OwenM

@phoog I have, but you're right I didn't remember the subtlety of the delivery linking length with importance (having rewatched). But the idea behind my comment was more or less inline with yours, theres nothing objective about the length compared to the importance of a piece, no absolute rules to be gleened, just a fathers proud reaction. I feel MWB is looking for theoretical justification for the statement, but I believe it's more included for the development of the father character...

@MWB Nothing! It’s a line in the movie to develop a character, he’s summing up his feeling of it. The piece has been released to the public, he is obsessively still recording its time and then remarks he feels it’s an important piece, I think you are perhaps looking for a connection where one doesn’t exist. The rough length of the piece would be known for most of the duration of its creation, the EXACT length doesn’t really matter at all from a musical perspective as long as all tempos were appropriate etc.

@MWB generally, knowing the timing of a piece is generally important and a regular thing to do at rehearsals etc. In my rehearsals today we were being timed to make sure the program would fit our allotted slot. This is common. In the movie it may be that they are seeking to show this almost obsessive preoccupation of detail. The length of the piece doesn't have any impact on the practice or theory particularly, but it is of commercial importance and I feel they are trying to show that the composers father has an awareness of that.

@AndyBonner I think it might be a British English / US English colloquialism. We certainly do use busking to mean playing for tips too but it’s also used to describe just picking it up by ear ear. “Do you know Memphis blues again?”, “no”, “ah don’t worry it’s a busker, you’ll pick it up…” is an example of something commonly heard. Though I do feel it’s not used so often these days, and more associated with blues / skiffle / early rock and roll etc for me. Also a ‘busking gig’ is one where you know there’ll be no music and you just give it a go (usually low quality and annoying gigs!)

...At least in terms of absolute mathematical value. You can overlay the note names on any of the related tuning systems and a given piece of music that comes out will be recognisable and explainable in each more or less, only some will sound out of tune. As these days 12TET is ubiquitous even a busy composer probably never thinks about other tuning systems that much, as such, within the modern system, note definitions ARE absolute, as we all mean the same by eg. A to B. sometimes we tweak to get closer to perfect intervals, but this by no means needs new note names, that would be confusing.

@Gerald Well all the frameworks (even those with quarter tones etc, a special case but very much related to the same group of tones) end up very close to each other, with subtle tuning differences, it works fine to overlay the same set of note names. However as the tuning system is usually set up and defined way before any music is written we spend most of our time thinking in notes. Notes are just labels to apply to the current framework, to allow us to communicate, navigate, establish rules etc, they are not absolute things.

...the note names could easily be layered on top of those too, the same broad idea of an octave split into 12 notes, the same note names but a new set of slight mathematical inconsistencies. There is no way to solve the problem perfectly, a few hundred years ago we decided to divide everything up evenly in the octave. Again very similar ratios to the earliest systems, different notes out of tune. 12TET eases moving between keys but is a little more 'out of tune'. We have dealt with this problem since before note names were defined, note names are a way to navigate this set of ratios.

@Gerald swarthmore.edu/NatSci/ceverba1/Class/e5_2006/MusicalScales.h‌​tml , I think you may need to know a little more about theory before you will be satisfied with an answer on this, the way you are talking about notes seems to give them too much importance in being defined. The ratios come first (see link for some early examples) then we layered the note names on for ease of communication. The system had some mathematical inconsistencies so a new set of ratios was considered, very similar to the first but with slight tuning differences....

@phoog Indeed! But Gerald so recently believed that you could define a fourth to be a totally different note, even the relatively large difference between major 3rds is still easily small enough for it to not be mistaken for it's neighbouring tones. My point is not that all the distances are insignificant, it's that they are all close enough that we don't have any trouble layering the note names on top of the common tuning systems.

Notice that the ratios, while different, are very very similar to each other. The notes themselves are relatively arbitrarily named but we of course have our conventions, and we can overlay them over these various tuning systems.

@geralddepends on what tuning system you are using, here’s a link to a page that lists the ratios from a given starting point for Just and Pythagorean tunings : swarthmore.edu/NatSci/ceverba1/Class/e5_2006/MusicalScales.html if you look up the ratios for 12TET you will see their representations are more complex.

To add an example, the frequency of a perfect 5th in the just intonation system is 1.5 times the given starting tone, in 12tet it's 1.498 times the given starting tone. THIS is the sort of magnitude of variation we are talking about when talking about different tuning systems.

