Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum reading music

Putting it bluntly Mr Hao ... you use polite Chinese diplomacy to again put your foot in the door ... but it wears a bit thin when you refuse to accept the message ... and continue with the selling of a stillborn concept.

But try to stay on the subject ... can you measure up to the Beethoven measure?

Holy OMG!

Jeff, if you have not, look at some of btb's other work and earlier comment. As follows:

Change comes hard. Steady progress of the single-voice instruments over a thousand years has found no cause to change the format of musical notation. Sight-reading might be effective for string, woodwind, brass and voice but has become purgatory for the multi-voiced keyboards. Hapless pianists are obliged to preface performance with a mind-blowing process of note de-coding, practice and memorisation.
This complicated preparation is due to the algebraic format of the antiquated notes where each symbol needs a separate identification calculation like puzzling an Egyptian hieroglyph. Keyboard sight-reading can be likened to the tense experience of viewing oncoming traffic through a rain-swept windscreen. Formal musicians are so used to the bad weather that they merely brace themselves before the next piano venture. Why the stave was not adjusted at the time to accommodate all 12 "well-tempered" basic keyboard notes and thereby avoid accidentals and key signature changes beats me.
Any comment? - preferably fresh thought without staid pedagogic claptrap.

Jeff, both of us are on the fireing line of what we think ought to change. We may well never have but minor success. I find encouragment in btb's line above. "why the stave was not- - -" Indeed, why the keyboard wasn't changed at the time is (for me) a significant question. But of course I know the answer, it is but the staid pedagogic claptrap weight of things past.

James

James, your questions have been answered throughout this long thread by experienced musicians and teachers.

I'll have another crack whilst trying to avoid the staid pedagocical claptrap.

In diatonic music, which accounts for almost everything we play, there are NOT 12 notes. There are only 7 notes....

A B C D E F G

Those other notes are chromatic alterations of the 7 basic notes and are not used equally in a composition.

This is what 'diatonic' means. Music which is based on scales which use each of the 7 different notes.

That is why we have a line and a space for these 7 notes. It makes it easier to see the patterns in melody and harmony.

Most of what we play is 'in a key'. So you can't just get rid of key signatures and accidentals. It makes no sense.

As for your keyboard layout I will remain unconvinced until I have seen anyone perform advanced repertoire fluently on it as they would on a standard keyboard.

Yes, true Chris, but that is ONLY by definition and convention. To me (and some others) it is not logical to discriminate against particular notes and create keys and scales based on a restricted subset of the full set of 12 notes. And before you all go off on me, let me explain once more that I do understand the usefulness of key signatures, accidentals etc but it is still not a logical approach because of the complications --- see btb's quote about driving into oncoming traffic in a rainstorm above. It doesn't have to be that way, it's just that that is where we currently are. It has it's good points and bad points, like relatives or spouses but we're married to it.

I'm not sure that logic has anything to do with it. It's just the way it is.

While it might not seem logical to create scales and keys that is what composers have done over the last couple of hundred years. And that is the music most people want to play. Jeff has transcribed this music into his Haostaff and ignored the fact that it is based on the system of keys.

If you want to create logical music based on using the 12 notes equally then that's fine, you wouldn't be the first to try. But it's garbage though isn't it?

Huh??? So we write 12-tone music so as not to "discriminate" against some poor little notes? I suppose in a way that is what Schoenberg was saying - that all of the 12 notes should have equal importance, but the result was atonality. Are you prepared for that? Many people don't seem to be, though I'm a fan of Berg and Webern myself.

No Chris it's not garbage. You are certainly welcome to that opinion but it's only that - an opinion.

As I said previously but will say again since we seem to be going in circles again.

By using a different notation which treats all 12 tones equally it doesn't change one iota the way the music sounds or feels. It is only a different way of notating it.

Call it whatever you want, but it sounds the same. A rose by any other name is still a rose.

I'm not advocating that, in fact the atonal music of Schoenberg that I've heard I did not care for.

