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Re: [microsound] state of beauty
On Friday, November 26, 2004, at 09:05 AM, michael trommer wrote:
wrong... 'harmony' as we know it was not a concept around at the time
of the music cited in the earlier post (1000 years ago).
hmm...in an earlier post i thought you mentioned that this was
impossible to
be certain about this ? i'm curious as to what you're basing this on ?
the research that exists in the musicology community, ie the people who
have spent the time in the libraries going over the manuscripts with
white gloves...
The early forms of, lets call it 'multi-line music' , are things like
organum. which, so it appears from sources, evolved from parallel
(homophonic) parts to polyphonic (contrapuntal) parts to make a music
that was driven on the principles of independent horizontal lines
(imitation, canonical structures etc....). There were quite stircit
rules of consonance and dissonance in relation to vertical simultaneity
(and the church was involved in massaging those rules), but the music
was not put together by harmonising melodies... and the vertical
structures arising from the counterpoint did not form 'functional'
harmony in the sense that we have come to understand it from the
Baroque onwards...
When you use a word like 'harmony', you need to be precise about what
you are saying, by providing it with some context. Otherwise you might
be creating the wrong impression about how this kind of music was
composed. The initial posts bandied around these words as if the
concepts that underlie them have been stable.... and it is entirely
unclear, why the original poster was asking us to see music as
essentially unchanging, (without any sense of how that was being
measured)
in any case...some would appear to disagree:
"Bruce Richman argues that both (music and language) originated in
collective repetition of formulaic sequences; and Björn Merker
suggests that
synchronous chorusing was a key adaptation in human evolution. "
sorry, but 'synchronous chorusing' (and I assume we are talking greek
chorus here) is not 'harmony'...
lets not confuse multiple performers (or even multiple lines) with
harmony
This argument is a dead end... other than a vehicle
to express anti academic sentiments and sweeping generalities...
well...i prefer to think of music as a general social mechanism that
exists
largely outside of the sphere of academia ...this coming from someone
who
has experienced it (musical academia) directly.
what does this statement have to do with anything in this discussion?
thanks for sharing your opinion anyway! I'm sure most academics would
agree with you!
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