Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Composer's Lounge Walter Piston- Harmony: What the heck has happened???

Back in the 60's and 70's, as big-name composers were dropping like flies (Hindemith, Khatchaturian, Stravinsky, Shostakovich . . .), Walter Piston, who was also a composer, and the author of the mainstream textbook on Harmony, seemed to be going quietly nuts, while university dweebs were waiting in the wings for the old boys to die off so that they could meddle.

It didn't help that Piston's tome was getting more and more out to lunch with each edition. His theory of secondary dominants, while a nice teaching-tool, had reached the point where it crossed several lines as an educator's manual, mainly by acting as a vehicle for some of Walter's crackpot ideas which, based on 19th century performance practice (aka music theory + harmony), were not only misguided, but very much out of date and out of step in terms of being of any use in analysing more modern music.

Also, once the cats were safely dispatched and away, the mice did play, meddling, for example, with the 6/4 chord by referring to it as a appoggiatura, when there were/are countless examples of music where the 6/4 chord does not behave like an appoggiatura. Certainly in modern usage the treatment of 6/4 chords in sequence is not even in the same ball-park. But the meddling mice had their way, so that generations of students since the 1970's have been indoctrinated with their nonsense.

My old edition of Piston's Harmony makes no mention of Piston's theory of "tonisization", either, and if it did, I would either black those passages out with a felt marker or else rip the pages out altogether. It's a useless, superfluous idea which serves no purpose whatsoever, except, perhaps, to further Piston's agenda of promotiong Walter Piston and his crackpot ideas.

When the old composers died off, they took with them the checks and balances that kept the mice at bay. We're badly in need of a better mouse trap these days.

So that's what that is about?! I just finished a chapter on a "6/4 double appoggiatura" and many of the examples did not seem appoggiatura-like.

They're not. I 6/4 is I in its second inversion, and is not and never has been an appoggiatura.

The glaring flaw in Piston's reasoning, and that of the "mice" I was referring to, is that the "appoggiatura" treatment is a modern notion with no historical basis or precedent.

In Beethoven's symphonic period, when prolonged endings with lots of false endings were a fad, I 6/4 often went unresolved, or else changed direction, either by transition or by irregular resolution in another direction entirely. Even in Bach's day, the appearance of I 6/4 was no guarantee that it was headed to V.

Piston's Theory of Secondary Dominants is likewise suspect. It's okay when used as a teaching tool, in terms of the analysis of 19th century tonal music, but the obvious flaw is that composers weren't as regimented in their approach to the treatment of chords as Piston would have us believe.

Before there was such a thing as Traditional Harmony, what we had was something called Performance Practice. Performance Practice was the study of the works of working composers. An example of the early work of "mice" is that they wanted the "rules" codified. This is how Harmony came about. The difference betweeen Performance Practice and Harmony is that Performance Practice was the study of what composers did, whereas Harmony was the establishing of "rules" based upon those techniques that were the most used and the most accepted.

This effectively put the writing of music in a straight-jacket, pushing experimentation aside in favour of canon.

There is a fundamental dishonesty in Piston's work when you consider that his Theory of Secondary Dominants is so much sophistry: secondary dominants notwithstanding, a cursory look outside the purview of his carefully selected musical examples reveals music that could be explained in terms of, say, secondary subdominants, or in the case of modal harmony, secondary mediants and/or submediants.

As I say, it's an excellent teaching tool, but trying to apply it as an all-encompassing theory is to ignore 400 years of taxonomic progression, and riddle the minds of modern students of classical music with anachronisms which stand squarely in the way of the underlying facts.

The I6/4 as far as I care can be used as an appogiatura chord in reallity. It's just delaying the coming of the V7 ...

Sorry that I can't read right now the rest of the post, but hopefully I'll get round it later on this week!

Heh- Nikolas, my buddy, my chum, you should have read the full post, first.

The point in a nutshell is that it's not delaying the coming of V7, any more than V7 is delaying the coming of I. It's a stand-alone chord that can and does behave any number of ways.

As I said, in Beethoven's time, when false ending after false ending was a fad (and an often annoying one at that), I 6/4 was often left hanging, or else went somewhere else.

In terms of appoggiatura, in the world of tonality, one could dismiss reams of chords as appoggiatura material. What is IV, after all, but an appoggiatura that most likely will resolve to I?

The I 6/4 -as-appoggiatura had been proposed a good many times before the old composers (who were also the leading theorists) died off, but was always shot down because the function in question if intrinsic to the overall workings of tonal music, and assigning this characteristic to only one example only serves to muddy the waters.

