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Comment by IAmGraydon | Hacker News Reader

The only thing that learning music theory will do for you in this case is make you realize that most of what you see in this article is nonsense. Certainly, none of it will help you make music. I say this as a songwriter and student of music theory for 20 years.

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I agree with you on this as a lifelong musician and improvisor. It isn't the math of grammar we think about when conversing to convey meaning and style. We think about what we want to say and how we want to say it. We listen and build something together just like we do in conversation. There is a kind of obsession among some jazz players with spirituality though, it is true. If you are the sort of person who likes that kind of thing, you probably like prose writing like this as well. You certainly don't need to analyze all mathematical relations and artifacts to improvise masterfully. In my experience, the more time a player focuses on this type of thing, the less energy they put into actually having something to express. Or perhaps it has something to do with a fear that they will find they have nothing to say, so they avoid that challenge by making technique and mathematical-theoretical relationships the focus of their practice. The only composer I can think of who managed to be obsessed with the math of things while actually using them to create a unique language through which he expessed ideas,style, and narrative was Messaien. (in his modes studies and bird calls) I do understand why many jazz musicians reached for spirituality and really complex mathematical relationships in modes of improvisation:it's because they were not granted the legitamacy and respect they deserve (and craved, many of them, like Monk, for example) from so-called arbiters of "high culture". If what they were doing could be serious and difficult and inscrutable except with hours and hours of thinky labor, they felt it might elevate them.Of course this was totally not needed and what they (monk especially) were creating had a laguage and history of its own that was in many ways more innovative and culturally relevant than that what they sought to be included with. Of course that's easy to say now.It must have been frustrating, like for Ornette.

> most of what you see in this article is nonsense

How as a creative person are you okay with saying blank statements like that? Sure if you just want to only talk about John Coltrane's drawing out of his time and only focus on today, possibly.

As someone who has several years of Music Theory and a grandfather that retired as a NYC Jazz Musician I absolutely know many people that worked this way. Heck we had 20 years of the "Mozart Effect" (Was bogus since day one that believed passively listening to Mozart made children and lab rats smarter). BUT music is mathematical and some people have certainly taken this bogus Mozart thing and found out the math behind music. For decades the musical music was captivated with math in the 20th century. This wasn't some spiritual journey in music it was a mathematical puzzle they were trying to work out.

The best example of Music based on Math was Iannis Xenakis, who composed from 1940s into the 1990s. Now he is certainly a required taste and I would say listening to his music live MIGHT make it more palatable but he was using computers in the 1960s to help his compositions. He wasn't Thelonious Monk who just played everything in the hardest keys to prove how great he was on piano but just wrote music from the love he had for mathematics and engineering. Classical music or "European Classical Music" was more into Math and as the high brow crowd was into his stuff it certainly was inside the head of John Coltrane, Miles and Ornette Coleman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iannis_Xenakis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2O8bMlEijg

Stravinky's Septet from 1952 can also show how this serial technique composition had huge influence on Jazz in the late 50s and early 60s. Especially when you listen to Miles Davis and Bill Evans "Sketches of Spain." You see that thousands of musicians were exploring and thinking about the "Math of Grammar."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijSmRoPzMaY

Well, it's difficult to discuss this math/music issue in a just a comment-length mini-essay and manage to get at what I'm trying to convey. I didn't write the "nonsense" comment myself, but i do hear the legit and justified frustration in it. Sketches of Spain- beautiful. Xenakis though. Man, every time I have had to perform one of his pieces, I'm thinking I should be paid double or they should just hook a digital sound making device up to his score so they don't have to pay anyone to practice that stuff! I guess some people enjoy it? He is the perfect example of what I was trying to get at. Does he have ideas? I guess so...? Do i need to practice them? Um, only if I get paid double/triple for the gig. Know what I mean? It isn't that I'm saying that musicians don't ever practice this way or compose using these devices. Tons of jazz musicians sit around with Slonimsky, mathing their way to a technique in improv that is truly justified by labor. People do it. It is a bit ridiculous. There is a pianist here in NYC who does this- she's a fantastic pianist and composer without Slonimsky and the like. She has compositional ideas and stylistic ones. I will say she is a cold player, but she's battling it out in a tough shark tank, so I get that she feels she has to join the arms race. I'm just saying that the musicians/composers I admire most focus on the human communication, style, and content aspect of improv and the aspect of music that comments upon culture and also inspires cultural change and reflection. Nuance. in As a young musician, I was forced to practice this thinky-mathy way for various professors. With age comes the perspective and mercy I hope to show my students and colleagues when I don't spend our valuable practice and rehearsal time on retrograde-inversions and the set of combinatorial relationships in a given collection, i.e. things that don't sound like much (except to a music theorist who studied serialism and 12-tone) but are justified by practice room labor. I'm definitely not trying to claim that there aren't musicians that go down this path-- there certainly are! Famous ones, even! For me though, it's is a flag waving frantically that loudly signals a lack of artistic content, usually. But not always, as I said. This is only my opinion, however. I voiced it because there aren't enough musicians/teachers/composers who voice this pushback against the macho-mathy in jazz. There is this fallacy that anyone who can't play all mathy w the Slonimsky snippets weaving in and out of their improv should not be listened to when they say, "hey! why are we practicing this stuff??? I'm not a computer! I'm an artist-human!" I'm just saying some of us don't feel bullied (not saying you are doing that-you were just raising a legit point) and we feel perfectly fine calling out this approach for its mad dash to cover up for a severe lack of artistic content and a fear that one is vulnerable to being unseated from the throne.

I'd say jazz is really suffering from a lack of artistic content right now, and I believe it's a direct result of years of this kind of prove-your-mathy-badassery-technical-arms-race among jazz musicians. This is what happens when an "island is sinking"- people start pushing others off the sinking island so there is room for themselves. Jazz (and classical) is kinda sinking. Hopefully we can heal from this and get away from analogue versions of computer music (Xenakis) and back to humanity soon. It's funny, the defense against the sinking is causing it to sink faster by being less human, less relevant. Ironic.

But I sure didn't say that people don't get all up into the math of interrelationships in music theory. They do- I would hate for a non-musician to think they had to do that though to understand music. Absolutely not!In fact, I'm just saying that isn't what music is about for me, as a composer-musician. (I want to encourage people to love music, not to feel bullied by the 'difficulty" of its theory)

also: you said, "...He wasn't Thelonious Monk who just played everything in the hardest keys to prove how great he was on piano..."

What? I don't think that's what Monk was doing at all! Monk developed a sonic language all his own. I don't think any keys were hard for him... nor are they for any professional musician. Monk thought in sound texture and color. They are just different sounds. Sometimes you need a freshness or a timbre that a special key provides. Enough jazz music is written in B-flat if you know what I mean.

I realised a while back that music theory is like modular synthesis.

You can keep collecting modules - ideas about theory - forever. But only one person in a hundred, at most, knows how to make them work together to produce something audiences are going to want to hear more than once.

Coltrane may have been one of those people. But if he was, it was because he was Coltrane.

Most people who play with these ideas aren't. And acquiring more ideas and theories won't change that for them.

exactly. well said.

> "Thelonious Monk who just played everything in the hardest keys to prove how great he was on piano..."

Can't find where I read that. I believe it was a Miles Davis biography I read years ago. I know many Jazz greats thought the same of Monk. When you listen to "Monk meets John Coltrain" you can just see the two of them just making the hardest possible way to resolve what each other was doing. It is almost like they played musical dare for the last 9 months and finally gotten to a place where we got that album.

As a saxophonist I really enjoyed playing to his work, but my keyboard friends would get so worked up. Just look at 'round midnight. The key signature and the accidentals make it almost unreadable. Plus sure we can play in any key but certain one's are easier than others and it seem like it was always the key that couldn't make it harder if one tried. It was always known if you shown any weakness in playing keys that everyone else would keep modulating to try and mess you up.

One-upping is definitely a solo strategy that has a long history, and the tradition continues today. I just don't see Monk's key choice as some kind of proof of his skill. He wrote tunes that often sat awkwardly and offered a lot of space, like "We See" or "Coming on The Hudson" or even "Blue Monk" of all pieces. I feel those as offering freedom of direction and color- offering lots of rhythmic, motivic, and harmonic interpretational options. I guess that's why I love playing Monk tunes. And also his unique accent in the way he played- accent-inflection that was so of himself and so personal. It was confident and simple. I'm personally not a fan of the one-upsman approach to soloing, but it definitely exists.

