[HN Gopher] Did Bach "invent" the rules of music theory? ___________________________________________________________________ Did Bach "invent" the rules of music theory? Author : revorad Score : 29 points Date : 2022-08-17 17:02 UTC (4 days ago) (HTM) web link (michaelberrymusic.com) (TXT) w3m dump (michaelberrymusic.com) | pierrec wrote: | The statistical study of Bach's works seems interesting. That | said, I'm not convinced that any of the cited works (McHose, | Hanson...) suggest that Bach invented the rules of music theory, | they just use him as an prime example for baroque counterpoint. | I'm sure those authors are quite familiar with Bach's immediate | predecessors like Buxtehude, who had a fairly similar style. | heikkilevanto wrote: | Bach was considered in his lifetime to be a rather old-fashioned | composer, not one that invented new theories. Still a respected | composer, of course, and quite productive. | | That was a time when many people wrote about music theory in one | way or another: Corelli, Rameau, Telemann, Quantz, Handel, etc. | My understanding is that they mostly tried to explain the | existing tradition of baroque music, more than invent new theory. | After Bach died, musical tastes changed, and music developed into | a different direction. | motohagiography wrote: | I'd argue baroque music, and particularly Bach's work wasn't | merely a tradition and an affect of taste and fashion, it was | discovered, and it is still being discovered though statistical | and other analysis techniques used on his work today. Bach's | work is all about expressions of implied symmetries and forms, | and one of the most interesting aspects of it is that you can | essentially extend his pieces by writing consistent theorems in | them. It's not just harmony it's iterating the rules within the | pieces. | | Take this example of Alan Mearn's interpretation of BWV 1007, | this isn't mere ornamentation, he has filled out an entire | exposition of implied counterpoint, where the alberti bass | evolves into a completely new voice: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp98MRKrs2U I'm biased because | I think Mearns' new Bach album is the most important | interpretation since Gould's Goldberg Variations, and I'm | working my way through his sheet music edition, but this idea | that Bach's work was an artifact of a time whose importance is | diminished by progress is farcical. It's a foundation without | which there would be nothing approaching what we know today. | Bud wrote: | But how different, really? Bach still has a lot of relevance in | the present day. Try out Paul Simon's "American Tune". Based on | a Bach chorale. | galaxyLogic wrote: | > they mostly tried to explain the existing tradition of | baroque music, more than invent new theory | | Explaining existing music means creating new theory. Creating | music and creating a theory about it are two different things. | klik99 wrote: | This is how I understand it too - though "the rules of | counterpoint" as they are taught today were really codified | after Bach (who was already ~50 years out of date!). Typically | (not always!) the "rules" of a style of music are malleable and | flexible and argued over while the music is still relevant and | codified into unchangeable standards after they have fallen out | of fashion. Blues is a good modern example. Dubstep and the 100 | related genres and vaporwave and it's 100 related genres, are | counter-examples, instead slightly changing the rules becomes a | new subgenre, which I feel is the same effect but manifesting | itself differently. | | Bach himself "breaks" at least one rule in every piece, and I | can think of one rule that was really due to technological | limitations of the time - not modulating to more than 2 keys | away, because they didn't have 12-TET and going more than a few | keys away sounded more and more dissonant - keyboard | instruments were tuned to a specific key. | | The story I'm trying to tell is people arguing about the rules | of music is no different than how composers/producers/song | writers about music today with modern genres, and when some | genre dies, the old guard tries to keep it "pure" by zeroing on | a set of commonly used stylistic techniques and calling it "the | rules" which makes the music more bland and uninteresting by | smoothing out the rough edges. | | I was taught counterpoint by one of Shostakovichs last | students, and my opinion on rules is greatly influenced by him | - it's good to learn the rules, even though they aren't really | rules, and all the greatest music from that time was written | decades before the rules were even codified. | mmcclimon wrote: | Oh boy. Music theory, as such, has no "rules," and so of course | Bach did not invent them. Music theory is a descriptive | enterprise, which aims to make sense of music as | composed/performed/enacted by humans. (I have a PhD in music | theory.) | | Bach's chorales were functional music for the Lutheran church, | and to the extent that they form any sort of "rules" in music | theory, it comes from the fact that they have been used to teach | harmony for a long time (since at least the 1940s, as evidenced | by this article). The reason for that isn't so much that they're | prime examples of Western common-practice harmony, but rather | that they have a homogeneous texture that's easy to use in | classrooms, because they're easy for one person to play at the | piano or for students to sing. | | Recent music theory pedagogy has largely been moving _away_ from | the reliance on Bach chorales to teach harmony, especially as | music theory has taken a broader perspective on what music we | should be studying anyway. Studying the Bach chorales is just | fine if you want to know about how Bach used harmony, but there | 's a whole lot of music in the world, and there's no meaningful | sense in which Bach's music intrinsically defines a set of rules | any more than Mozart's or Clara Schumann's or AC/DC's or Meredith | Monk's defines a set of rules. | hooboodoo wrote: | I find it interesting that all of your examples to help define | the broadness of musical theory as you see it are all, | themselves, descended from western musical thought. That might | speak to the point being made in a different way than any of us | consider it. | yomkippur wrote: | oh good god, here comes the software engineer turned armchair | music theorists in the comment section. | Bud wrote: | Since this article focuses in on Bach chorales, here's a project | I headed up in 2020 during the first months of covid to record | (remotely; each person recorded their part individually, then | sent it in) all the chorales from Bach's St. Matthew Passion, | with some of the greatest Bach singers and players in North | America, along with a brief talk before each chorale. Also, we | obtained an acoustical model of Bach's church (the Thomaskirche | in Leipzig) from its creator, and rendered the sound into that | space, with each musician placed approximately where Bach would | have had them. | | Enjoy. | | http://spiritsound.com/operationbach/index.html | | or here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm41dm8K6pS5Grt- | LqYLVSg/vid... | galaxyLogic wrote: | Cool | jimbob45 wrote: | The answer is resoundingly no. If anyone deserves to be called | the father or mother or modern music theory, it would be | Pythagoras. | [deleted] | jancsika wrote: | > The answer is resoundingly no. | | Not only is it a resounding no, there is ongoing research to | find the roots of this cliche. | | I can't seem to find the article, but it traces it back to this | chemical engineer who did a statistical analysis of the bass | lines and cadencial formulae in Bach's chorales. | | I've even seen some scans of his analyses, it's wild stuff. | Maybe it's on libgen? I can't remember but you can probably do | a search for it... | | Edit: added a link to the article | | Edit2: nope, never mind, that wasn't it. But if I find it I'll | add the URL later... | klipt wrote: | Did Pythagoras actually write any music worth listening too? | analog31 wrote: | We don't know. From what I've read, we know a little bit | about early theory, but don't know precisely what scales and | intervals they were talking about. | mmcclimon wrote: | We know quite a lot about Greek music theory (Thomas | Mathiesen's _Apollo 's Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory | in Antiquity in the Middle Ages_ is the go-to source here: | https://archive.org/details/mathiesen-1999-apollos- | lyre/page...). Of course we don't have recordings, but we | do have a solid understanding of the theory, and some very | good guesses as to the scales and intervals. | Stratoscope wrote: | Not that we have live recordings of. | | But there is no doubt that he was a pioneer of music theory. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_tuning | | https://www.jstor.org/stable/24045969 ( _Pythagoras and the | Origin of Music Theory_ ) | | https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.00998.pdf ( _Dynamical systems, | celestial mechanics, and music: Pythagoras revisited_ ) ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-21 23:00 UTC)