Further, just as the legal/judicial system is fundamentally corrupt (laws are made by lawyers for lawyers, which is a conflict of interest), so too has Harmony become.

The big-name composers were also the leading theorists, and Harmony is the puview of the composers. But when they died off the analysts ("mice") usurped Harmony and did as they pleased.

For the composer, it is important that the tools of composition adhere to the dictum all things being equal. This means that all chords just are what they are, without anything extra being read into them.

For the analysts to meddle is a case of indulging in the cardinal sin of preaching instead of teaching. No analyst has the right to tell any young potential composer how to view the composer's tools. To do so is interfering with the fundamental right of the composer to use the tools as he or she sees fit. Any attempt to interfere with that process involves stepping over any number of lines, the line between Harmony and composition being but one of them.

Harmony is the study of what composers do, which is something that needs to be drummed into the head of the modern analyst. Harmony used to be called performance practice, which is a more accurate term.

The first time I saw V64-53 (numbers should be vertical), I was totally disoriented. I was taught, decades ago, that 64 simply means second inversion--and that it often (but certainly not always) appears in a standard I64 to V(7) to I progression. This, of course, is only for when the 64 chord is a I chord.

Thats seemed both logical and self-explanatory to me. The "double appoggiatura" idea unnecessarily complicates an extremely basic, simple, natural chord progression.

Frankly, I find "secondary dominance" a much larger problem. It is presented, by some teachers, as if it were the Holy Grail, so (for example) failing to analyze a major chord built on the second degree of any major scale as V/V (such as D major in the key of C) seems to produce the immediate assumption that if we don't call it that, we don't know what it does, or where it could go.

To me the problem is basically the same in music as in language. We have prescriptivists, and we have descriptivists. The latter are simply interested in what musicians do and therefore have no vested interest in proving that something is not valid unless it fits their preconceptions.

Before I am flamed for sounding as if I am against any kind of formal rules, I am not. I simply want the rules to be presented as temporary constructs that are meant to ultimately *liberate students from them*, not *bind students to them*.

Regarding the I 6/4 chords:

I think the mistake here is contained in the belief that it has to be taught as one or the other. It would make more sense to me, to show how in the majority of cases it can be interpreted equally well either way, and how there are also usages where obviously a composer was treating it more as one than as the other. (On the surface this is analogous to the situation of particles vs. waves.)

Declaring that (to paraphrase only slightly) "the way they did it in the old days was better" doesn't really help much. The study of harmony is inherently anachronistic and backward-looking anyway, unless we stop using examples from older music and study only unfinished compositions-in-progress by living composers. Harmony is very much like economics in that regard; both concentrate pretty much exclusively on various methods and techniques for predicting the past.

Speaking of the "old days", the chord progressions of many old-time Christmas carols do not obey Piston's attempts to create some sort of canon that's written in stone.

This matter is a perfect example of junk science vs real science. Real science is based upon observation and lets the facts speak for themselves. Junk science is a case of going at it with a crackpot theory, and trying to force and fudge the facts to fit the theory.

Piston started off sanely enough in his early editions of Harmony, and his introduction of "secondary dominants" as a teaching tool, but somewhere along the way he followed in the footsteps of Eric von Daniken.

The question now is How do we undo the damage and set things right?

I had a parallel experience back in the 70's with editions that attempted to second guess the work of composers. One of the most glaring that has stuck in my mind ever since was an edition of one of the Debussy's Arabesques that questioned the voicing in one bar and compared it to a later bar that was slightly altered. That the difference was an obvious use of V 11 the first time around and V 13 the second time around in order to indicate the impending completion of the section didn't dissuade the dweeb in question from sticking his interfering neb in where it didn't belong.

One of my three harmony books (seems to be the weakest) has a small section on Bach chorales. It explains what Bach tended to do and goes into a bit of an analysis. Then it gives a handful of melodic lines of some Bach chorales. We are to harmonize it SATB. But (!!!) it warns that we must not break the rules that Bach broke. So while harmonizing the melodies that Bach harmonized, we are not allowed to do what Bach did, when working with Bach, because Bach broke the rules (which I understand they extrapolated by studying Bach). I suppose that Bach would get a low grade in a harmony theory exam.

Talking about second-guessing, I have an old edition of the Chopin Preludes. In the first prelude, the editor "fixed" a number of Chopin's "mistakes". By this, I mean that the editor removed the -5- tuplets in several measures, put ties in instead of what Chopin wrote in the the lower voice in the RH, and more. The date of the publication is closer to 1900 than 2000.