Thank I never get to geek out on Jazz anymore. I moved to a different city and never got to crack into the scene that is here.

To me Monk = craziest and most intellectually stimulating harmonies of all time. No one has ever played his music and fooled you into thinking it was by Thelonious.

You also rightly said, "For decades the musical music was captivated with math in the 20th century. This wasn't some spiritual journey in music it was a mathematical puzzle they were trying to work out."

Yeah, you are right, for some. But actually, for some others, it was a serious spiritual journey. Like for George Crumb! (way into numerology- used it in Ancient Voices, Black Angels and other pieces- yeikes!- but some people dig this-- remember though, some people also dig a good seance or a good horoscope you know?)

https://music7703lsu.wordpress.com/2017/03/12/liturgical-num...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11o8nHk-l_o

Also- look into Webern's beliefs about numbers. He was really driven/controlled by this superstition. There is certainly a tradition of just this kind of spirituality that is alive in jazz today. Sun Ra was all about this spirituality without the math stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djBKQNVj5Cc

Anyhow, computers had a lot to do with this math obsession in 20th century music composition.

And Ornette? Was he about math at all? I may not know about this. For me, having played a lot of his music, I'd say that his music is a music-of-the-people, and much more about folk music than jazz, although he's of course a great jazz musician. One of the greatest, and maybe because of this fact. He had confidence in the simplicity of his ideas. He didn't seem out to prove anything to anyone. Harmelodics has absolutely nothing to do with mathematical relationships or theory. It's all about each bringing what they think to a melody. (in very short, here) But if he was about math, I just don't know it. Please tell me, so I can look into it.

Damn son, talk about dropping the hammer on ‘em.

As a longtime, trained musician with a bit of theory, I’d love to get a breakdown. Would you be willing to explain what is nonsensical about the article?

I think what the grandparent is getting at is that music is a culturally-mediated perceptual phenomenon, and so the geometric interpretations here are an artifact of the model rather than of how our minds organize pitch into some musical Gestalt. I both agree with that (I love Coltrane, but as the article accidentally implies, this is about as meaningful as numerology) and find the artifacts to be pretty cool, so I’m not so down on it as an intellectual lark as that poster.

The author of the original post seemed to miss that Coltrane was drawing a "circle of fourths" (all the notes you see that are squared in the diagram are part of this) with a +1 / -1 half step radiating from them. I'm not entirely sure what John Coltrane was trying to do here, but the circle of fourths is well established theory. From my perspective, the transformations the author did were strange to me. They made neat letter patterns but I'm not sure they made musical ones.

From my personal perspective (and all music is to some degree personal opinion), I'm not a fan of trying to orient too much "numerology" to our 12 note equal tempered system (12TET). The 12 note equal tempered system really doesn't pattern all that well to what humans typically find as "consonant": whole integer ratio harmony. EG: One can say the most pleasing ratios follow as such - 2:1 (C:C - octave), 3:2 (C:G, fifths), 4:3 (C:F, fourths), 5:4 (C:E, maj. thirds). That has a certain "math as beauty" look to it when you look at the ratios, but the letter sequence is not as pretty. So if one is trying to find "numerology sense" in music harmony, I personally I think one should use frequencies or frequency ratios instead.

My personal impression about too many 20th century music theories, is that too often theories overfocused on 12TET note relationships, and led to some music that in general is difficult to get into (atonal, 12 tone, serial, etc.). These "have their uses" (some of the theories have found great success as scoring techniques for, say, horror films), and some people do seem to genuinely enjoy it. But the theories that I see that were more successful in the public eye (and in my mind as well) are "less is more" type theories (eg modal jazz or minimalism).

Thank you both for the thoughtful answers :). I think what you both said makes a lot of sense.

The one thing I'll throw in is that graphic notation (which I don't know a lot about) is an area where something like the OP can also have relevance - a way of visually expressing musical ideas (including, perhaps, some ideological content meant to inform attitude of the musician). It's also a blurry place between "functional" music notation and art.

I hadn't looked closely at the actual notation in the article - sounds like it may have lacked some rigor.

My main interest is just that it seems like an interesting system—and it's cool that it can be put into correspondence with sounds.

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