(Content warning: Music theory.)
Some YouTube comments:
Bryan Starkweather
4 years ago
what is basically talking about is the ever-diminishing distance between intervals that the human brain keeps evolving to find Pleasant. Even a hundred and fifty years ago, a minor second was considered a very ugly sound. now of course, with jazz, and modern music, it's not uncommon at all. it can sound quite beautiful in the right context. And now we begin to delve into things like quarter tones, and microtones.
My education is probably very similar to Bernstein's, except obviously, being born in the 80s, everything he knew I was able to learn younger, and I'll pass down what I learn to composers and musicologists of the future.
perhaps in a hundred years, the quarter tone will be very common, who knows?
Ryan Kuzmic
4 years ago
He's kind of talking about two or three things. They're all fairly simple, but they are very important. First, is the progression of western music theory. Early music was focused on droning or octaves, then incorporated fifths (V's, dominants), then fourths (IV's, mediants), and then thirds. Thirds were either major or minor, and those gave you a major or minor chord. The key concept is that composers didn't think of music as being based around keys or chords until remarkably late; the most important unit before was intervals.
When thirds began to be introduced, the concept of "tonality" was as well. This simply means that your music is in a "key", which means it has a limited number of notes in it. Then came sevenths, seconds and sixths. What happened was you had notes that fit into the key, this was tonal music. Those notes and chords had set roles, set meanings in that key. E.g., the fifth dominates it (specifically because all of the individual notes that are present in the V chord are shared or want to resolve to the I chord). These 'roles' are known as "diatonic function".
The next interesting part was that this still didn't really work for instruments unless you retuned them for each key. This is because of what he was (I think) alluding to (confusingly) with the circle of fifths. To find the actual pitch frequency of the second or sixth, you had to find them by taking a fraction of the harmonic interval of two other notes. Basically, what this means is, there came to be a difference in frequency between, for example, an A# and a Bb depending on what key, and what direction you're moving in. What this means is, one instrument could not modulate keys. Because the notes would be out of tune. This led to the introduction of "equal temperament" (except for Germany - forget about germany) in the majority of music. This allows you to walk up to a piano and play in any key. But fundamentally, some of your notes are chosen at makeshift frequencies in between their natural #/b frequencies by (iirc) 100 "cents" (a unit of measurement of physical frequency).
The final part is: once you had equal temperament, you now had 12 universal notes that you could combine in certain ways (tonally), or do any of the awful things that composers started doing in the 20th century, that made academic music super hard to listen to. Such as: button mash in a horrible mishmash of any combination of the 12 notes you wanted (playing chromatically). Chromatic means playing a sequence of the 12 notes in a row. I joke, but it has it's place. You can also use all 12 notes, and never create a tonic center, or have an ambiguous, shifting tonality (12 tone music).
Finally, coming virtually full circle to the greeks, having equal temperament allows us to write in modes - which awesomely, and confusingly enough, have a tonality but do not have diatonic function. So you play all the notes found in a plain major or minor (or other) scale, but emphasize a different note as the tonal center of the song, and all of a sudden you have all kinds of neat weird stuff like minor iv chords. They sound very exotic.
This all happened in about the last 1000 years of western music (not counting greek modes).
Ryan Kuzmic
4 years ago
/Sorry for the errors, was typing at work.
subg88
4 years ago
Having equal temperament actually turns the greek modes into something other than how the greeks intended them. With unequal temperaments such as the greeks used, every interval would vary depending on the mode, giving each key a unique flavor which does not exist in our system. When greek modes were employed in western music 1000+ years ago they more or less put a square peg in a round hole. We can't actually be said to be using greek modes, we just stole their names basically and applied them to the degrees of the western major scale.
subg88
4 years ago (edited)
I have to disagree with the modes being non diatonic as well. That is popular conception, but it doesn't make sense. The ionic mode is the diatonic scale. By definition, a diatonic scale has two half steps and five whole steps, and the modes being essentially inversions of the ionic scale must necessarily fit that definition, and in fact only the modes conform to that definition. It has been argued and I agree the modes are merely diversions from the tonal center. That is to say if you were playing for example in the phrygian mode, you are still working in the tonal center of the ionian mode, that is the major scale, and thus the tonal is the key of the ionic. The key of the phrygian mode is merely working as a secondary tonic while the primary tonic is avoided, but still existing. The phrygian tonic doesn't feel like the center because it is not, but there still is one. That is because the conception of the modes was superimposed upon the existing diatonic scale system.
subg88
4 years ago (edited)
To back up my claim, if you are so inclined, take any modern so called modal piece and then resolve it to its relevant ionic key center and without fail you will find a satisfying resolution results. The composer has merely avoided that resolution. This would not necessarily be the case with ancient greek tuning systems due to the unequal temperament.
AnotherLover
4 years ago
That's rad I never heard that. Does anybody play in such a fashion today? I'm not sure exactly what you're saying because I don't know much music theory, but I tried building a scale once from the Reimann frequency and I found a comma of fifths instead of a circle because I was using Pythagorean ratios to find all the notes, starting from whatever it is, 7.86Hz or something. The frequencies didn't line up like I thought they would. I thought that was pretty cool. I've heard that you can tune to pure Pythagorean tuning but you're badly constrained within the tuning somehow.
subg88
4 years ago (edited)
What instrument are you talking about tuning? You can tune a piano or similar instrument to any set of frequencies you want since each tone is independently produced. The intervals in other keys won't lineup the same, that is the constraint. In the greek system, an instrument was only tuned to the particular mode. I haven't really had much of a desire to mess with it, although I built an eight note modal xylophone of a physics class once. In that case, I just calculated the frequencies and cut the metal to the appropriate lengths. I'd think for a fretted instrument you'd have to move the fret position. Not worth messing with to me. Maybe after I exhaust the existing standard system, but I'm pretty sure I'm a few lifetimes from that.