8 ms·

Did Bach “invent” the rules of music theory?

99 points by revorad 4y ago

jimbob45 4y ago
The answer is resoundingly no. If anyone deserves to be called the father or mother or modern music theory, it would be Pythagoras.
- klipt 4y ago
  Did Pythagoras actually write any music worth listening too?
  - analog31 4y ago
    We don't know. From what I've read, we know a little bit about early theory, but don't know precisely what scales and intervals they were talking about.
    - mmcclimon 4y ago
      We know quite a lot about Greek music theory (Thomas Mathiesen's Apollo's Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquity in the Middle Ages is the go-to source here: https://archive.org/details/mathiesen-1999-apollos-lyre/page/n1/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/mathiesen-1999-apollos-lyre/page...). Of course we don't have recordings, but we do have a solid understanding of the theory, and some very good guesses as to the scales and intervals.
  - Stratoscope 4y ago
    Not that we have live recordings of. But there is no doubt that he was a pioneer of music theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_tuning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_tuning https://www.jstor.org/stable/24045969 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24045969 (Pythagoras and the Origin of Music Theory) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.00998.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.00998.pdf (Dynamical systems, celestial mechanics, and music: Pythagoras revisited)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jancsika 4y ago
  > The answer is resoundingly no. Not only is it a resounding no, there is ongoing research to find the roots of this cliche. I can't seem to find the article, but it traces it back to this chemical engineer who did a statistical analysis of the bass lines and cadencial formulae in Bach's chorales. I've even seen some scans of his analyses, it's wild stuff. Maybe it's on libgen? I can't remember but you can probably do a search for it... Edit: added a link to the article Edit2: nope, never mind, that wasn't it. But if I find it I'll add the URL later...
  - darkerside 4y ago
    Allen McHose perhaps? :)
- ajross 4y ago
  Meh. I think that's sort of overstating things. Pythagorean tuning is an iterated, circle of fifths construction of a scale. And as such it... frankly kinda sucks rocks at explaining triad-based harmony. The numbers don't work out. You can get something that kinda sounds like a chord, but not really. And so two millenia of Pythagorean music really didn't get into triadic harmony at all, because the language that it had with which to express those notes didn't permit them. It wasn't until vocal music in the early enlightenment essentially happened upon major/minor chords and built modalities around them (largely by accident, because they sound good!) that people went back to the drawing board to build a mathematical description of the scale based on integer ratios instead. And from there, it was a quick jump to the equitempered scale we know today, which (unlike the pythagorean scale) actually is a very good approximation to the "real" chords people were singing. And the first composer to really put all those new tools together into a coherent theory behind how to compose music was... J. S. Bach. He didn't "invent" all that stuff, but his works were the first ones we can look at and recognize what we now call "modern" exploitations of tuning and tonality. Anyone earlier was missing big pieces. Anyone later was only adding something new here or there. JSB is a genuine discontinuity, and it's worthwhile to celebrate that.
- bogomipz 4y ago
  And furthered later by Aristoxenus a pupil of Aristotle: https://soundpostonline.com/music-theory-in-ancient-greece/ https://soundpostonline.com/music-theory-in-ancient-greece/
pierrec 4y ago
The statistical study of Bach's works seems interesting. That said, I'm not convinced that any of the cited works (McHose, Hanson...) suggest that Bach invented the rules of music theory, they just use him as an prime example for baroque counterpoint. I'm sure those authors are quite familiar with Bach's immediate predecessors like Buxtehude, who had a fairly similar style.
heikkilevanto 4y ago
Bach was considered in his lifetime to be a rather old-fashioned composer, not one that invented new theories. Still a respected composer, of course, and quite productive. That was a time when many people wrote about music theory in one way or another: Corelli, Rameau, Telemann, Quantz, Handel, etc. My understanding is that they mostly tried to explain the existing tradition of baroque music, more than invent new theory. After Bach died, musical tastes changed, and music developed into a different direction.
- Bud 4y ago
  But how different, really? Bach still has a lot of relevance in the present day. Try out Paul Simon's "American Tune". Based on a Bach chorale.