But this "second-guessing" problem never seems to stop. I was examing Palmer's edition of the preludes, and for the most part he did a clear job of making any of his suggestions clear as editorial and not Chopin's. However, he replaced the old "ped" and "*" with modern pedal marks, which completely disguises the fact that Chopin's marks were general and rather ambiguous.

We don't. The so-called "damage" is illusory, because music (and most especially harmony) isn't scientific. You like the old words to the harmony song because you learned them first. There's no more to it than that.

If this whole thing was scientific, then the way to undo the damage would be to put forward some experimentally dis-provable hypotheses, and test them in an experiment with unequivocal results, reproducible by anyone who cares to try the same experiment. But what constitutes a harmony experiment? How does one disprove a theory of harmony? It makes one giggle just to think of it.

If harmony is scientific, (and please notice the emphasis), then a harmony text that only lays out "common practice" and does not put forward any theories about why harmony works (i.e. any text that is expository rather than explanatory) is essentially bankrupt. To put the same general concept another way: every scientific theory of harmony predicts how harmony must go in the future, and does not restrict itself to rehashing (cataloguing, naming, re-naming) the past. If a scientific theory doesn't even try to predict the future, then it's rubbish; it doesn't deserve the name "theory" at all.

Cooking up new names for chords is just a game, of little to no significance; though certainly it might be irritating to keep being told new names for what's obviously the same thing. We could go through any edition of Piston, scratch out all the chord names and replace them with new names, and that wouldn't make it a significantly better or worse predictor of the future of harmony. I bet we could make it more confusing though. I'm willing to try.

In the case of Bach, it is always a mistake to put Harmony before Counterpoint. Bach understood the importance of Counterpoint as being of greater importance than Harmony. In fact, having lived in the days of Performance Practice, before Harmony in its present form was invented, I don't doubt that he would be somewhat disappointed with the present state of the art.

The transgressions of editors aren't just restricted to music. J R R Tolkien had a devil of a time finding a publisher who wouldn't meddle with his work, and effectively wreck it.

The arts have become like an old abandoned building full of rats and mice. So much so that the rats and mice have made it "politically incorrect" to speak of cleaning house.

Where's a cat when you need one?

There is some truth in what you say, David, but we are also speaking of education, and of clearing the way for new students to get at the underlying mechanics of music without being misled. Education is like television- it's scary sometimes how many people believe everything they're told.

Second only to education is the fact that we're also speaking of future generations of educators, and students and educators alike need access to good information, not junk information.

As far as musical "proof" goes, it's the same as with making a meal. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the proof of the music is in the performance.

The rules of voice-leading, for example, are no accident. Without them, the result sounds like crap, not to put too fine a point on it. I spent many hundreds of hours in studios (I've been part-owner of two studios over the years) helping make the musically illiterate ditherings of rock and related musicians work, and the solutions always came down to the stuff learned in 1st year Harmony and Counterpoint.

Bach's early work was sometimes pretty overtly harmonic.

But as far as counterpoint being of greater importance than harmony, why don't we demonstrate that; perhaps by showing how a I 6/4 chord is actually more contrapuntal than harmonic?

Further, there has been ample study into how Harmony works in the human brain in recent years. One discovery is that our ability to hear music is hard-wired into us, that other animals hear the sounds we make, but lack the mechanism in the brain that interperates it as music. In other words, the ability to perceive what we call music is something that is uniquely human.

So there is a scientific basis to what we call music, although in the way that the study of the mind is worlds apart from the reality which that mind experiences.

There is also the social psychology of music, which is a study unto itself.

That would involve going back to the beginning, to plain-chant, organum, and the creation of voice-leading itself. The problem nowadays is that modern Harmony seldom starts at the beginning.

Proof is, like, you know, proof; the stuff that it's impossible to argue about. You've as much as said that your opinion equals a scientific proof. Well, BS. I know you're not arrogant, I know you have the best intentions, but still, BS. If you want to bring science into the discussion (which you did), then you have to play by science's book. And I think where you brought in "science" was exactly where things went wrong.

I think harmony has no need to be scientific, and gets no benefit (and in fact a lot of grief) from pretending to be. The point is that your considered opinion of what works in harmony and what doesn't, which is surely better than mine, is sufficient. Reliance on opinion as the final arbiter is a scientifically untenable position, and I think such a non-scientific alignment suits harmony just fine. Your opinion can lay claim to no scientific status, it is no more than an opinion, AND there is nothing wrong with that - is there?

Making a pseudo-science out of a [craft, art, whatever harmony really is], by talking of science, junk science, and so on in connection with harmony, only serves to add to the load of misinformation.

