I just heard some of the Theme Time radio shows. Damn, this is almost better than Chronicles! I’m delighted to see that he’s actually doing what I suggested a few posts back – play the stuff that he likes…
Theme Time is exactly that: a selection of favorite songs, interspersed with hilarious, deadpan comments, interesting insights, floating in and out of quotation and commentary, the way he does it on the sleeve notes to World Gone Wrong and, in a different way, all through `Love and Theft’. Way to go, Bobby!
I explicitly suggested Charles Aznavour, and, well… here’s what Dylan says about Charles: “He’s written over a thousand songs. I only know half of them.”
Category: music
“What I Learned from Lonnie” pt. V: three times 2, and 7 and 4
[This post concludes the series about Dylan’s idea of “mathematical music” in Chronicles]
When Dylan talks freely, he can be very eloquent, and one feels one is snapping at the heels of pure genius. But once he starts giving examples, it all sounds quote mundane, and very banal, and one is left thinking “Was that it?!”
And of course it wasn’t — one realizes that some people are better poets than teachers.
Let this be the introduction to this last installment in the Lonnie-series, where the shroud of doubt is lifted and everything is explained:
* * *
Today’s lesson is from I Chronicles, Ch. 4
In a diatonic scale there are eight notes, in a pentatonic there are five. If you’re using the first scale, and you hit 2, 5 and 7 to the phrase and then repeat it, a melody forms. Or you can use 2 three times. Or you can use 4 once and 7 twice. It’s indefinite what you can do, and each time would create a different melody.
Now, what is he talking about?!
In a way, it’s very simple. In a scale there are certain tones, and if you pick some of them and put them together in a sequence, “a melody forms”.
I doubt it, however, that his point is as trivial as that. He’s not describing just any melody, but rather a way of creating counter-melodies that — for some mysterious reason, which in Dylan’s version of it is connected with the symbolic force of numbers (or with the force of numbers tout court) — will always yield good results.
2, 5, 7, 4, 2, 7, … whaat?!
And this melody – just what is it? First of all, I severely doubt that the exact tones he mentions has anything to do with it; most likely, they are whatever numbers popped into his mind at the time of writing it (the passage in the book resembles the kind of vague ramblings that he occasionally gets himself into during interviews). But for the sake of completeness, let’s take his example at face value and see what the result becomes. In the key of G, we get the following:
Chord Scale alternatively:
||--3--||-----------------0--2--3--|| --1--3---||
||--0--||--------0--1--3-----------|| ---------||
||--0--||--0--2--------------------|| ---------||
||--0--||--------------------------|| ---------||
||--2--||--------------------------|| ---------||
||--3--||--------------------------|| ---------||
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 7 8
||--------2--------2--||-----------||-----2--2--||
||-----3--------3-----||-----------||--1--------||
||--2--------2--------||--2--2--2--||-----------||
||--------------------||-----------||-----------||
||--------------------||-----------||-----------||
||--------------------||-----------||-----------||
2 5 7 2 5 7 2 2 2 4 7 7
The first thing we notice is that the steps 2, 5, and 7 incidentally form a chord: D major (or D minor, if we use the minor seventh for the ‘7’). This might be a clue to a solution, but I don’t think it is, for several reasons. The main reason is that the tones and the melodic fragment that is mentioned here, a broken D major chord against (or even ‘in’) the key of G, is not something I recognize from Dylan’s music making. The dominant is not very important in Dylan’s music — one might say: other than by being absent (in which capacity it draws some attention to itself).
The other reason is that the D major chord emerges out of the numbers 2, 5, 7 only on the assumption that Dylan uses the traditional numbering of the tones in the scale, but this is not necessarily so. We know from the terminology of blues musicians that there are many ways to refer to chords and scales. I don’t know if Lonnie Johnson is known to have used any particular terminology in this respect, but at least one alternative is worth mentioning before we abandon the search for a meaning in those particular numbers: If we shift the relation between numbers and scale one step, so that ‘1’ denotes the first step up from the keynote, we get the following:
Chord Scale alternatively:
||--3--||-----------------0--2--3--|| --1--3---||
||--0--||--------0--1--3-----------|| ---------||
||--0--||--0--2--------------------|| ---------||
||--0--||--------------------------|| ---------||
||--2--||--------------------------|| ---------||
||--3--||--------------------------|| ---------||
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 6 7
||-----0--3-----0--3--||-----------||-----3--3--||
||--0--------0--------||--0--0--0--||--3--------||
||--------------------||-----------||-----------||
||--------------------||-----------||-----------||
||--------------------||-----------||-----------||
||--------------------||-----------||-----------||
2 5 7 2 5 7 2 2 2 4 7 7
This makes far more sense: a playing around with the main steps in the chord, with a sixth thrown in for good measure. This accomodates both the ‘sing-song’ style of singing that we all love so well, and many of Dylan’s trademark licks.
Another take
In a more thorough study than this, I would have gone through a number of tapes and searched out examples to corroborate this interpretation. Here, I’ll let it remain as a vague suggestion. The main reason for this is not laziness (although that is part of it), but the strong suspicion that the search would be futile; one might find such examples, but they would not prove anything. A more fruitful path is, I believe, to take Dylan’s statement more as an indication of a general principle than as an exact example.
This principle would consist in
- a selection of some scale steps, either within the chord or, for that matter, outside of it,
- which are combined to simple patterns
- which are repeated or combined as building blocks.
This not only makes sense in relation to Dylan’s music making since 1988, it also makes sense as a description of an improvisational system. In order to be usable in practice — not the least as a ‘learned’ system — such a system should be simple, and it should be based on or related to a wider musical system (in this case, e.g. the musical grammar of the blues and its descendents).
