A 'Simple' C Maj Modality Question ;-)

Harmony & Theory
#21

I’m not sure I understand the premise of the question, I guess.

How does notation reveal that a composition is in a pentatonic scale? Nothing about the key signature or the way the pitches are written on the staff says “pentatonic,” it’s just that you, as a fairly savvy musician, should be able to recognize that if you see a G major/E minor key signature, the music is resolving to the tonic of E, and the pitches being played are E, G, A, B, and D, and nothing else, that it’s an E minor pentatonic line.

And that takes it to another degree, really - how does a key signature reveal that it’s in E minor, and not G major, in the first place? If you see one sharp, it could as easily be G major as E minor, and yet while we’re talking about “Rambling Man,” you’re very confident in your assessment that the tune is in G major, and not E minor (at least before we get into the inclusion of the b7 in the chorus). I think the answer for that is that you’re also turning to other context clues, and noting the fact that the song continously resolves to a G chord means it’s in G, not E minor. But, nowhere on the staff does it say “the tonic is G,” you’re just using context clues to determine that.

I’d see it as kind of the same question. I actually don’t know whjat standard practice is here, but I’d assume that to minimize the number of accidentals you would write a D Dorian composition in the key signature of C, but based on the fact the music continuously resolves to a D minor and treats the D minor as the tonic, know that it’s a D Dorian composition and not a C major one. Or an A minor/A aeolean one, for that matter, and since A Aeolean is just as much of a mode as D Dorian is, I think the principle of just looking at HOW the music is functioning and knowing what you’re working wiith from that is on pretty solid footing.

As for whether or not this makes modes “only useful to theorists,” I don’t know if I agree - I suppose you could look at a piece with no sharps or flats that resolves to D the whole time as “a C major composition, but for some reason it keeps resolving the the ii” but I think it’s probably more functionally useful to look at it based first on the tonic, D, and then on how the pitches employed all relate to each other, in this case Dorian.

Idunno. I don’t think it’s needlessly complicated, so much as just really flexible.

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#22

You absolutely nailed my thought process: Eventually I concluded that only the composer knows why he or she did something, and that as a bedroom instrumentalist I only need concern myself with what is written, and not why. Indeed, I probably take this philosophy to the extreme and notice lots of 6’s might suggest a minor key, and yes, if I can make something be a major key, that’s what it is to me.

At some point I will find the standard textbook used for composition in a conservatory (for classical music), and I might read it in order to see how they approach things. The thing that I have negative interest in (e.g., I think it is toxic for one’s growth) is the desire to improvise with heuristics, I feel that premature improv derails learning repertoire. The reality is there are actual musical geniuses out there that I could never touch, so my hope is to at least learn some of their works, ideally to an acceptable level.

But one day I might try my hand as a bedroom composer… that would be scary, it would be a shameless attempt at pop music with hooks and loops. The world deserves better, people with actual talent and muses whispering in their ears.

#23

There’s nothing wrong about it. I wrote tens of tearjerking love songs back in the years (thanks god most of them lost in time) :))

#24

That’s surprising then, because we’ve come to exact opposite conclusions. I think because standard notation provides the notes and the rhythm but not the context, it’s incredibly important to be familiar with the, call them building blocks, I guess, of the context. At a minimum, on an instrument like a guitar where there can be as many as five or six different places on the fretboard to play a given note, I think being able to look at sheet music and identify the scales (and modes, at the end of the day, are scales) and harmony and key center, is the sort of understanding that sight reading would be essentially impossible without. Even when you’re not sight-reading, knowing how a series of notes is functioning can provide some really valuable information when it comes to arranging them on the fretboard, and interpreting the music, emphasizing certain pitches, etc. Reading standard notation has made me want to know MORE about how music functions, not less.

The thing that’s especially confusing to me is you’re already halfway there - you’re talking about music being in “G major” but the presence of a single sharp on the staff tells you nothing about the tonal center of the music. You’re clearly doing at least some sussing out to determine that the way the music is functioning, G is the tonic, and not, say E. Presumably that’s useful information to have or you wouldn’t be doing it, no?

Also… You keep going on about “premature improvisation.” I don’t understand this - premature according to who? When are you “mature” enough to improvise? Is your background classical music and classical guitar, and that’s why your focus is on performing compositions and building repertoire? I’m trying to understand where you’re coming here. At a minimum I’d suggest maybe phrasing it differently - frankly, it sounds like a riff on premature ejaculation which makes it come across as fairly dismissive, and while that may not be your intent, it’s something worth thinking about because it impacts how others will view your posts.