The rules of voice leading, TAKEN AS SCIENCE, are worthless and indefensible.

As tools of a craft, they are essential.

That's the difference - for me anyway.

Heh- no, David, tell me what you really think :^)

There are different axioms in the sciences. In mathematics you have addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. In physics you have the "reproduceability of results". The latter also applies to music.

All right, let's go back to the earliest days, before voice-leading was "invented".

First there was plain-chant, which consisted of a single melodic line. The two earliest composers in Western Music were composers of polyphony (Latin for "more than one"), and their names were Leonin (115?-1201) and Perotin (116?-122?), or Leoninus and Perotinus if you use the Latin form of their names.

The early theorists discovered what anyone who mucks about with multiple voices discovers-

- that two parts can only move in relation to each other in the following ways:

1) in unison
2) in contrary motion
3) in parallel motion
4) in oblique motion (one rises a step, the other by more than one step, and/or vice versa

These were the first rules of voice leading, and they were referred to as voice leading precisely because only the vox humanis (human voice) was allowed in church.

These four rules are rules that may as well be written in stone simply because they are what they are. They were not invented by anyone. They were a simple recognition of the four ways one voice can move in relation to another.

From there, from two-part polyphony, a third voice was added, creating punctum contra punctum, which eventually was shortened to its modern form counterpoint.

The rules prior to three-part compositions first involved the manner in which two voices could move against each other. When a third part was introduced, things suddenly got a lot more complicated.

In order to hear all the three parts clearly, new rules were hit upon through endless trial and error, based, not upon any type of convention, as no convention yet existed, but instead was based upon what works and what does not work.

For example, in order to hear all three parts clearly, it soon became apparent that this was best fascilitated by having the parts move at different note divisions from one another- hence the rule in counterpoint that one part moves, the other doesn't.

Anyway, I could go on for pages and pages here. But the point is, there's far more at work here than mere convention.

Sorry- I said something misleading there- punctum contra punctum or point counter point (later became counterpoint) began with two-part writing, not three.

There were conventions that have their origins in the crackpot religious thinking of the day. The tritone was said to be "the devil's interval", so-called "perfect" intervals were a result of Just Intonation, so at the time there were perfect 3rds and 6ths (which were done in by Equal Temperament). Octaves, 3rds and 6ths were given preference as they were considered more "sonorous" than 4ths and 5ths, "dissonant" intervals such as 2nds and 7ths were avoided altogether (at first), and so on.

However, these conventions were really based upon everyday perception, which at the time was attributed to ideas based upon religious anthropomorphism. This does not mean that those perceptions were false or incorrect: it means that, at the time, everything was deemed to have a religious connotation. Whatever name you give a perception, the perception itself remains, even if and when ideas about that percption change. In other words, dragonflies are just dragonflies, for example. Humans in the Middle Ages had all sorts of silly ideas about them, calling them "the Devil's darning needles" and so on, but the insect itself is the same as it ever was.

gsmonks:

Just butting here to say that I love reading your posts. They are so interesting to read and chocked full of good information.

If you ever write a book I want a copy.

I want to go back to this:


I don't want to put either ahead of either. There are compositions by Bach that that are little more than broken chords (typical in some preludes), and those might be analyzed effectively as "harmony". On the other hand, approaching a fugue with this thinking would be insane.

The overall principle for me is that ALL analysis is about using "tools" to get something accomplished, and the number one mistake is using the wrong tool for the wrong job.

In other words, using chord symbols (letters or Roman Numerals) to analyze a Bach fugue is about like trying to use a hammer to put in screws.

The thing is, Gary, that Bach himself conceived fugue both linearly and vertically. Bach was a master of both fugue and harmony, the latter of which is best illustrated in the form of his chorals, which for students of harmony and music history can be obtained in a single edition for the purpose of study.

While it is true that Bach (and other composers of his day who wrote fugue) conceived Inventions improvisatorily, during the process of notation the finished work was tweaked for harmonic structural integrity, much the way a structural engineer goes over the blueprints of a bridge in order to suss out flaws which may lead to the collapse of the finished product. The tools of harmonic analysis are of course the very symbols you've mentioned, and without them no harmonic analysis would be possible, ergo the vertical structure of the music, without it, would be utter chaos, and anything but pleasing to the ear.

I am considering writing an annotated book of harmony and its history, Studio Joe, which would necessarily include counterpoint, so that it would be a harmony/counterpoint hybrid of sorts, and would probably include composition techniques. But I don't know that there would be any demand for it as the information already exists out there, albeit in dribs and drabs throughout any number of texts.