A little music theory (has never hurt anyone)
A tonal system means a system out of which meaning can be gleaned from conjunctions of tones. Fundamentally, musical meaning does not lie in the connection between certain tones and something in the outside world (i.e. a piece of music cannot in itself mean love, rain, brick walls, etc.), but is founded on connections between certain combinations of sounds and certain experiences and expectations, and this must be learned, through repeated exposure to the connection and to the regularity by which the sound is accompanied by the experience. This is what we know when we know a musical style: we know that in a blues tune an E is followed by an A, and we expect a turnaround at the end. In this way, and only in this way, can the tones of “Another Brick In The Wall” mean meat grinder, inhumanity, and bricks.
Musical meaning thus lies in a habitual fulfillment of the expectation of this kind of connection to take place — and the constant adjustment of expectations against the experienced fulfillments.
A complex system at the base allows for a wide array of possible meanings within the system. In the classical music tradition, harmony has been the central field of development since the fourteenth century, culminating in the invention of the twelve-tone technique in the early twentieth century. Thereby, the range of possible connections between tones was stretched to the extreme (some would say: beyond that): everything is accounted for (or accountable) within the system.
But that is not the only option. Expectations can be established temporarily. Play an ever-changing series of tones, and nobody knows what to expect for the next tone — play 2, 5, 7, 2, 5, 7, and you have already established a pattern with certain inherent rules, and play that against a song which follows another set of rules, and you already have a quite complex field of potential meaning, created with very simple means.
Against this background, Dylan’s description can be rephrased in more general terms:
-
Make patterns out of any selection of tones, and repeat and combine them;
by repeating the patterns, you thereby temporarily establish a new tonal system, exploiting the field of tension between the musical backbone of the song and the new pattern; - this meaning is brought out in the interplay between expectations and experience — between the cultural knowledge that the listeners and the musicians have, and the newly established tonal system;
- in order for this to be recognized as a new tonal system, however ephemeral, in the short time that is at the musician’s disposal, the patterns must be simple;
- but if they are, and a balance is struck betw een redundancy and inventiveness (there is a limit to how long you can play 2,5,7,2,5,7), it will always work, with these very simple means.
A translation
This is, I believe, the core of Dylan’s technique, which he has explored — with varying degrees of success, but mostly ending up with a huge surplus in the balance — during the 90s and the 00s. It also explains some of his other statements where he explains his system in more general terms:
A song executes itself on several fronts and you can ignore musical customs. All you need is a drummer and a bass player, and all shortcomings become irrelevant as long as you stick to the system.
. . .
The method works on higher or lower degrees depending on different patterns and the syncopation of a piece.
Very few would be converted to it because it had nothing to do with technique and musicians work their whole lives to be technically superior players.
This can be translated fairly exactly, if not word for word, then at least concept by concept, into the following:
A song can exploit several different meaning systems at the same time, and you are not limited to the rules set by one such set of musical customs. Since I play rock, I need a drummer and a bass player, but all shortcomings become irrelevant as long as you stick to the system, since this system is based on a conscious play with ‘inventive redundancy’ and not on the intricacy of the base system and the technical prowess of the musician.
. . .
Since the system works in the interplay beween the song and the newly established fields of meaning, the concrete way of playing or singing will have to be adjusted to the different patterns already present in the song. Very few would be converted to it because it had nothing to do with technique and musicians work their whole lives to be technically superior players.
“Lyrics Dustup Ends in Apology”
Wired News: Lyrics Dustup Ends in Apology
Kinda interesting, this one… Especially the last couple of paragraphs.
Beginning in January, the Music Publishers Association, of which Warner Chappell is a member, will begin pursuing a campaign against 5 to 6 such companies, according to MPA CEO Lauren Keiser.
“Lost revenue for rights holders is in the millions,” said Keiser, “We’re not going after fan clubs, but websites that make money.”
True, I do have that “small donations welcome” link hidden away at the bottom of some frame, but I guess that doesn’t really count — I’m a small potatoe here (sob! my ego is hurting!).
Anyway, for various reasons, I will not make any drastic changes quite yet, but stay tuned.
Thanks to Per Egil at www.chordie.com (another Norwegian in the tabbing trade) for the link.
Thank god! There is still hope!
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Young ‘prefer illegal song swaps’
So, the question of file sharing and illegal music sites is coming up again. One consequence is that dylanchords is temporarily down. “Sam Spade” first posted a note in a different thread, about the record industry being intent on stopping sites like this one. Fair enough, perhaps. I took a consequence of that. An overreaction, perhaps, but that was my decision.
The post also contained a link to a report about a study that Jupiter Research has undertaken, about the music habits of young people. One conclusion is that illegal file sharing networks are used three times as much as the legal ones.
I don’t know what to say about this: of course artists should be paid for their work, but according to artists like Roger McGuinn, there isn’t much that gets past the record company. Then again, they also need to make some income to run the whole apparatus of production and distribution.
All in all: fair enough, and I do pay for my music.
But there was another line that caught my eye:
[The report] also warns that file-sharers, particularly young people, have little concept of music as a paid commodity.
That’s the most vulgar, obscene, inhuman expression I’ve heard in a long time: music as a paid commodity.
Here’s the dictionary definition of “commodity”:
That which affords convenience, advantage, or profit, especially in commerce, including everything movable that is bought and sold (except animals), — goods, wares, merchandise, produce of land and manufactures, etc.
At least animals are excluded…
Raise your heads, clap your hands, sing hallelujah or Allahu akbar! “Young people” have little concept of music as a movable item that is bought and sold. There’s still hope.