The main point to take home is the ratios ARE defined (in various ways), but however they are defined they still end up very close to each other, nowhere near the value of an adjacent ratio. As such numbering the ratios we have (or giving them note names), regardless of wether they are 3/2 or 2^(7/12), is a very useful system to describe a piece of music.

It's very small differences, based on the fact that the underlying 'discovered' phenomena doesn't have a neat mathematical solution. As for whether such a system (or array of systems) is useful, well, almost all (maybe all) the music you have ever heard has been communicated using the system of notes, work back from that. It's a worthwhile enough tool to be able to explain all of what we consider interesting combinations of tones.

But because of the inherent 'imperfectness' of the system we discovered we need to tweak things slightly up or down on occasion, depending on academic understanding of how the music we are playing was composed in reference to the tuning system the composer was using. Again, the different tuning systems don't create a vastly different theory, just a different approach to what tones in our broadly shared 12 tone system may end up being a little funky if we don't compensate.

Within this framework we can all agree on ROUGHLY the shape of buildings or distances etc, but some tweaking may be required when crossing the border. This is similar to music, the same general rules tend to apply between tuning systems, and we all share that 2:1 is the octave, we all share that you can give labels (whatever they are) to refer to the 12 divisions of that octave.

Maybe analogous to how quantum theory and general relativity are both very robust theories that are rigorously tested every day, but we can't quote figure out a way of elegantly explaining how nature works to the rules of both at the same time. But the devil is in the details, your meter-measurement analogy would be closer to the truth if you phrased it as "in country A a meter is 99.6cm, and in country B it's 100.45cm.

@Gerald, don't worry, you wouldn't be the first to say it's all somewhat illogical! It's because it was discovered not invented. We discovered interval ratios that sound interesting to our ears, tried to apply the math to what we had found, and realised that although it ALMOST all works, it doesn't completely work in a neat and complete way.

I’ll add in my 2c, I’m British and have only ever heard the ‘quaver lmno’ version, not learned from TV but learned at school in the 80’s..

@electricaladdict ...power is less of a consideration at that level, still important, but you're dealing with very low need for current and the complexity is in the ability to fit more computation per square mm. Advances are made by going smaller, clever-er, more efficient. These things are not factors when you take a large amount of electrical energy and need to alter it with a transformer that won't burn out when stressed. You just need the amount of material that will do the job reliably.

@electricaladdict regarding cell phone shrinkage comparisons, I think it's because the technology and physics of transforming voltages in a way in which they are able to still deliver significant power was understood a long time ago, and you need large transformers, lots of coils and iron, to achieve this. It would take a revolutionary materials discovery or a change of the laws of physics to change this. Device shrinkage is at the other end of the field, miniaturisation and providing complex computation with ever decreasing power demands is what drives the 'hi tech' end of the sector.

@MichaelCurtis no, they didn't, but Wayne Shorter, later Miles, Herbie Hancock, and many other musicians going into the late 60's an 70's did, and that is where the chord/scale system was key to the music they created.

@MichaelCurtis yeah, my answer is specific to the chord/scale system and perhaps why it appears as it does in the Mark Levine book. FWIW I don't subscribe to the chord scale system very much in my playing day to day, it's one of my 'further criticisms' of the Mark Levine book that I mentioned, that it presents it as 'the way and the only way'. But anyway, a fragment of the 'modal/chord/scale' system is in my jazz vocabulary and when I see eg. 'Calt' I think altered scale and I think thats fairly common among musicians who primarily play jazz.. I could be wrong!

@MichaelCurtis Ahh, here may be a point of confusion between us, I think in jazz the term altered usually mean's the altered SCALE, or directly related to the altered scale... Not any one 'altered dominant'. ie. Galt can contain anything from the G altered scale, usually one type each of altered 9 and altered 5, but you could have both 9's for example. Thats when it's in the chord symbol, it means all alterations to 5 and 9 allowed, no natural extensions. The altered scale pops up as a melodic tool over non fully-altered chords like G7b9, but thats not relevant here!

@MichaelCurtis It is NOT clear in it's presentation of jazz harmony, it is not anywhere near a complete manual and it leaves out pretty much everything that came before modal jazz, which is for many people most jazz. It IS confusing. I am not 'pro' this book. I'm just defending from some specific criticisms, not for the book but just saying hey, this is actually how jazz musicians think about this stuff day to day so maybe something could be learned from the way it presents the information it contains.

