Is this you?
You love music, classical music in particular. Perhaps you studied an instrument when you were young and perhaps you can read music, but beyond that you have had no formal musical training. You attend classical music concerts regularly and are often exalted or moved to tears by the beauty of Mozart's or Beethoven's music, but you also have the uneasy feeling that you are always missing something, that "real" musicians are privy to a world of esoteric secrets from which you are excluded.
You enjoy learning about fields in which you have no expertise and have enjoyed reading the excellent books available these days on fields as diverse as quantum physics, climate change, archeology, etc. You would love to learn something about music theory, but everything you try to read about music leaves you feeling all the more confused. Wikipedia articles about the simplest musical topics overwhelm you with page after page of informational overkill.
If this resembles your experience, then you, the oppressed silent majority of music lovers, are my target audience.
Why does it have to be so hard?
Like any other discipline, music has its own set of specialized terms - octave, tritone, polyphony, submediant, hemiola ( a term describing a type of rhythm, not a blood disease), hemidemisemiquaver (a British term having to do with the duration of an event), and on and on. Music also - again like many other disciplines - uses what appear to be normal English words in ways that have little or nothing to do with their everyday meanings - words like interval, dominant, flat, sharp, meter, major, minor, modulation, key, dynamic, etc. To make matters worse, musical terminology is rife with everyday Italian words like allegro, andante, piano, forte; words that simultaneously retain their ordinary Italian meanings but which also carry with them a long tradition of subtle tacit conventions. Moreover, Western culture has developed a peculiarly arcane and awkward system for writing music down, a system that has taken many forms over the past thousand plus years and which has continuously evolved to meet the musical needs of the day.
So, when musicians speak to each other about music, you are right: they speak a language that you have no hope of understanding and they assume a knowledge of musical notation that you will probably never acquire.
Writing about music in layman's terms is notoriously difficult. For every gifted communicator like the late Leonard Bernstein there are uncountable music professors, critics, and commentators who exacerbate the problem. And sometimes it seems to me that some of them - especially the folks who write program notes for classical concerts - use this specialized vocabulary with sadistic intent.
For example, if you were attending concerts at the Philadelphia Orchestra a few seasons ago, you might have optimistically opened your Playbill to the section entitled "Musical Terms" only to find yourself ambushed by this mish-mash of jargon-infested circular definitions:
• Octave: The interval between any two notes that are seven diatonic (non-chromatic) scale degrees apart. Two notes an octave apart are different only in their relative registers (e.g., c-c’ d-d’).
• Diatonism [sic]: Music whose tonality is predominantly nonchromatic (such as the works of Haydn and Mozart).
• Chromatic: Relating to tones foreign to a given key (scale) or chord.
• Tonality: The orientation of melodies and harmonies towards a referential (or tonic) pitch class.
This is, admittedly, a particularly egregious example. It's not so much that the definitions are incorrect as that they explain nothing to the uninitiated. If you don't know the lingo to begin with and therefore can't distinguish between incompetence and plain old obscurity, such writing is likely only to make you feel that much more insecure.
And even writers with the best intentions typically assume a level of musical sophistication that locks out a good deal of the music-loving public. For example, here's Alex Ross, the superb music critic for The New Yorker, writing in his blog about a scene in Richard Wagner's Die Walkure:
Wotan is about to enter the most spectacular psychological tailspin in the history of opera. But just before he goes into freefall, the orchestra plays a brief microlude. It consists of one upward-arcing phrase lasting ten bars and around thirty seconds. At the top of the arc, sharp rhythmic figures in F-flat major collide with columnar E-flats sounding below. We instinctively feel the dissonance as a pang. What might have been is set against what is.
It is, I think, a beautiful, poignant description of one the great moments in opera, but for a reader without any theoretical background, the words I've highlighted - and thus the heart of what Ross is trying to say - are incomprehensible.
Is there hope?
In the late 1960s, when I was a graduate student at Berkeley teaching undergraduate music appreciation classes, I was confident in my bridge-building ability. Just explain the vocabulary, I thought, and play some illustrative examples, and everything will be clear. And at the time I believed that I was, for the most part, successful. Looking back, I suspect things were not as rosy as I thought.
There was one incident in particular that has stayed with me over the years, an incident whose lesson I was unable to learn at the time. One of my students came to me and said, timidly and apologetically, "Mr. Coren, I just can't tell the difference between major and minor."