The Airwaves, They Are A-Changin’
The Airwaves, They Are A-Changin’
Amazing how we think the same about things, Dylan and me :-) It’s only a month or so since I wrote:
Why doesn’t he give us something he’s interested in? He obviously loves old music, the kind of songs he rips off and records with new lyric collages, the kind of stuff he sings when he’s all by himself. That’s what he does amazingly well, so why not do it more? How about ditching the war-horses — they’re as tired as him — and playing a show once in a while, with Doc Boggs, Gene Austin, Johnny and Jack, Charles Aznavour, stuff we know he loves?
And now he’s going to do exactly that, on his own radio show… This is exciting news indeed.
“Song sites face legal crackdown”
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Song sites face legal crackdown
Before you act: there’s no point in writing comments like: Where’s the zip file? I want the zip file. Can you please send me the zip file?
well well… What can I say? Several people have sent me links to this and other similar news reports, concerned about what is going to happen to dylanchords.
I understand the concern — I share it, and I don’t know what’s going to happen.
On the one hand: I don’t want to go to jail, and I can’t afford a 500,000$ lawsuit. Those are two good reasons to shut down the site right now.
On the other, I keep telling myself that I don’t have much to worry about: all the lyrics are already freely available from bobdylan.com; all the tabs are my own interpretations and “intellectual property” in some sense of the word, I haven’t copied them from anywhere, and god knows I haven’t cast so much as an eye on the official chord books — heaven forbid! (in fact, had the publishers done a decent job on those, I would never have started this site); to my knowledge, chord charts in the form and with the contents you will find on dylanchords.com have not been copyrighted; etc. All in all, if I were the judge, I couldn’t really say that the site is much of an infringement.
Then again, I ain’t the judge.
The Australian Copyright Council writes:
If you own copyright in a musical work or lyrics, you are generally the only person who can:
- reproduce it: for example, by recording a performance of it, photocopying it, copying it by hand, or scanning it onto a computer disk;
- make it public for the first time;
- perform it in public;
- communicate it to the public (including via radio, television and the internet);
- translate it (for lyrics); or
- arrange or transcribe it (for music).
That would mean that I would need Dylan’s permission to arrange the songs, even though the “arrangements” (i.e. tabs) are my own.
However:
Unless a special exception applies, copyright is infringed if someone uses copyright material in one of the ways set out in the Copyright Act without the copyright owners permission. The special exceptions include fair dealing with copyright material for research or study, or for criticism or review.
The disclaimer about “research, study, personal use” etc. is a standard mantra in headers of tab pages, which I’ve never really taken seriously, and I doubt that anyone has — especially not the publishers and copyright holders. Whether or not a use is fair depends on four factors, listed in the US Copyright Act:
• the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
• the nature of the copyright work;
• the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyright work as a whole; and
• the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
I’d say I score a point on #1, but I lose on the other three.
All in all, the situation is too unclear for me to see through it, but also to just sit and wait. I have therefore decided — actually while writing this — to take down the potentially offensive parts of the site until the situation has become clearer. There will be a solution, I’m sure, but until then: have patience! This is not a goodbye, but a “We’ll meet again”
And — not that I think it will have any effect whatsoever, but there’s a petition one can sign at http://www.petitiononline.com/mioti/petition.html
Chimes of Freedom
Chimes of Freedom was, I think, the first Dylan song that I really made an effort to transcribe. This was before the days of the Internet and in my case also before the days of Lyrics, so if I wanted the words on paper, I had to write them out myself.
Which I wanted, and which I did.
I was spellbound by those words. The layer upon layer of different meanings connected to different sensual experiences: the thunder storm, the lightning, the sounds, the “we”, which is not explained in the song, but I imagined a loving couple, on their way home from a date, to . . ., well, you know – all these and more, working together, flowing in and out of each other and each other’s natural domains, lightning itself evoking sounds, not by laws of physics, through its companion, the thunder, but by laws of association.
And all this channeled into Freedom, even giving that flashing sound a political or at least social dimension. No wonder the post-pubescent me had to love it.
And I had to see it on paper, to savour it, possibly also to understand the bits that escaped me in their sounding form. I only had it on vinyl (of course, this was back in those days . . .), and it’s only owing to my quick (and illegible, to anyone but me) handwriting that there aren’t more scratches and dents in that track. Somehow, I managed to get through it, and even solve some of the textual mysteries.
For this and other reasons, I have quite a special affection for the album version. I don’t know if it is because of this, or because Dylan has never really done it better, but I’ve never been quite satisfied with his live versions. They always leave me cold, don’t do it for me, and the result of having listened to all these versions that leave me cold, has been that the song itself has lost some of its attraction.
Then came No Direction Home. I won’t claim that this is the best version ever – it probably isn’t. The singing is the whining, slightly tense, 1964 voice – not his best year. I’ve even heard the track before, without any noticeable effect.
But this time, somehow, it worked.
I can’t explain why – probably a combination of circumstances (I was listening on headphones, walking around in our local grocery store, looking for some aubergines and some washing powder), and the thing that caught me was something as insignificant as the guitar playing between the verses.
It goes something like this:
G : . . : . . : . |-3---3---3---|-3---3---3---|-3---3---3---| |-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---| |-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---| etc. |-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---| |-2---2---2---|-2---2---2---|-2---2---2---| |-3---3---3---|-3---3---3---|-3---3---3---|
Nothing much, and yet…
At first, the performance disturbed me. Especially two of the between-verses passages, where he keeps strumming this one G major chord abnormally long. I thought, “Damn, he has forgotten the lyrics.” It has happened before. But this time, “phew”, he managed to get back on track again. Until next verse, same thing again, even longer this time. But both times, the following verse with all its intricate images and assonances followed without any hint of a problem, so relieved by this I ended up listening to the sheer sound of the guitar: never have I heard a more perfectly ringing, shimmering tone from Dylan’s hand. It’s not that it’s simple word-painting or anything – that would have been trite; they don’t sound like church-bells, those guitar chords – especially not the kind which are caused by lightning. But they chime alright.
