Ethan Hein references the mythologizing habits that have surrounded Robert Johnson as nonsense and I agree. I know that many people want to believe the myth that Robert Johnson went to the crossroads to sell his soul to the devil to play guitar better. Avoiding the physical ordeals of plantation work and getting formal training in music sounds far, far more plausible. If you get too immersed in some times of work there's not a lot of time or energy left to do as much musical anything. My earliest years working were in vegetable canneries down in Oregon and there's nothing like even an eight hour shift of doing that sort of work to leave you less than ideally situated to write a bunch of music, and that's cannery work replete with union benefits and the like, not plantation anything.
I finished Bruce Cornforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow's recent biography on Robert Johnson earlier this year, so their case that Robert Johnson apprenticed or studied guitar formally with Ike Zimmerman may be something the mythologizers want to contest and let them make their case. Johnson's music is too complex to be explained as the work of a man who did everything by "feel" and didn't think through what he was doing.
Ethan mentions a few pervasive Johnsonisms and for a classical guitarist with some training in choral singing the way to translate Johnson's preference for a high tonic note pervading his riffs would be to say that he liked to use what's called a tonic pedal point--the highest pitch stays fixed while the rest of the musical material moves by oblique motion toward or away from that fixed pitch.
Another Johnsonian device that Ethan mentions is shifting within the tonic chordal space between a dominant seventh chord and a diminished chord built from a common root. As Hein has provided a transcription we can see that the diminished seventh chord tends to be a diminished triad or a half-diminished seventh chord (i.e. A, C, E flat/D sharp, and G natural rather than having the F sharp that would appear in a fully diminished seventh chord).
I realize for some this is literally pedantic but the kind of diminished chords preferred within a system of pitch organization will tell us a lot about what form of tonal organization is being used. In classical music the fully diminished seventh chord is often preferred because the chord is more likely to be used as a pivot point for modulation and the fully diminished seventh chord can be enharmonically spelled so as to let any factor in the chord become the leading tone to a new target chord. An A fully diminished seventh chord could move to B flat major or minor; D flat major or C# minor; E major or E minor, or G major or G minor or to another diminished chord of some kind. The idea that I trust you get is that each chord factor can be the leading tone to a new remote sonority that isn't necessarily in the key of A major. By contrast, an A half-diminished seventh chord in 18th century practice would be more likely to resolve the G natural downward to the subdominant, i.e. some version of D.
So it might be useful to point out that since roughly 1810 diminished chords have been, in their fully diminished seventh form, the rapid modulator of choice in a lot of classical music. Adorno went so far as to say such chords were so routine they shouldn't be used. Half-diminished seventh chords can be thought of as tonic ornaments you can shift to and from within an anchor chord that could be I, i, I7, i dim etc. That C chord could be C major, C minor, C dominant seventh, C minor dominant seventh, C half-diminished seventh and you could add a 9th but it would all still be "home". The question as to how and why that can be the case and has been the case in blues but not for nominally "common practice" Western music that is tied to eighteenth century practice has been something else Ethan Hein has been writing about.
Now having read Kyle Gann's work for years; having read Ben Johnston's book Maximum Clarity, I have a reservation I'll admit to up front. If we're going on what spins out from the overtone series you will never get to the IV. Gann has mentioned this, if memory serves, in The Arithmetic of Listening, you will never get the tones needed for the subdominant chord from the overtone series. What we now call the subdominant harmony is an outworking of temperament and tuning processes that took centuries. That means that there may be a basic problem with a theory of blues tonality that is based on the overtone series of I and IV.
On the other hand, and this is me just spit-balling here, could we get to blues tonality by way of Harry Partch's otonality and utonality, a synthesis of the overtone and undertone series? I'll explain why that doesn't really work in a bit, but first I have some reservations or questions about the nature of blues tonality being set up in contrast to equal temperament because the standardization of equal-temperament could seriously postdate the emergence of what we might call blues tonality.
One of the sticky wickets about theories of blues harmony over against equal temperament is that blues emerged around the time that, according to Kyle Gann and others, equal temperament was finally standardized around 1918. Don't man y blues scholars agree that blues is older than 1918? So how would blues tonality be a subversion of a tuning system that wasn't even the standardized tuning in Western instrument building yet?
