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Comment by scrozier | Hacker News Reader

Grew up playing classical and pop music, basically 3-4 chords (maj, min, 7th, etc). Went to the best jazz school in the world (U of North Texas) and woke up to jazz...an order of magnitude more harmonically complex than classical. Will spend the rest of my life learning to play jazz.

Why is this on HN? Because there is a giant overlap between hackers and musicians.

For those of you interested, but confused, go to a music store and ask for a "fake book," a big collection of tunes in "head chart" format (just melody and the kind of chord symbols being discussed here. Study it like a new programming language. Bang out the chords on a piano, if you can. (Most fake books have a "glossary" of the chords in the front or back.)

Donald Knuth said that when a new CS grad student arrived at Stanford, they didn't ask, "are you a musician?," they just asked, "what instrument do you play?"

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I went to UNT as well (not for music) and I'm still in Denton and work remote from here, not because it's a great tech hub but because of the music scene and culture I want to raise my kids in.

A good number of the best coders I work with right now are fantastic musicians, including Chad Fowler who is a phenomenal sax player, and another senior dev on my team who is a superb UNT-trained jass pianist. We talk about this all the time -- so many good coders are also musicians.

Great story about Knuth, I was never aware of that quote!

Interesting. I'm in Denton also. Went to UNT thinking of studying music but ended up in Math/Physics, two of the guys I work with currently were in the UNT music school before getting into programming/tech.

Also married to a UNT music graduate who I'm hoping to lure into programming :-)

Cool. Not sure if you're still watching this thread, but I'm thinking of putting together some kind of tech group for Denton, maybe through meetup. Ping me at davsims at gmail if you want. Do you work out of Denton? I set up @ Jupiter House most days.

"""an order of magnitude more harmonically complex than classical. """

Depends on the classical. There's classical stuff that's harmonically miles beyond jazz music.

Contemporary classical, that is.

Absolutely, dextorious. Something of a semantic issue. Maybe we should say, "serious" music or "concert music" or some such. I really don't like any of the terms.

In any case, your point is well taken. It would be interesting to trace the parallel development of harmony in "serious" music and jazz. (Which, of course, someone has done.)

I always liked the term "art music" to refer to the entire classical music genre. "Classical" implies a certain period to me.

Yes, not bad. Perhaps as opposed to "entertainment music"?

The problem with terms like these is the music at the boundaries. There's pop and jazz music that sound more like art than some concert music. There's art music that will never see the inside of a concert hall. What about interactive computer music? Is it art? Is it a game? Is it theater? Is it improv? What about music that arises out of dance movement? Is it dance music?

What's "serious"? What's a "composer"? What's "art"? What's "sound"? And just like any jargon, it depends on the audience with which you're communicating. The more you try to standardize a definition, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

Yes. It's utterly pointless to set these distinctions. Iggy and the Stooges and the Ramones were disciplined conceptual artists, yet they were part of a movement that spelled stupid "stoopid". The beautiful thing about real art, the kind that gets remembered as great art later, is that it is always ahead of the theoretical game.

A famous example is Shakespeare, who was vulgar until the German Romantics discovered him as classic.

mmm, I wouldn't be so sure. Both can be about as "out" as possible, or about as "complex" as possible. I would say that, in general, contemporary jazz musicians have thought about harmony about as much as contemporary classical composers. I mean, they focus on different aspects of harmony, but I wouldn't claim that one school is miles beyond another. Its almost a silly comparison, anyway.

I'd love to listen to something like this, but don't know even where to start looking. Could you provide some pointers?

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