@MichaelCurtis Regarding the ∆ labelling thing, by default in jazz every I and IV will be labelled maj7 or ∆ on a lead sheet, barring key changes. It's a place marker for the maj7 type chords in a progression and allows you to see where you are in the key. You can chose to play a maj7, or as a major triad, if it makes sense to you creatively/improvisatorialy in the moment. When Mark Levine does this it's just saying 'the overriding harmony is ∆, I am choosing to play a major triad'. it's just that. The fact he doesn't explain that is a failing, but it's how jazz musicians think.

@MichaelCurtis he's not using ∆ to specifically mean a major triad.. ∆ means major 7 in the book, he is just outlining that when you see the ∆ chord you can use any of the chords that have the same harmonic function (as far as jazz theory groups them), which 'includes' the humble major triad amongst 6/9's and maj9's and so on. Jazz tends to funnel down all chords into types, so it becomes second nature assorting them into the 6 or so boxes intuitively.

Now I'm not arguing that it's an efficient way to teach, and he doesn't attempt to explain it. But it IS consistent with the general jazz-musicians job, interpreting basic chord charts of all 7th's into something dynamic and musical. Often having enough ideas to fill out a song or gig is a big ask, and the book does at least give a lot of material in this regard. But it's not for a beginner to jazz, you need to know the functional harmony equivalents that jazz relies on so heavily. This is a miss selling of the book, I think, not practical, and fairly advanced.

@piiperiReinstateMonicaI I agree on your disagreement on my choice of words! Perhaps 'could be written as' works better... But yes, I think the Mark Levine book has a lot of great info but it is also flawed and inconsistent. The accidentals on alt chords, evidently, but also many other areas. However I don't really agree with the threads’ sentiment that the chord namings are incorrect…as such. Most jazz chord charts give just 7th chords for each chord, which is not what anyone would play in practice, the book has lots of examples of what you could play when you see eg. Maj7, ie. play 6/9.

Agreed, also the major 3rd in an alt chord is actually a flattened 4th. The altered scale is the 7th mode of the melodic minor, and goes 1, b2, b3, b4, b5, b6, b7, if naming it strictly! I would imagine thats why he names it a Db rather than C#. Altered scale naming convention is a bit murky and tests our naming system a bit, I haven’t seen a definitive guide for ‘what to call what, when’!

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

This may make sense to you but I have never heard such an explanation of the theory in decades as a jazz musician and educator, interesting things you’ve noted but this is not why ii V I’s are common in jazz.

I highly recommend doing so. You are almost forging forward trying to create your own system of theory from it at this stage. By all means try but the various teachings and systems of western harmony out there have been well developed over many years and can describe and explain almost all western music. I can see right now that the system you are explaining would fall short at even accurately describing what is happening in the most basic of western progressions, the ii V I

"Ok, please tell me about the system that defines the 4-1-5 and 1-5-2. " The problem is that you are naming it on your own terms, and missing quite a few bits of key info. The pattern you have identified is present in music theory, but it isn't used in the way you are saying. If you carried on looking into the conventional system of music theory you would see HOW some of the patterns you have identified fit into the grander scheme of things, and what they are used for.

*when I say 'how keys are arranged' in my first message I mean how a single key, that you are currently playing in, is arranged in terms of chords etc. Not the overall system of keys and their inter relation.

the system of music that is used in the vast majority of popular music and is taught all over the world and can explain Jazz or the Beach Boys or the Beatles etc. etc. When talking about smoothly moving between key centres then the stuff you are talking about is USEFUL, larger leaps from a starting point mean there will be more dissonant notes in the new key compared to the starting key.

So framing a 'single key' chord progression like a ii V I in such a way makes no sense. The Chords of each come from the parent key. In F they Are Gm7 (6 extension available, Dorian scale), C7 (9, 11, 13 available, Mixolydian mode) then Fmaj7. Note how the extensions on each chord come from the chords root note in comparison to the parent scale of F major. The intervals created by stacking keys are not used on these chords in a ii V I progression, the system you have proposed doesn't fit over...

For example when you play the C chord in an F you are not adding any dissonant notes to the overall pool of notes used, because you do not change key. The C chord in F is a C7 of course but it belongs to a scale called the C mixolydian, which uses identical notes to F major. Yes as you cycle round keys in 5ths or 4ths then alterations are added, but not if you stay within one key.