Another potentially sticky wicket is the historical reality that among string players microtonal deviations within ostensibly enharmonic respellings is a given. what if we play with the possibility that, yes, people knew that E flat and D sharp were not at all the same pitch or Haydn wouldn't have instructed string players to play an extended passage scored in E flat as if from the actual pitch of D sharp (he really did do this but I'm not so steeped in Haydn's scores (he wrote so many!) that I can rattle off that passage off the top of my head). Fortunately, Ross Duffin broached the issue in his book How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) Duffin points to Haydn's Op. 77, No. 2 String Quartet as an example of how Haydn's instruction to play E flat as if it were D sharp shows that an unequal tuning system was assumed.
That we will never get F from the overtone series starting on C seems hard to get around. Kubik's thesis sounds interesting but it sounds like it might need bolstering from Partch's otonality and utonality. That would entail taking Partch's concepts so seriously as to retroactively use them to explain blues tonality. I'm not conversant enough in Partch to know if this is more than just winging it with an idea that might make sense of Kubik's thesis (which I haven't read (yet, sounds interesting)) in light of the reality attested by Gann that there can never be what we conventionally define as a subdominant harmony from the overtone series. The tricky part with Partch is that although otonality and utonality could explain blues the concept showed up in Genesis of a Music, which was first published in 1949! That's well past the birth of blues and nearing toward the emergence of rock `n roll. Then again, it's axiomatic in music theory that music theories are hugely post hoc, so let's not rule out the idea that Harry Partch's approach to otonality and utonality can bolster Kubik's thesis out of hand.
But we probably should admit that whatever blues tonality is we're developing theories of how to talk about it roughly a century after it became the popular musical language of the United States. As Ethan was putting it, we don't have a lot of theorizing being done about this music considering how influential it is. A theory of blues tonality deriving from the overtone series from I and IV may be a post hoc kludge but then so is much of music theory.
Even if there can never be a IV derived from the overtone series by itself, the guitar is most assuredly tuned in fourths, at least the Spanish six-stringed guitar is. The Russian seven-stringed guitar uses an open chord tuning.
There's something else I'm wondering about with respect to equal temperament and issues of tuning. I remember Gann mentioned the "cosmic" joke about the overtone series and the short version is that we know 1,200 cents make an octave and yet the problem is that if we go through a cycle of pure major thirds or pure perfect fifths then we'll discover that we never get to a pure octave by way of stacking those intervals. You would think that three perfect major thirds would land you at a perfect octave but, nope! No, that doesn't happen. Thus the cosmic joke is that you can't have pure thirds or fifths and get to pure octaves. We can tune a specific interval purely across the board but we then lose our octaves. To get pure octaves some interval has to be less-than-pure based on the overtone series in contrast to whatever tuning system we end up using.
If you've ever used an electronic tuner to tune your guitar and then tried playing natural harmonics on the 7th fret of your high E string, the 5th fret or your B string, the 3rd fret of your G string, and just below the 3rd fret of the low E you know all of these pitches don't coincide. Play the 9th fret G sharp harmonic on either E string and then play your G sharp at the 1st fret of the G string and you're in for a harsh discord indeed. As a guitarist I get why there's an appeal to the idea that blues tonality derives from the overtone series of I and IV but we didn't discover the overtone series until just a few centuries ago and I wonder about us retroactively imputing to blues a system of tonality based on a pair of overtone series in which the IV, by definition, has been established as never actually emerging from the I overtone series.
What if the I and IV relationship is just a kludge that sprung up from derivations of Pythagorean concepts of intervals as explicable by the simplest and purest number ratios? We can't completely ignore the ancient Greeks even if it's oh so tempting in contemporary musicology to try to find ways to explain non-Western musics in ways that show up the constraints of Western theories against which those musics have often been declared wanting. In other words, we somehow got to I and IV as chord options over centuries of Western music and no instrument reveals the possibilities of overtone series based on consecutive fourths in the Western musical traditions as well as the guitar. Blues tonality may have the overtone series of I and IV and it may be that blues musicians favored sonorities that are explicable by way of just intonation possibilities in those two overtone series. Or it might be possible to explain blues tonality as something that emerged through some kind of otonal and utonal synthesis but the 1940s is so far past the point at which scholars agree blues was born that this, too, seems like a post hoc explanation.