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  > they mostly tried to explain the existing tradition of baroque music, more than invent new theory Explaining existing music means creating new theory. Creating music and creating a theory about it are two different things.
- klik99 4y ago
  This is how I understand it too - though "the rules of counterpoint" as they are taught today were really codified after Bach (who was already ~50 years out of date!). Typically (not always!) the "rules" of a style of music are malleable and flexible and argued over while the music is still relevant and codified into unchangeable standards after they have fallen out of fashion. Blues is a good modern example. Dubstep and the 100 related genres and vaporwave and it's 100 related genres, are counter-examples, instead slightly changing the rules becomes a new subgenre, which I feel is the same effect but manifesting itself differently. Bach himself "breaks" at least one rule in every piece, and I can think of one rule that was really due to technological limitations of the time - not modulating to more than 2 keys away, because they didn't have 12-TET and going more than a few keys away sounded more and more dissonant - keyboard instruments were tuned to a specific key. The story I'm trying to tell is people arguing about the rules of music is no different than how composers/producers/song writers about music today with modern genres, and when some genre dies, the old guard tries to keep it "pure" by zeroing on a set of commonly used stylistic techniques and calling it "the rules" which makes the music more bland and uninteresting by smoothing out the rough edges. I was taught counterpoint by one of Shostakovichs last students, and my opinion on rules is greatly influenced by him - it's good to learn the rules, even though they aren't really rules, and all the greatest music from that time was written decades before the rules were even codified.
Bud 4y ago
Since this article focuses in on Bach chorales, here's a project I headed up in 2020 during the first months of covid to record (remotely; each person recorded their part individually, then sent it in) all the chorales from Bach's St. Matthew Passion, with some of the greatest Bach singers and players in North America, along with a brief talk before each chorale. Also, we obtained an acoustical model of Bach's church (the Thomaskirche in Leipzig) from its creator, and rendered the sound into that space, with each musician placed approximately where Bach would have had them. Enjoy. http://spiritsound.com/operationbach/index.html http://spiritsound.com/operationbach/index.html or here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm41dm8K6pS5Grt-LqYLVSg/videos?view=0&sort=da&flow=grid https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm41dm8K6pS5Grt-LqYLVSg/vid...
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  Cool
mmcclimon 4y ago
Oh boy. Music theory, as such, has no "rules," and so of course Bach did not invent them. Music theory is a descriptive enterprise, which aims to make sense of music as composed/performed/enacted by humans. (I have a PhD in music theory.) Bach's chorales were functional music for the Lutheran church, and to the extent that they form any sort of "rules" in music theory, it comes from the fact that they have been used to teach harmony for a long time (since at least the 1940s, as evidenced by this article). The reason for that isn't so much that they're prime examples of Western common-practice harmony, but rather that they have a homogeneous texture that's easy to use in classrooms, because they're easy for one person to play at the piano or for students to sing. Recent music theory pedagogy has largely been moving away from the reliance on Bach chorales to teach harmony, especially as music theory has taken a broader perspective on what music we should be studying anyway. Studying the Bach chorales is just fine if you want to know about how Bach used harmony, but there's a whole lot of music in the world, and there's no meaningful sense in which Bach's music intrinsically defines a set of rules any more than Mozart's or Clara Schumann's or AC/DC's or Meredith Monk's defines a set of rules.
- hooboodoo 4y ago
  I find it interesting that all of your examples to help define the broadness of musical theory as you see it are all, themselves, descended from western musical thought. That might speak to the point being made in a different way than any of us consider it.
  - mmcclimon 4y ago
    Fair point; that's partly my own bias (I know basically nothing about non-Western musics), and partly because of the article I'm responding to ("Bach doesn't tell us anything about gamelan music" isn't an interesting observation). But also: the majority of academic music theory at the moment does focus broadly on the Western tradition. That's changing, I think, but a quick scan of recent articles in Music Theory Online (https://www.mtosmt.org/issues/issues.php https://www.mtosmt.org/issues/issues.php) reveals quite a broad spectrum of music, most (not all!) of it is from the Western tradition.