Improvisation may not be a part of your goals as a musician, and if that’s the case, then that’s totally fine. If you don’t want to learn how to do it, then it doesn’t make a ton of sense to put the time in. And, in some genres, that’s the norm - I have a classically trained violinist friend that I’ve performed and worked with in the past who I believe was trained in the Yamaha, I think, school, where the focus is entirely on repertoire. When I ask her to improvise she looks at me like I have two heads, because it’s completely alien to her learning process. That doesn’t make her a lesser musician, it’s just not part of her genre’s canon. But, some genres rely heavily on improvisation, and if you’re a blues or jazz musician, and you can’t improvise, then you’re not a blues or jazz musician.

Idunno - I promise you I’m coming from a good place here, I’m not trying to be antagonistic, and I mean this as a friendly observation and not a criticism - your belief that improvisation is bad for guitarists is very much a product of your own musical goals, and as someone where the ability to fluidly improvise is a very, very high priority, it feels kind of dismissive and is a little off-putting.

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#25

Right, standard practice is to pay meticulous attention to notation about dynamics and articulation, listen to famous musicians playing it (e.g., Glen Gould for Bach, etc.), and, in certain cases, read the scholarship about a piece (but I’m too lazy).

I know the notes when I know the key, that’s why the key is important: I couldn’t play without it. However, I can easily play anything with no attention to modes, and this is really my underlying point, I suppose.

People like Mozart were improv machines, you could do anything and then he could go to town on it. However, this is because his composition is so incredible and he is so musical it is nothing for his brain to compose in real-time with constraints (= improv). When I see people totally unable to compose a piece given unlimited time adding real-time constraints on themselves and then basically making what I view as… uh… less than desirable music, that is premature improvisation (as I see it).

I can’t help it if you have a dirty mind, for example Knuth (Stanford professor) opines “premature optimization is the root of all evil.” Or, to quote Freud, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” But yes, I went from popular music (mostly metal) into classical, and while I don’t play piano, I run in circles where I regularly talk to very famous artists, and then I get to abuse them with stupid questions.

I know that you’re both a good guy and quite sincere. I can just tell you this: If I go into a high-end piano or violin store the little kids always blow me away, they sound great, and this is because they’re playing the music of geniuses and their teachers enforce good technique. When I walk into Guitar Center I see people of every age improvising and it makes my ears bleed. I feel that if they devoted their time to careful practice and repertoire, they really would be in a much better place, but then again, if they’re having fun and don’t care about performance or composition, that’s fine. But are they happy? I believe not, and you know what I blame for all of this.

You’ve probably heard this one before, but if not, let’s close the loop with Mozart, and this work freaks me out because he is so far beyond anything that I could possibly imagine, and it becomes immediately clear when he opens one can of whup-ass after another: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyhxeo6zLAM

#26

Two comments here.

One, I think there are some pretty major differences between these two groups of kids that are unrelated to improvisation. The first group, as you point our, has their teachers overseeing their training. The second group, I’ll hazard, is primarily untaught and working without teachers. It’s not improvisation so much as the lack of any structure. Most of the first group of kids are having 1-2 lessons a week and are probably doing an hour of practice, at a minimum, a night, while most of the second group arn’t. Part of this is probably socioeconomic, too, since a high end piano is a five figure investment and you can buy a starter guitar for $200, and very little on the floor of a Guitar Center that a kid can pick up without supervision is worth even as much as a grand.

I’d hazard that if you took a kid, gave him a guitar, and had him do scale and arpeggio exercises an hour a night while also encouraging him to improvise, he or she would turn into a pretty excellent player. I think the real issue here isn’t improvisation, it’s the fact that classical music is a very diciplined endeavor and has a ton of structure built into it, while rock is more of a wild, abandon, “break the rules” genre, where a disregard for formal dicipline - right down to the theory we’re discussing in this thread, I can’t count the conversations I’ve had with rock guitarists who don’t WANT to know theory because they “don’t want to be bound by rules” - is not only common, it’s kind of cultivated.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that a free-for-all, throw-out-the-rulebook culture is not the best way to build technical aptitude, and there’s a lot of sloppy guitarists out there for it, and maybe even more telling a lot of guitarists who see nothing wrong with that. And that’s fine, it’s just not one of my musical goals. But I don’t think improvisation is the right scapegoat here. I think rather it’s that rock is an inherently anti-authoritarian genre, while classical is extremely authoritarian and rigorous.