What if blues tonality emerged as guitarists subconsciously took their cues from all of the overtone series available on the strings of the six-stringed guitar? The element of aspiring to just intonation could be there but could it be that blues tonality, when we work through which pitches tend to show up, hews more toward the wealth of overtone series on the guitar strings than to the equal tempered keys of pianos? That is the general sense I'm getting with what Ethan has brought up and I admit I find it intriguing. It might also be something to study further but I'm no acoustician and my interest in microtonal music doesn't extend so far as to do more than discuss it as something I find fun.
Or as one of my music teachers used to put it, never under-estimate the obvious. The pantheon of blues singers and guitarists seems to be bigger and grander than the pantheon of blues pianists and it might be because singers and guitarists can bend notes to fit the results of overtones while pianists plunk away.
That blues evolved on the guitar and the guitar has the overtone series for I and IV is pretty easy to establish. If you want a demonstration of just how many notes can be played in harmonics you can go over here. If you'd rather just see a chart ...
If you're careful in your execution 8th fret harmonics are possible which produce tones two octaves above the 12th fret harmonic.
I would recommend Miles Okazaki and Martin Lawrence Vishnick as references for how high into the stratosphere your natural harmonics can go on the guitar. One of the things I appreciated about Vishnick's thesis beyond the sheer fun of how thoroughly he explored extended techniques on the guitar is he highlighted the usual Western avant gardists you might expect along the way for techniques like slide or other unusual ways of playing, but he also made a large reference guitar referring back to Robert Johnson's blues recordings. For my time and money Robert Johnson and Blind Willie Johnson explored extended techniques and microtonally inflected extensions of musical possibilities more than, oh, Brian Ferneyhough. Others who are fans of the New Complexity are free to feel differently.
Now, as for that big list of natural harmonics spun out of the overtone series of six strings, what that practically means is that you can play at least nine different scales on a guitar using natural harmonics alone: A mixolydian, A minor (ascending melodic, natural, and harmonic are all possible between frets 3 through about 2.5), B minor, B phrygian (and locrian), D mixolydian (D major only happens in drop D tuning), E minor (with a quasi blues mixolydian in the lower register), G lydian, and G major. You might even be able to squeeze in a G sharp locrian cumulatively if you don't mind your G sharps being at multi-octave removes). In Drop D tuning you even get C lydian once you've mastered playing the seventh harmonics. If you want a demonstration of how you can play all of the above scales in different registers using natural harmonics you can go over here. If you want to get an idea just how much music you can compose for solo guitar using natural harmonics (with exactly one artificial harmonic exception) you can go over here.
So ... with all these things in mind, and writing with the open bias of a guitarist who loves blues, maybe blues tonality reflects an aspiration on the part of musicians to hit the proverbial sweet spot of notes that are actually products of the overtone series (whatever the fundamental of whichever string), over against the constraints of equal temperament. But the tension between the ideal of just intonation and the practical realities of temperament within tuning has always been with us, so blues tonality might be a new variation of an ancient impulse.
Ted Gioia would, I grant with some cause here, describe this kind of thing as a tension between music as notes vs. music as sounds; between reified conceptions of tuning systems and actual sounds ... but a more accurate way to articulate that tension might be to say that there has been an insoluble tension between aspirations toward just intonation that springs from the overtone series and the reality that literally forces us to temper the notes we play on our instruments. But this paradoxically could boomerang back to an ancient belief that human voices and human ears can tune purer intervals than instruments can achieve ... which might be a topic for some other time. It's not entirely accidental that in religious mystical traditions the idea of a cosmic harmony in which humans can participate is literally an eschatological point of discussion--people with a more material or secular perspective might prefer to think of it as our struggle against what Kyle Gann has called the cosmic joke built into the overtone series.
I know that if you ever play slide guitar and have an open chord tuning you discover that the sweeter-sounding chords are the ones that hit frets 5, 7 or 12, which have the strongest harmonics and bring out all those shimmering partials that make slide guitar sound so glorious when it's done well.