No I'm not accusing you of not being genuine, I just think that you are in the position of not knowing what you don't know (understandable). I think a problem is that your suggestion of cycling up the keys in 5th which give more dissonance isn't really how keys are arranged and the dissonances added by this system are not some of the more common dissonances/extensions used. How to play in a key, and add tensions/extensions etc. in the standard way doesn't fit into your system too well.

But you have not found a great trick in music theory, stacking to see how keys move around like that is a couple of lessons at most in a harmony theory class, it's nothing new. I'm happy that you have found it and it's helped you, but it is disingenuous to suggest it answers the question when it doesn't to any satisfactory degree, and misses out a lot. In fact it misses out the bulk of harmony theory, and analysing chord sequences using such a system would need to be developed on considerably to be of any practical use, and it HAS, in fact, over the last few hundred years.

And noticing that the way keys evolve round the circle of 5ths and how the numbers that appear are similar to the numbers that are mentioned in common chord progressions is to be expected, they are all part of the same theory set after all, but this comment is incorrect - "The next three up are 2-1-5... and that's why it's so common in jazz... because as you move up keys you're adding a dissonant note, the accidental, each time." It may be clear to you but it is NOT why ii V I's are common, when talking ii V I's we are not talking about key changes for a start!

This may make sense to you but I have never heard such an explanation of the theory in decades as a jazz musician and educator, interesting things you’ve noted but this is not why ii V I’s are common in jazz.

... as you mention make the chart in reference to the minor scale and go with that.. However I don't think you'll get many other musicians to enthusiastically uptake such a system, I work in all manner of styles of music and we already have the full compliment of tools necessary to describe any set of notes desired! (within our 12 notes sytem of course)

Regarding your focus on the WWHW and WHWW, yes thats elegant and shows of the beautiful patterns in the natural major and minor scales very well! But this thought was around 2000 years ago, a lot has happened in between. To understand more complex areas of theory it may help to just begrudginly use the major scale to name the intervals (after a while, you don't notice it's major, they're just the interval names) OR

I had all the tools needd to describe concepts in theory way more complicated than simple relationships to major or minor, so I would argue that the system of naming against the major scale is enough and fit for purpose. I, personally, don't need another way of naming the intervals, but if you want to explore it further then go for it!

... As you'll see in any more recent learning resources it's the tool that everyone uses to quickly convey very complex information. I have answered a couple of questions here in the last few days and I would have been completely stuck to have described the concepts within without such a system, and it would have been more complex to answer if I had multiple naming conventions and I had to make sure I was defining which I was using in each case..

The system in no way seeks to say the natural minor scale doesn't exist, or phase it out of existence, or any of the other scales or modes either. It's just we needed to pick one so we could quickly describe relationships from a given root note, a convention which has become widespread over the last hundred years or so. It's just a shorthand, a tool.

... 'minor' by labelling each as 'flat' compared to it's major counterpart. ie 1, 2, b3, 4, 5, b6, b7. The terminology 'b3, b7' was probably developed over the more traditional 'minor 3, minor 7' because it addresses the fact that you get lowered 7th degree's in non-minor chords (hence avoiding confusion) and if I say 'minor 7' it's unclear wether I am talking about the interval name or the chord. The proof that this is how we name things should be evident by the fact that you'll be unable to find a chart that names the intervals in the way you propose, apart from Aarons answer on this stack!

Again, the fact that we chose major is fairly arbitary, but also pretty obvious to conclude that thats the one we would choose (though I suspect it developed rather than was chosen), although major and natural minor are both huge concepts that have dominated music for thousands of years major is arguable the one with the SLIGHTLY better pr team, hence thats the one we named off. But its just an arbitrary measuring stick, it's not really part of the deeper or more complex areas of theory that it can be used to unambiguously describe.

The D7 in the middle isn't really from either key, it's a secondary dominant, it's a chord thats commonly substituted for sometimes quite complex chords. How shall we name those intervals? Against the minor tonality or against the major tonality? As well as learning the interval names in respect to a major parent scale AND a minor parent scale we would also have to learn the convention for when we switch naming...for all the chord sequences out there.. this is a daunting prospect in itself. What about modal music? etc. As naming intervals is just a tool, a means to an end, we simply stick to..