Sing it Brent

My friend Brent is getting his PhD in choral conducting at North Dakota State University. He and I taught at the same school in Bismarck about five years ago. We've lived to tell the tale. And we've agreed never to talk about it.

His skills as a director are impressive. He has an ability to diagnose a performance and to instill good habits in his singers. With a wide focus on such basics like posture and eye contact to the specifics like enunciation, vowel quality and pitch stability he transformed a sad little choir into a solid singing group.

In my office the other day Casey asked a question about the obviousness of "good" and "bad" chords. Some agreed that there was something inherently good about some combinations. I disagreed. But I had to leave before I could impress everyone with my amazing insights. What? No I'm serious. I'm amazing.

In a recent email exchange with Brent the topic came up and he gave me this bit of enlightenment--much of which I remember reading and hearing (in books and on NPR) and very little of which I would be able to say on my own.

I would disagree completely that music is biological/genetic. I would agree that it is cultural. There's the old story about the group who took the visiting Indian (dot, not feather) ambassador to his first symphony, and when asked afterward which song he enjoyed the most, he chose the "first song" - the one the orchestra was playing before the conductor came out and started the program. Remember George Harrison using a sitar on some of those Beatle tracks
like Norwegian Wood, and others? Someone asked Ravi Shankar what he thought of Harrison's playing, and he said "it was terrible!"

Even if the first story isn't true, the tuning/tonal systems in eastern Asian music are completely different than anything we have in the west. I've tried to understand how a Raga is put together, and all I can really say is that it is almost impossible to notate in our
western system - microtones, complex rhythms and all that. But, it sounds fine to those that live there!

Western music itself has evolved quite a bit since we started writing things down in the 10th century. A440 didn't exist as a standard - there are organs in the old churches where A=415 on the low end, and A=460 on the high end. The early Pythagorean tuning system (2:1 = octave, etc - which is what our western music is based on) didn't quite work out when you started tuning keyboards, which resulted in "wolf" tones and the whole "diabolus in musica" avoidance of the
tritone. People experimented with 19 note/octave (and even larger!) keyboards and other things just trying to get it correct. It wasn't until well/even temperament - where musicians said "the hell with it, I'm just going to make these all even" did we get music even close to sounding like it does today. Now we use tritones and all manner of dissonances regularly that would have shocked the Renaissance composers.

The reason why your colleague thinks that notes "X, Y & Z" (or C, E and G if you will) sound good to "everyone" is because they've heard it over and over. Notes J, Q and L might sound like noise to him, or might sound very cool to someone else. Eric Whitacre is a upcoming composer about our age that everyone is drooling over. His choral music for the most part is nothing but suspended chords linked together. The choral world is freaking out over his music - people just can't get enough - but the rest of us that understand what's going on just roll our eyes and wish we would have thought of it first and made some money on it as well.

Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier" is not about a little piano that never gets angry--It's a technical piece intended to prove that the new tuning system works.