Yet when it comes to theorizing an origin for blues tonality the overtone series itself may cut off some of our possible theoretical paths. If as Gann has pointed out there is no way the subdominant chord tones derive from the overtone series then, yes, positing a subdominant from which a new overtone series is added means we're basically not using the overtone series to explain tonal systems. Paul Hindemith tried to argue for an expanded sense of tonality deriving from the overtone series but not being beholden to V7-I progressions in The Craft of Musical Composition and it was pretty well rebutted. On the other hand, Hindemith was trying to argue for a quasi-tonal approach that took the Western traditions he was part of for granted. Partch and Ben Johnston weren't necessarily doing the same thing. Using the overtone series as a theoretical starting point won't do us any good for explaining how a chord we now call IV or subdominant emerged.
But at another, more material and practical level, it makes sense to argue that American blues evolved in response to the harmonic and melodic possibilities of the overtone series (plural) that are available on the six-stringed Spanish guitar.
Gann has written that we can, in fact, chart the origin of a lot of Western music from five-limit tuning systems. I don't know if Ethan Hein has read The Arithmetic of Listening but the book does lay out a case that five-limit was the standard for centuries. But we didn't get IV from the harmonic series, which wouldn't be discovered until just a few centuries ago--Western music theorists and musicians reverse-engineered the subdominant as an outworking of tuning systems, working with the resultant scales, and then formulating the subdominant over centuries. We can't meaningfully talk about any IV anything prior to the era of figured bass as best as I can tell. You won't hear subdominant anything in Byrd or Tallis even if you "think" you're hearing that sonority based on the operant conditioning of Western listening ears.
It's a potentially Captain Obvious question but if we run with the idea that blues tonality does rely on the overtone series from I and IV we need to ask how we even got I and IV and on what instrument that we know to be associated with blues that such an overlapping set of overtone series is possible. I think we all know the answer to that question has never been the piano. On the other hand, when I think about how many guitarists would rather capo up or retune their guitars than play in B flat major in standard tuning the overtones, the partials, the harmonics may not just potentially define an element of blues tonality, it might explain why so many guitarists only want to write music in that proverbial "sweet spot" sound rather than venture out into a more comprehensive mastery of the instrument by playing in any and every key regardless of whether or not you can switch from a twelfth fret A on the string that you can replace with a natural harmonic.
7-5-2021 11:15am POSTSCRIPT,
sort of, on how a master like Robert Johnson could imply harmonies that lesser blues musicians feel obliged to play for fear you won't hear them
Ethan Hein mentioned something that has stuck with me about the third verse in "Kind Hearted Woman".
The third verse, the one before the guitar solo, is especially striking. It starts at 1:17 with a break in the groove: “Now there ain’t but the one thing makes Mr Johnson drink.” There’s a measure each of A7 and Adim7, then two beats of each chord, then one beat of each chord. Then at 1:28, you expect Johnson to go to D7 for “Oh babe, my life won’t be the same.” But he doesn’t. Instead he plays a spidery riff on the minor pentatonic, and the only chord underneath it is a momentary A. Then he sings, “You break my heart” on something close to an E augmented triad with a strange displacement of the downbeat. You won’t hear Eric Clapton do any of that!
One of the things I've noticed about Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker is that they both performed their songs in a way where there's a harmonic gestalt that emerges from their performance that they don't literally play. It's the opposite of a concept in a Romantic staple of the piano literature Charles Rosen mentioned in which there is a notated melody in a piano score that the pianist is explicitly told to not play but which is intended to guide how the pianist plays what is supposed to be played.
There's a concept in Gestalt psychology called "reification", which proposes that when something we expect doesn't appear we fill in that absence with our minds. I propose that part of blues tonality in practice (and, of course, by implication, theory) is that Robert Johnson doesn't have to play a subdominant harmony of any kind in that third verse of "Kind Hearted Woman" not because it "isn't there" but because he has primed you with all the previous uses of subdominant chords that you supply it yourself where he wants you to hear it even when he omits the played harmony. He trains you to listen for that IV(7) chord to show up exactly where it's supposed to even though he doesn't play it but uses that descending scale line.