And I started wondering, if he hadn’t forgotten the lyrics, perhaps there was a reason he did it like this? Playing the waiting-game like that – unless one believes it’s just a mistake, and all one can think of is how painfully embarrassing this is – it forces one to notice that which is going on in place of that one expected but which is not. And what goes on here, is sound – simply sound. “Only silence is more beautiful.”
The death of classical music, III: Pythagoras, the ghastly adolescent, and the awful monster
Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | Beethoven was a narcissistic hooligan
This article from the Guardian manages to combine two of the topics I’ve been writing about here lately — the death of classical music, and the heritage from Pythagoras — so I thought I should cite it.
From the speculations of Pythagoras about the “music of the spheres” in ancient Greece onwards, most western musicians had agreed that musical beauty was based on a mysterious connection between sound and mathematics, and that this provided music with an objective goal, something that transcended the individual composer’s idiosyncrasies and aspired to the universal. Beethoven managed to put an end to this noble tradition by inaugurating a barbaric U-turn away from an other-directed music to an inward-directed, narcissistic focus on the composer himself and his own tortured soul.
This was a ghastly inversion that led slowly but inevitably to the awful atonal music of Schoenberg and Webern. In other words, almost everything that went wrong with music in the 19th and 20th centuries is ultimately Beethoven’s fault. Poor old Schoenberg was simply taking Beethoven’s original mistake to its ultimate, monstrous logical conclusion.
Whoa! These are some giant leaps in the argument… Flawed ones, at that, at least when they turn into value judgements.
It is true that for a long time (approx. from Pythagoras to Mozart) it was believed that beauty was an objective property, based in numerical relations. But the U-turn — in the author’s actually quite appropriate words — which more or less coincided with Beethoven, was that this 2,000-year-long line of thought was abandoned, in favour of a philosophically based notion of receiver reactions.
So, if “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder”, it is obvious that the perspective in both the production and the reception of beauty will shift towards the individual. But to give Beethoven the blame — or should I say: the credit! — for this, is a slight exaggeration.
He employed his genius in the service of a fundamentally flawed idea. If Beethoven had dedicated his obvious talents to serving the noble Pythagorean view of music, he might well have gone on to compose music even greater than that of Mozart.
This is great…! I have only two things to say:
1. serving “the noble Pythagorean view of music” in the age of Kant — now that would have been a historical monstrosity and an employment of genius “in the service of a fundamentally flawed idea”.
2. In my book, Beethoven still rules.
One Too Many Mornings
Seven years ago, I wrote, in the first version of the tab of “One Too Many Mornings”:
The chords below are what he plays. I’m not sure about the fingering, though. I have a feeling that it is played in some kind of altered tuning, but I’m not sure yet. The low g’s that are sounding throughout most of the song would indicate an open string. I’m working on it.
This was one of the first songs I tabbed — or should I say: failed to tab. At that time, I only had the song on vinyl, and apart from the huge problem involved in tabbing from a vinyl player (moving the pickup five seconds back not only damages the record, it is also impossible). I thought about various open tunings — especially the consistent use of the G on the deepest string pointed in that direction, but also the many instances of two neighbouring strings with the same tone — but in the end I settled with an approximation in standard tuning, and the song remained in the “things to do” folder (only to prove that the last sentence in the quotation was a lie).
Today I finally sat down with it again, and it turned out to be played in open A, the same tuning that he used on the Freewheelin’ outtake “Wichita Blues”. It’s an interesting tuning, because the strings are tuned as closely together as possible. This may also be the reason why it has not been used much: the closeness gives a very homogenous sound, but this also limits the sonorous possibilities. Also, the two c# strings give the major third a very prominent place, which almost rules out any blues oriented songs at the outset (in Wichita Blues, the highest string is not c#’ but e’).
Anyway, the tab is ready.
“What I learned from Lonnie” pt. IV: Dylan the Pythagorean
[This post belongs to a series about Dylan’s idea of “mathematical music” in Chronicles]
“I’m not a numerologist”, Dylan says (Chronicles, p. 159). But before and after this statement, he builds up such a metaphysical web around the force of numbers, that the only definition of a numerologist that he does not fit into, is the kind who calculate a lucky number from the letters of their name. Alright, this is after all not a Rod Stewart blog.
In the Rolling Stone interview from November 2001, where he first mentioned the Lonnie Jonhson method explicitly, he says:
Lonnie Johnson, the blues-jazz player, showed me a technique on the guitar in maybe 1964. I hadn’t really understood it when he first showed it to me. It had to do with the mathematical order of the scale on a guitar, and how to make things happen, where it gets under somebody’s skin and there’s really nothing they can do about it, because it’s mathematical.
In Chronicles, he continues:
I had the idea that he was showing me something secretive, though it didn’t make sense to me at the time…
So we have an esoteric system, communicated to him in the secrecy of the back room or wherever he was taken aside, which works, regardless of what the player or listener know, understands, or thinks of it, solely on the force of the mathematical structure of the system — “because it’s mathematical.”
The Pythagorean Tradition of numbers
The belief that something can work simply “because it’s mathematical”, depends in some way or another on the idea that numbers have certain metaphysical qualities with a real influence on things in reality.
