What is pitch? It is defined in hertz, the number of times the underlying vibration repeats per second.
If you have an octave, you take one pitch like 220, then you double it to 440. That is the next octave. It's clear that if you define the "underlying vibration" as a sound that oscillates twice (2hz) then the 440hz sound is also in a way a 220hz sound. Thus the octave is really just a recognition of that mathematical relationship between the two pitches.
Is definitely somewhat out of date, and in need of improvement to encompass not only the music created in other cultures but also textural and sonic expression which makes up interesting music which could otherwise be under - analysed using WCM as the baseline, but equating this to white supremacy is to me incorrect, and missing the point of what's actually needed - an update.
And he is still wrong. Every culture refers to its own music theory (or most any other kind of theory) as THE theory, not "A" theory. That's not because of supermacist tendencies, it's just familiarity and closeness.
It's usually not useful, nor are we get any special benefit from, to take into account 2000 other traditions (even our own past ones, or some niche traditions in our midst) when we talk of the kind of music we do 95% of the time.
It would be like saying "I am hungry - and this is my personal feeling", "This artist is fire - and I say this speaking on behalf of myself alone", "Macaroni and cheese is the best comfort food, for me that is".
A useless and tiresome clarification.
Even more so when everybody else (e.g. every other culture) doesn't reciprocate the same, and speaks of its own stuff as THE stuff.
So, yeah, this is just a fad, and a very US-centric 2010-20x0 at that. No Italian would give two fucks if they refer to regular western music theory as THE music theory.
> Even more so when everybody else (e.g. every other culture) doesn't reciprocate the same, and speaks of its own stuff as THE stuff.
I've never seen this to be true in Indian music discussion. They know Western music too. I can only assume the same is true in China being that America and Europe export so much.
Maybe start american people actually listening to music outside of the US and UK? (And I'm not referring to latin americans listening to latin music).
They're some of the most chauvinistic peoples when it comes to consumption of music, movies, tv series, books, etc.
Then we can worry about some jazz player at Berklee or some high schooler at a school band learning western music theory as "this is music" vs learning about the gamelan or classical indian ragas...
>I've never seen this to be true in Indian music discussion. They know Western music too. I can only assume the same is true in China being that America and Europe export so much.
That's only because they have to play this too, as it has become popular in the 20th century.
Historically however there was no mention or need to mention western music theory though.
Well, Indian and Chinese theories you're never gonna use in 99% of the music you play in the US, so you might as well ignore it.
The same way Indians are not taught Bluegrass and the Chinese don't study ragas.
Indians and Chinese in India and China do study western music theory, but that's because it has become a global francize and thus they need it (e.g. to play a pop gig). They don't do it in order to merely be inclusive.
I'd reverse the charge, that only westerners (at least some modern ones) think of themselves as some engligtened all-inclusive superset of humanity, that they feel like they should be studying western + Indian + Chinese + whatever music theory, and not just the theories they need as working musicians (plus a la cart study if someone is interested in particular ethnic styles).
Chinese musicians don't feel any great urge to study Indian classical music, and Indian musicians don't particularly care/call for studing Chinese music...
Worse, if western musicians are made to study Indian/Chinese music, and start producing works in said formats, the end result will be the watering down of said musical traditions.
There is Indian and Chinese music, because it's tied to those peoples' history, tradition, artistic development, sentiments, and so on.
Without that, it's just "ethnic fusion" BS - which we shouldn't be encouraging more of...
If a westerner wants to learn that music, they shall go to a special Indian/Chinese music school (preferably in the respective countries), study it with reverance, understand it, live like the peoples who made it do, and so on, until they can actually feel it. Not have someone teach it to them at Berklee and then start producing works based on them....
You don't see how this comes across at least "racist-adjacent"? "Whatever, all that other stuff isn't relevant to what we do here in the US. It isn't worth learning."
That's obviously false. There's been a centuries long tradition of mixing of musical approaches to create great stuff. The most uniquely american musics (blues, jazz, hiphop) all have roots in western african music brought over via slavery. This isn't just "ethnic fusion" but truly deep exploration of the breadth of human music.
That is true, but I don't see that happening in music education in the UK. I can't speak for anywhere else.
Saying that it doesn't encompass some traditions of music is one thing (and broadly correct, as I already said), but that's not the same as saying that it's white supremacist. Saying 'music theory is incomplete', or that 'music theory ignores other cultures', etc. would be fair enough, although again I think it would be one-sided. I'd be interested to see if the teaching in other cultures (such as, for instance Indian) encompasses Western Classical tradition (i.e. based around a 12-note octave instead of a 22 note one) in a similar manner - I would imagine that it doesn't, as it concentrates on the idiom that it describes. And I'm certainly not a music theory specialist, but I believe that attempts have been made to make a standard method of incorporating microtonality into western music notation.
For the record, I spent nearly 20 years teaching in UK schools, and the music curriculum is most definitely not exclusionary - a wide range of traditions are covered in detail, and the roots of popular music in 'The West' are traced back to their origins, often leading pupils to make some interesting wider discoveries about culture and history. Music is not taught in a way that the Western Classical tradition is an exclusionary yardstick (although at A-level some elements of it are covered in some detail) And this has been the case since I was at school in the 80s, so this isn't down to any current changes.
Perhaps you compare it with something like Physic's theory. That it is not.
But it's more like a mathematical theory, a set of axioms, and an algebra of relationships and properties that derive from them.
And of course it's a theory as opposed to the actual practice (applying it to playing an instrument).
Physics on the other hand, though it relies on mathematical models, can't really explain why the universe exists in the particular way that it does. The best we can do is use the scientific method to make very educated guesses at an accurate mathematical model that might help us accurately explain the behavior of some physical system we're interested in. Physics is full of inconsistencies and unexplained phenomena, but we're slowly getting better at making predictions.
Music theory is the same way. Music sounds good to humans, and there doesn't really need to be a deeper reason than that for me to listen to a song over and over. Music theorists will study the music that people tend to like / dislike, and do their best to come up with an explanation for why -- often by pulling it apart into its core components, comparing it to other works, analyzing chord structure, voicing, instrumentation, etc.. In the end, just as with physics, composers have slowly built up a reliable foundation of knowledge to help them compose music that will reliably sound "good". But every so often someone comes along with an earworm that can't fully be explained.
That's exactly what makes it like a mathematical theorem.
Mathematical theorems are not about proving anything about "subjective human experience".
The axioms of western music theory just prove that X chord is the dominant under these conditions, or Y plays this role in that context, or Z scale/mode/whatever should be constructed as such, or M and Y form a K together, and so on.
Similar to how a (quite simple) algebra would work.
That's what I take issue with. I vaguely agree with the notion that music theory does have some kind of axiomatic form hidden deep within, but what can you prove? There is no fundamental theorem of Counterpoint, or that 12-tone rows are the work of the devil etc.
It's not about reductionistically (?) deriving even those from first principles.
You could regard the period and origin of a given theory as a set of axioms, e.g. African classical music has almost nothing to do with Bach, but you'd be missing the point.
20th century and Levine's books are a good introduction to applying music theory to do bizarre and twisted things when improvising.