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But why do harmonica players bend their notes in the first place? Blue notes are a profound music-theoretic mystery. Why should it sound good to play certain notes so far out of tune? Performers in every kind of Western music inflect their pitches for emphasis and feeling, but outside of the blues and its descendants, no one intentionally plays notes that are a quarter-tone flat on purpose. It’s customary to explain blue notes by saying that they are harsh, weird, or dissonant. But this is not the way I and other blues lovers experience the music. Blue notes sound unusual and ear-grabbing, but they don’t sound “bad” the way that an extremely flat note would in a performance of, say, Mozart. How can this be?
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Ever since I began to dig into writings by and about the history of microtonality in Western and semi-Western music it has seemed that even the idea that microtonal inflections in Western music might be more of a scholastic super-myth than something testified to within the literature of the time. Kyle Gann mentioned that Anton Reicha (who taught Lizst) openly speculated about quarter-tones. I had to do my own digging around to find that Reicha extolled the use of quarter-tones in aria performances in his Treatise on Melody going back to the earlier 19th century. Since Pendragon Press is no more (!) I have to get a little help to show you what Reicha wrote.
Ever since I began to dig into writings by and about the history of microtonality in Western and semi-Western music it has seemed that even the idea that microtonal inflections in Western music might be more of a scholastic super-myth than something testified to within the literature of the time. Kyle Gann mentioned that Anton Reicha (who taught Lizst) openly speculated about quarter-tones. I had to do my own digging around to find that Reicha extolled the use of quarter-tones in aria performances in his Treatise on Melody going back to the earlier 19th century. Since Pendragon Press is no more (!) I have to get a little help to show you what Reicha wrote.
by the way, contrary to the late Richard Taruskin, Reicha's ideas about harmony, melody and rhythm and even form were not necessarily "conservative". Taruskin was good at a lot of things but scholars have openly corrected him on a variety of topics over the years. Had I not gone to the trouble of reading at least some of Reicha's writing and music for myself I might have just had to have taken Taruskin's word for it Reicha was "conservative". Nobody who wrote a 5/8 fugue whose A major subject was answered in E flat would have been "conservative". But I digress.
Reicha was a French citizen, if I recall, but Bohemian and it was perhaps not entirely coincidental that the Bohemian Alois Haba began to experiment with microtonal writing in his cycle of string quartets in the early 20th century. Bohemian folk songs do not (and did not) necessarily fit within the pitch regions of equal tempered tuning. As Ben Johnston dryly observed, it was about the time twelve-tone equal tempered tuning became fully standardized in the West that the Schoenbergian "crisis of tonality" emerged and Schoenberg's ad hoc system became hailed as the liberation from the cliches of Romantic harmony. Or ... as microtonalists over the last century have alternatively proposed, it was only once the tuning system became standardized that there was suddenly any "crisis of tonality" in the West but what if all bets were off on standardizing tuning systems?
Obviously for microtonalists there was no reason to presume a single standardized tuning system of conceiving of music in such standardized terms was necessary or good. We can see from Reicha's treatise on melody that quarter-tone injections into tonal music was considered great if you could competently and consciously veer from what was "on the page" or "expected". Reicha obviously endorsed the practice "if" you could pull it off. Back when I studied some music theory as an undergrad I'd never even heard of Anton Reicha, let alone that microtonal anything was on the table. Microtonal inflections of seemingly wavering straight tones shows up in aboriginal music in the Pacific Northwest and if you don't know the folk tradition it can sound like old guys shakily singing single notes and given the aversion tribes have to mechanical recording of human voices you're never going to hear any of that in field recordings, Dr. Ida Halpern's work conspicuously being the exception that proved the rule. There is some folklore, if you will, where if you aren't literally tribally connected in some way to the tribe that produces the folklore you won't have any knowledge of or exposure to it. That roundaboutly gets to questions of whether Led Zeppelin was a good blues band compared to a great rock band.
Ethan Hein has come back to Kubik's proposal that blues based music could be thought of as deriving from tones available from the I and the IV overtone series. I don't know if I exactly am sold on the idea but as a guitarist I'm absolutely sympathetic to the idea. :) I pointed out a while back that if we go through every natural harmonic on every string of the six-string guitar in standard tuning to see which natural harmonics we get we get something resembling a blues scale.