This is the foundation of the Pythagorean theory of numbers, which I’ve alluded to before in this series. Most people know the Pythagorean Theorem, about the relations between the sides in a right-angled triangle: a2 + b2 = c2 (Dylan knows it too, even though he got the formula wrong in the Rome interview, where he presented it as “a square equals b square equals c square”, which may reveal a truth on a more profound level, but which would do you no good in your calculus 101 class).
But the classic didactical myth, handed down in numerous treatises throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages, tells of how Pythagoras walked by a blacksmith who was pounding away on his anvils, and Pythagoras discovered that some of the anvils produced harmonious sounds together, while others did not. He investigated this closer, and found that the mass of the harmonious anvils were in simple proportions to each other — 1:2, 2:3, or 3:4 — while those in more complex relations produced unpleasing sounds. An anvil twice as big as another, would sound an octave lower, whereas one 1.3658 times the size, would sound like… dunno, the Shaggs or something.
The physical facts of this legend have been proven wrong, but what matters is the belief (1) that harmoniousness depends on proportions that can be expressed in simple ratios, (2) that these proportions, which can be described in a purely mathematical form, not only govern harmony in music, but also in the universe as a whole, and (3) that there is some kind of connection between the different kinds and areas of harmony. Thus, playing a tune in a mode which emphasises certain intervals, will influence the balance between the body fluids, and can thus alter the mood of the listeners.
This discovery and the theoretical/religious system that was built around it, became essential to all ideas of harmony and beauty from Antiquity up until the eighteenth century. Plato considered this kind of mathematical harmony to be the fundamental property of the world. In his creation myth Timaios, the creator-god shapes the world beginning with unity, then extending it with ‘the other’ and ‘the intermediary’, and along the corresponding number series 1, 2, 4, 8 and 1, 3, 9, 27, the whole world is created.
In the Middle Ages, this idea was adapted to the Christian frame of thought. In the apocryphical Wisdom of Solomon in the Bible, it says, “You have ordered all things in number, measure, and weight” (Wisdom of Solomon 11: 21), and this verse was quoted time and again in medieval treatises on music.
Thus, what at first sight may look like a dry and slightly tedious exercise in simple arithmetics, is of vast importance because behind the dry façade lies the notion that numbers and numerical relations are reflections of the divine principles governing the universe; that we find the same relations in the universe as a whole, in human beings, in musical sounds, and in visible beauty, and that by knowing the numbers, we can affect humans and glimpse God.
This is why the slight irregularities in the purely mathematical definition of the scale became such a heated topic. The theorists spent gallons of ink on discussing the problem with the division of a tone in two equal halves, which according to the Pythagorean system is impossible, because it is founded on ratios between natural numbers (the equal division of a tone requires the square root of 2, which was unknown to ancient and medieval thinkers).
The Christian heritage from antiquity was largely Platonic. One of the consequences of the humanistic re-appraisal of the classical traditions during the Renaissance, was that other voices from antiquity were added to the stew. Aristotle, with his less mystical and more rationalistic approach, was revived from the twelfth century, and in the field of music theory, Aristoxenos, whose theories were based on geometrical rather than arithmetical considerations, was more palatable to the practically oriented writers of the Renaissance, who were more concerned with actual sound and preferred the pure harmonies of just intonation to the theoretically “correct” but ugly-sounding harmonies.
Approaching Dylan again
If you object that this doesn’t seem to have much to do with Dylan and Lonnie, you’re absolutely right. I’m partly exerting my right to write whatever I want to do — this is my blog — but partly I’m also trying to demonstrate how important the concept of mathematical music has been, way back in history, and how widely the implications it carries reach.
In order to gradually work our way back to Dylan again, one might point to yet another element that entered the picture in the Florentine academies in the fifteenth century: an extension of the notion of the special mystical character of certain numbers. The mainstream medieval tradition had mainly been concerned with twos and threes, but — partly owing to influence from the cabbalistic tradition — a more extended array of meaningful numbers was established and systematized. The Fibonacci sequences and other similar number sequences, and all the sacred numbers of the Bible — just about every number seemed to have a secret meaning, a value beyond the numerical one.
This is the background for Dylan’s perception of the system he learned back in ’64. In the following quotation from Chronicles (p. 158), I have emphasised some words which highlights the strong dichotomy that Dylan sees between the world of 2 and the world of 3:
The system works in a cyclical way. Because you’re thinking in odd numbers instead of even numbers, you’re playing with a different value system. Popular music is usually based on the number 2 and then filled with fabrics, colors, effects and technical wizardry to make a point. But the total effect is usually depressing and oppressive and a dead end which at the most can only last in a nostalgic way. If you’re using an odd numerical system, things that strengthen a performance automatically begin to happen and make it memorable for the ages. You don’t have to plan or think ahead.
What is most striking, I think (apart from the description of popular music as based on the number 2, which quite bluntly disregards the blues/jazz tradition, where a triple feel is predominant), is the statement that these are different worlds, different value systems, which have an automatic effect on the performance: it is not something the performer does, but something that is done through the performer.
Does Dylan believe all this? Yes, I would think so. He is after all a poet, a sponge, a mystic, a sage; he takes what he can gather from coincidence, mixes it all together, and out comes… well, sometimes Knocked out Loaded, but we can forgive him that, since he also produces Blood on the Tracks and Chronicles, which is a fascinating read, even though what he writes is less clear than what an academic might have wanted.
More to come…
(Those of you who have access to Judas! may want to look up my article “Beauty may only turn to Rust” in the 8th issue, where I go into these things in more detail, and relate them to Dylan’s liner notes to Joan Baez in Concert, vol. 2, his aesthetical manifesto.)
“What I learned from Lonnie” pt. III: The Link Wray “Rumble” connection
[This post belongs to a series about Dylan’s idea of “mathematical music” in Chronicles]
In the discussion of the Lonnie Johnson technique in Chronicles, Dylan refers to Link Wray’s “Rumble” as one of the pieces that uses this method.