I have never written a fugue, so I am limited to admiring the magic. However, I have recently spent countless hours examining four part writing and put myself through the challenge of starting with a few interesting chorale melodies, exactly what Bach used, and making a go at finishing them before looking at what Bach did.

My own experience was somewhat schizoid, though I think in a very positive way. I felt myself flipping back and forth from vertical to horizontal. In some cases I knew exactly where I wanted a cadence, which gave me the bassline automatically, then sort of fooled around with the inner voices until I succesfully avoided parallels. From this I began to see why parallels occur and started to sense horizontal patterns that avoid them.

In other places I heard bass and soprano, as a skeleton, and the inner voices more or less took care of themselves. However, there were other places in which I had in mind interesting movement in individual voices, and the others would shift or morph in a very intuitive manner. My feeling of some kind of harmony was always there, but it would sometimes dominate, sometimes fall into second place.

Most interesting was that at times opening up range between voices (such as tenor and alto) to a distance almost condemned by books gave me the most freedom for adding more ornate lines, mainly climbing or falling in interesting parallel or contrary motion. And Bach did that a lot.

Finally, there are times when "no-no" parallels or things like augmented 2nds can be defty avoided by allowing the tenor to ascend above the alto, and the individual lines may take on special interest that way. Again, Bach did that a lot.

I think what is most important is to keep in mind "general, practical rules" BUT, at the same time, pay careful attention to how fine composers "thumb their noses" at them, either deliberately, or because they developed such a fine instinct that their ears always guided them to the best solutions.

One final thought: we are always in danger of assuming that when two people do something that is equally effective and very similar in results, their ways of getting there were the same or similar. Ultimately the creative process remains a mystery.

That makes perfect sense. I hesitate to say this, since where I am in all this is rather elementary compared to where you no doubt are, but my personal experience seems to be in line with what you just said. While exploring SATB writing, falling back on certain rules helped me find parallels that my ear was missing. I found I had to check the four voices against each other, and I assume that over time Bach developed such an instinct about this that he simply did not have to do that. Regardless, each time I discovered weaknesses that could be identified by "checking for structural integrity", the solutions to eliminating weaknesses also lead me to more interesting and more musical ideas. It was not just a matter of avoiding "no-nos". It was the additional creative ideas that occurred to me through the process of checking.

An important thing you should know, Gary, when it comes to "breaking the rules", is that all composers are both experimenters and autodidacts (self-teachers), the former because you test ideas on your own sense of hearing, the latter because intuitively going beyond the "rules" means teaching yourself to alter your own view of the underlying mechanics of music.

Your mention of playing with voicing is a perfect example of this, because you've reached the point where you're beginning to realise the part that acoustics plays in the perception of Harmony.

Let me give you some examples:

Composers like Bartok, Rachmaninoff and Ravel (listen for the piccolo doubling in Bolero, for instance) sometimes employed the use of organ stop technique to the voicings of their orchestrations. In case you've never had the opportunity to fool around with a big pipe organ, many of the stops produce false harmonics at intervals such as P5th's and Major 7ths. By "false harmonics" I mean that pulling a stop brings extra pipes on line in order to augment the sound. You can only hear these intervals by playing a single note and really listening for them, but the manner in which they enrich the sound is amazing.

Now, remember that Bach was a well-known organist in his day. He was well-aware of the role played by both harmonics and false harmonics. Did this influence his voicings and the way he "broke the rules"? You bet it did! And hundreds of years later, composers like Rachmaninoff were still following this precedent. The opening of his Prelude in C# minor employs the use of parallel harmonies, not after the fashion of organs and false harmonics this time, but after the fashion of church bells, which strongly produce harmonics of a similar nature. Give a big church bell (of high quality- not some cast-iron dog) a good whack, and you'll hear all kinds of odd harmonics, in some cases which almost overpower the standing tone.

Complete agreement there...

I'm sure that's true. Of primary importance to me is that what I have learned in the last year reaches out in strange ways and gives me a different view of music that I felt I completely understood.

No, my opportunities for playing a fine organ were very close to zero. However, I have heard these harmonics in performances, and they can be heard even on recordings. I have not noticed major 7ths. Because of my background in brass, I am familiar with the harmonic series as we use it on such instruments, since we actually PLAY the harmonics, and which harmonics we choose has an incredibly strong effect on tone color. For instance, in one of Vaughan Williams symphonies a solo trumpet plays a bugle-call, and one of the notes is very "out of tune". In fact, it is perfectly IN tune, but to the natural harmonic series, since the "sour" note is somewhere around 30 cents flat to the tempered scale. The effect is eerie, very effective. In order to get to the major 7th on brass, you would have to play in the third octave and play a normally never used harmonic. It might be useable on a valveless French horn with the use of the hand.