I think the difference between blues geniuses like John Lee Hooker and Robert Johnson and more conventional blues players like Clapton who came after can be heard in what the masters imply that the more ordinary players feel obliged to literally play because they don't trust that you will hear the conventions in blues if they don't play them for you in the most literal way. This, I propose, explains how and why lesser blues musicians "smooth out" things in terms of rhythm and meter or in terms of applied vs. implied harmony. A master like Johnson can brilliantly imply the IV change that you supply because he's set up an expectation for it that a Clapton would feel obliged to play in a far more literal way. .
I know reification is a very abstract term to throw around when discussing blues tonality and blues harmony but I think it's important to consider because even in classical music there's a history of guitarists choosing to do something that seems "wrong" based on formal expectations but which play with expectations (I'm not a big fan of Hector Berlioz but Charles Rosen and Kyle Gann have written eloquently on how Berlioz (a guitarist) manipulated conventions. Given the sheer physical constraints on what the guitar can do it's not a big shock to me if many guitarists choose to imply what they obviously cannot literally play on their instruments by themselves.
Because Robert Johnson didn't record ensemble work we can only guess as to whether or not the subdominant chord would have shown up in the third verse of "Kind Hearted Woman" by way of a supporting bass line. I think that is a reasonable inference based on Johnson's style and blues practice but it's simply one option among many to consider. I suggest this because I think that reification in blues, where a master like Johnson or Hooker implies harmonies via preparation and transformation across a single performance that an audience can supply when the musician doesn't literally play the chords, is something we need to consider. That is because doing some justice to blues harmony and tonality depends not just on what notes are being played but on what harmonies can be implied by expectation. I think that's what Johnson was doing in "Kind Hearted Woman", setting us up to hear that IV chord even if he doesn't literally play it. He was such a great musician and songwriter/composer he didn't have to play it. We supply that harmony as listeners in response to his mastery of musical form and language and the covers that supply the IV let us know, I think, that Johnson was doing all of this reification on purpose.
POSTSCRIPT 2: 7-5-2021 3:15PM
Ethan mentioned that there are trade-offs in instrument building and tuning systems and that there are cultural and musical practices where the idea of a trade-off in which every key is useable but at the price of purity of intervals being dropped is considered not worth it.
That's gotten me thinking about how blues guitarists bend notes but, more crucially, how many blues guitarists use open chord tunings and work within those keys. In other words, there was a tale that Lonnie Johnson joked about having one hundred and twenty pieces that were all in the key of D major. If you go back to look through keyboard music written by a Renaissance era composer like William Byrd in England you discover a prodigious amount of music written by a composer who was happy to write reams of music in a handful of keys. Whether we're looking at blues or at Renaissance keyboard music, a willingness on the part of master musicians to favor more purely tuned intervals over variability of key signatures keeps showing up.
POSTSCRIPT 3: 7-18-2021 7:03PM
If anyone who knows Sofia Gubaidulina happens to have read this, feel free to share the chart of notes possible as natural harmonics to her. I remember reading the liner notes of an album of her works for guitar that she expressed interest in the possibility of writing something for guitar using just natural harmonics.
There is, in fact, a lot that can be done composing for solo guitar using harmonics alone. The following playlist is about one hour and fourteen minutes worth of music.
2 comments:
It doesn't seem like a big stretch to imagine West African musicians deriving IV from the overtone series by asking, hmmm, what other note's overtone series contains the root of this one? It isn't the only possible historical origin for an interest in IV, but it's one that I find plausible.
Equal temperament may not have been fully universal before 1918 but it existed for hundreds of years before that, and was already in widespread use by the time the other temperaments fell out of use. I would have assumed that pianos and other instruments that were available in the US in the 18th and early 19th centuries were tuned to 12-TET, though I don't really know.
Blues history is hard because before they started making audio recordings, there's no reliable documentation of African-American music at all. You get vague verbal descriptions and the occasional transcription, but those are pretty useless. It's possible that enslaved people were singing the blues in the 17th century, and it's possible that they happened to invent it in the same decade that it was first recorded. I think it was a steady and gradual evolution from distinct West African and Native American and British Isles folk musics into the hybrid that eventually got labeled as blues, but we probably will never know.
