SHOSYS ACADEMY 15 LESSON: Methodology In Music
Kelvin Sholar
1 Introduction To The Blog Series
This series of lessons and tests incorporates an easy music appreciation curriculum for adult beginners who are remote learning, or are self-taught. Lessons are posted on Mondays while Tests are posted on Saturdays. For more in depth and private guidance, I offer personal instruction by Zoom (Personal Meeting ID 8522954569) – for 1 dollar a minute. Time schedules range from a minimum of 30 minutes to a maximum of 60 minutes. Email me at [email protected] to set up personal instruction. I accept payments and cash gifts by Cash App ($KelvinSholar), Zelle ([email protected]) or Paypal (paypal.me/kelvinsholar).
2 Revisiting The Tree Of Knowledge
In Lesson 14, we learned about criteria of consonance and dissonance. In this Lesson, we will learn about methodology in music. This knowledge resides in the Ways branch of knowledge (1.20) of the Tree of Knowledge (1.00), at the seventh leaf from the left (1.25) – Methodology. In “Taxonomy Of Educational Objectives”, Benjamin Bloom describes knowledge of methodology as: “Knowledge of the methods of inquiry, techniques, and procedures employed in a particular subject field as well as those employed in investigating particular problems and phenomena” (Bloom 73).
2.1 Methodology In Music
What are the laws of music? Musicians have tried to answer this question since music appeared among human behaviors. In musical literature, it is easy to see that musicians mostly try to make sense of music in terms of their own drives. For example, music is often described in terms of the drive to feel or have intense emotional experiences.
Roger Kamien describes melody in terms of the drive to feel; as if it were a human on a journey driven to experience intense emotions: “A melody begins, moves, and ends; it has direction, shape, and continuity. The up-and-down movement of its pitches conveys tension and release, expectation and arrival” (Kamien 36). In particular, Kamien describes the melody of “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” relative to the human feeling of yearning, questioning and longing: “The yearning quality of the main melody (A) comes from its slow upward leaps combined with a quicker, questioning pattern of tones (on over the rainbow). Evoking Dorothy’s dream to fly over the rainbow to a better place, the main melody (A) begins with a wide upward leap of an octave, from the low tone on Some to the high tone on -where. Smaller upward leaps, on way up high and There’s a land reinforce the melody’s feeling of longing“.
Sir James Jeans describes tonality in music relative to the human drive to defend, or the desire to protect a home. He writes:
“A collection of notes played in succession does not of itself constitute a melody which can awaken our musical imagination; to satisfy modern musical feeling, there must be a further element, which we describe as tonality. Our musical thought does not wish to wander indifferently all over the scale; it remains associated always with one particular note, the tonic or key note, which we somehow think of as giving a fixed and central point. Just as the traveller thinks of each point of his journey in terms of its distance from his home, so we moderns think of each note of a melody in terms of its interval from the key note. The skillful composer contrives to make us conscious of the key note from the very beginning of his music, and keeps our minds conscious of its position through all the notes that are played. In general, for instance, we expect the music – or at least the bass of it – to end on the key note, just as the traveller expects his journey to end at his home; we refuse to accept any other ending place as final” (Jeans 170).
Musicians have also tried to describe the laws of music in terms of mathematics; but, they often added suppositional associations. For example, we learned that in order to comprehend the law of consonance, Pythagoras tried to associate the most beautiful melodies that were able to be performed on ancient Greek lyres and flutes with small frequency ratios between the lengths of strings or pipe which did and did not vibrate (Penrose 10).
Plato asserted that mathematical propositions did not refer to physical approximations, but to idealized elements that lived in a formal world that is distinct from the psychical and physical worlds. True mathematical propositions of tuning theory, for example, refers to formal elements – not to the physical sound pressure waves that we can observe, nor to the psychical sounds that our brains generated from them. This allows musicians to separate the exact mathematical tones from the approximate frequencies and pitches that we actually observe in earthly music.
The advantage of Plato’s way of thinking is that musical scientists can assert mathematical models of how music works, (such as the theory of equal temperament tuning), and we can test these models against observations and experiments with musical instruments. In this way, mathematical truths can provide an objective external standard on which to judge musical theories – a standard that is free from the opinions of individual musicians or specific musical cultures.
In addition to artistic methodologies that describe music in terms of human drives, or scientific methodologies that describe music in terms of mathematical truths, there are two basic logical methodologies that are used in music theory: induction and deduction.
Inductive logic reasons from specific instances to general theories; it is the main method that is used to confirm a scientific theory. For example, Alban Berg observed many different compositions of nineteenth century composers and concluded that all nineteenth century music had the same characteristics: “it is almost always homophonic; its themes are built symmetrically in units of two or four bars; its evolutions and developments are for the most part unthinkable without an abundance of repetition and sequences (generally mechanical), and finally this conditions the relative simplicity of the harmonic and rhythmic action” (Reich 4). Basically Berg’s logical argument in simplified form was: I have observed homophony, symmetry, repetition and sequences in enough nineteenth century compositions to conclude that they are almost always homophonic, symmetrical, repetitive and full of sequences.
Deductive logic reasons from general theories to specifics. A simple deductive argument in music theory is: “all music is composed of pitches that change with respect to time, “Mary Had A little Lamb” is music; thus, “Mary Had A little Lamb” is composed of pitches that change with respect to time“.
3 Bibliography
Berg, Alban. Why Is Schoenberg’s Music So Difficult To Understand?. Vienna: Musikblaetter des Anbruch, 1924
Bloom, B. S.; Engelhart, M. D.; Furst, E. J.; Hill, W. H.; Krathwohl, D. R. Taxonomy Of Educational Objectives: The Classification Of Educational Goals. Handbook I: Cognitive Domain. New York: David McKay Company, 1956
Jeans, Sir. James. Science And Music, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937
Kamien, Roger. Music: An Appreciation. New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2018
Penrose, Sir. Roger. The Road To Reality. London: Random House, 2004
Reich, Willi. The Life and Work of Alban Berg. New York: 1982