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  • a_jug_of_marx_piss [he/him]
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    4 years ago

    As a hobbyist musician, I am strongly in favor of just dumping all of current music theory and starting from scratch. There has to be a better way.

    • wifom [they/them]
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      4 years ago

      Solfege should be the first thing to go. Also forcing students to learn whatever the fuck this is but not teach them that basically everyone after the year 1800 constantly broke the rules because you don't have to follow strict part writing that only exists to keep the music as pure and Bach-like as possible

        • Will2Live [he/him]
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          4 years ago

          The piano roll is a much better intuitive composition tool, but trash for reading music.

          But at the same time for many styles if music you can get by without the staff. I play jazz and cannot read sheet music to save my life

          Also knowing note names and the number of sharps and flats in a key is overhyped. I get by with the Roman numeral system just fine

          • Mardoniush [she/her]
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            4 years ago

            Yeah, I wouldn't want to have to sightsing off a piano roll.

            Interestingly, I find the roman numerals incomprehensible, but sharps and flats and intervals and scale notations come easily.

            • Will2Live [he/him]
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              4 years ago

              That's funny :)

              Roman numeral system is so natural for me, that with most pop, jazz, or rock songs, In my head as i'm listening i can go "that's the V, that's vi, that's I" etc. etc.

              Did you take music classes? maybe that's why you're more acquainted with the sharps/flats etc.

              • Mardoniush [she/her]
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                4 years ago

                No, I just have a voice that suits classical solo-work, and picked up chord structures from singing endless interval exercises, so I just naturally think of chords as intervals stacked on top of one another.

                I am super crap at Solfege, can't really do it in real time, at least with the rapid florid shit I usually sing. I just pick a reference note and the tonic and hope for the best. Works out ok for everything that isn't too dissonant

                  • Mardoniush [she/her]
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                    4 years ago

                    There is a lot of benefit of Solfege (Indian music has its own traditional version.) Vocalists mostly learn it to sightsing, and trying to sing without it can have real issues if you're singing dissonant or atonal stuff on first sight.

                    Even something like some of Rameau's work (Castor and Pollux, the all Accompagnato show, all Accompagnato, all the time. You want an Aria? You get ONE.) will trip you up if you don't realise that chord isn't resolving quickly enough, or that the notes between the chords are deliberately off key.

                      • Mardoniush [she/her]
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                        4 years ago

                        Yeah. Absolutely. I'd like to note that the current notation system was never designed to be a comprehensive guide to a performance any more than Plainchant Notation, until mid 19th century the finishing work was given largely to the performers. It's mostly Rossini's fault, him getting fed up with shitty soloists doing runs all over his pieces.

                        If you look at soloist copies and autographs, there are shitloads of additional symbols in 17th-18th century music. There were between 9 and 22 different types of trills (upwards, downwards, same note trill, pressed vibrato, glottal stopped, played on the palate, bounced off the diaphragm.)

                        Performers notated musical colouring, turns, the type of portamento, the exact shape of mezza di Voce, when to add vibrato, how to attack the note beyond Legato-Staccato, Really complex phrasing. All things that are lost in modern vocal music.

                        The notation varied from region to region and from teacher to teacher but most people could look at a score and follow that performance notation.

      • Mardoniush [she/her]
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        4 years ago

        Even Bach didn't keep the music Bach-like. Lotta parallel octaves in his work (and of course he never expected people to be stupid enough to use pure equal temprement.)

        In fact I'd say the mid romantics pumped up this whole formal system that never really existed outside of scholarly speculation and basic guidelines to students (and possibly in the mind of hardline Gallant composers like Gluck or Gretry.)

      • lvysaur [he/him]
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        4 years ago

        There’s a little discussion about this in microtonal communities.

        It's not just music, it's literally everything. Cuisines, namings of so-called "continents", art, literature, science, etc.
        https://hexbear.net/post/19561

        Sorry for tooting own horn

          • lvysaur [he/him]
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            4 years ago

            All modern western "-ologys" came about within the last 400 years as a result of wealth subsidizing intellectual pursuits in europe. First the wealth was from the Black Death, then from the Americas and then from coal.

            As such, literally every study of everything ever is polluted to the brim with eurocope because they've shoehorned it in. Europe isn't a continent, modern medicine isn't "western medicine" and also homeopathy is traditional western medicine, the Aryans were brown, whites aren't Caucasian, Americans aren't Indian, "Yersinia pestis" should be called "Shibasa buboe", etc etc, too many to list.

            I'm just making that comment in the context of "Music theory is racist", yes it is but only because everything is racist, because it's all funded by a singular group of people that lucked out with having the American continents located virtually next door.