once again seems like you’re missing the forest for the trees. The “pursuit”, or use of these structures as an add-on to people’s broader musical knowledge doesn’t inherently limit what they can do. when it comes to playing with other people, whether in an improvised setting or dealing with scores/direction and everything in between, having a well rounded understanding of different rhythms and how they can bounce off each other goes a long way to increase the possible outcomes (factoring in self awareness and conviction with ideas). Or more succinctly, One can study these ratios and apply them, however abstractly, to a much larger picture they are painting.
Of course, many are guilty of thinking that merely writing something complex and performing the ink is enough for the music to be something. Obviously it isn’t. There are many other parameters of music that contribute to the resulting sound, and they all need to be addressed. Otherwise the outcome might be terrible, and we can certainly agree about short diatonic melodies and going free, or bad free jazz.
However, The “respect” given to your peers in this post doesn’t do much to clarify the purpose of your writing. What exactly is the thorn in your side, that makes this a “subject worth tackling”? It mainly reads like an attempt to add another blanket demographic of artists to the list of people who are inferior to you artistically, which is totally fine! Just should be presented that way instead of this facade of improving the music scene lol
I agree. It definitely doesn't necessarily limit what they can do. The case I am making is that there are many ways of making music and approaching rhythm but what I am hearing is a lot of people clustered around a similar approach. The concepts of irrational rhythms or repeatable aleatoric rhythms are actually pretty elementary. It would be really interesting to develop rhythms that way, try to internalize them, and write music like that. Yet I don't know anyone seriously pursuing it. Let me know if you do!
LOVED those late 90's Dave Holland records when I was in college. I wanted to be funky in 13 so hard.
AI stuff has gotten surprisingly good at reconstituting isolated stems from recordings. It's neat because you can start to decompose "feels" with a lot more flexibility than you could before. Can be a nice information source.
Thanks for speaking the truth, Chris. I think one of the things that feels like a gap or missed opportunity in 2020's New Complexity Jazz is the idea that the *notational* complexity of the material, or the rhythmic challenges that the rhythmic structures present, is/are the justification for the music being "serious". It's like communally agreed upon as a transcendental justification for the music.
I do enjoy the music as a listener, and I have friends who make it. I felt a pull towards making it myself it in probably 2016, 2017 (shortly after encountering Steve Coleman's music for the first time, and when I got to NEC a lot of people were really excited about Matt Mitchell), but as my own interests led me to concert music, and ultimately really deep into the notated nested tuplets world, I went a different way. After writing some extremely rhythmically dense notated music in my mid 20's, I kind of got over it. I had proved whatever it was that I needed to prove to myself, which was also really connected to my willful and forceful purging of my own Conservatory Brain.
So I felt the pull of the notational complexity as a sort of transcendental justification for the music, and I can empathize, but at this point, it's a completely neutral material for me. There are perceptual things about it that I enjoy and appreciate (the ability to create specific types of detail in time), but that's about as far as it goes.
Also, Phil Golub had some really good points about this type of music when he presented in Anthony Coleman's 'Issues and Trends in Contemporary American Music' class back in spring 2019. Shoutout to Phil.
If you were to zoom in finely enough on someone playing quarter notes in 4/4, that wouldn't be on the grid either, in the sense that at some level of measurement discrepancies would be detectable. That doesn't mean they aren't playing quarter notes in 4/4, it just means that for real-world pragmatic purposes we ignore small discrepancies like that in judging (hearing) what counts as playing in 4/4.
In that sense, your friend is not wrong to say that finely enough, everything is on the grid, meaning that at some degree of fineness you get to a level where the sonic events are (perceptually) close enough in time to some division to count pragmatically as being on that grid.
The notion of events being on the grid at some mathematically infinite degree of fineness, no matter how far down you go, has no practical application and is probably meaningless. "That attack was EXACTLY on the 2" is pragmatically fine, but metaphysically (I'm not sure what other word to use) not.
Maybe all this is obvious or irrelevant. These are thoughts responding to what you wrote, not an attempt to refute what you say about irrational numbers. But, in the above sense, the events in real-world realized music that was composed/conceptualized using irrational numbers will also fit closely enough to some grid.
Considered as a mathematical object, a circle perfectly instantiates pi. But no physically inscribed circle does.
