Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Composer's Lounge Why do "rules" exist?

To understand the whys and wherefores of the rules you have to go back to the beginning. The rules of voice-leading exist for good reason, and some of those rules go back to plain chant, long before Harmony and Counterpoint existed.

You won't gain an understanding of the rules by examining Renaissance or Baroque music. You have to go back further, to when the rules were being formed.

I notice a post in this thread which does mention plain chant. Unfortunately, the post is incorrect. The formation of rules predates polyphony (before there were intervals). The first rules had to do with the movement of notes and notions of resolution, which predated Harmony. The rising leading-note, for example, was a rule of plain chant (single melodic line), as was the fourth falling to the third.

The notion of 4ths and 3rds in those days referred to scale degrees, not intervals.

Some of this might be potentially confusing. I had to read this twice: "(before there were intervals)." Unless you play only one note, there are always intervals. But I think you mean that people weren't thinking in terms of intervals even melodically, but how they were going up and down some scale (which of course consists of intervals). Intervals are still there somehow, however. If the pentachord of the Greeks had different classes which involved distances of quartertones in one case, then the interval is "considered" - but maybe it is more something that is felt in the framework of that pentachord (?)

The only way I can only get at it personally is by exploring and going way back, and trying to be in the mindset of whatever period as much as that is possible.

I may not have fully explained my posts. A lot of what I have said is admittedly my personal experience, not something I'd expect everyone to immediately accept at face value.

My experience went like this:
-started playing a kawaii upright piano back in 2000, learning various scales and basic improvisation

-began striving to learn a bit about theory, resulting mostly in failure due to being a terrible student and hating study of any kind

-met Ted Jones, a member of this forum and another forum, and he gave me some practical advice which for whatever reason was way more useful to me than any traditional teaching I had encountered

-I got a lot better at improvisation, particularly romantic improvisation with an emphasis on exploring my own harmonies. I found that without studying much theory, I tended towards traditional harmony without having received specific advice about it from Ted. Thus, there must be a reason why I gravitated in that direction. I must have liked something about the sound.

-Strove to try to improvise in the baroque style, resulting mostly in failure but increasingly small successes over the years. This may be due to lack of talent but probably also due to believing incorrectly that I would have to study music theory for years in order to do so.

-eventually got a digital piano. For whatever reason, I found my skill improved more than I expected, mainly in the romantic idiom. I continued to learn more intuitively during this time about traditional harmony, but still found the baroque sound to be a tough nut to crack.


Now, here's where I reach the point in my experience where for me, all the ideas I've put forth very much do "hold water." Whether or not they make sense to others doesn't matter to me...

I got a clavichord---and within a few short months a wide number of fragmented ideas I had collected over the 10 years I've been improvising all connected, and I suddenly found that improvising in the baroque style made perfect sense to me, and the reason it sounds the way it does makes perfect sense. The vast majority of this revelation is admittedly intuitive, so describing it in an over simplistic manner as I did as "thirds emphasis" is probably inadequate, but it is the best I could do in a single forum post.

I've still got my water. In other words, what I posted was not speculation, it was an attempt at explaining an intuitive revelation, or connection, that I had been striving to make, with my goal of learning to improvise in the baroque style.

I guess my hope was that if I shared these ideas, maybe someone else out there who was interested in this sort of music might get a switch flipped and it might help them. You never know...

His explanation seems off. The tenor is hard to sing with or without the other voices because of the voice leading. When the notes are rearranged the voice leading works, which makes all the voices easier to sing. It is voice leading and not parallels that make the first version harder to sing.

Also look how the tenor criss crosses above and below the bass. That also makes it hard to follow. If the bass didn't go down a sixth then the tenor wouldn't overlap.

If parallels were more difficult to sing, then how do you explain early music?

Like is this really an explanation about "why" parallel fifths are "bad"? (Btw, my main theory book makes a point of saying that they are not bad, just not how music was done during that period).

There were no intervals at the time because there was no polyphony. Plain chant consisted of a single line of music. The overall scale was the Gamut, an 11-line stave that was the predecessor of the treble and bass clef + the C leger line.

Before you start thinking about secular music of the day, remember that we're talking about monks who were very strictly sequestered from the rest of society, and a very strict church code which banned any outside influence.

Also remember that all instruments were banned from this milieu, and that only the vox humanis (human voice) was allowed.

In terms of voice movement (which is where such terms came from), they weren't thinking in terms of intervals. Voices moved by step and by leap, not by interval.