"Oh, don't worry, that's really pretty easy. Here, I'll show you."
I went over to the piano.
You love music, classical music in particular. Perhaps you studied an instrument when you were young and perhaps you can read music, but beyond that you have had no formal musical training. You attend classical music concerts regularly and are often exalted or moved to tears by the beauty of Mozart's or Beethoven's music, but you also have the uneasy feeling that you are always missing something, that "real" musicians are privy to a world of esoteric secrets from which you are excluded.
You enjoy learning about fields in which you have no expertise and have enjoyed reading the excellent books available these days on fields as diverse as quantum physics, climate change, archeology, etc. You would love to learn something about music theory, but everything you try to read about music leaves you feeling all the more confused. Wikipedia articles about the simplest musical topics overwhelm you with page after page of informational overkill.
If this resembles your experience, then you, the oppressed silent majority of music lovers, are my target audience.
Why does it have to be so hard?
Like any other discipline, music has its own set of specialized terms - octave, tritone, polyphony, submediant, hemiola ( a term describing a type of rhythm, not a blood disease), hemidemisemiquaver (a British term having to do with the duration of an event), and on and on. Music also - again like many other disciplines - uses what appear to be normal English words in ways that have little or nothing to do with their everyday meanings - words like interval, dominant, flat, sharp, meter, major, minor, modulation, key, dynamic, etc. To make matters worse, musical terminology is rife with everyday Italian words like allegro, andante, piano, forte; words that simultaneously retain their ordinary Italian meanings but which also carry with them a long tradition of subtle tacit conventions. Moreover, Western culture has developed a peculiarly arcane and awkward system for writing music down, a system that has taken many forms over the past thousand plus years and which has continuously evolved to meet the musical needs of the day.
So, when musicians speak to each other about music, you are right: they speak a language that you have no hope of understanding and they assume a knowledge of musical notation that you will probably never acquire.
Writing about music in layman's terms is notoriously difficult. For every gifted communicator like the late Leonard Bernstein there are uncountable music professors, critics, and commentators who exacerbate the problem. And sometimes it seems to me that some of them - especially the folks who write program notes for classical concerts - use this specialized vocabulary with sadistic intent.
For example, if you were attending concerts at the Philadelphia Orchestra a few seasons ago, you might have optimistically opened your Playbill to the section entitled "Musical Terms" only to find yourself ambushed by this mish-mash of jargon-infested circular definitions:
• Octave: The interval between any two notes that are seven diatonic (non-chromatic) scale degrees apart. Two notes an octave apart are different only in their relative registers (e.g., c-c’ d-d’).
• Diatonism [sic]: Music whose tonality is predominantly nonchromatic (such as the works of Haydn and Mozart).
• Chromatic: Relating to tones foreign to a given key (scale) or chord.
• Tonality: The orientation of melodies and harmonies towards a referential (or tonic) pitch class.
This is, admittedly, a particularly egregious example. It's not so much that the definitions are incorrect as that they explain nothing to the uninitiated. If you don't know the lingo to begin with and therefore can't distinguish between incompetence and plain old obscurity, such writing is likely only to make you feel that much more insecure.
And even writers with the best intentions typically assume a level of musical sophistication that locks out a good deal of the music-loving public. For example, here's Alex Ross, the superb music critic for The New Yorker, writing in his blog about a scene in Richard Wagner's Die Walkure:
Wotan is about to enter the most spectacular psychological tailspin in the history of opera. But just before he goes into freefall, the orchestra plays a brief microlude. It consists of one upward-arcing phrase lasting ten bars and around thirty seconds. At the top of the arc, sharp rhythmic figures in F-flat major collide with columnar E-flats sounding below. We instinctively feel the dissonance as a pang. What might have been is set against what is.
It is, I think, a beautiful, poignant description of one the great moments in opera, but for a reader without any theoretical background, the words I've highlighted - and thus the heart of what Ross is trying to say - are incomprehensible.
Is there hope?
In the late 1960s, when I was a graduate student at Berkeley teaching undergraduate music appreciation classes, I was confident in my bridge-building ability. Just explain the vocabulary, I thought, and play some illustrative examples, and everything will be clear. And at the time I believed that I was, for the most part, successful. Looking back, I suspect things were not as rosy as I thought.