I'm quite familiar with what you are talking about re large bells. In regards to "breaking rules", I only know that I can't think of anything Bach wrote that sounds in any way "wrong" to me, and to the extent I am able to analyze what he wrote, it always seems 100% logical. There is a lot I do not know (actually I only know a little), but I do know that he seemed to be very careful, for instance, in avoiding augmented 2nds in voices, chorale writing, but thought nothing of including one in a theme for something fugue-like.

It sounds to me like you have the potential to become a good arranger, if not a composer. Having your ear deep in the sound is just as important as having it in the mechanics of harmony and counterpoint. More so, in my opinion.

You have a background in brass? We have that in common. Lots of more modern composers use the brasses and winds to "colour" their arrangements. This is due in part to the nature of orchestration/arranging. Lots of doubling at the unison with only a hint needed from other instruments to colour the sound. The ratios are often mind-boggling. The sound-source from a piccolo or trumpet is an area from 12.00 mm to 18.30 mm (1.2 to 1.83 cm) across, yet it can dominate an entire concert hall.

Speaking of how easily a single trumpet is heard, one of the most interesting experiences I had was the first time I heard the Beethoven symphonies played on "period instruments". I know there is a huge debate about how "authentic" the instruments, tuning and interpretations are, but I remember being struck by how "untamed" the percussion is in the 6th Symphony, and when the horns have to be stopped with the hand in order to play certain notes, it is just a different world. In the recordings I heard, everything sounded more rugged. Less smooth but more character.

In contrast, the instrument I played, euphonium, does not project well at all, and of all the brass instruments I believe it is the most difficult to play quietly.

And with that I probably ended this discussion, since I am WAY off topic.

Not at all. I know exactly what you're talking about in terms of sound. It's raw, like a wooden chair made using a mallet and wood-carving set, with sweat and wood-shavings and chips flying, the smell of clean wood in the air, like a lumberyard.

You can certainly hear it in the percussion. Timpani were made of wood, with calf-skin heads, and when hit produced a robust, earthy, satisfying sound that is entirely absent in the modern version.

The old bassoons, like those you hear as an entire section in Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique- such a big, robust, woody type of sound, full of character and drama.

The composers of that music were exploring a new-found freedom, largely because of the emergence of fully chromatic brass which, unlike trombones, could play with great speed in all registers. Walter Piston's later editions of Harmony are anathema to the freedom experienced in those days, simply because things were changing far faster than anyone could codify them. The same thing would happen again with a vengeance in the late 19th century, and the process would continue in fits and starts until between 1963 to 1965, when the wheels fell off the proverbial pony-cart.

I don't know much about Piston, in fact I don't know much about music theory other than the few years as a teenager when I was forced to learn it for those ABRSM exams.

I don't want to talk about how harmony is taught in a completely wrong way to younger students, but as a kid I didn't understand why on earth the progression I6/4-V-I is actually called that, or in easier piano pieces when the bass line goes DO-SO-DO-SO it's called I-I6/4-I-I6/4 (when it's not I-V-I-V of coruse). Because, I was taught that the I chord is supposed to end cadences and what nots.

These days, I look at it and I think this kind of nomenclature is utterly misleading. When it's I6/4-V I think it's exactly a double appogiatura. It's what you hear, it's what you expect, what else can one classify it?

Obviously I6/4 is used in many more ways than just I6/4-V. But it's pretty simple, really--notes and chords have different functions in different contexts, just like individual words have different meanings in different sentences. Moreover, music, just like language, evolved over time, and what's expected in one composer's time is not necessarily expected in another composer's time. Maybe it's just better nomenclature that's needed, or else make sure one does not lose track of the fact that music theory is supposed to only assist in the making of music, not making music itself.

Am I on track or am I completely off base here?

No, you're exactly right. The job of theory is mainly to give students of music something to "hang their hat on", something which provides a semblance of structure, that semblance of structure entailing a common language so that we can all do what we're doing right now- talking about music and having a common language which allows us to do that.

The reason I say semblance of structure is that there are endless possibilities when it comes to analysing music. Walter Piston developed his Theory of Secondary Dominants as a teaching tool in the beginning, and what we're talking about here is that he went too far, intending what began as a teaching tool to become an all-encompassing, codified, written-in-stone understanding of Western Music based solely upon one person's (his) methods.