Over time plain chant composers introduced various types of tuning devices out of necessity, and various types of experimental instruments began being built, because theorists (this is before we began thinking of them as "composers") naturally wanted to explore the possibilities.

We're not talking about instruments like a lute, lyre or guitar, here. We're talking about something like a dulcimer with multiple moveable bridges, because the theorists were exploring Pythagorian ideas of modes, pitch and tuning, the latter of which resulted in Pythagoras' revolutionary discovery of the manner in which the modes belong to an overall system, prior to which it wasn't understood that there was an underlying structure to which all the Greek modes belonged.

I should point out that the instruments I mention were made to study, not to play. They were instruments more in a scientific than a musical sense.

Also, theorists at the time were steeped in the mathematics of tuning and intonation, which in turn led directly to their developoment of polyphony, and the invention of "just" intonation.

In many ways they knew far more about music than most musicians living today. People today just bash and thrash around on ready-made instruments. The theorists we're talking about here made those instruments possible, and knew all the ins and outs of how the music played on them came to be.

The entire study of how the rules came to be entails a huge body of knowledge accumulated over a period of over two-thousand years. Those who have studied the subject are really the only ones qualified to answer your question. Otherwise, all you're getting is the opinions of students and laymen.

This is also interesting. I feel I didn't truly start to understand what I put forth in the original post til I got a clavichord---partially because as a clavichord player one is generally encouraged to learn how to tune it oneself, there are no clavichord tuners in town. There are some very good sources/books by modern clavichord/harpsichord makers. The one I have, "Clavichord Tuning and Maintenance," by british clavichord maker Peter Bavington, has an excellent explanation of temperament, tuning, techniques, and tuning schemes. I'm no expert on this material yet, but have done enough experimentation and reading to understand what he's talking about. I could be wrong about this, but I'm not so certain that most of these guys were "steeped in mathematics," I think it is more likely they were "steeped in sound." I mean I'm sure some did study it mathematically, but in terms of practical musicianship I think more of them thought purely in terms of sound. That's how this book treats temperament, and it makes it a very approachable subject.

I find that as I am studying tuning as well as playing the clavichord, my awareness of the sweetness of various concords is heightened. An equal temperament major third is wide, and actually kind of harsh compared to the softer, more consonant thirds found in some of the older temperaments. The clear sound of the clavichord makes this more noticeable than the piano.

A lot of the old tunings were based on getting certain numbers of keys to have sweet or acceptable sounding thirds in them, I think this was the goal. In fact, in meantone temperament, the purity of fifths is sacrificed to the most tolerably impure level in order to get at sweeter thirds.

So while it is tempting to view the 2000 years of development and long succession of geniuses with obsequious deference, I choose to view it as a source of practical ideas for modern, private music making that pays homage to an older style. I choose to try to find simple ideas from which I can derive personal explanations for how/why they made the sounds they did, rather than acquiring an encyclopedic knowledge of all the theoretical split hairs that came after all those old geniuses died.

I also choose not to restrict myself entirely to what they did in the past...I just felt, for myself, that it was an important musical "rite of passage" to understand how baroque music works. Now I am free to use it or not use it as I please---I won't avoid it simply because I don't understand it, now. I'm sure for many others this is not even an interesting thing to pursue and it is quite sufficient to simply explore making one's own sounds, but for whatever reason it was definitely important to me.

Clarichords and harpsichords (real ones- not modern ones with fixed bridges) are an excellent example. I recall back in university how many piano majors were horrified when they saw their workings for the first time. Kind of like the expressions on the faces of people in gym class when told to run a bunch of extra laps.

Ah, no, they knew their math, and left behind plenty of treatises as proof. It's the same when you build and do major repairs on brass instruments (which I do). There is plenty of math involved. A lot of things are repetetive, and in those cases you do develop shortcuts, but when a specialty item comes your way, you hve to know what you're doing. And every instrument builder/repairer has a few horror stories under his belt caused by assuming he knew what he was doing.

The genius thing is a myth. It was the culture of the times that produced the interests involved. What has been lost, unfortunately, is the genuine understanding of what makes music work. This is an age of bashers and thrashers who for the most part don't know anything about the workings of music.

Some good examples of this are found in this thread. There is the prevailing assumption, for example, that the rules were arrived at arbitrarily, or simply as a matter of convention. Assumptions like this are the direct result of a lack of knowledge.

Certainly, you are free to pick and choose from the detritus of the past. Each successive generation has done so, and has also looked to other cultures. Learn about citar tunings, apply that to the clavichord, and you'll literally hear chords that don't exist in the world of equal temperament, some of which are absolutely gorgeous.

