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The Conventional Theory of Chords is Just a Special Case
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Musical notation must have gotten its start as an aid to memory, as a way of using written symbols to make possible the more or less accurate reproduction of a particular piece of music.
Unfortunately as musical notation developed it quickly forgot its origins as a mere shorthand for experience, and began to think of itself as a system which could dictate which sounds were music and which were not, and by doing so morphed from a notation into a definition.
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Which may explain why some trained musicians have insisted what we are doing is not music. Since our “soundings” ( as one such gentleman insisted on calling them ) can not be written down, well then they can not be music.
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More specifically it morphed into a very technical kind of system which abandoned ordinary language and attempted to wash the soulful irregularity out of music by developing both increasingly regular scales and mathematical methods of describing rhythm ( Slow, Low, And Varied ).
And this seems to have happened without any awareness that this growing dependence of conventional music on regularity merely reflected a technological take on how to get things done rather than any fundamental aesthetic imperative.
If you want a gear to work, its teeth must all be the same size…… in a bureaucracy positions must be fungible….. while when one measures time in an experiment, the seconds must be the same in every lab.
But while this is an approach that obviously works well for science, when it intrudes into the world of aesthetics it produces a dulling uniformity…. and that’s exactly what’s happened in music…. that’s part of why most everything you hear now sounds like something you’ve heard before……
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Anyway, as conventional music theory continued to develop, it started to claim it, and it alone, was in a position to help both composers and improvisers shape their new creations.
Which of course is nonsense. Musical notation was born as and continues to be just a crude way of writing down approximately what happens when a particular piece of music is actually being played.
Indeed when one plays something so all of the quarter notes are exactly the same length, the result sounds unmusical and mechanical.
Billy Holiday never worried about being right on the note. In fact the liberties she took, the way she bent and twisted notes, helped make her music magic.
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The Map Is Not the Territory
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But of course this is something most music teachers and musicologists prefer to forget.
They would rather believe their specific technical systems encapsulate the core of music, or in other words that the written down cantata is the pure music of which any real world performance is just a poor approximation.
So proto-musicologists started making sweeping statements like that there were only certain precisely defined frequencies which could be pretty notes, that notes harmonize only when their frequencies conform to certain precisely defined relationships, and that chord progressions could only be resolved in a few definite well described ways.
And the situation got even worse when intoxication with the apparent clarity of music theory inspired the development of instruments which were so limited they could only play the notes which the musicologists were prepared to allow into their systems. ( Our Instruments )
Leading to such marvelous monster machines as the Boehm flute and the piano.
Of course if your goal is to have many identical instruments being played very fast by many well trained technicians, then all this uniformity is useful. Still our admittedly heretical impression is when many instruments play the same line together, even if their tuning is more or less the same, usually all you get is some sort of overwhelming mush. Or to say it differently, having a whole herd of violins is nothing more than musical materialism.
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Standardized Tuning Leads To Insensitivity
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Even worse, standardized regular tuning has done more than shackle the imaginations of musical creators and limit the number and subtlety of commonly used musical instruments, it’s also reduced the sensitivity of musicians to small variations of pitch.
So conventional musicians learn to ignore subtle differences in pitch ( sometimes of necessity, as when a pianist must play a slightly out-of-tune instrument, and sometimes just to cut themselves a little slack ).
In effect this means their ear-brain systems learn to assimilate any pitch to the nearest available “legitimate” ( i.e. chromatic ) note. That is to say when a tone is one half of the way between some note and its sharp, they tend to hear it as one or the other.
Whereas we hear it as different and think “ah, that’s an interesting sound,” and then if it’s pretty, ” now how can we use it? ”
So while it may at first seem a bit odd that musicians who have chosen to explore a world of non-standardized irregular tunings, should complain about more conventional musicians being “out of tune”, in fact the type of music we play has forced us to learn to listen very very carefully.
And this greater sensitivity to microtonal variations has made us become aware of the incredible liberties most musicians take with their tuning.