I don't see any need for blues tonality to have to wait until after any theoretical formalization. Anybody sitting on a back porch with a guitar and enough free time on their hands can figure out the overtone series. Kubiks' studies of West Africa show all kinds of fascinating tuning systems that are very different from what Europeans have used. Like, there's a balafon tuning where they divide the octave into seven equal sized parts--it sounds extremely weird to my ears!
The blues was presumably a purely vocal music for many years before it became an instrumental one, but I would definitely believe a theory in which it really crystallized around the guitar, especially slide guitar. There's too much overlap between the guitar's natural affordances and the blues to be a coincidence. There's also probably a whole history of blues played on homemade instruments with one or two or three strings tuned in all kinds of idiosyncratic ways.
I like the idea of microtonal composition, and in principle I want to be excited about Ben Johnston and Harry Partch, but none of their music sounds half as good or as interesting as Delta blues.
I did read the Arithmetic of Listening, and I do believe that five-limit was the standard for centuries... in Europe. In Africa, who knows what they were up to during all that time. It's not like the colonizers did a lot of meticulous documentation of the musical traditions they encountered. And now it's really hard to study those traditions independent of the influence of colonial Europe, not to mention 100 years of Western media. How do you even know when someone in Mali is playing something that sounds like blues because it predates the slave trade vs when they're playing it because their grandfather was a fan of John Lee Hooker?
"Like, there's a balafon tuning where they divide the octave into seven equal sized parts--it sounds extremely weird to my ears!"
My brother has told me that seven equidistant pitches dividing up the octave is a norm in traditional Thai classical music, so that might back up Leonard Meyer's argument that the overtone series may be "natural" but humans have no obligation to build our music on what is considered "natural"!
I think we may witness a generations long process in which theory has to catch up with blues practice, but that would be the norm. The tricky part is that perhaps just as 19th century codifications of what the 18th century composers supposedly did misrepresented a lot of what the musicians were really doing, theoretical post hoc codification of blues isn't going to be a substitute for actively participating in the music-making itself, which is why it's handy we have so many recordings. :)
Something else that's tricky about white reactions to blues is there are complaints about the "discord" in the music but I don't hear dissonance as such. On the other hand, if professional music critics and fans of classical music were complaining about "dissonant" music they may have been lazily shifting to what they regarded as an offensive TIMBRE rather than an actual discord. This is something I've been wondering about since reading Dale Cockrell's work. Many tunes in American vernacular styles are as tuneful as any tunes around but if they were performed by people who weren't steeped in Italianate vocal traditions it would be chalked up as "discord" by listeners who were into operatic traditions or Western liturgical music.
I think the I and IV overtone series is strengthened if we tie it to something concrete like the guitar. After all, the guitar's tuning system has the I and IV overtone series literally built into the instrument. I'm going to have to add Kubik to my already too-big reading list.
One of Gann's passing proposals in Arithmetic is that if we want a clearer sense of how and why intervals were considered dissonant in different styles (like major thirds being considered uncomfortably dissonant intervals in ancient Western music) we have to look at what tuning and temperament systems were in place.
Some of the colonizers did do some work to document what they heard on the Native American side. Michael Pisani has a pretty good book covering that topic in the early chapters ... the title escapes me, but I remember he mentioned that by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries European composers used G minor to emulate Native American scales because the prevailing mean-tone tuning system most resembled, as best they understood in Europe, the intervals available in the Native American scales they heard.
Native American music can be challenging to find resources about because, as Ida Halpern discovered with Nootka and other tribes in the last century, many people in tribes opted to not learn the old songs and while there were reservations about recording traditional songs because of the spiritual beliefs about who and what ought to be shared in such a permanent public-record way (PNW tribes had, for want of a better term, a really advanced concept of what we'd call intellectual property), elders in the tribes decided that it was better to err on the side of documentation to keep the songs around for future generations than let them vanish. So in the Pacific Northwest region we can be grateful Ida Halpern did so much field recording, even if how the Canadian government handled her legacy was pretty bad!
Yes, that jazz emerged in Estonia in the early 1920s is a great example of how we can't possibly know how rapidly and how long ago styles flourished overseas! Hooker recordings could have made it to Mali within mere months after being recorded for all we don't know but if they like John Lee Hooker in Mali that's great as far as I'm concerned. :)
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