yomkippur 4y ago
- a4isms 4y ago
  Perhaps, but this is true of all subjects: Sports, economics, politics, most hobbies, &c. On the one hand, this shows the arrogance of the techie: A belief that since we're rather clever in one application of intelligence, we must be clever at all of them, as if intelligence is the ultimate fungible skill. Intelligence is remarkably handy, and it is a lever: It takes whatever we know and multiplies its value. But it can't do much about fields in which we have little experience. It's simply not possible to have expertise in many fields without actual experience and study in those fields. But we can't resist assuming that whatever people are talking about, we can derive everything of interest from first principles and not from absorbing a body of knowledge that others have assembled over decades or even centuries. But let's not demonize ourselves over it. This is a social forum, a kind of digital saloon. And if we visit real-world saloons, we will find armchair political scientists, armchair coaches for every popular sport, armchair police detectives and so forth. It seems we're just like everyone else, we're just better at sounding articulate when we pontificate upon subjects with which we have little practical experience.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    And to add to that: there are plenty of HN'ers who do have a pretty solid grounding in music / music theory. (I'm not one of those, but I'm patiently working my way forward in this super interesting field.)
sdwr 4y ago
Just like everyone else, I love baiting questions designed to provoke engagement.. I heard a small child playing giant wind chimes (?) at the park today. She had fully-formed musical taste, as far as I could tell, and sounded really good. It helped that the instrument was easy to make good tone with, but all the pieces were there. Tension, release, playing around the root note, rhythm. Music is the intersection of sound and us.
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  Pentatonically tuned? I enjoy showing people that "can't play" that just using the black notes on a piano can be pretty enlightening. A sense of rhythm, sometimes however....
  - sdwr 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure there was a full scale in there!
rdtennent 4y ago
I heard a delightful story about a student who submitted as his own composition a chorale harmonization by Bach that he'd found in an obscure place. He was surprised to receive a failing grade from the professor. When he went to ask why, the professor simply said that it was too good and he couldn't possibly have composed it.
strangattractor 4y ago
I feel like like the term "theory" is somewhat subjective with regards to how it is being used for music. In science a theory is "a well-substantiated explanation of an aspect of the natural world that can incorporate laws, hypotheses and facts". From the discussion I would interpret theory as a set of rules used to achieve some musical effect. It is much squishier because there is likely a large set of music rules that can achieve similar results. In science that is also true but usually the simplest set of rules are chosen that satisfy the conditions. Seems like the scientific approach would be rather limiting for music - making it rather tedious and boring instead of inventive and interesting.
erwinh 4y ago
A lot of the early music theory comes from discovering resonating overtones before having the full physics & mathematical model to describe it exactly scientifically. The opening chapters of Theory of Harmony by Arnold Schoenberg are a very interesting read from that perspective. In a way its the same question as for math. Do mathematicians invent new mathematical theories or do they discover structures and concepts that exist in the idea world outside of our physical reality?
AlbertCory 4y ago
When I was a senior, I took the basic Music class, pass-fail, just in the hope that I'd finally learn something about classical music (spoiler: I did it on my own, well after college). Surprise, surprise: I had an African-American woman teacher, and she exposed us to a lot of blues & gospel music & jazz, as well as classical. We actually had Thomas Dorsey (Take My Hand, Precious Lord) and Furry Lewis visit the class. How many times are you going to luck into something like that? Since I spent lunch time at the library rather than go home, I also checked out jazz records and listened to them, like Monk, Miles, and Trane. What was supposed to be a primer in classical music instead turned into a lifetime passion for American roots music. This is no disrespect to either Bach chorales, or whatever is the opposite.
musicale 4y ago
Palestrina should sue.