He says:
Once I understood what I was doing, I realized that I wasn’t the first one to do it, that Link Wray had done the same thing in his classic song “Rumble” many years earlier. Link’s song had no lyrics, but he had played with the same numerical system. It would never have occurred to me where the song’s power had come from because I had been hypnotized by the tone of the piece.
He then compares this to a performance by Martha Reeves where she “beat a tambourine in triplet form […] and she phrased the song as if the tambourine were her entire band”.
This is all very interesting, but it hardly sheds any light on the “Lonnie” system as he presents it. Well, let’s see.
“Rumble” is an instrumental, played by a combo of two guitars, bass and drums. It is easy to see how the raw intensity may have caught Dylan’s interest. The introduction goes something like this:
D D E D D
. . : . . . : . . .
---0-----0-----|-0-----------------------|-------------0-----0-----|
---3-----3-----|-0-----------------------|-------------3-----3-----|
---2-----2-----|-1-----------------------|-------------2-----2-----|
---0-----0-----|-2-----------------------|-------------0-----0-----|
---0-----0-----|-2-----------------------|-------------------------|
---------------|-0-----------------------|-------------------------|
| | |
| : . . . | : . . . |
|-------------------------|-------------------------|
|-------------------------|-------------------------|
Bass |-------------------------|-------------------------|
|-------------------------|-------------------------|
|-------------------------|-------------------------|
|-0-----1-----2-----3-----|-0-----1-----2-----3-----|
| | |
| | |
| : . . . | : . . . |
Cymbal |-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-|-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-|
| | |
Bass drum |-x-----x-----x-----x-x-x-|-x-----x-----x-----x-x-x-|
This is really all there is to the song, with the exception of a “solo” verse, which consists of violent tremolo strumming, and a turnaround figure after each verse, which adds two beats to the general four beats per measure, giving it all a limp that is certain to wake one up, should one against all likelihood have fallen asleep.
D D B7
: . : . . .
---0-----0-----|-------2-----------------|
---3-----3-----|------0------------------|
---2-----2-----|-----2-------------------|
---0-----0-----|----1--------------------|
---------------|-2-----------------------|
---------------|-------------------------|
E D D E
: . . . . . : . . . :
|-------------3-0---------------------|-------------2-----2-----|-0-----
|-----------------3-0-----------------|-------------3-----3-----|-0-----
|---------------------2-0-------------|-------------2-----2-----|-1-----
|-------------------------2-0---------|-------------0-----0-----|-2-----
|-----------------------------2-0-----|-------------------------|-2-----
|---------------------------------3---|-0-----------------------|-0-----
It makes perfect sense that Dylan has liked this. There is the unpolished character of the whole thing, which reminds one of the best moments of Highway 61. There is the soundscape of sharply differentiated parts, each with its own distinctive rhythmic pattern:
- a raw electric guitar, slightly out of tune, pounding three-chord patterns and a simple run at the end;
- a muffled bass playing simple, chromatic ascending figures over and over again;
- two widely different percussion sounds — the cymbals with their insistent triplets and the bass drums with their dump “tam, tam, tam, ta-ta-ta”;
- and the rhythm guitar, which only plays the strong beats and nothing else.
Both guitars, in different ways, take the part of the drummer, as Dylan has described his own solo guitar playing on several occasions, whereas the drums do just as much “motivic” or “thematic” work as any of the others.
But what does it have to do with Lonnie Johnson and mathematical music?
At first sight: nothing.
At second sight: well, the number three is all over the place: the main line of the guitar is three chords — silence — three chords — etc, ended by a measure which is extended from 2×2 to 3×2 beats. The cymbals play different kinds of triplets all the time, and the bass drum plays three long and three short.
Hey, perhaps we’re on to something here? Triplets, what is it about triplets? He says earlier:
I don’t know why the number 3 is more metaphysically powerful than the number 2, but it is.
There is a long line of thinking behind this, which of course goes back to the pythagoreans, again. I will write more about this in a forthcoming post, but as a teaser, the numerical system in Plato’s account is based on each number having its own metaphysical character, one being unity (and not really a number at all), two representing “the other” and three “the intermediary”. The difference between two and three has been central to all numerological systems throughout the history of ideas.
I’m not saying Dylan is a Platonist (and he says himself that he’s not a numerologist, so we better believe him, right?)(Right!), but it is not either unlikely that he has picked up some sort of idea along these lines, and why not from Lonnie Johnson? And if he believes the beauty of the system is that it works, regardless of artifice: the audience will go wild, no matter — if it works, then why not use it?
Be that as it may, the beauty of this explanation is that it works whether Dylan is right or not, whether there is a firm basis for the system or not. What Link Wray does, through his use of various permutations of threes, is to create a polyphonic structure with different layers of rhythmic activity in different instrument parts, all going on at the same time, and creating a remarkable complexity with very limited means. Whether it works because of the number three or because of the raw sound, the hypnotic repetitivity, and the underground Rumble of ominous ta-ta-ta in the drums and weird chromatics in the bass, barely audible as such, but mostly very disturbing — who am I to tell why it works?
And these elements: pared down resources, insistent repetition, sometimes weird “chromatics” (which one might — O horrible thought! — have mistaken for mistakes, but now we know better…), guitars playing drums and vice versa — these are precisely what characterizes Dylan’s band and his playing from 1988 and in the following years.
Now it remains to take a closer look at some of his own music making during those years, to see where the triplets went.
