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PhilGoetz comments on Bad Concepts Repository - Less Wrong
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"Harmony" -- specifically the idea of root progressions -- in music theory. (EDIT: That's "music theory", not "music". The target of my criticism is a particular tradition of theorizing about music, not any body of actual music.)
This is perhaps the worst theory I know of to be currently accepted by a mainstream academic discipline. (Imagine if biologists were Lamarckians, despite Darwin.)
No. Just no. You're trying to enshrine your aesthetic preferences as rational. Besides, chord progressions work. Most people like music that uses chord progressions better than music that doesn't. Compare album sales of Elvis vs. Arnold Schoenberg.
You've completely misunderstood my claim, as arundelo pointed out. It's like accusing moridinamael of denying the atomic theory of matter (or worse, being opposed to scientific inquiry) because he/she criticized the Bohr model.
I.e. you're taking for granted the very thing I'm claiming is wrong, and then somehow using my statement to deduce other unrelated beliefs that I don't in fact hold.
(I'm somewhat surprised, because we had some fairly extensive discussions about all this in person a couple months ago. )
I'm afraid my brain chose to remember the jogging path, the view of the Potomac, the bridges, and some of the joggers, but nothing about what we said. If you converted me to your view, I have lapsed back into my old ways. I have to learn everything several times.
I don't see how I've misunderstood your claim. I realize you claim harmony doesn't cut reality at the joints. I think that's an aesthetic judgment. You say that Westergardian theory allows one to treat the music of Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern as belonging to the same school as earlier Western music, as if this were a point in favor of that theory. To me, it is a proof that the theory is both wrong and destructive, because my aesthetic sense says that music is crap. We agree that the test of a theory of music is whether it helps one compose good music. I've never tried to write music using either theory, but if using Westergardian theory allows one to write music like that of Berg, my aesthetic judgements, which are different than yours, say that proves it is a bad theory.
Perhaps if I had been raised in a culture that used Westergardian composition techniques, I would be acclimatized to it, and would appreciate that music, and have a low opinion of harmonic theory. Even supposing that were true, which I doubt, it would only mean that this is culturally relative. Not a failure of rationality.
It seems to me that to claim that harmonic theory is objectively wrong, you must also claim that the tastes of people like me, who like things written using harmonic theory and dislike things not using harmonic theory, are also objectively wrong.
If you showed that Westergardian theory gave a simpler explanation of the music that I like, that would help convince me that it was a superior theory. (I don't expect you can do this in a blog post.) But even then, calling it a bad concept would be like calling Newtonian physics a bad concept because it doesn't explain motion at relativistic speeds.
This is not really true, for a variety of reasons:
I do agree that this would be quite relevant.
I understand and sympathize. (It wasn't that I thought I converted you to my view, but that I thought I had done a better job of conveying what my complaints about harmonic theory were.)
The misunderstanding is most evident when you write a phrase like:
which begs the whole question. You assume that harmonic theory is an accurate description of "how those things are written", which is the very thing I deny. You seem to be confusing music theory with music, which is like mixing up the map and the territory.
Not quite. At least, the emphasis is on "helps", not on "good". You should think of a work of music (including its aesthetic qualities) being held fixed when we evaluate theories; the parameter we're measuring that determines how good the theory is is how easily the theory allows us to produce the music in question.
(Furthermore, it certainly can't be the case that harmonic theory's classifications track your likes and dislikes. After all, you apparently don't like Beethoven's Great Fugue, and yet as far as harmonic theory is concerned it's in the same category as his other works, which you do like.)
I disagree that harmonic theory is anywhere near as good as Newtonian physics. I would instead compare it -- unfavorably -- to pre-Darwinian theories of biodiversity. I specifically believe it to be one of the worst theories of all time (whereas Newtonian physics is one of the best).
I don't understand music theory enough to continue the debate. I don't even understand what you mean by harmonic theory, since I assume you don't mean we should throw away 1-3-5 chords. I have noticed that Baroque music tends more often than classical or romantic music to have passages that starts on one chord, and the different parts walk their different ways to another chord with no pivot chords, just walk the bass and damn the torpedoes in between. is that related to what you're talking about?
By harmonic theory I mean the idea proposed by Jean-Philippe Rameau in 1722 of analyzing music as a succession of simultaneities ("chords"), to each of which is assigned a "root", and with the order of chords being governed by relationships among the roots.
The above doesn't make any literal sense, but if what you mean by this is that Baroque music violates Rameau's rules of root progression more often than later music (which, believe it or not, is actually what I think you mean), then this is almost certainly not the case: generally speaking, music gets more complex as you go forward in history, and the more complex it is, the more likely it is to crash Rameau's theory.