About parallels "wrong", I found the passage in my theory book:



BBB, did you have a chance to listen to the links that I posted? These explain the different temperaments and how they are chosen by violinists, when, and why, but also lets us hear.


**Materials of Western Music, W. Andrews, M. Sclater, p. 64

I think it must be a mix, don't you? I think it is pretty clear that concord intervals are really "there" in nature. That's something we can observe objectively; it is a fact. To go from there and start tempering the concords to get at more playable keys or to sacrifice certain sounds for the sake of others is where subjectivity comes in. After that, if you want to continue emphasizing certain sounds, there will probably be objective guidelines for producing that emphasis (common practice era theory).

Rhythm on the other hand, as I brought up in another thread, seems more arbitrary to me. Can anyone come up with an objective reason why notated baroque music would predominantly follow certain conventions of meter? I can't think of one. So I'm willing to bet that the reasons for the way the old music sounded is a complex mix of things. Thirds exist. They liked thirds (and sixths, and tenths and etc.), and found objective rules to emphasize them. They decided they liked even rhythm better, but as far as I can tell this was more like an arbitrary choice than an objective reason.

*edit* the only reason I can think of was that it is easy to notate even rhythms, and takes more thought and effort to notate uneven rhythms. I know some older "fantasias" were written with only suggestive note values, and no barlines..so I guess that is the closest we ever came to notating free rhythm pieces. Probably the only true way for recording music with complex rhythm is to record it. I'm not certain how far I will personally go with rhythm in the context of baroque, but I find it an interesting personal discovery that this is orthogonal to the baroque sound and can be incorporated or not incorporated, yet still sound baroque (to me, personally).

I haven't had a chance to check that out yet, but I may at some point, thanks for the link. I can't imagine learning to play in different temperaments by ear with a fretless instrument, that there is anyone out there that can do that truly amazes me! It's enough for me to painstakingly tune my clavichord and then forget about it for a few months while I enjoy it in fresh tuning. Cool thing is, this instrument lets me get away with vibratos despite not forcing me to have an exceedingly precise "real time tuning" ear.

Well, there is a musical feel side to it. I was an adult violin student but had to break off my studies. I couldn't relate to the technical mathematical kind of explanation, but I could relate to it otherwise. I had movable do solfege as a kid, and you get that movement up and down the scale or mode that gsmonks was talking about. You are also singing Ti (^7) closer than a half step to Do, and Mi Fa (^3 ^4) are closer than a half step. This enhances the feeling of the movement of tendency tones and the sense of being in that key. I never knew I was doing that because it seemed so natural. This is something happening in melodic line.

The other intonation is for harmony, for example when you play doublestops = 2 notes sounding together. You don't think mathematically: you listen for a sweet sound where it clicks together.

Then there are these musical effects that you reach for, which is in one of the other masterclass lessons in that clip. Math can only get you that far.

I understand that wind players have to do another kind of listening because of the physics of their instrument. So maybe every type of instrument gives us different kinds of insights.

Btw, the clavichord sounds like a cool instrument from what you have described.

keystring: I enjoyed that last post. I wonder if singers have to think about intonation in a similar way to violin players? My sister encountered challenges while singing with a band. She received pressure to have everything autotuned, but turned it down and preferred to deal with the acoustic challenge of singing with a variety of instruments. The keyboard of course is tuned in equal temperament, but I'm not sure how guitars work. I *think* they would be in equal temperament, but I feel like I've read that they sometimes don't quite mesh with keyboards either. I'm not even sure what the autotuner does, maybe it puts everything into mathematically perfect intervals no matter what key something is being played in, producing an unrealistically perfect harmony. It'd be interesting to find out what autotuning really does: equal temperament, or absolutely pure concords wherever possible?

gsmonk: I didn't mean to imply I thought that composers/musicians of the past never used math to study temperament, of course they did, I only meant to suggest that perhaps not every single one of them bothered with it and they learned a practical, sound based way of tempering scales. That this is possible and approachable today suggests to me that it was possible and approachable in the past. I of course could be wrong, I'm still a n00b to the world of non equal temperament.

The subject of rhythm is another biggie, BBB. The foreword of Walter Piston's Counterpoint brought it to my attention back in the early 70's. I can't recall his exact words off-hand, but suffice it to sayt that rhythm is "the road not taken" in classical music. As has been pointed out, there are oodles of examples, but zero explanations. You can purchase books on all types of rhythms from around the world, but no treatise exists on how it works.