“What I learned from Lonnie Johnson” part II
[This post belongs to a series about Dylan’s idea of “mathematical music” in Chronicles]
I agree with the comment in the first post on this subject, that rhythm and a deliberately ambiguity between 3/4 and 4/4 time may be part of what Dylan is talking about. Some of the problem is that he seems to glide — at least in the way he talks about it — between pitch and rhythm as the topic. Some of it, which is the part that I emphasised in my previous post, makes sense as a descripion of a formulaic system of composition, where a set of generic rules can be applied in a variety of situations and produce the goods.
This has been described in the field of literature by Albert Lord and Milman Perry, who studied the formulaic composition of epic poetry in the Balkans, and compared it, as a (then, at least) living tradition, with the Homeric epics, and found the same fundamental traits. The conclusion that the Iliad and the Odyssey are written-out versions of improvised poetry, while upsetting some notions about the Genius who laid the foundation for Western Literature, is hardly surprising, since Homeros was supposed to have lived before the development of writing.
But apart from that, the Lord/Perry studies have been important for the development of a framework for studies of formulaicism in general. This has been taken up by the musicologist Leo Treitler who has applied some of it (but with major qualifications) to the medieval repertory of plainchant.
Anyway, I’m rambling; stop me. [Stop!][Ok, thanks].
The other side would be the rhythmic aspect, which is also clearly part of what he’s talking about. It makes sense, judging from his singing style in the late 80s and early 90s, that he has had considerations about various ways to circle around the various rhythmical strata in a song.
It reminds me of Levon Helm’s comment in the video about the making of “The Brown Album”, about people thinking that it must be difficult to sing lead and play drums at the same time. But for him, he says, it’s the other way around, because he can sing ‘around’ what he plays (or vice versa).
But in either case, there is no easy connection between what Dylan says he does, and what one can hear him doing. Especially when he gets concrete. When he says:
It’s a highly controlled system of playing and relates to the notes of a scale, how they combine numerically, how they form melodies out of triplets and are axiomatic to the rhythm and the chord changes.
–there are a number of possible interpretations, but also a quagmire of possible mistakes, on Dylan’s part and on the reader’s. One is fairly easily taken care of:
- “triplets” is a rhythmical term, denoting the subdivision of a beat in three instead of two units. What he probably has in mind, is triads, the units of three tones separated by major and minor thirds, which have been the foundation of Western harmony since the fifteenth century, and which is usually called “chords”.
But other points are less clear-cut:
- “How [the notes of a scale] combine numerically” — is this a reference to the esoteric tradition of harmony-of-the-spheres which goes back to the Pythagoreans, or simply a way of saying that there are certain patterns in the scale?
- “How [the notes of the scale] form melodies out of triplets” (i.e. triads). Is this a reference to the triadic nature of melody in the western tradition, where certain melodic tones get a particular emphasis because of their structural importance in the triads? In functional harmony, a certain sounding chord is described according to which function it fulfills, which means that the same chord can mean different things depending on the context (see the “D” in different versions of Girl of the North Country), or a chord can be called a G chord without even containing the tone G. (I know I have an example of that in one of the tabs, but I can’t remember where). As I’ve argued in some of my articles in the “Self-Ordained Professors” section, the skillful handling of these features can be observed in Dylan’s music, but I still doubt that that is what Lonnie told him.
- “axiomatic to rhythm and chord changes”. Yes, again: the relationship between rhythm and harmony is close, even though they are different phenomena. The pivot is “structural importance”, which is decided in the interrelations between triad and rhythm: a structural tone is one which is placed on a strong beat, but in some situations, a weak beat may become strong because it is inhabited by a structural tone.
This is fairly straightforward, but Dylan actually makes a much wider claim when he says that the notes of the scale are “axomatic to rhythm and chord changes”. “Axiomatic” would imply that the notes of the scale are the fundamental building blocks upon which the system is defined, without themselves needing any definition within the system. This would mean that rhythm is inconceivable without a structured pitch hierarchy, which — as a general statement — is pure bullshit. He may be thinking only of his own system, but for an artist working in a tradition based so heavily on rhythm, this becomes a strange statement, to say the least.
Is this what Dylan means, then, or does he actually mean “triplets” when he says “triplets”, and hints at some direct, mystical connection between harmony and triple rhythm? If that’s what Lonnie told him, he lied…
The death of classical music, II: On whales and camels
Going off the rails
Norman Lebrecht has a lot of critical insight to share for those who care about the classical music scene (I don’t know if I do, anymore, but I do appreciate people caring). Recently (well, in January anyway — I’m slow) there were reports of railway stations in England playing classical music over the speakers, with the effect that the crime rate dropped dramatically.
“Wonderful! Behold the soothing effect of classical music on the human mind!” We’ve heard it before (“Mozart makes you smarter”, etc.).
Lebrecht comes to a different conclusion:
It works as a deterrent effect rather than a corrective one. Hooligans are not reformed by Mozart, so much as driven away by a noise that is as alien and hostile to their world as whale song to a camel herd.
there is not a jot of evidence to show that music can be made to work one way or other as a force of social engineering. The reports from peaked-cap inspectors at Elm Park, Whitley Bay and Sow Hill, as well as results from Canada and Australia, are anecdotal. They demonstrate only that in a limited area, for a short period, hooligans can be deflected by unfamiliar sounds.
I’m not saying that it may not be a good thing, and neither does Norman, nor the average traveller:
Travellers in musically protected areas say they feel reassured for their safety and culturally enhanced by the accompaniment to their waiting time.
So far so good. Music doesn’t make you a better person. If you like it, it may give you a good time, but the hooligans don’t become better people — they don’t disappear, they just move on to the next station, where there aren’t these strange, non-sampled sounds coming out of nowhere.