Yes that's totally true, and really good to point out. But the point is that writing an irrational rhythm--even the simplest possible one--using ratios to come close enough, is very inefficient. It would require some insane counting and a lot more ink. More importantly, if you thought that only rational numbers existed, it would probably never occur to you to make such a rhythm. But as soon as you start using irrational numbers in even the simplest ways, different options quickly open up. The article is about using lateral thinking to generate interesting musical results. It's definitely not making the case for expanding our toolbox so we can be ultra precise.
Yes, I absolutely get that conceptualizing in a different way can lead to qualitatively different results that you might not get to any other way, and that fussiness about mathematical/metaphysical precision is not the point.
This is about as literal an example as we are likely to get of "thinking outside the box"!
Mathematics? I remember reading an interview with Charlie Watts in a drummer's magazine some 40 years ago. Do you practise at home, the interviewer asked. Charlie said, yes I practise with a metronome. (Remember, there were no clicktracks at the time.) Not because I have a problem keeping time, he said, but because I want to vary the tempo a few bpm now and then. He said he would increase the tempo a bit each verse until the solo, and then drop it again to increase it again towards the end of the song. I didn't really believe it until I found a video on Youtube with the isolated drum track of Honky Tonk Women compared to a clicktrack. Already in 1969 Charlie did exactly what he described.
I am doing performances generating music on an indoor bike with Bluetooth sensors on my bike and body, using my heart rate for the bpm. I'm not sure I would call it irrational time signatures. It's probably more heart rate induced time signatures. Pretty much like Charlie Watts.
Fascinating stuff, if mostly way beyond my compositional technique, which is mired in the most common jazz subdivisions. I don't know; I did record a piece that was in 26/4, but that was satirical, a way of making fun of Dave Brubeck, who I can't stand. I believe, as a relatively old-style composer (think Mingus/Monk/Ellington/Ornette/Hemphill) that the music should create the time rather than the other way around, even in 100-year-old black musical formats, which I have played around with. But I am definitely bound to harmony fused with open-improvisation, which is maybe a sinking ship; so I have tied myself to that mast. As for those multi-rhythms (or whatever the terms is, sorry) I get lost counting everything, and have a basic learning disability when it comes to math....so I long ago adapted in my own way. But truthfully, as I write this I have a feeling we are talking about two very different approaches.
once again seems like you’re missing the forest for the trees. The “pursuit”, or use of these structures as an add-on to people’s broader musical knowledge doesn’t inherently limit what they can do. when it comes to playing with other people, whether in an improvised setting or dealing with scores/direction and everything in between, having a well rounded understanding of different rhythms and how they can bounce off each other goes a long way to increase the possible outcomes (factoring in self awareness and conviction with ideas). Or more succinctly, One can study these ratios and apply them, however abstractly, to a much larger picture they are painting.
Of course, many are guilty of thinking that merely writing something complex and performing the ink is enough for the music to be something. Obviously it isn’t. There are many other parameters of music that contribute to the resulting sound, and they all need to be addressed. Otherwise the outcome might be terrible, and we can certainly agree about short diatonic melodies and going free, or bad free jazz.
However, The “respect” given to your peers in this post doesn’t do much to clarify the purpose of your writing. What exactly is the thorn in your side, that makes this a “subject worth tackling”? It mainly reads like an attempt to add another blanket demographic of artists to the list of people who are inferior to you artistically, which is totally fine! Just should be presented that way instead of this facade of improving the music scene lol
I agree. It definitely doesn't necessarily limit what they can do. The case I am making is that there are many ways of making music and approaching rhythm but what I am hearing is a lot of people clustered around a similar approach. The concepts of irrational rhythms or repeatable aleatoric rhythms are actually pretty elementary. It would be really interesting to develop rhythms that way, try to internalize them, and write music like that. Yet I don't know anyone seriously pursuing it. Let me know if you do!
LOVED those late 90's Dave Holland records when I was in college. I wanted to be funky in 13 so hard.
AI stuff has gotten surprisingly good at reconstituting isolated stems from recordings. It's neat because you can start to decompose "feels" with a lot more flexibility than you could before. Can be a nice information source.
Thanks for speaking the truth, Chris. I think one of the things that feels like a gap or missed opportunity in 2020's New Complexity Jazz is the idea that the *notational* complexity of the material, or the rhythmic challenges that the rhythmic structures present, is/are the justification for the music being "serious". It's like communally agreed upon as a transcendental justification for the music.