The only thing I'm arguing in this thread is that there MAY be a better way that is less confusing than the current system. I'm NOT discounting it's advantages, but am saying that those who defend it so aggressively may not be seeing the advantages of a different system.

And no I don't expect anything to change any time soon, or maybe never, but that will not stop me from looking at alternatives.

Yes, but..........(circles warning!)

Using a staff which shows the position of all 12 notes (as if they are equal) is a more difficult way of notating it. To me, learning the position of 12 notes HAS to be more complicated than learning just 7.

'Garbage' is my opinion of logical 12-tone technique. It never really caught on did it?

Berg was atonal, Schonberg serial , Webern super-serial, - very different fish.

It has to do with the nature of the music that is being notated, Kenny. Most music is based on a particular structure that found its essential form at the time the notation system was invented. Playing music does not have to consist of playing note after note after note.

Think about language for a moment. We have paragraphs that consist of sentences. The modern paragraph in most cultures now consists of Introduction of idea, setting out elements of that idea, Conclusion or restatement of the same idea. Older structures of other cultures may not have this at all (I'm thinking of some in particular). Because we have these structures engrained, we expect them, and that makes written material easier to follow. The very shape of this paragraph tells you that I will be exploring one idea.

And then I break to the next paragraph. Thus.

The current form of written music gives us something similar. It guides us by sight and intellectually in the manner I outlined in my example earlier. By glancing at the music, you can see that it modulates, that it's in G major for the most part, etc. If you are accustomed to hearing music while residing inside its structure, then it also gives audial clues. You see and hear a harmonic minor scale and you situate yourself in it. You see a chain of notes, or a ladder of notes, and you anticipate part of a scale, or an arpeggio. You see an accidental up ahead, and you anticipate that you are about to hit a cadence and conclusion in a minor piece, or that you are about to modulate.

It is not confusing at all. It is a simple system. But we live in a digital age that looks at things in "bits" (as in bits and bytes) one fragmented element at a time. That mindset makes something straightforward and intuitive complicated. You have to start with the music, not the written notes.

And this is true only for the music that has the structure for which this system was designed - which is most music we commonly hear and play.

Kenny,

The following items were known to the Greeks in the time of Pythagoras. This is not to be interpreted as an explanation of why we have the major chords or scales, just as an explanation of some physical facts that make you go HMMMM when thought about in the context of the major chord and scale. Warning, this is a long post and very theoretical, but if you make it all the way through this topic, I think you will find it useful.

Our instrument of choice for this "experiment" is called a monochord. It is a string stretched between two posts on a board and a movable "fret" that you can use to only play a specifically measured portion of the string. We will imagine that this instrument is played by bowing or plucking a portion of the string (in the center of that portion) and that it is tuned to the C two octaves below what we call Middle C on the piano.

First we will play the entire string. With this, as I stated above, we hear the note two octaves below Middle C.

Next we move our fret so it is halfway between the two posts. The note we hear is the C one octave below Middle C. If we are playing two monochords side by side, both tuned to the same pitch while playing the full string on one and half of the string on the other, we notice that we really don't hear two separate notes, but rather a single fuller sound that sounds like it is just the lower note. This brings us to the conclusion that notes one octave apart are in a simple 2:1 ratio and that these notes belong to something we will call the same pitch class. In terms of our notation a example of a pitch class are all notes we would label by the letter C.

Remember we are dealing with the Ancient Greeks from about the time of Pythagoras, and they loved their simple ratios. So we next move our fret so we are playing only 1/3 of the string. Lo and behold we hear the G below Middle C. The first note that we have to give a new name to. From G to our original C we have a 3:1 ratio of frequencies. Also, the ratio between this G and the note that plays when we only play half the string (C one octave below Middle C) is 3:2. We currently would call this distance a perfect fifth.

Hopefully, you can imagine what we are going to continue doing with our monochord. Next we will play 1/4 of the string, and we hear Middle C.

Next we play only 1/5 of the string and we now have E above middle C. We have discovered a new interval, what we would call a major third.