The jazz world is an interesting comparison here, because it shares the discipline of the classical world - the hours of woodshedding and building vocabulary and technique, though also with an added on focus on theory to compliment the physical ability to execute - but from the get go also has a STRONG focus on improvised playing, where even fairly beginner jazz players are expected to be able to take a set of changes and improvise a passable solo over the top, often navigating some outside tonalities while doing so. And yet, you don’t see any of the “problems” you ascribe to improvisation in the jazz world, even though the genre is built entirely around the idea of guys getting together, blowing through a head, and then taking turns improvising. If it was improvisation and not lack of dicipline, then your ears would bleed every time you walked into a jazz club, too, and I don’t think that’s the case.

The other thing I’d disagree with you on, is yes, I believe they probably ARE happy. Guitar is a fun instrument, and even if you don’t really know what you’re doing jamming with other musicians and messing around freely on a guitar is a blast. I’d bet the guitarists are probably happier than the kids in a high end piano shop playing whatever they’ve been working on with their instructor of memory.

I mean, end of the day, if the ability to play an improvised guitar solo isn’t important to you or doesn’t have any value to you, then I don’t expect this to make much sense to you… But, to pick up a guitar and rip off a solo off the top of your head, improvisng it, is a LOT of fun. It’s a very liberating and creative feeling.

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#27

In addition to what @Drew already addressed, I think you may be underestimating the influence of very common “classical” methods that emphasize improvisation as an essential skill. Noa Kageyama, featured elsewhere in CtC-land, speaks to the issue here better than I can…

And bringing the discussion back to the OP’s topic, and regarding barriers to entry in jazz improvisation, with regard to what @Drew wrote here:

There is actually a pretty severe drop off between players that can navigate changes and those that wish they could, and I attribute that in large part due to the teaching of scalar improvisation in schools post Mile’s Davis’s Kind of Blue. I believe it’s worth noting here, as there are a ton of folks learning scales while looking at arpeggios as an afterthought, often fingered on their own.

If one is wrestling with the concept of modes in C Major, I highly recommend that one study the related seventh chord arpeggios in C Major before trying to gawk the modes themselves. In use, D Dorian makes a whole lot more sense as D minor seventh arpeggio (1, b3, 5, b7) with added color tones (9, 11, 6) than as a set of notes built on the second scale degree of C Major.

I’ll posit that if one thinks of seventh chords as four note scales within a parent scale pattern, one is likely to advance more quickly improvisationally than someone dished an entire seventh note scale identical to it’s related major scale.

And damnit, I’m incredibly jealous of folks afforded sophisticated musical training at a very young age. Happy Friday and Days of the Dead, y’all. :slight_smile:

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#28

Being perfectly honest, this is a pretty big weakness in my own playing, and I always mean to practice improvising a solo or even just making a drill out of it and playing straight 8th or 16th note lines limiting myself strictly to chord tones to force myself to think more in terms of chordal harmony while improvising, but I never do.

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#29

The downside of not being born into to the classic jazz and big band eras, prior to the birth of bop. :slight_smile:

update:
I should add, musicians from the pre-bop eras would have likely been thinking about melody more so than chordal harmony. But in as much as bop answered the question of how to connect chords linearly, I do think there were fewer barriers to hearing harmony clearly. In keeping with the season, I find it useful to think of the arpeggios as the skeletons that give the various scales the opportunity for personality.

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#30

That’s the relative view, C Major comprising D Dorian.

The need for flats comes from thinking of D Major and modifying the third and seventh degrees of the scale. The F# and C# get lowered. The parallel view.

In a truly modal tune the parallel view is significant. That the sixth degree remains unmodified distinguishes the resulting scalar structure as Dorian.

#31

Hmmm… I am weak on understanding jazz, but I can’t see the analogy. Successful classical instrumentalists memorize huge swaths of very complex repertoire [forcing a very high technical bar], there is just nothing like that in jazz, to my knowledge. (I might be wrong, of course?)

I always thought that the defining property of jazz music (in modern times) is boredom, e.g., they keep on wanting to do something new and different, like drug addicts looking for a new high, so their music has gone further and further “out there” (for example big band stuff was pretty awesome, but people like John Coltrane sound like fingernails on a chalk-board to me, and it has only gotten worse, at least to me). Indeed, I predict that future jazz artists [perhaps they’ve already done so?] will (a) totally go to insanely complex polyrhythm beats because they’ll be bored with everything else, and (b) abandon the 12 tone scale and go microtonal.

I know that as a genre, jazz has terrible sales, and it’s about tied with classical (what, at 1%?); both had better watch out or nobody will know what they are before long. Classical might have an excuse in that how many copies of a given piece does one really need, but I have no idea what’s going on with jazz, and I think it’s already reached the point of being incomprehensible to non-jazz lovers, although a lot of the really old stuff has aged magnificently, IMHO:

#32

Replying from Spain on my phone and only have a few free moments here so I’m dropping out of the conversation for a while after this by necessity, but that wasn’t the point I was making.

