The Lydian Scale/Mode

A friend on Facebook posted a link to this explanation of the Lydian scale, and it's very well done. With the simple graphics and musical examples it does a great job of getting across the feel of a scale that's neither major or minor, the two scales we sort of mostly settled into around the time equal temperament came in during the 18th century.

Since at least Plato, there's been the feeling that different modes elicit different mental/emotional states in people. Before equal temperament came in (which makes it much easier to modulate from key to key) the different modes had a stronger flavor due to the more pure tunings used (e.g. C# and Db weren't the same pitch as they are today). The examples here, though, show that they still have a feeling different from either major or minor.

Dance Gestures

This article is brief, but the animations are worth a thousand words. The title of the article is, What women want on the dance floor, according to science. Some dance gestures are more attractive than others. My sense is that this is also the case for gestures made while making music, some of which are embedded aurally in the music. And when watching a music performance we don't generally spend all our time trying to logically deduce the meanings of gestures - we simply react to them as we do watching these animations.

Horn Diary

 *  I retired from the community band in December after the Christmas concert after what I think was 7 and a half years participation. It was a great run. I'll miss playing for the veterans on Veterans Day and Memorial Day, and it was the crucible in which I learned the horn well enough to play the Brahms Requiem, which was one of the most amazing and rewarding experiences of my musical life. 

Between realizing I'll never fully appreciate the concert band repertoire (maybe because I never knew it until my fifties and it always seemed a dialect I could never really speak) and the occasional drill sergeant approach by the music educator directors - when I realized I was over extended, moving on from the band seemed the best thing to do.

 * Over Christmas I played in a cantata, which at one point had the entire congregation singing along with the choir and instruments, and once again found playing the horn with voices an extraordinarily moving experience.

 * On my old horn, the F side didn't sound as good as the B flat side - and most of the stuff I was playing in band was very high (I think concert band arrangers think of the horn as an alto trumpet) - so I never used the F side. My new horn has a wonderful sounding F side, and it was a revelation to me that Brahms used a much lower pitch range in the Requiem than I was used to in band. So I've been working on the F side - and due to this horn having a good sound there, have come to realize what people mean when they say the F side is really the more authentic sound of the horn. However, relearning fingerings is an old dog, new tricks thing for me.

The Importance of Tone

I often compare tone of voice to the quality of tone made by music makers with their instrument. The most frequent example of this is to say to a student, "Have you ever had the experience of talking with someone, or listening to a teacher in the classroom, and realizing they have wonderful things to say, but that their tone of voice makes it hard to pay attention to them?" I've never had this point not understood. I then go on to say that if the tone they're creating with their instrument isn't appealing - no amount of work on articulation or dynamics is going to make a real difference in how their music is perceived. 

This article points out that the decision we make about how we feel about someone's voice tone happens in milliseconds, and there is great agreement among people on what the tone of voice can signal about the person.

. . . Although it's not clear how accurate such snap judgements are, what is apparent is that we all make them, and very quickly. "We were surprised by just how similar people's ratings were," says McAleer. Using a scale in which 0 represents no agreement on a perceived trait and 1 reflects complete agreement, all 10 traits scored on average 0.92 – meaning most people agreed very closely to what extent each voice represented each trait. . . 

 . . . The impression that our voices convey – even from an audio clip lasting just 390 milliseconds – appears to be down to several factors, for example, the pitch of a person's voice influenced how trustworthy they seemed. "A guy who raises his pitch becomes more trustworthy," says McAleer. "Whereas a girl who glides from a high to a low pitch is seen as more trustworthy than a girl whose voice goes up at the end of the word." . . .

What the researchers in this article are calling "tone" and what musicians call "tone" is not exactly the same, since the researchers are including pitch in their definition - but for me this is a very validating bit of research.

I've always been baffled by music educators talking so little about tone. In my years in the community band, except for one director saying "You can't be in tune without good tone", the only other mention of tone was that lame joke about someone having good tone on a note played at the wrong time - which was told over and over and over by multiple directors - and to me, after the umpteenth repetition, had the effect of mocking the concept of good tone. 

Performance Diary

Four of us - trumpet, clarinet, tuba and me on banjo/guitar and a few vocals did a Mardi Gras performance in a local French restaurant - and then last Saturday we did some hymns as a five piece brass choir (trumpet, flugelhorn, horn, trombone, Eb tuba) for the prelude and postlude to a funeral in the Presbyterian church, and then followed up with Dixieland jazz with the full group at the reception in the fellowship hall following the service.

Following the Mardi Gras performance someone who had been there - who probably attends more live music than just about anyone I know - sent a note containing the following: "Whenever you play beyond the music is a sense of communitas." It's the most gratifying comment I've ever gotten about my public music making. 

I've posted from time to time about the Buddhist notion that it's one's motivation that makes any action/karma positive, neutral, or negative. I've also said from time to time I'm convinced one reason people enjoy our playing is that it's obvious how much fun we're having and that the fun is contagious. That an audience member divined the music therapy behind the performance feels like a terrific accomplishment.

One thing that I think conveyed that feeling was my memorizing a number of tunes and then walking out amongst the tables with the banjo and singing. A highlight of that was a little girl - say four or five - who started clapping along, and then some adults did as well. 

Another thing that helped was that I always play the banjo/guitar while standing up and sort of dance with the rhythms. Back in the days of running music therapy groups with emotionally disturbed children, that's essentially how I conducted. All the extra physical gestures seem to heighten the effect of the music.

Having a smaller combo for the Mardi Gras performance helped us play better as well. We were all more exposed than we are with the full group and had to work to get a good sound.

Another factor was working with the hostess to play tunes she liked. A lot of bands have a set list and when you ask them to play - that's what you get. What we do is talk to the host to get an idea of what they want and then tailor our performance for that specific event. It's sort of like working up a music therapy treatment plan, and when done well contributes greatly to the overall success of the performance.

For the brass choir at the funeral (of a man who has been a lawyer in town all my life and with whose children I grew up) I just took the hymns they requested and put them in four parts with minimal tweaking. To my ear, simple four part harmony played by brass is one of the most glorious things in all music making.

The Dixieland jazz at the reception just made people happy. I don't know of any other genre that has that effect for so many people.