Montagues; now think of one of them as illiterate, and you’ve got it.

Two days earlier, Kenny Drew (not the one who played with Bird, but his son, who is also a pianist) wrote an article on All About Jazz entitled “What the F**k Happened to Black Popular Music?” – which, predictably, led to an explosive messageboard discussion about the decadence of American youth.

The animosity towards rap is uniquely strong in jazz circles for two reasons. First, rap has taken the place of jazz as the inspirational voice of black America, and there’s a certain cultural jealousy at work – jealousy in its second-most justified form (the first being an armed response to the Universal Constant of the Treachery of Women).

For my part, it is my learned opinion that jazz was, and is, a discovery, not an invention; it does not belong to black America, or America on the whole, any more than the moons of Jupiter belong to Italy. At the same time, I am not going to disrespect the forefathers of the great musical artform of the twentieth century by ignoring the hard fact that the syntax of jazz improvisation developed out of a specific ethnic milieu motivated by the desire to express a positive racial identity. The very problem is that once jazz was properly recognized as a universal construct, it lost its importance to African-American youth.

The second peeve, and the more fundamental one, is that jazz is an extension of the accepted musical dimensions of melody, harmony and rhythm, whereas rap thrives on the absence of the first two and the minimalistic reduction of the third.

I’m not going to get into the discussion of whether or not rap is music. Hip-hop production is no small task, even if it constricts itself to a limited subset of possible syncopations in 4/4 time – which, at face value, isn’t too different from the rhythmic complexity of early swing. It’s just that one requires a MIDI keyboard and a handful of plagiarized samples, whereas the other requires an instrument and practice. But as with any artform, the EffortMeter is merely the first line of aesthetic defence, and leans heavily towards exclusion (or, in the case of aurora borealis at 28,000ft, religion).

The repetition of vowel sounds produces a series of resonances that could be characterized as a harmonic system of its own, though it’s no more sophisticated than Eliza Doolittle reciting nursery rhymes about the rain in Spain falling mainly in the plain or Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor tapping to “Moses supposes his toeses are roses” over half a century ago. And melodically speaking, there does exist a “correct” diction that distinguishes “good” rap from cheap imitation President’s Choice rap, though in either case, it still deserves a bad rap.

So the genre passes all three tests. I accept that rap is musical, in the same way that the ziplocked excrement of an underfed chihuahua decorated with parsley (the excrement, not the chihuahua) is edible. Technically, yeah… it’s just that I prefer the filet mignon, especially when it’s offered for the same market price.

And I will state, for clarity, that it’s not like all rap is intolerable simply because its musicality is relegated to technical excuses. I will concede that the most outstanding track on Bound Together, a tribute to the music of the Super Nintendo game Earthbound, is the rap remix “Da Black Market”. I will concede that for some reason, French rap is actually not bad; if it’s as full of crass proletarian gutterspeak as the English variant, I don’t know it. I will even concede that the sight of a shrimpy Japanese-Norwegian rugby player channelling the Wu-Tang Clan is hilarious.

However, I am going to identify a general cause behind all of this semantic infighting.

Contemporary popular music has a problem. It happens to be the same problem as the one in mainstream computer animation: there are too many goddamned words.

Rap is the extreme case: the distillation of music for the consumption of the lowest common denominator of the tone-deaf breakbeat bobblehead. Somehow, it always manages to stumble its way back to the but-it’s-poetry tagline excuse. But in almost every genre, there is this depressing tendency for kids with mad guitar chops to obscure their playing with vapid half-sung lyrics about love or death or whatever else is fashionable this afternoon on the bipolar planetoid of Kazaa, when the music is perfectly comfortable speaking for itself.

The meaning of the words is at most a supplement to the music, or a part of some larger dramatic mixed-media construction. The words do not equal the music in any respect apart from acting as signals in the soundspace. Remove the words, and you still have music. Remove the triumvirate of melody, harmony and rhythm, and the music is gone; lyrics are not information-preserving. There’s a reason we file operas by composer, not librettist.

Louis Armstrong recognized the self-sufficiency of melodic expression and invented scat. Annie Ross turned it into a joke and pioneered vocalese. And when jazz vocalists still anchor onto the old standards, the melodies suggest a template for creative interpretation, a crucible for the formation of a personal musical identity. The notes on the page by your Gershwin or Rodgers or Porter, and the words that fit them, are norms. What you listen for are the erratic deviations.

I don’t say this to exclude. I have a lot of respect for the burgeoning poetic tradition of the singer-songwriter, be it those who can sing (Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell) or those who can’t (Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen). But in most cases, the words do not equal the music. They are separable, as lyricophiles consistently demonstrate; and that also implies, quite correctly, that the musical dimensions can be isolated. Unless, of course, the music is absent. Just as bad music can get in the way of well-meaning lyrics, bad poetry – or poor enunciation thereof – often obscures the music. And there’s way too much of both going around. Curiously, market forces are driven by the verbally empowered and musically illiterate, a subdivision that is disturbingly representative of consumer society at large where everybody hears and nobody listens.

That’s one possibility, anyhow. The other one is the ego of the musician who feels the need to disrespect the audience by spelling out how it should feel and what everything means. That’s not poetry, it’s narcissism. And when the words are superficial blotches of noise designed to obscure an underlying monotony of composition, the practice is especially reprehensible.

I don’t deny that words can serve a very direct musical function, and in fact, that is what works in rap. That is what works in opera when you ignore the supertitles and listen to the enunciation of a foreign language, which is itself emotionally indicative of something. That is what works in John Coltrane when he chants along to Jimmy Garrison’s bass line in his spiritual “Acknowledgment”: a love supreme, a love supreme. Which is the dominant function, and which is the supplementary one? Here’s a clue: most of what you hear today has it the wrong way around.

I’m told that the choir I play with is performing Saturday evening at Convocation Hall, somewhere in the vicinity of 8pm. Admission is $10 for students and $15 for all of you other folks. Aside from little oddities like banquets and weddings, this will be my first public performance in several years, so if you absolutely insist on missing it, do have the courtesy to at least miss it very deliberately.

I’m also seeing Filumena tomorrow, as far as I have been made aware. I don’t expect to have the opportunity to review the Edmonton Opera production anytime soon or relevant, not even in the form of a capsule (a capsule review or a time capsule – take it however you wish), but word is that I won’t have to: the overwhelming sentiment preceding the show is that it speaks for itself, and admirably at that.

And then it’s back to work. You probably don’t want to hear about that, unless it so happens you have a perverse fascination with suboptimal approximation algorithms or semantic analysis of formal grammars. And if you do, welcome to the club.

On a tangentially operatic non sequitur: is it Towy Season or Gwit Season?

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.