You’re arguing improvisation is responsible for poor technique and musical ability and pointing to rock guitarists as proof. I mention jazz because that’s a genre where improvisation is a necessary skill right from the get-go, that like classical is also characterized by a pretty high average level of technical competency and musical ability.

I’m saying I don’t think improvisation is the reason there are so many less-accomplished rock guitarists, because if it was jazz guitarists with poor technique would be everywhere, and that isn’t the case.

Also, again, not saying this to be a jerk so much as to try to help you understand where I’m coming from - classifying jazz musicians as mostly being bored is another pretty clear example of taking the biases that you as a classical musician have in terms of musical goals and objectives, and assuming that musicians in other genres have the exact same goals and objectives as you do. They don’t. Jazz isn’t about doing drugs and getting bored, it’s about improvisation, pushing harmonic boundaries, and expanding musical limits, and I say this as someone who is absolutely not a jazz player.

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#33

Actually it’s quite low percentage of ‘complex’ pieces in repertoire of a classical musician (violinists don’t play Kacikawawa often, as well as pianists don’t do Listz everyday). There are set of songs which they must know regardless of it’s complexity just because. Though this set is not very large for a particular person. (fo you know that Hilary Hann, for example, never played Vivaldi’s “Winter”?)
Same with jazz: you have to now some set of pieces (“jazz standardts”). Difference in approach is that you learn changes and main melody, but what you play - depends on you. So, basically, jazz is based on learnng and improvisation.

As for popularity… how does it correlate with topic? An argument just for the sake of argument? Blackened dethmetal is not very popular either though I like it and it could be challenging too \m/

There is jazz and jazz. Avant-garte on one side and smooth-jazz on the other side. Just listen to what you hear in movies, in TV-ads etc carefully. You’ll be surprised how much jazz is around )

Same with classical music. There is Bach/Beethoven on one side and Schnityke/Stravinsky on the other. As I always say academic music was always step ahead in terms of experimentation (‘boredom’ in your terms). Some pieces are hard to listen even for a classically trained musician, some… well Cage’s “4’33” or “ASLSP”.
Welcome to the world of classic. We can make Colthrane’s pieces sound as Mary had a little lamb.

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#34

Hey-hey! Don’t mix everything up. What biases do I have? ))
Considering @kgk questions and posts I highly doubt that he is a classical musician.

#35

Academic musicians did it in the beginning of XX century ) Some refused to use tonal scales (serialism), some refused to use melody and harmony per se (sonoristics), some refused to treat piece as a constant nonchagable (aleatorics)… Classical music hole is deep indeed )

#36

Please don’t take me very seriously because I am self-taught in music (a mistake that I made because I didn’t realize it was wrong at the time). All I really care about now (in music) is reading with less and less effort and memorizing (usually) classical music on a 6-string electric although I might need a bass or 7 string one day to deal with piano and cello music with notes that “fall off” the guitar. I have been spending lots of time over the past years with classical musicians (some famous) and they have strongly influenced me but I am obviously not anything like them either, although I think that they have the best general educational practices possible and excellent pedagogy. I must apologize for hating modern jazz music (I don’t think that I even like bebop, and certainly hate free jazz), along with most improv, but that is because I like to see things that are perfect, with meticulous refinement of every note, so this really is a fault with me (and the reason I marvel at writers like Max Martin with his perfection in crafting pop music). I definitely know some classical artists that enjoy jazz, and next time I will try to find out if it is “free jazz” or “swing,” that should be an interesting conversation.

#37

btw here my favorite violin guys made a video where they try to improvise ))

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#38

Well, as much as I appreciate the Nicholas Brothers as a dancer, and TwoSet Violin on YouTube, and lest it get buried in the meta discussions… :slight_smile:

@datasundae I tried to give you a concise response to your originally posted question about why b3 and b7, above. Hope the modal explorations are going well. Cheers, D

[update: I’m curious, if you’d care to share. Were you working on “So What?” “Impressions?” Or, coming at the issue from some other angle? Those being the usual Coltrane infused starting points for confusion. :slight_smile: ]

#39

Um, no. And I’m not sure who “they” refers to here, but given the historic and epic ignorance projected on the musical idiom and culture over the years, and given that you have several folks, including a musician earnestly taking the time to answer you from Spain on his phone, you might want to reconsider casually stating something as loaded as the above in a community forum. I wish you well in your explorations.

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#40

@RockStarJazzCat thanks for your thought provoking response. I understand your comment about the relative view when thinking in terms of D Major. I am less clear what your mean when you say "

Could I ask you to elaborate a little?

Hagen

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