[HN Gopher] Did Bach "invent" the rules of music theory?
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Did Bach "invent" the rules of music theory?
Author : revorad
Score : 29 points
Date : 2022-08-17 17:02 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (michaelberrymusic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (michaelberrymusic.com)
| pierrec wrote:
| The statistical study of Bach's works seems interesting. That
| said, I'm not convinced that any of the cited works (McHose,
| Hanson...) suggest that Bach invented the rules of music theory,
| they just use him as an prime example for baroque counterpoint.
| I'm sure those authors are quite familiar with Bach's immediate
| predecessors like Buxtehude, who had a fairly similar style.
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| Bach was considered in his lifetime to be a rather old-fashioned
| composer, not one that invented new theories. Still a respected
| composer, of course, and quite productive.
|
| That was a time when many people wrote about music theory in one
| way or another: Corelli, Rameau, Telemann, Quantz, Handel, etc.
| My understanding is that they mostly tried to explain the
| existing tradition of baroque music, more than invent new theory.
| After Bach died, musical tastes changed, and music developed into
| a different direction.
| motohagiography wrote:
| I'd argue baroque music, and particularly Bach's work wasn't
| merely a tradition and an affect of taste and fashion, it was
| discovered, and it is still being discovered though statistical
| and other analysis techniques used on his work today. Bach's
| work is all about expressions of implied symmetries and forms,
| and one of the most interesting aspects of it is that you can
| essentially extend his pieces by writing consistent theorems in
| them. It's not just harmony it's iterating the rules within the
| pieces.
|
| Take this example of Alan Mearn's interpretation of BWV 1007,
| this isn't mere ornamentation, he has filled out an entire
| exposition of implied counterpoint, where the alberti bass
| evolves into a completely new voice:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp98MRKrs2U I'm biased because
| I think Mearns' new Bach album is the most important
| interpretation since Gould's Goldberg Variations, and I'm
| working my way through his sheet music edition, but this idea
| that Bach's work was an artifact of a time whose importance is
| diminished by progress is farcical. It's a foundation without
| which there would be nothing approaching what we know today.
| Bud wrote:
| But how different, really? Bach still has a lot of relevance in
| the present day. Try out Paul Simon's "American Tune". Based on
| a Bach chorale.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| > they mostly tried to explain the existing tradition of
| baroque music, more than invent new theory
|
| Explaining existing music means creating new theory. Creating
| music and creating a theory about it are two different things.
| klik99 wrote:
| This is how I understand it too - though "the rules of
| counterpoint" as they are taught today were really codified
| after Bach (who was already ~50 years out of date!). Typically
| (not always!) the "rules" of a style of music are malleable and
| flexible and argued over while the music is still relevant and
| codified into unchangeable standards after they have fallen out
| of fashion. Blues is a good modern example. Dubstep and the 100
| related genres and vaporwave and it's 100 related genres, are
| counter-examples, instead slightly changing the rules becomes a
| new subgenre, which I feel is the same effect but manifesting
| itself differently.
|
| Bach himself "breaks" at least one rule in every piece, and I
| can think of one rule that was really due to technological
| limitations of the time - not modulating to more than 2 keys
| away, because they didn't have 12-TET and going more than a few
| keys away sounded more and more dissonant - keyboard
| instruments were tuned to a specific key.
|
| The story I'm trying to tell is people arguing about the rules
| of music is no different than how composers/producers/song
| writers about music today with modern genres, and when some
| genre dies, the old guard tries to keep it "pure" by zeroing on
| a set of commonly used stylistic techniques and calling it "the
| rules" which makes the music more bland and uninteresting by
| smoothing out the rough edges.
|
| I was taught counterpoint by one of Shostakovichs last
| students, and my opinion on rules is greatly influenced by him
| - it's good to learn the rules, even though they aren't really
| rules, and all the greatest music from that time was written
| decades before the rules were even codified.