I've been working on such a treatise for the past thirty years or so, but I'm afraid it's doomed to remain a work in progress, because the scientific area of the study of rhythm is still in its infancy.

This is not to say that I didn't make some headway. Beyond the notation, I was able to take some inferences in terms of perception and pursue them to varying degrees.

One thing I found is that musicians tend not to have figured out how to make rhythm evolve or progress within a given piece of music. We all know the Darius-Milhaud-type of example of advising young composers to travel the world, so seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no man has gone before. Or was that Captain Kirk? Anyway, we all know examples of musicians who have followed like advice, such as Dave Brubeck and Sting.

Their downfall, however, is that, although they came across interesting things, they were never able to decipher their workings to the point where they could come up with their own constructs, nor could they make their rhythms, new and/or old, progress or evolve.

By the way, BBB, you have to remember that the early singers and composers (of the kind of music we're talking about) worked within a closed, highly regimented system. These guys were singing rigidly controlled religious music. They experienced nothing like the freedom of being able to noodle around in their free time. Every waking hour of every day was a stylised, formalised, structured affair. The notions we have of personal rights and freedoms would have been completely alien to their way of seeing the world and their place in it.

BTW- I think you mean "newb" or "newbie". A noob is something else altogether.

This is an example of how modern urban dictionaries define the term:

<<II. Defining 'Noob'

<<Contrary to the belief of many, a noob/n00b and a newbie/newb are not the same thing. Newbs are those who are new to some task* and are very beginner at it, possibly a little overconfident about it, but they are willing to learn and fix their errors to move out of that stage. n00bs, on the other hand, know little and have no will to learn any more. They expect people to do the work for them and then expect to get praised about it, and make up a unique species of their own. It is the latter we will study in this guide so that the reader is prepared to encounter them in the wil...>>

From urbandictionary.com

Let me translate what I wrote earlier: I think you're completely on the wrong track with the thirds thing. I think this particular intuitive revelation is just a plain old mistake. But if you can show some written evidence, I'm happy to be proved wrong.

I don't understand how you can claim this is a mistake when I've clearly stated that it has helped me learn to create my own baroque music. Alright, well maybe it is a mistake and makes no sense at all. Mistake or not, it helped me learn something about baroque music. This wasn't idle discussion or speculation on my part; it was an attempt to explain something which HAS WORKED for me. I didn't expect it to immediately work for others...the process of creating music is an intensely personal enterprise and nobody can be expected to pick up "someone else's" intuition from a few forum posts.

I think the only thing for which we can provide hard scientific evidence is the existence of concords and discords. Beyond that, a personal set of intuitive guidelines, such as my idea of basing everything on thirds and their inversions, cannot be "wrong" if it works for me personally. If it ends up informing or helping someone else, then great...if not...nobody has been harmed by it. so I'm afraid I can't provide "evidence" as I didn't state something for which I need to provide evidence. The only thing I could provide as evidence would be "before" and "after" recordings of myself making an attempt at creating my own baroque music. The problem there is that, I may perceive an improvement, others may perceive all kinds of flaws that I'm not really interested in hearing about, because both the "before" and "after" attempts I may post gave me pleasure when I created them, and do today. That's all I'm after...taking pleasure in personal music making.

*edit* I'll admit in some of my posts I may have made it sound like the old composers must have had some sort of similar simple "emphasize thirds and their inversions" principle that guided them. Perhaps this is where I am wrong; though I still don't see how "right or wrong" applies here, since they very well may have been doing exactly what I described, but never bothered to verbalize it as I have chosen to do for myself. In other words, maybe it was simply taken for granted for years that certain sounds should be emphasized, because of how new and beautiful all those sounds were. Now that post modernism has torn everything down, I find it of personal importance that I discover a good reason "why" the old music sounded the way it did without taking it for granted. What I have described satisfies this, for me.

How are you defining interval? If I sing the pitch C and then sing the pitch D, then I have moved up a step, which is an interval or distance between two notes. I think that you are saying that there were no harmonic intervals, meaning that one voice sings C, while another sings D, so that we hear C and D at the same time. That is what I tried to clarify the first time round.

This was exactly where I misunderstood you, and is exactly what I think there is no evidence for.

I have heard quite a bit of music in neo-baroque styles, and some of it I have liked as music; but I have never found any of it even remotely convincing, as baroque music.

But if what you're saying is that you have found a satisfying theory that fits your own neo-baroque music, separate from real baroque music (criteria number one for "real baroque" being that its composer's musical education was completed in the 17th or early 18th century), then that makes perfect sense.