The problem here is that Walter Piston, as a composer, was doubly off-base, not only because Harmony and our view of it changes over time, but because, as every composer knows, the advanced student of music eventually synthesises an internal understanding of Western Music, which in turn finds expression, through composers, in the form of entirely new interperetations of what Western Music is, what it's inherent possibilities are, the manner in which its underlying mechanics can be manipulated and developed, and the manner in which the relationship between Harmony and acoustics can be altered in order to produce an entirely new palate of colour.

Further, Harmony belongs to composers and potential composers, not analysts, and in the world of composition, less is more. Using terms like "double appoggiatura" is to clutter the tools of composition. For the composer, there is no "double appoggiatura". There is only a box of notes which may be assembled any old which-way to the composer's content. The composer may use a whole bunch of those notes to build chords, and then assemble those chords into a piece of music, the way one fits together a jigsaw puzzle, but although the composer (or anyone else who puts together a jigsaw puzzle) notices recurring patterns in the pieces, the composer knows that giving those patterns names is a fool's errand, because they're a secondary matter which is not directly related to the making of music.

I began music theory with a background. That background is that for a lifetime I did not as much as know the names of notes, but did have solfege from a primary grade - the little singing exercises that give a first feel of diatonic structure. As a child I had a piano, some inherited books of sonatines, and using my ear with that solfege sense deciphered the first notes. The patterns in that genre of music are readily absorbed: not only Alberti bass, ABA, modulations, but also how themes were developed and reiterated with variation. Some of this learning is frozen in time, because music that I invented then and kept in memory contains those same patterns. I had no instrument for several decades afterward so it's like a time capsule.

I got lessons in an instrument a few years ago, and it turned out that I was anticipating the music as much as reading it because I sensed where it would go. When I finally started theory, that theory meshed with what I had already internalized (the fact that lesson pieces are often Common Practice) helps. That meant that this artificiality of theory was not first for me - the realness that I had used for decades was first, and theory helped explain it and give it a better shape. You have the idea that there is more to it, and this gives the outlines.

In both lesson pieces to play, and music theory, I have personally encountered a curious phenomenon. Sometimes the music is dummied down for the student (or the theory contains only some components). It no longer meshes with what is sensed, and in me it creates a feeling of distress or confusion. The first time it happened I didn't know what was going on. It has to do with reaching toward the invisible structures that ought to be there ... but aren't because of the dummying down ... and then having to work blindly. It's a conflict between where you sense it should go, and what has been done to it. The dummied down version is no longer whole. I have had that feeling a couple of times with harmony theory, and if I chase it down, often there is something else which was left out "in order to not confuse". OR there is a feeling that the music explanation was made to fit with the theory. Which is what you are saying.

I'm glad you brought this up because it is a perfect parallel example of what has become broken in Harmony. Solfege teaches students to be sensitive to music in real time, something that disciplines like Harmony have always lacked. Solfege is therefore excellent when it comes to sussing out musical inaccuracies and fallacies.

The "dumbing down" you're referring to has become a glaring problem in the way our young people are educated, and concerns far more than just music. You also find it in the sciences, in mathematics, in what passes for "grammar" these days, to put a name to just a few disciplines.

There didn't used to be this "pass the explanation off till later" disease that has infected modern schooling. Once it had crept in, this mental laziness became worse, to the point that often the explanation simply was never forthcoming, that the "passing off" ended up being done past the point of graduation.

Parents in my childhood used to read their children Shakespeare, and would stop to explain the difficult passages and answer questions, for example. As a result, as a young adult I found Sesame Street insulting and appalling. And that was four decades ago!

I could write a book about education, but will desist.

I downloaded the book by Goetschius on musical form. A couple of things struck me:
- He starts with a general idea of form being a mix of predictability and variety, and consisting of the elements of rhythm (time), vertical (harmonic) and horizontal (melodic). This kind of broad picture is missing from all my modern books. Up to where I am so far, he always keeps this in the background.
- He stays with all three elements: vertical, horizontal, time.
- Students are asked to explore a multitude of excerpts for whatever concept he has introduced. However, he says that we will not be able to find everything because our ears are still developing, and to not sweat it - hear what you can hear, and don't worry about what you cannot yet hear.
- There is a sense that music is subtle, composers work in a subtle manner, and not everything can be defined or should be defined.

All of this seems in contrast to other more modern books. How does Goetschius fit with Piston time-wise or otherwise?

I have to comment.