(Yes, I know that popular histories tell you that Classical music was simpler than Baroque. This is wrong.)
The reality is that the torpedoes were always damned. Rameau and his theoretical successors mistook certain superficial patterns (which automatically arise in particularly simple musical contexts) for underlying laws. The actual underlying laws were discovered by Schenker and Westergaard.
Would you deny that Baroque music deviates from common chords more often than classical music does?
Yes. Look at how many Baroque vs. Classical entries there are on this list of examples of augmented sixth chords, for instance.
That appears to be an effect of the data compiler's bias. This list of I-5-7 chords from the same source has the same ratio.
That's an argument that classical music uses more augmented sixths chords, which are not especially uncommon. Contrast that with something like the chord held at the start of Bach's Fugue in D minor -- it's got a C#, a D, and an E it in; what the hell is it?
That's what I was talking about when I said "I have noticed that Baroque music tends more often than classical or romantic music to have passages that starts on one chord, and the different parts walk their different ways to another chord with no pivot chords, just walk the bass and damn the torpedoes in between," which makes perfectly simple literarl sense. Classical music moves from one resolved chord to another thru a series of pivot chords. Baroque music sometimes just walks the bass, and maybe the top note also, by one half-step per "chord" until it arrives at the destination chord, passing through intermediate states that aren't any kind of recognized chord, certainly nothing so common as an augmented 6th.
Now, if when we say Baroque you're thinking Vivaldi and I'm thinking Bach's organ music, that could account for the difference of opinion.
You couldn't be expected to tell it from the grandparent, but komponisto is saying not that tonal music is bad but that the standard set of harmony concepts does not cut reality at the joints, even when dealing with Elvis or Bach. See also the link given in komponisto's other comment.
(I haven't looked into this enough to have a strong opinion on it. I will say that the standard set of harmony concepts is an extremely important part of my mental furniture.)
The title of the post is "Bad Concepts Repository", not "Bad Musical Repertory". Shouldn't that make it a given that theories of things, rather than things themselves, are what what we're critiquing here?
Hopefully you can take my comment as an application of the principle of charity to PhilGoetz rather than a critique of your comment that he was responding to.
("Harmony is a bad concept?! But all my favorite music was written using that concept!")
I agree that whether "the standard set of harmony concepts" is actually superseded by Schenkerian/Westergaardian analysis is not really obvious.
Westergaard has a highly non-trivial theory of what counts as "consonance" or "dissonance" in a melodic line, which is roughly equivalent to "harmony" in standard music theory. The other way that traditional "harmony" is recovered is that this kind of analysis allows for a note in the 'background'/'deep' structure to be tonicized over, effectively becoming a "temporary tonic" and admitting the construction of tonic triads ('arpeggiation').
It would not be hard to make a strong case that "harmony" is a derived phenomenon; just take a bunch of chord progressions (or pieces that are commonly analyzed in terms of chord progressions) and re-analyze them in terms of the Schenkerian/Westergaardian concepts (deep structures, arpeggiation, tonicization). Then show how this leads either to a simplified analysis, or to one that's a better description of the music.
If you don't find it obvious after studying Westergaard and comparing it to (say) Piston, then my best guess is that you're relying on tacit musical knowledge that you don't realize others lack, or which you mistakenly think is being communicated in Piston (etc.) but which actually isn't.
Not so -- there is nothing in Westergaard about root progressions (Rameau's "fundamental bass"), which is the defining concept of "harmony" in the traditional (theoretical) sense. Consonance and dissonance are part of traditional contrapuntal theory, which goes back to long before Rameau. (Yes, Westergaard does draw on the tradition of contrapuntal theory, as did Schenker.)
Again, if you think this is what is meant by "harmony", you are missing the point. (Yes, Rameau kinda sorta had this idea as part of his theory -- but not really. It's really a Schenkerian idea.)
In harmonic theory, the "hierarchy" has only two levels of structure: a note is either part of the chord, or not part of the chord ("nonharmonic tones"). In Westergaardian theory (as in Schenkerian theory), there is no limit to the number of levels. Take the Mozart analysis that folds out from the back of the Westergaard book. The data in that analysis cannot be expressed in terms of harmonic theory. The latter is simply not rich enough. All you can do in harmonic theory is write Roman numerals under the score, which (at best) might be considered roughly equivalent to showing one level of reduction in the Westergaardian analysis (though not really, because the Roman numerals only contain pitch-class information, not pitch information like the Westergaardian version; plus harmonic theory's "chords" frequently and typically mix up different levels of Westergaardian structure).