I do enjoy the music as a listener, and I have friends who make it. I felt a pull towards making it myself it in probably 2016, 2017 (shortly after encountering Steve Coleman's music for the first time, and when I got to NEC a lot of people were really excited about Matt Mitchell), but as my own interests led me to concert music, and ultimately really deep into the notated nested tuplets world, I went a different way. After writing some extremely rhythmically dense notated music in my mid 20's, I kind of got over it. I had proved whatever it was that I needed to prove to myself, which was also really connected to my willful and forceful purging of my own Conservatory Brain.
So I felt the pull of the notational complexity as a sort of transcendental justification for the music, and I can empathize, but at this point, it's a completely neutral material for me. There are perceptual things about it that I enjoy and appreciate (the ability to create specific types of detail in time), but that's about as far as it goes.
Also, Phil Golub had some really good points about this type of music when he presented in Anthony Coleman's 'Issues and Trends in Contemporary American Music' class back in spring 2019. Shoutout to Phil.
Thanks for these thoughts!
If you were to zoom in finely enough on someone playing quarter notes in 4/4, that wouldn't be on the grid either, in the sense that at some level of measurement discrepancies would be detectable. That doesn't mean they aren't playing quarter notes in 4/4, it just means that for real-world pragmatic purposes we ignore small discrepancies like that in judging (hearing) what counts as playing in 4/4.
In that sense, your friend is not wrong to say that finely enough, everything is on the grid, meaning that at some degree of fineness you get to a level where the sonic events are (perceptually) close enough in time to some division to count pragmatically as being on that grid.
The notion of events being on the grid at some mathematically infinite degree of fineness, no matter how far down you go, has no practical application and is probably meaningless. "That attack was EXACTLY on the 2" is pragmatically fine, but metaphysically (I'm not sure what other word to use) not.
Maybe all this is obvious or irrelevant. These are thoughts responding to what you wrote, not an attempt to refute what you say about irrational numbers. But, in the above sense, the events in real-world realized music that was composed/conceptualized using irrational numbers will also fit closely enough to some grid.
Considered as a mathematical object, a circle perfectly instantiates pi. But no physically inscribed circle does.
Yes that's totally true, and really good to point out. But the point is that writing an irrational rhythm--even the simplest possible one--using ratios to come close enough, is very inefficient. It would require some insane counting and a lot more ink. More importantly, if you thought that only rational numbers existed, it would probably never occur to you to make such a rhythm. But as soon as you start using irrational numbers in even the simplest ways, different options quickly open up. The article is about using lateral thinking to generate interesting musical results. It's definitely not making the case for expanding our toolbox so we can be ultra precise.
Yes, I absolutely get that conceptualizing in a different way can lead to qualitatively different results that you might not get to any other way, and that fussiness about mathematical/metaphysical precision is not the point.
This is about as literal an example as we are likely to get of "thinking outside the box"!
Mathematics? I remember reading an interview with Charlie Watts in a drummer's magazine some 40 years ago. Do you practise at home, the interviewer asked. Charlie said, yes I practise with a metronome. (Remember, there were no clicktracks at the time.) Not because I have a problem keeping time, he said, but because I want to vary the tempo a few bpm now and then. He said he would increase the tempo a bit each verse until the solo, and then drop it again to increase it again towards the end of the song. I didn't really believe it until I found a video on Youtube with the isolated drum track of Honky Tonk Women compared to a clicktrack. Already in 1969 Charlie did exactly what he described.
I am doing performances generating music on an indoor bike with Bluetooth sensors on my bike and body, using my heart rate for the bpm. I'm not sure I would call it irrational time signatures. It's probably more heart rate induced time signatures. Pretty much like Charlie Watts.
sounds f'in amazing. Can you please link me to your music?
Fascinating stuff, if mostly way beyond my compositional technique, which is mired in the most common jazz subdivisions. I don't know; I did record a piece that was in 26/4, but that was satirical, a way of making fun of Dave Brubeck, who I can't stand. I believe, as a relatively old-style composer (think Mingus/Monk/Ellington/Ornette/Hemphill) that the music should create the time rather than the other way around, even in 100-year-old black musical formats, which I have played around with. But I am definitely bound to harmony fused with open-improvisation, which is maybe a sinking ship; so I have tied myself to that mast. As for those multi-rhythms (or whatever the terms is, sorry) I get lost counting everything, and have a basic learning disability when it comes to math....so I long ago adapted in my own way. But truthfully, as I write this I have a feeling we are talking about two very different approaches.