But to me, the most important question is: what does this use of music do to us, or to our appreciation of music? It’s related to the question why we don’t just DNA register the whole population — law-abiding citizens will have nothing to fear, and the positive effects are considerable. So why not do it? Well, because —
Music is a vast psychological mystery, and playing it to police railways is culturally reckless, profoundly demeaning to one of the greater glories of civilisation.
That’s why. Music and art are too important to be left to commoditifying and utilitarian officials, because they relate to how we think, and how we think to how we act. I say: musical structures can be meaningful because they resemble a language — the stylized sounds through which we think — and knowing them (and knowing them as such) can give us a glimpse from the outside of how language works, of how we think. But it is also a stylization of how we act: an aestheticization — a systematization into a framework of thought about physical acts — of common actions like walking, breathing, making love: a meetingplace for body and soul.
Now, after this cannonade of simplified aeshtetic theory, answer this: if music is a translation into sound of the patterns and tensions we live by as human beings, what does it do to your breathing (or your love-making) to be constantly surrounded by stylized versions of it, e.g. while you’re running to catch the next train?
I’m not saying the answer cannot be: “It does me good!” I’m just saying that as long as we can’t rule out that the consequences of this light-weight, ill-planned use of the materials of mind and body are potentially disastrous, I’d rather have my soundscape as clean as possible, as the default.
And crime rates? This isn’t a nice and cozy society we’re living in, as a rule, and don’t tell me that a little beautifying, some aural cosmetics here and there, will change that. The grim realities are that “Legalized abortion was the single biggest factor in bringing the crime wave of the 1980s to a screeching halt [during the 90s].” Not Mayor Giuliani’s efforts in New York, but the fact that “hundreds of thousands of prospective criminals had been aborted”, who previously had been brought into this wonderful world of ours. This is the conclusion that the Indiana Jones of economics and statistics, Steven Levitt, has come to in his book Freakonomics. Truly food for thought. Seen this way, legalized abortion is a self-regulating safety valve of a society — a political stroke of genius, albeit unplanned: let the poor buggers weed out their own scum before it even sees the light of day. Perhaps this is putting too much weight on links between socio-economical conditions, abortion, and crime, but at least it puts some huge issues on the table, and and the more I think about it, the more the thought of hearing music in trainstations makes me sick.
* * *
Norman Lebrecht doesn’t like this (ab)use of music either. He suggests an alternative: Look to Finland!
What are the Finns doing right? Every child in Finland is given an instrument to play from the first day at school. They learn to read notes on stave before letters on page. They spend hours at drawing and drama. The result is a society of with few tensions and profound culture. Finnish Radio broadcasts in Latin once a week.
Is it possibly as simple as that? Probably not, but it’s a nice idea.
“What I learned from Lonnie Johnson”
[This post belongs to a series about Dylan’s idea of “mathematical music” in Chronicles]
Well, what is it — the musical style that Dylan talks about in Chronicles?
I’ll be writing some more on this on the main site, but here are some less processed ideas about it, in preparation for the longer study. I welcome comments.
He’s been talking about this before. The first time was already in 1966, in the interview with Klas Burling in Sweden:
Well you know my songs are all mathematical songs. You know what that means so I’m not gonna have to go into that specifically here. [yeah, sure] It happens to be a protest song … and it borders on the mathematical, you know, idea of things, and this one specifically happens to deal with a minority of, you know, cripples and orientals, and, uh, you know, and the world in which they live, you realize, you know, you understand, you know. It’s sort of a North Mexican kind of a thing, uh, very protesty. Very very protesty. And, uh, one of the protestiest of all things I ever protested against in my protest years. But uh…
Not necessarily very clear, but he certainly had the idea about mathematical music already back then. It might perfectly well be true, that he learned about this from Lonnie Johnson in 1965.
But what was it that he learned? If one wanted, one could go as deeply into this as one wished. There is a long tradition, going back to the Pythagoreans in pre-ancient times, of a connection between music and numbers. It is my contention, however, that
1. what Dylan talks about in Chronicles has nothing whatsoever to do with the Pythagorean tradition,
2. Dylan’s method is less clear-cut and conistent than what he presents it as,
3. it probably has nothing to do with whatever Johnson may have told him in the 60s,
4. but that doesn’t matter, as long as it has worked for him.
All this stuff about even and odd numbers — well, I don’t think it makes sense. What does seem clear, judging from what he actually says and comparing it with what he does on stage, is that he’s talking about the peculiar guitar style that he has developed during the Never Ending Tour years: the little two-three-note figure solos that he has kept churning out and that at times has driven most of us crazy, but which also — in a strange way and to a surprisingly high degree — work, musically. Outgrowths of this is probably also the sing-song/”up-singing” style of the recent years: it all fits his description fairly well, of a system of infinite permutations of very simple formulas, nothing to do with improvisation or inspiration, but a schematical approach to the basic chords and melodic shapes, which can be applied to just about any song — which is what he does.
That said, I don’t think it is a system that someone else can learn to use — it is hardly insignificant that there are twenty years of touring and music making between the time he first learned it and when he understood how to put it to use. It has taken him those years to gain the musicianship (and perhaps also the need for routine which persistent touring must bring with it) which he then could cross-fertilize with what Lonnie Johnson had told him, to produce his new method. In other words: I think Dylan should receive more of the credit for it than Lonnie.
Alex Ross: The Wanderer
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: The Wanderer
I’ve only recently gotten involved in the blog world, and this is one of the blogs I’ve realized I’ve missed. Alex Ross is known in the Dylan world as the author of one of the best recent articles about Dylan, and in the rest of the world as music critic in The New Yorker. His blog (mainly concerned with classical music) is one I frequently check out, and the Dylan article is available there too.