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Assorted links
1. The world's "most unanswered" music questions.
2. Secular Right blog
3. Most popular Japanese phrases of 2008.
4. From economics to Mahler; his recording is good although my favorite 2nd remains Stokowski with the LSO.
5. French list: 20 best books of the year
Posted by Tyler Cowen on December 1, 2008 at 02:08 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
Testing to see if comments work...
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Dec 1, 2008 2:24:43 PM
the french book list contains mostly non-french works. perhaps the translations into french improve on the original in which case we have a whole new category of novels?
Posted by: mpkomara at Dec 1, 2008 4:09:12 PM
Argh, the world's most unanswered music questions except by professional scholars of music. I mean, it's nice to have inquisitive laymen, but it's not as though an entire academic specialty (mine) hasn't been all over that stuff for decades, if not centuries (depending on what you count).
Posted by: Chris at Dec 1, 2008 8:40:36 PM
Chris, a pointer to good resources for answers to those questions would be great!
Posted by: mk at Dec 1, 2008 8:53:10 PM
Reading the music questions reminded me I know nothing about music (and by nothing, I mean what is a "key"). What is a good book ( I assume with CDs) that can fill in this hole, if I take the time to study it?
Posted by: rhodium at Dec 1, 2008 8:59:50 PM
@mk:
Well, one thing I will say is that the disciplines of music theory and music cognition haven't really found their way onto the internet to the same extent that some others have. So unfortunately print publications are still the best place to look. Most of the questions on the Skytopia webpage would benefit from some of the recent good work in music theory and cognition: Fred Lerdahl's work (A Generative Theory of Tonal Music with Ray Jackendoff and the newer Tonal Pitch Space), David Temperley's book (which Skytopia appears to have already seen), Justin London on rhythm (Hearing in Time). Some of his questions could be answered with recourse to the experimental music cognition literature, which I first read much of in John Sloboda's book The Musical Mind and to which there are devoted entire long-running journals such as Music Perception.
It's clear to me that the guy on the Skytopia website hasn't read that stuff (or at least understood it) for two reasons. First, he seems ill-informed on some basic contextual information regarding questions within music theory that have been hotly debated for centuries. For example, what is tonality? Well, that's not a simple question to answer. (One might start with Brian Hyer's "Tonality" article in the New Grove, reprinted in the Cambridge History of Western Music Theory.) So when he asks whether medieval music could be seen as "tonal" because its consonant perfect fourth is an inverted perfect fifth, he shows his ignorance of the debate surrounding the nature of tonality and of medieval music theory.
Second, he seems to be totally unclear on which aspects of music theory are subject to empirical testing and which aren't. This problem shows up in a lot of his questions. He asks, "Can we prove that one piece of music is better than another?" and provides a link to his article arguing that, in fact, we can. I don't think you have to know much about aesthetics to recognize that this operates off a hugely faulty understanding of what "quality" in art really is. (I.e., the opposing position to his viewpoint is not the strawman "All works of art are equally good because all opinions are equally valid.")
Posted by: Chris at Dec 1, 2008 9:36:19 PM
I'm sitting here in my office listening not to Mahler but to Stokowski ("and his orchestra")right now!
An album (yes, album) long out of print: "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring," which features Bach, Vivaldi, and Corelli. I recently bought a 40 year old Califone record player for the office. Plays 33 1/3, 45, and 78 rpm. Sometimes it's nice to be backwards as all get-out.
Posted by: Dave Prychitko at Dec 2, 2008 7:15:57 AM
I'm sitting here in my office listening not to Mahler but to Stokowski ("and his orchestra")right now!
An album (yes, album) long out of print: "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring," which features Bach, Vivaldi, and Corelli. I recently bought a 40 year old Califone record player for the office. Plays 33 1/3, 45, and 78 rpm. Sometimes it's nice to be backwards as all get-out.
Posted by: Dave Prychitko at Dec 2, 2008 7:16:34 AM
I'm sitting here in my office listening not to Mahler but to Stokowski ("and his orchestra")right now!
An album (yes, album) long out of print: "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring," which features Bach, Vivaldi, and Corelli. I recently bought a 40 year old Califone record player for the office. Plays 33 1/3, 45, and 78 rpm. Sometimes it's nice to be backwards as all get-out.
Posted by: Dave Prychitko at Dec 2, 2008 7:16:54 AM
I'm sitting here in my office listening not to Mahler but to Stokowski ("and his orchestra")right now!
An album (yes, album) long out of print: "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring," which features Bach, Vivaldi, and Corelli. I recently bought a 40 year old Califone record player for the office. Plays 33 1/3, 45, and 78 rpm. Sometimes it's nice to be backwards as all get-out.
Posted by: Dave Prychitko at Dec 2, 2008 7:16:59 AM
>>>Reading the music questions reminded me I know nothing about music (and by nothing, I mean what is a "key"). What is a good book ( I assume with CDs) that can fill in this hole, if I take the time to study it?
I have no real talent in music, but I do have years of piano and guitar lessons behind me. In my experience, books and articles on music theory are almost impossible to understand without an instrument in your hands. If you are an absolute beginner and are truly interested, I would recommend taking piano or guitar lessons from an instructor with a degree in music, and explaining to them your interest. I bet you coul dlearn and truly understand more theory from three 1/2 hour lessons than from a dozen books.
Posted by: Thelonious_Nick at Dec 2, 2008 12:02:05 PM
Those music questions are indeed very tough. I know quite a bit about modes and the history
of the current dominant system, but I have no good answers for any of them.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Dec 2, 2008 12:59:54 PM
For Rhodium:
Temperament by Stuart Isacoff is a not-bad popular introduction to the physics of Western music, keys, etc. Something like Tonal Harmony Workbook by Kostka might have the musical examples you are looking for, I haven't used it. Here is a list of online resources: http://www.philrees.co.uk/links/theory.htm. The Tonal Center is useful: http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/andymilne/.
But Thelonius is right. Find a keyboard or guitar to try out sounds as you learn. It might be easier to visualize scales and keys from a keyboard than from the fretboard of a guitar.
Posted by: Timothy at Dec 2, 2008 2:59:43 PM
The Mahler story is spooky but credible. Mahler specializes in converting atheists into believers. It should not work, but disturbingly, it does sometimes.
Posted by: Yan Li at Dec 2, 2008 6:05:37 PM
@Chris
I'm the author of the posted article :) Can you email me to discuss one or two things. I'll try and be brief, but I'd rather not clog up the posts here really.
About the aesthetics thing, I don't think anyone can prove outright one way or another, so perhaps "show" would have been a better word to use.
I tend to think there's a possibility that medieval music could be a subset of general tonality, but I haven't looked into it that deeply (and haven't quite got round to reading some of those books you mentioned).
Finally, I still think the most overlooked thing in music theory is the idea of multiple weighted roots for a given chord. That would really help push theory into new directions I reckon.
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