| mmcclimon wrote:
| Oh boy. Music theory, as such, has no "rules," and so of course
| Bach did not invent them. Music theory is a descriptive
| enterprise, which aims to make sense of music as
| composed/performed/enacted by humans. (I have a PhD in music
| theory.)
|
| Bach's chorales were functional music for the Lutheran church,
| and to the extent that they form any sort of "rules" in music
| theory, it comes from the fact that they have been used to teach
| harmony for a long time (since at least the 1940s, as evidenced
| by this article). The reason for that isn't so much that they're
| prime examples of Western common-practice harmony, but rather
| that they have a homogeneous texture that's easy to use in
| classrooms, because they're easy for one person to play at the
| piano or for students to sing.
|
| Recent music theory pedagogy has largely been moving _away_ from
| the reliance on Bach chorales to teach harmony, especially as
| music theory has taken a broader perspective on what music we
| should be studying anyway. Studying the Bach chorales is just
| fine if you want to know about how Bach used harmony, but there
| 's a whole lot of music in the world, and there's no meaningful
| sense in which Bach's music intrinsically defines a set of rules
| any more than Mozart's or Clara Schumann's or AC/DC's or Meredith
| Monk's defines a set of rules.
| hooboodoo wrote:
| I find it interesting that all of your examples to help define
| the broadness of musical theory as you see it are all,
| themselves, descended from western musical thought. That might
| speak to the point being made in a different way than any of us
| consider it.
| yomkippur wrote:
| oh good god, here comes the software engineer turned armchair
| music theorists in the comment section.
| Bud wrote:
| Since this article focuses in on Bach chorales, here's a project
| I headed up in 2020 during the first months of covid to record
| (remotely; each person recorded their part individually, then
| sent it in) all the chorales from Bach's St. Matthew Passion,
| with some of the greatest Bach singers and players in North
| America, along with a brief talk before each chorale. Also, we
| obtained an acoustical model of Bach's church (the Thomaskirche
| in Leipzig) from its creator, and rendered the sound into that
| space, with each musician placed approximately where Bach would
| have had them.
|
| Enjoy.
|
| http://spiritsound.com/operationbach/index.html
|
| or here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm41dm8K6pS5Grt-
| LqYLVSg/vid...
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Cool
| jimbob45 wrote:
| The answer is resoundingly no. If anyone deserves to be called
| the father or mother or modern music theory, it would be
| Pythagoras.
| [deleted]
| jancsika wrote:
| > The answer is resoundingly no.
|
| Not only is it a resounding no, there is ongoing research to
| find the roots of this cliche.
|
| I can't seem to find the article, but it traces it back to this
| chemical engineer who did a statistical analysis of the bass
| lines and cadencial formulae in Bach's chorales.
|
| I've even seen some scans of his analyses, it's wild stuff.
| Maybe it's on libgen? I can't remember but you can probably do
| a search for it...
|
| Edit: added a link to the article
|
| Edit2: nope, never mind, that wasn't it. But if I find it I'll
| add the URL later...
| klipt wrote:
| Did Pythagoras actually write any music worth listening too?
| analog31 wrote:
| We don't know. From what I've read, we know a little bit
| about early theory, but don't know precisely what scales and
| intervals they were talking about.
| mmcclimon wrote:
| We know quite a lot about Greek music theory (Thomas
| Mathiesen's _Apollo 's Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory
| in Antiquity in the Middle Ages_ is the go-to source here:
| https://archive.org/details/mathiesen-1999-apollos-
| lyre/page...). Of course we don't have recordings, but we
| do have a solid understanding of the theory, and some very
| good guesses as to the scales and intervals.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Not that we have live recordings of.
|
| But there is no doubt that he was a pioneer of music theory.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_tuning
|
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/24045969 ( _Pythagoras and the
| Origin of Music Theory_ )
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.00998.pdf ( _Dynamical systems,
| celestial mechanics, and music: Pythagoras revisited_ )
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