I totally agree. I would say that all analysis is an ATTEMPT to explain why things work (or are effective) that already work perfectly. Furthermore, the problem is that analysis always plays "catch-up". Whatever it is that we call "harmony" already exists before people begin to attempt to describe what it is, or existed before people tried to explain it in the first place.


It is interesting that you used the term "jigsaw puzzle". I frequently make the point that when 100 people assemble the same complicated puzzle, we only know that the result is the same. From the result we have absolutely no idea of the individual strategies that people use to put that puzzle together.

There are relatively rare instances in which I would see the "double-appoggiatura" idea as valid, although I would still not use the term myself. However, the I64 chord would have to move VERY quickly to the V(7) chord so that the voices move in the rhythm we would expect with an appoggiatura. Even then I feel uncomfortable. In Mozart's sonatas there are numerous instances in which the appoggiatura notation is used to both show appoggiatura-like melodic movement AND to discourage players of the time from further embellishing his melodies with extra ornamental notes.

I still think that the whole issue of anlaysis comes down to descriptivism vs. prescriptivism. Prescriptivists attempt to make rules, laws, and formulas that attempt to prescribe what is right and wrong, hence the name. One of the most famous examples of a fine composer butting heads with such people is Debussy. Such hard-headed, limited thinking is certainly not limited to harmonic analysis (or theory in general). We all know that Chopin's way of teaching technique was all but damned by most teachers, who basically told their students: "Don't study with that young Polish guy. His technical ideas will ruin you."

Descriptivists, on the other hand, are only interested in what was done, what is being done now, and where all of this might lead to. They basically say, here is the music, here is what composers A through Z from different time periods *did* or *do*, now you form your own conclusions.

All that being said, we still need to have something to work with. I've been learning about chords, and qualities, and degree names, and how the dominant likes to lead to the tonic - and from there it is an easy jump to some aspects of modulation. These are tools to hook into, and they give us insights. I see it as ** A ** way to understand things, and * an ** aspect of the stuff of music. Having spent some 40 years without the name of anything, or any description of any structure of any kind, I don't recommend that kind namelesness.

It's like when you study languages and linguistics. Language is the way that we represent our thoughts and our realities. We have objects and actions: matter and motion. From there in language we get subject and predicate, a thing and what that thing is doing, and description of both. Each language has tons of rules and things to memorize and if we have only one language we can get stuck thinking that's all there is. But when you start working with various languages that are quite different from one another, you're back at that initial reality of matter and motion. But then to be able to talk about it, we still need some kind of vocabulary: subject, predicate, direct object, verb, noun, adjective. These things are not real, but we still need them as tools. It's the same with music.

The dominant, and dominant of the dominant tells me another aspect of what I used to know as "Now G wants to call itself Do instead of Sol" - and I find I have another handle for doing what I want with the music because of it. The more ways we have of seeing a thing, the better. I don't know if this makes sense.

It makes very good sense to me.

Ha-ha! No, please, don't desist! This is exactly the kind of book we need these days!

The Goetschius method is one of a number of similar methods developed by educators, and is as valuable a teaching-tool as Solfege because it acts as a real-time template that is always running in the background. This sort of thing serves to give students badly needed confidence and awareness in the early days.

That is an excellent point you've made here, that each composer comes up with a "strategy". This describes exactly what a composers is and does. Each composers approaches entail a different or modified strategy to solving the same old problems.

More later.

Music is and always has been about strategy, and when those strategies get stale, everyone involved desires new strategies.

3-chord Rock is a perfect example that has been around a lot longer than Rock. Back in Purcell's day, he and a lot of other musicians were tired of the sound of their own music. So one day Purcell added a chromatically altered figured bass to one of his tunes (Dido's "lament" from Dido and Aeneas), which dramatically altered the possibilities of where the harmony and melody could go, thus immensely enriching the music.

Now, as a few of you have wisely pointed out, there was no name yet in Harmonic terms for what he had done. As a composition it was really "out there", and was a foreshadowing of things to come in the following centuries.

A parallel example in reverse is the manner in which modern songwriters don't know squat about songwriting or music. We've all noticed how lame modern songwriting is, and one of the most glaring elements that's missing is the absence of textual declamation, aka the art of making the words and the music reflect each other. Without textual declamation, a song lacks one of the key elements that mades a song a song.

In educational terms, this means that modern songwriters are both functionally illiterate and musically illiterate. The latter was noticed by jazz musicians in the 1960's. Miles Davis, to name a specific example, said of the 60's generation that "they dont know anything about music".

Don't know anything about music! Think about that for a moment. Don't know anything about music.

Don't know anything. That's what we're up against.