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Our Tuning……
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By contrast we have not had to take such liberties because right from when we made our very first instruments, the tuning of our instruments has been overtly irregular and loose. ( Our Instruments )
So for our shokis, because we were not interested in playing standard shakuhachi tunes, we decided to go with very large finger holes that leave the fine tuning up to the player.
Then when we started making our Kalimba Family instruments, because we were hammering our keys out of thick steel wire rather than cutting them out of machine fabricated uniform sheet steel, we discovered individual keys had such wildly different tone qualities, that it was more than difficult to tune them “accurately”.
In addition we found that the low harmonics of two adjacent keys often were related in quite a different way from their higher harmonics, which of course also made it impossible to tune them “correctly”.
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Modern standardized instruments have on the other hand been carefully engineered to reduce this sort of problem, that is to say they have been designed to make their fundamental frequencies loud enough to overwhelm their other harmonics.
Unfortunately it seems like one unavoidable side effect of this is to make their tone flatter and less interesting.
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At first we worried about this irregularity, but pretty quickly we discovered that it didn’t seem to be having a negative effect on our music.
Even more intriguing we realized that when we played something pretty, it sounded “in tune”, even though we knew that if our instruments were examined with scientific measuring devices, they would turn out to be “out of tune”.
And this was one of the things which first made us suspect that the musicologists’ claim to have explained musical “sweetness” in terms of frequency ratios, was a clear case of mistaking the map for the territory…. or that at the very least the real situation was much more complicated than the theorists would like to believe.
In any case we’re very grateful that when we’re playing our quarter-tone kalimbas, since they’re actual ( not virtual or imagined ) instruments, we can just let our fingers dance over their keys and listen carefully. Then instead of facing the daunting intellectual task of having to invent quarter-tone music, we can just discover it.
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Nowadays when well meaning friends suggest we check the tuning of our instruments with some electronic tuning device, we just smile and tell them we’d rather use our ears…….
So to tune quartus we first tuned every other key to a chromatic ( half-tone ) scale and then tried to put the other keys half-way between them. But since it’s tricky hearing such small intervals, certainly some of the splits are more like 55-45 than 50-50. Though truthfully, having the tuning slightly irregular doesn’t bother us. Indeed we prefer it, even as we prefer walking a rough mountain trail to striding over perfectly flat and uniform city pavement.
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But to continue…… when we started building the first members of our Bowus Family we soon found not only did we prefer to keep the tension of our strings very low, but also that we liked to bow slowly and without much pressure.
This plus the fact these instruments are all fretless means that it’s beyond difficult to force them to make some preconceived note. So like with our kalimbas, most of what we play on our bowus family instruments would be considered by a conventional musicologist to be out of tune.
And yet as with our kalimba music, it can sound very “sweet”.
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Conventional Music Is Just a Special Case
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By creating beauty with music based on irregular scales and variable rhythms ( to read a bit more about the variable rhythm issue, please go to our Slow, Low, And Varied page ), we’ve demonstrated nothing less than that despite it’s wonderful richness and variety, conventional music ( including the great classical traditions of India and the middle east ), since it’s built exclusively on regular scales and meters, is just a special case.
To say this a bit more concretely, according to conventional theory, the notes we play on our instruments are “out of tune”, and yet the music we make with them is beautiful. This is clearly a case where the theory does not describe reality, and when this happens to a theory it’s time to start looking for ways to revise it. ( The Conventional Theory Of Chords Is Just A Special Case )
To fail to do this, that is if the music world continues to insist on functioning only within the limits of its currently accepted conventional theory ( incarnated as its system of notation ), would be as silly as it would have been for mathematics to have rested content with just the positive integers, or physics to have rejected relativity……. or as it would be to insist that the only legitimate type of writing is rhymed and regular poetry.
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Doing Music Differently**** Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog****Slow, Low, And Varied
Our Instruments***Kalimba Family***Bowus Family***Shoki Family
The Conventional Theory of Chords is Just a Special Case
Home***Buy Our Music
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