musical thoughts

What the heck is this guy talking about now? Mental lever? Like a crowbar for your brain?

Alright, a while back I introduced the mental representation of music idea, and talked about how mental manipulation of musical imagery is what trained musicians do. I’ve been having some conversation with a friend recently who’s trying to bring up his bass playing. The Big Idea that emerged from those conversations is the idea that you get to be a better musician by moving upward from fairly concrete representations to more abstract representations.

What’s a concrete image? A single note. Even a chord or scale, which are sets of notes, are more abstract, and hence more powerful mental constructs. Why more powerful? It’s sort of a mental compression–it’s easier to conceptualize C7 than the four notes (C E G Bb). And a theory student will tell you, that symbol can represent a huge variety of different sets of notes, all of which can be described by the symbol. The scale is similarly powerful because it contains an implicit order (ascending or descending) and there’s an entire system of note relationships embedded in it. It’s easier to think of the last phrase in “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” as a descending scale passage than to recall the five notes that make it up. The abstraction is more efficient for your mind to access and manipulate.

But first you need to be able to perceive those structures. That’s why the study of theory is fruitful. You gain an ability to manipulate mental representations of musical structures at increasingly higher levels of abstraction as you study theory and learn how music is put together.

I spent some time recently listening to some music made by a musician who was very earnest in desire to learn more, but who was at the early stages of the learning journey. The compositions had a lot of good things about them, but what stood out to me was the relatively small amounts of musical material he used to build each song. Usually a single two- or four-bar phrase was the foundation that he developed into an entire piece. A lot of interesting things happened in the songs as they developed (changes in instrumentation, textures, dynamics and so on), but what was holding these works back was that they were built entirely out of smaller musical structures. The big idea for this musician was opening up his ears and eyes to the larger scale musical structures. I could tell by listening to his music that if someone just opened that door, he’d walk through into much more satisfying musical explorations thanks to the new understanding.

Let’s look at the hierarchy of musical structures, from concrete to abstract:

Notes are the basic building blocks. They sort of correspond to letters in words–taken individually there’s no meaning to be conveyed, but in combination (chords and scales) they start to become significant.

Chords and scales are the simplest groupings of notes. Chords are sometimes called “vertical” arrangements of notes while scales or melodies are “horizontal.” Those are somewhat driven by notation–another way to consider them is “simultaneous” versus “sequential” or “parallel” versus “serial” groups. These equate to words in our musical language analogy.

Phrases are the next step up the ladder of abstraction. A phrase is a sequence of chords with a melody in most cases. Repetition and imitation frequently occur at the phrase level in music. This is especially true in children’s songs and folk music. Even though we aren’t capable of analysis as children, the music we learn establishes our cultural expectations about the makeup of music–its structure. Phrases are the sentences of our musical language analogy.

A section is a group of phrases. Again, sections usually repeat. The well-used verse-chorus song structure is the most familiar example. Each is a section, and the sections generally contrast to some degree. Songs with fewer than two sections have a harder time holding the listener’s interest. Our minds want that contrast, and will become distracted without it. Most songs contain between two and four sections, but sometimes additional variety is introduced by making a slight modification that doesn’t change a section’s structure significantly. Sections are the analogue of paragraphs.

What we call form is generally the largest sorts of musical structures. Form is usually a prearranged sequence of sections, where all or part of the sequence repeats. Intros and endings, while they are similar in scale to phrases most of the time, are usually considered features of the form. A form is a lot like the chapters of a book.

Larger structures beyond song form take us into the realm of classical music (with Sonata form as an example), opera (with several acts made up of arias and recitatives), albums (where a collection of songs is programmed as a whole), or musical theatre (where songs support a structure driven by the plot or story).

Okay, now that you have a sense of the spectrum of abstraction over which musical ideas occur, let’s get back to this idea of mental leverage. My bass playing friend was trying to learn several blues tunes. What I did for him was to show him the larger structures at work:

• The blues is made up of three, four-bar phrases.
• That twelve-bar form repeats.
• Occasionally there are contrasting sections, but often there is just the one 12-bar section, repeating.

Here’s the real key: Because you can predict this structure reliably within the blues genre, you can anticipate what’s coming. There really shouldn’t be a lot of big musical surprises within the blues. when they do occur, you are likely to find they come from a bag of well-used devices. Some of those are:

• breaks, where the time stops for a measure
• prolonged phrases, where on of the three four-bar phrases is either repeated or prolonged
• bridges, where a short contrasting section is added for interest.
• introduction that’s the last four bars of the 12-bar form (”intro from the five”)

So really, there’s quite a bit more in common than different among various blues tunes. If you can come to grips with the common stuff, you only have to remember the ways in which a particular tune deviates from the reference version. This sort of abstraction makes it possible for someone to learn a lot of blues tunes if they can deal with this sort of abstraction. And, it gives you a way to communicate on the bandstand with players who need to know the essential features of a blues tune.
“We’re playing Kansas City. Do you know it?”
“No.”
“12-bar blues, shuffle in G, intro from the five, breaks on the second chorus.”
“Got it.”

That same mental lever works across genres. People who sight-read well do so by perceiving the larger structures–they are not reading the notes. You simply can’t process the notes at the level necessary to sight read. Good sight-readers anticipate based on familiarity with structure, and they know how to pick the key features off the notation on the page. They know that songs are more alike than different, and use that to their advantage. There are a few really well-used song forms out there. People dealing with the standard repertoire in jazz will encounter most of them by the time they learn maybe a dozen songs.