Piano and Music Videos

The question today is, “Is Silence Music?” Naturally you may think, “How can silence be music?” Interestingly, there’s a pivotal piece of music that was composed in 1952 by John Cage called “Four Minutes, Thirty-three Seconds“. You may have heard of it.

“4’33” was written for piano in three movements and all three movements are nothing but rests. The artist comes on stage, opens the fallboard of the piano, and looks at his or her watch and waits the appropriate time for each of the three movements and that is the whole piece! What was he trying to prove? It’s actually a very interesting point that is made.

When you think about the whole universe, you cannot have matter without having space. Indeed, the space between things is as much of a reality as the objects in it. One cannot exist without the other. When I was attending the Manhattan School of Music, we studied the literary works of Carlos Castaneda in one of my classes. Castaneda conducted many different experiments to come to the realization of the meaning of life.

One of the teachings of Don Juan was when you look at a tree most people just look at the leaves of the tree, identify it and stop thinking about it because that is what we are programmed to do as human beings. He was trying to get the young man to understand that you can look at the tree and try not to classify it and indeed you can look at the space between the leaves and appreciate the beauty of that reality as well.

You may have heard the term polyphony before and might have wondered what it meant. Polyphony is intrinsic to almost all the music we listen to today but it wasn’t always that way. So, what does this term mean and why is it important?

There was a time when the only written music was monophonic, which means “one note at a time.” The first written music was called Gregorian Chant (or “plainsong”). This music was simply liturgical text that was sung with embellishments. There was only one line of music at a time and this is the only written music we have (and the very first written music) from the 9th and 10th centuries.

Eventually music evolved into something called organum, which had two lines – typically in parallel 4ths that would embellish the melody.

The tritone was considered to be a forbidden interval hundreds of years ago. Churches actually banned this interval from being played! Luckily there are no such restrictions today so we will be experimenting with it and understanding what its function is.

To put it very simply, the tritone is half an octave. There are twelve possible tones in Western music and if you go six half steps you will create a tritone. When you invert a tritone, it remains a tritone because it divides the octave exactly in half. When you play a triton you will understand why it was feared; the sound is eerie and almost demonic. In fact, it is used extensively in heavy metal music!

How does a tritone resolve? This is a very interesting aspect to tritones because you can go outward or inward by half steps and the tritone will resolve either way. So, if you have a tritone C – F-sharp, it could resolve outward to B – G. Or, it could resolve inward by half steps to C-sharp – E-sharp. Interestingly, each of these resolutions (outward or inward) end up being a tritone apart from one another. When resolving outward we ended up in G and when resolving inward it resolved to C-sharp. (G and C-sharp a tritone apart!)

The tritone is actually the basis for all Western music. This is because it is very important in determining the key of your music. In the classic cadence, I – IV – I 6/4 – V7 I, it is the tritone of the V7 chord that establishes the key.

A diminished 7th chord is actually two tritones creating great tension and a myriad of possibly resolutions which you can explore in the following videos:

The term perfect pitch sounds like a great thing doesn’t it? It even has the name perfect in it! However, there are a few drawbacks to having perfect pitch that some people might not be aware of, despite the name, it does have some challenging aspects.

Perfect pitch is actually a misnomer. It has nothing to do with intonation – being in tune – it is simply pitch memory. Someone with perfect pitch can hear any sound and without even thinking about it know exactly what note it is just like most people can recognize colors without effort.

The adjunct to perfect pitch is Relative Pitch. The vast majority of people – including professional musicians – are able to comprehend pitch by hearing one note relating it to all others. This is a skill that can be honed to the point where you might think that someone with a well developed sense of relative pitch has perfect pitch because they can nearly instantaneously recognize notes just from hearing them. The secret is that they must first identify one note. From there they can relate all other pitches from that reference note.

A person with perfect pitch does not need a reference note. They can simply identify notes on their own.

The benefits of this skill are great. For transcribing music – listening to music and writing it out – it is incredibly simple for someone with perfect pitch. There are some instances however where perfect pitch can actually be a detriment. How can this be?

Imagine this: you are singing in a choir and you have sheet music in front of you. The choir director decides that C major is a bit high for the choir so she wants to lower it down a whole-step to B-flat major. For the people in the choir with relative pitch this would make pretty much no difference – their relative pitch can easily adapt to the changes. For those in the choir with perfect pitch, they will have to calculate every single note to the lower pitch because their sense of pitch is absolute! If a C is written on the page they only see and hear C and not the B-flat the director wants.

What about if you have perfect pitch and you’re in an orchestra? Perhaps you are used to A- 440 which is how your piano is tuned at home. But what if the orchestra tunes higher to A-442 or A-444? This could be a challenge because the reference is so ingrained that a small change can be maddening – to have to play “out of tune”. The temptation is to play the “correct” pitch which is not going to work in this setting.

Let’s go back to the choir scenario. Imagine if during the performance the choir shifts up or down in pitch – which can definitely happen when the choir is not accompanied by any other instruments. People with relative pitch may not even sense the wandering of the pitch. But the person with perfect pitch will hear the error and have a hard time adjusting as the choir drifts up or down in pitch. This is a very real scenario.

Perfect pitch is not something that’s a deal breaker for musicians. In fact it can be extremely beneficial but it’s not without its challenges. It’s important for all musicians regardless of whether they have perfect pitch or not to understand the underlying structure of music. Perfect pitch is a tremendous thing to have in certain situations but it’s not a substitute for getting intimately involved in how music is constructed.

If you don’t have perfect pitch it’s not a big deal – most of us have to depend upon relative pitch. If you have perfect pitch you should enjoy your inherent skill but still focus on learning the fundamentals of music and the relationship of tones just as someone with relative pitch would have to do.

Welcome to my ongoing series of music theory lessons. Today we will be covering Pentatonic scales.

“Penta” means five, and as such these scales all have 5 notes in them. Major and minor scales contain 8 notes and chromatic scales contain 12; so 5 notes is quite a difference from other scales. As far as the intervals for pentatonic scales go, you can form one in any key by using the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th, and 6th note of that major scale.

It’s actually great that we are using a piano keyboard as an example because the black keys on the piano actually form a pentatonic scale all on their own starting on G-flat. You might have noticed that if you play just the black keys on a piano, they tend to sound good together. That’s because it’s literally impossible to play a wrong note using just the black keys!

What’s really great about pentatonic scales is that all the notes sound really good together. I’m not kidding when I say you can play the black keys and make nearly anything sound good. Even someone who has never played the piano before can play just the black keys and create something that sounds pretty nice. If you’ve never improvised before this is a great place to start learning; just start playing the black keys and make something up. If you have a friend, try playing together just using the black keys; you will be pleasantly surprised at how good it can sound!

That’s really about all there is to know about pentatonic scales. I hope you enjoyed this exploration and look forward to next week’s video when we cover more music theory topics.