There was one incident in particular that has stayed with me over the years, an incident whose lesson I was unable to learn at the time. One of my students came to me and said, timidly and apologetically, "Mr. Coren, I just can't tell the difference between major and minor."
"Oh, don't worry, that's really pretty easy. Here, I'll show you."
I went over to the piano.
"Here's major:"
"And here's minor:"
"I just can't hear the difference!"
"Ok. Try this. Major:"
"Ok. Try this. Major:"
"Minor:"
Now she was in tears. "I just can't hear it!"
I tried a few more things - having her sing, playing a few melodies - but all to no avail. In the end, I guess I said something patronizing like "Well, just try to do some more listening" and wrote the poor young woman off as an obvious anomaly.
My fundamental error was the belief that almost everyone perceives music the same way. Except for the occasional tone-deaf person, I thought, everybody can hear the difference between major and minor, just as, except for the occasional color-blind person, we can all agree on the difference between red and green.
In the succeeding decades, I have learned again and again how wrong I was. I now believe that every individual - a trained musician, a music lover with no technical background, or someone who doesn't care at all about music - has a particular idiosyncratic way of hearing and - especially - responding to music, as valid as anybody else's. I hope my student went on to enjoy listening to music in her own way, whether or not she could tell the difference between major and minor. Sometimes I wonder how any communication about music takes place at all.
So, is there hope? Honestly, I don't really know.
While the physics and mathematics of the vibrations that reach our ears are well understood, our understanding of how our brains process these vibrations is in its infancy, and so our perceptions of even what appear to be the simplest musical phenomena are fraught with unsolved mysteries.
Nevertheless, even though you may not have the terminology to express what you're hearing, I'm betting that you are able to make incredibly sophisticated and complex judgments about musical style and syntax in a fraction of a second. In short, even if you feel intimidated by musical theory, I think you'll find that you're a lot smarter than you think.
So I am starting this website driven by the desire to show folks a way across the moat of confusion and obscurity that seems to have been put there with the explicit purpose of keeping music lovers away from musical knowledge.
Let me be clear at the outset about how I regard the theoretical side of musical experience. I find it impossible to make a distinction between the abstract ideas underlying music and my emotional responses to the music itself. For me, they are inextricably bound together and they are both ineffably beautiful. So be warned: I will be dealing with music theory, but, I hope, in a way that will enrich your own musical life.
I tried a few more things - having her sing, playing a few melodies - but all to no avail. In the end, I guess I said something patronizing like "Well, just try to do some more listening" and wrote the poor young woman off as an obvious anomaly.
My fundamental error was the belief that almost everyone perceives music the same way. Except for the occasional tone-deaf person, I thought, everybody can hear the difference between major and minor, just as, except for the occasional color-blind person, we can all agree on the difference between red and green.
In the succeeding decades, I have learned again and again how wrong I was. I now believe that every individual - a trained musician, a music lover with no technical background, or someone who doesn't care at all about music - has a particular idiosyncratic way of hearing and - especially - responding to music, as valid as anybody else's. I hope my student went on to enjoy listening to music in her own way, whether or not she could tell the difference between major and minor. Sometimes I wonder how any communication about music takes place at all.
So, is there hope? Honestly, I don't really know.
While the physics and mathematics of the vibrations that reach our ears are well understood, our understanding of how our brains process these vibrations is in its infancy, and so our perceptions of even what appear to be the simplest musical phenomena are fraught with unsolved mysteries.
Nevertheless, even though you may not have the terminology to express what you're hearing, I'm betting that you are able to make incredibly sophisticated and complex judgments about musical style and syntax in a fraction of a second. In short, even if you feel intimidated by musical theory, I think you'll find that you're a lot smarter than you think.
So I am starting this website driven by the desire to show folks a way across the moat of confusion and obscurity that seems to have been put there with the explicit purpose of keeping music lovers away from musical knowledge.
Let me be clear at the outset about how I regard the theoretical side of musical experience. I find it impossible to make a distinction between the abstract ideas underlying music and my emotional responses to the music itself. For me, they are inextricably bound together and they are both ineffably beautiful. So be warned: I will be dealing with music theory, but, I hope, in a way that will enrich your own musical life.
There is a blog available for reader feedback. I hope you'll let me know what you think. I haven't quite decided what form the blog should take, but for now I will post announcements of new sections as I finish them. The blog supplies an RSS feed for those of you who wish to be automatically notified as new material appears.