Ethan Hein has come back to Kubik's proposal that blues based music could be thought of as deriving from tones available from the I and the IV overtone series. I don't know if I exactly am sold on the idea but as a guitarist I'm absolutely sympathetic to the idea. :) I pointed out a while back that if we go through every natural harmonic on every string of the six-string guitar in standard tuning to see which natural harmonics we get we get something resembling a blues scale.
Successful music theory, as I was told it, successfully explains what people have actually done in actual music that people actually enjoy so the Kubik thesis makes sense if we consider that the core stringed instruments that have shown up in African American popular styles have been, say, the double bass, the guitar and the banjo. If it makes sense of the morphology of playing and the acoustic properties of instruments then, sure, why not, let's seriously consider the overtone series from I and IV as a good working theory for blues tonality.
Whether with jazz and blues on the one hand or the tension between musical practice and pedagogy in Western music on the other it's possible that in both cases there's a perilous gap between "ought" and "did" that can send music students astray regardless of styles.
I'm with Ethan Hein on live vs. studio Zeppelin. All the live Zeppelin performers I heard were just plain awful! They came across to me as an abominably self-indulgent live band. Some bands sounded astonishing live in comparison (or contrast to) studio recordings. The Who Live at Leeds was regularly on the threshold of ear-destroying pink noise but it was a fun live album. Some of the worst performances from a Knebworth concert album I heard were from Tears for Fears, even though they recorded plenty of tracks that sounded great in the studio.
Ethan Hein linked to a piece by Ethan Iverson "Received Wisdom" and while I'm a guitarist with a bit of a thing for church music here and there it reminded me of something I mulled over years ago in "Tropes of Soul" comparing Aretha Franklin and Mahalia Jackson takes on "Silent Night" to Mariah Carey and Michael Bolton. Something Iverson pointed out was there are things you "could" do with a song you're performing that would not be the things you "should" do if you understand the song as part of a performance tradition and body of work. In the case of singing Christmas songs the "folkloric integrity" that singers and choral singers think about has to do with "text painting"--how do the flourishes and decorations in some way pictorially reinforce something about the text you're singing. The difference between a bad soul and a good soul take has to do with paying attention to the words in the songs and only stretching out with ornaments the words where there's some compelling cultura/historical reason for that stretching.
This is something William T. Dargan got into in his book on the lining hymn traditions in African American churches I will absolutely have to write about some time but for now the short take is that there are traditions of pictorial extension and decoration in vocal performances based on significant words and if you have absolutely no steeping in church music you won't know which words those are. If you have an immersion in Pentecostal, Baptist, Methodist or even low-church Anglican customs (say in a low literacy Anglican church of some kind in Scotland) then you "could" totally have that folkloric integrity access to why certain texts get certain treatments in low church musical traditions. But, at the risk of making an icy point about this, if you're too heathen to ever set foot in a church service you won't pick up that folklore. So when Stanley Crouch mentioned something about people needing to soak up church music alongside blues, ragtime and other styles to get a firmer grasp on jazz I have "some" idea about the church music part of it.
Dargan's book dates from 2006, by the way, and he wanted to underscore the need for scholarship on a tradition that fewer and fewer people are around to keep alive. An advantage of recordings, though, is more and more people will have access to the lining out traditions ... which ... of course ... should be the topic of a post or two in the future. Dargan made some interesting points about the degree to which black power scholarship deliberately signed the significance of Isaac Watts hymnody as a staple in African American churches I might have to quote and, most intriguingly for this Calvinist, Dargan highlighted the ways in which edicts on practical worship by the Westminster councils ended up influence patterns in low literacy churches in the British Empire and the colonies that laid a foundation for traditions. Dargan has gone so far as to theorize that the low church Calvinist traditions of lining out metrical psalmody became a liturgical skeleton that supported African musical customs in a way that were banned in higher liturgical and "classier" liturgical customs ... in a word the low church Calvinist concessions were a better "fit" for African American musical adaptations of African norms to Western contexts then the more stringently high liturgical norms and expectations of the Anglican and high liturgical Methodist or Catholic or Lutheran norms.
Which fits in with my evolving thesis/proposal that in order to understand the weird and often vehement rifts between highbrow and lowbrow art-religions we need to spend some time on actual religious music.
But that's something to save for some other set of posts in the future. The William Dargan book has been a fascinating read and he's open about his speculative work and since so few scholars have attempted to engage the lining out traditions I'd dare say he's entitled to some educated guesswork when so few people have written about the lining out traditions to begin with.
Apropos of nothing, I'm glad to see a comment over at Ethan Hein's blog about the un-exquisite torture of live Zeppelin. :)
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