Hacker News Reader

Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

> "Much of the music in the world operates roughly on the pentatonic scale which coincides with the black keys, [..]"

I think there is not so much music in the pentatonic that is formed by the black keys, or a related scale. Off the top of my head only Paul Desmond's Take Five comes to my mind. I think this mainly because it is horrible to read and write in traditional notation.

Coincidentally I played a bit of Stevie Wonder's music recently which was all in E-flat minor. I have to say it is very pleasant to play, especially if you use Steve's often unusual fingerings.

Reading it OTOH was not so pleasant. This hints to me that our music is not only influenced by the way it sounds and the way it can be played but also by what is convenient to write down and read - and sometimes it takes a blind artist to overcome this limitations.

View on HN

Surely not related to black keys, that is what I tried to say. Most pentatonic music traditiona predate keyboards.

AFAIK Stevie's songs uses a lot of black keys due to being easier to him to locate them using touch instead of sight.

I highly doubt that anyone with that level of musical training really needs to look at the keyboard...just like you probably don't while you type.

While similar in some ways you can't compare a computer keyboard with a piano keyboard. The piano is linear and long and sometimes you cannot avoid to jump with your hands. No matter how good you are, the further the jump the higher the risk to miss. Performance is a lot about risk reduction, so even the best of the best have a glance sometimes.

if you ever watch a professional, especially a session musician, sightread, they don't look at the keyboard, even for big strides. it's all muscle-memory. and blind concert pianists play the whole repertoire, not just stuff in Eb.

That's what I meant when I wrote that his fingerings are pleasant to play and I meant that you don't have to be blind to benefit from the fact that they facilitate easy orientation on the keys.

For example Stevie actually plays the main melody of the main riff of Superstition distributed to both of his hands. This allows him to simultaneously play some bass notes with his left and some higher chords with his right hand while completely avoiding to move his hands away from their basic position. His hands never jump. Playing the melody with both hands is unusual and not what most Superstition tutorials show, but it is actually very pleasant and safe because everything just lies under your fingers.

The other side of the same coin is that Stevie never had to worry if his music is easy to write and read. That also facilitates playability and maybe emphasizes pleasant movements over looks on a sheet of paper.

Fascinating, do you happen to have an example with Stevie's own fingerings of superstition? I'd love to see that.

I watched many Youtube videos to figure it out. Thankfully a good soul named Josh FunkKeyStuff Paxton had already written it down and I was glad when I found his detailed analysis. Here is a link to a PDF that another good soul made of Paxton's now lost so called "Superstition dissertation":

http://bluefunk.rocks/NonBandPictures/FunkKeyStuff(JoshPaxto...

Awesome!

That doesn't really make any sense.

I think there is not so much music in the pentatonic that is formed by the black keys, or a related scale.

Depending how strictly you’re using “pentatonic” there, I don’t think you’re correct, unless I’m misunderstanding. In the wider classical and jazz repertoire there’s plenty of music written in Eb, Gb etc, heavy on the black notes.

For example, Debussy’s piano music often uses keys with lots of flats (or lots of sharps). Chopin supposedly played the black keys with his thumbs in some cases, against the accepted style at the time.

In jazz, Billy Strayhorn (who I think was strongly influenced by Debussy) seemed to be very fond of writing in Db.

Interesting... Do you have a source copy for this? I'm always interested to play music as the artist intended and Stevie Wonder is one of my favourites :)

I'd be interested in that as well.

If you are interested in Superstition, see my answer to jeffwass for a potentially useful link.

So here's my question then - is the musical notation we have the most logical and ergonomic language it could be?

No, not even remotely. But it's not trying to be. Notation is a way to communicate music to a player or conductor who applies their own interpretation to it. Notation is more like a movie script than a novel.

It's. It even well optimized for that. It's a very clunky path-dependent system that has centuries-old cruft just because it's difficult to change culture and it's mostly passable for an orchestra of different instruments to use a shared notation. Instruments with a strong culture of solo music (guitar) often use different notation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com