Next we play 1/6 of the string and we have the G just above the treble clef.

This is called the overtone series, and with the first six harmonics we have a major chord. HMMMM.

The pattern breaks down when we try playing 1/7 of the string. This generates a tone this is a very flat Bb.

OK, so the next experiment is a little bit more abstract. From the above we understand that the 3:2 ratio is the first one we come across and probably the most important one. Remember we called this a perfect fifth.

So, again, we start with a C.

A perfect fifth from C is G.

A perfect fifth from G is D.

A perfect fifth from D is A. (Starting to sound like something? )

A perfect fifth from A is E.

A perfect fifth from E is B.

A perfect fifth from B is F#. That pesky seventh note is out of tune to our ears.

But if we go the opposite direction from our original C we have an F.

Dropping the F# and putting them in order we have:

TaDa.

C D E F G A B

The Major Scale.

HMMMM moment, right.

One last experiment. If we were to continue with perfect fifths (3:2 ratios to be exact) from F# we would get the following sequence:

C G D A E B F# C# G# D# A# E#

Sounds like the twelve tones we are used to working with, right.

The next note in the sequence would be B# which we would expect to be the same as C. But it turns out that it is off by what is called the Pythagorean Comma.

So, even though we like to think of fifths as being in a circle, it doesn't really get us back to where we started.

HMMMM.

Rich

Keystring, as I said I'm not disputing what you are saying at all, I'm just saying that a different system will have advantages (and disadvantages) of it's own.

We really are going in circles or at least talking past one another again.

And of course as I was writing my extemely long post, plenty of other people were posting as well.

Oh, Well, I hope it is of interest.

(And if no one can tell, my major in college was physics. )
Rich

I guess that's where we are at odds. To me it is confusing because of the way it is notated. In particular intervals which are not obvious when noted and are dependent on the key signature. It's very confusing, while at the same time providing a shorthand for recording.

Again we are back to the advantages and disadvantages. They are there whether you are willing to see them or not.

Hey that's cool. My son just graduated from Reed College in Portland, OR at the top of his class in Physics and after taking the past year off school will be going to graduate school at CU Boulder in Physics on a full-ride scholarship. I'm quite proud of him.

P.S. Yes I've been through all that Pythagorus/Greek history of music/physics stuff and understand as well as understanding the logarithmic nature of human senses (the ear in this case) and how it affects our perception of sound/tones and the influence of that on the derivation of scales.

Kenny, if I felt that what I have written has been understood then I could let go of it because then I'd be looking at an informed choice. A while back I was confronted with things that were new to me, and I could only decide if they were good for me after working with them and understanding them. I have rejected one of those things, but only after understanding enough about it. I have no idea of what you do or don't know, and just a little bit about your musical experiences. Thus I don't know if what I have said makes any sense to you.

The thing is that you keep writing about difficulties. I know that it doesn't have to be that way, and why. The ideas I have seen proposed strike me as giving instant results of being able to type out a piece blindly, but I do not see a sign of acquiring what sits underneath, which would cause the act of reading music to become easier exponentially.

I am not against someone using another notation system. I would just like to see the positive elements of the traditional system that were presented understood. If something is presented, there is hope that it will also be explored. I have certainly explored the chromatic idea. I first encountered it over a year ago and I did my exploration back then.

No worries Keystring. I do think everyone here (though I've been wrong before ) understands the value of the current notation system and it's relation to music theory. Once more I will say (I'm an engineer, okay? ) any system has advantages and disadvantages. There is no perfect system, just one that meets a need or satisfies a requirement.

The current system does that and clearly does it well given its popularity for the last couple of hundred years.

P.S. I keep saying that I understand the advantages of the current notation system, but that doesn't seem to come across. It's almost as if one is not allowed to criticize, not allowed to hold the opinion that there is both good and bad about any given system (for example the U.S. Political System ). Engineers always look at trade-offs and evaluate in order to choose the optimal solution.