Len's Music Blog

Accidental Pandemonium (entry for 11/29/2024) One of the first frustrations any new music student has to contend with is the issue of ‘accidentals.’ If the student is learning piano, they have to absorb the notion of black notes having two names, a sharp one and a flat one, and if they are learning guitar or other fretted instrument, they have to absorb the idea that some frets named for the first seven letters of the alphabet have other frets between them that have names that are not just simple letters, but have other words attached to them, while other letter-named frets have no ‘extra’ frets between them.  For example, on the guitar’s A string, the first fret is the one for the note A-sharp (or B-flat) and the next fret is for the note B. But the one after that is for the note C, with no other fret between the B and the C. (The next fret up from C is for C-sharp or D-flat.) The piano student finds all this quite a bit easier, because they can see that there is no black note bet...

       Temperament (entry for 11/22/24) Having described modes and talked about major scales and the three kinds of minor, it’s time now to turn our attention to something that happened about 500 years ago that has had a profound effect on all music ever since. Namely, the invention of temperament. No, we’re not talking about temper tantrums (though some musicians do seem to have those when discussing this subject!). We’re talking about the difference between ‘real’ notes (pure notes) and the ones on a piano or fretted instruments or anything with sound holes or keys. Which, if you didn’t already know, are NOT pure! (Except for the notes named A.) Let’s go back for a moment to the notion of sharp notes and flat notes. We talked in an earlier post about the ‘invention’ of ‘black notes.’ We mentioned that these pitches were invented in order to provide intervals of a ‘perfect fifth’ for pitches that didn’t naturally have them. In order to explain all this we need to do...

     The Three Minors (entry for 11/15/24) This sounds like the beginning of a joke: These three miners walk into a bar, their pickaxes over their shoulders. Nope, that’s MINERS. The subject of  this  post is MINORS. (And the bar they walk into, in the US and Canada at least, will be called a ‘measure,’ instead.) Major keys are nice and easy You know what they sound like. You know when one of the notes is ‘off.’ The fingering for the scales is predictable. Even majors with signatures like five flats or four sharps are no huge problem. Most people can even handle six sharps OK. (That’s F-sharp major, in case you were wondering.) Minor keys are not so nice. And they do tend to have pickaxes over their shoulders, the better to impale you my dear. A couple of posts ago, we talked briefly about modes, and we mentioned that the Ionian mode is identical to Major, and that the Aeolian Mode is identical to Minor. So that’s the minor we’ll start with. It’s called natural ...

           Relativity (entry for 11/8/24) One of the things about music that is confusing to non-musicians (and, sadly, to some musicians as well) is the idea of  Keys . “What Key are you playing that in?” one pianist or guitarist will ask another. (This whole problem isn’t made any easier by the fact that the physical notes on a piano or on a woodwind instrument such as a flute or clarinet are also called ‘keys.’ But the two uses of the same word do not mean the same thing! Though they’re a tiny bit related.) What we mean when we say that we’re playing in the Key of G Major, for example, is that the G Major Triad is the Home Chord (the Tonic Chord) of the piece. Any song or other composition will usually have the Tonic Chord as its first chord and also as its last one, especially as the last one.  When that is the case, it’s usually very easy to figure out what key the piece is in! (You can’t count on it, though. There aren’t many exceptions, but...

More About ‘Rules’ (entry for 11/1/24) In the last post we talked about the ‘Rules of Bach’ that are so sadly mis-named, because J.S. Bach would have disowned them— if he had known about them! (They were invented in the late 1840s, whereas Bach died in 1750.) Music Theory students (and teachers, even more so) seem to forget with alarming frequency the fact that all Bach was trying to do was sound good, make the harmonies complex, and give the singers interesting parts to sing and the instrumentalists interesting parts to play. That was it! ‘All she wrote,’ or, in this case, all  he  wrote! There were no rules, ‘of Bach’ or otherwise. Part of this was the fault of an Austrian musician named Johann Joseph Fux, back in the 18 th  century. (And yes, it’s pronounced exactly the way you’re afraid it would be, though sometimes it’s spelled Fuchs.) Johann Fux : Though he thought of himself mostly as a composer, his most famous contribution to the musical world is not a compositio...