99 points by revorad 4y ago

The answer is resoundingly no. If anyone deserves to be called the father or mother or modern music theory, it would be Pythagoras.

klipt 4y ago
Did Pythagoras actually write any music worth listening too?
- analog31 4y ago
  We don't know. From what I've read, we know a little bit about early theory, but don't know precisely what scales and intervals they were talking about.
  - mmcclimon 4y ago
    We know quite a lot about Greek music theory (Thomas Mathiesen's Apollo's Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquity in the Middle Ages is the go-to source here: https://archive.org/details/mathiesen-1999-apollos-lyre/page/n1/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/mathiesen-1999-apollos-lyre/page...). Of course we don't have recordings, but we do have a solid understanding of the theory, and some very good guesses as to the scales and intervals.
- Stratoscope 4y ago
  Not that we have live recordings of. But there is no doubt that he was a pioneer of music theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_tuning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_tuning https://www.jstor.org/stable/24045969 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24045969 (Pythagoras and the Origin of Music Theory) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.00998.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.00998.pdf (Dynamical systems, celestial mechanics, and music: Pythagoras revisited)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jancsika 4y ago
> The answer is resoundingly no. Not only is it a resounding no, there is ongoing research to find the roots of this cliche. I can't seem to find the article, but it traces it back to this chemical engineer who did a statistical analysis of the bass lines and cadencial formulae in Bach's chorales. I've even seen some scans of his analyses, it's wild stuff. Maybe it's on libgen? I can't remember but you can probably do a search for it... Edit: added a link to the article Edit2: nope, never mind, that wasn't it. But if I find it I'll add the URL later...
- darkerside 4y ago
  Allen McHose perhaps? :)
ajross 4y ago
Meh. I think that's sort of overstating things. Pythagorean tuning is an iterated, circle of fifths construction of a scale. And as such it... frankly kinda sucks rocks at explaining triad-based harmony. The numbers don't work out. You can get something that kinda sounds like a chord, but not really. And so two millenia of Pythagorean music really didn't get into triadic harmony at all, because the language that it had with which to express those notes didn't permit them. It wasn't until vocal music in the early enlightenment essentially happened upon major/minor chords and built modalities around them (largely by accident, because they sound good!) that people went back to the drawing board to build a mathematical description of the scale based on integer ratios instead. And from there, it was a quick jump to the equitempered scale we know today, which (unlike the pythagorean scale) actually is a very good approximation to the "real" chords people were singing. And the first composer to really put all those new tools together into a coherent theory behind how to compose music was... J. S. Bach. He didn't "invent" all that stuff, but his works were the first ones we can look at and recognize what we now call "modern" exploitations of tuning and tonality. Anyone earlier was missing big pieces. Anyone later was only adding something new here or there. JSB is a genuine discontinuity, and it's worthwhile to celebrate that.
bogomipz 4y ago
And furthered later by Aristoxenus a pupil of Aristotle: https://soundpostonline.com/music-theory-in-ancient-greece/ https://soundpostonline.com/music-theory-in-ancient-greece/

pierrec 4y ago

The statistical study of Bach's works seems interesting. That said, I'm not convinced that any of the cited works (McHose, Hanson...) suggest that Bach invented the rules of music theory, they just use him as an prime example for baroque counterpoint. I'm sure those authors are quite familiar with Bach's immediate predecessors like Buxtehude, who had a fairly similar style.

heikkilevanto 4y ago

Bach was considered in his lifetime to be a rather old-fashioned composer, not one that invented new theories. Still a respected composer, of course, and quite productive. That was a time when many people wrote about music theory in one way or another: Corelli, Rameau, Telemann, Quantz, Handel, etc. My understanding is that they mostly tried to explain the existing tradition of baroque music, more than invent new theory. After Bach died, musical tastes changed, and music developed into a different direction.

Bud 4y ago
But how different, really? Bach still has a lot of relevance in the present day. Try out Paul Simon's "American Tune". Based on a Bach chorale.
galaxyLogic 4y ago
> they mostly tried to explain the existing tradition of baroque music, more than invent new theory Explaining existing music means creating new theory. Creating music and creating a theory about it are two different things.
klik99 4y ago
This is how I understand it too - though "the rules of counterpoint" as they are taught today were really codified after Bach (who was already ~50 years out of date!). Typically (not always!) the "rules" of a style of music are malleable and flexible and argued over while the music is still relevant and codified into unchangeable standards after they have fallen out of fashion. Blues is a good modern example. Dubstep and the 100 related genres and vaporwave and it's 100 related genres, are counter-examples, instead slightly changing the rules becomes a new subgenre, which I feel is the same effect but manifesting itself differently. Bach himself "breaks" at least one rule in every piece, and I can think of one rule that was really due to technological limitations of the time - not modulating to more than 2 keys away, because they didn't have 12-TET and going more than a few keys away sounded more and more dissonant - keyboard instruments were tuned to a specific key. The story I'm trying to tell is people arguing about the rules of music is no different than how composers/producers/song writers about music today with modern genres, and when some genre dies, the old guard tries to keep it "pure" by zeroing on a set of commonly used stylistic techniques and calling it "the rules" which makes the music more bland and uninteresting by smoothing out the rough edges. I was taught counterpoint by one of Shostakovichs last students, and my opinion on rules is greatly influenced by him - it's good to learn the rules, even though they aren't really rules, and all the greatest music from that time was written decades before the rules were even codified.

Bud 4y ago

Since this article focuses in on Bach chorales, here's a project I headed up in 2020 during the first months of covid to record (remotely; each person recorded their part individually, then sent it in) all the chorales from Bach's St. Matthew Passion, with some of the greatest Bach singers and players in North America, along with a brief talk before each chorale. Also, we obtained an acoustical model of Bach's church (the Thomaskirche in Leipzig) from its creator, and rendered the sound into that space, with each musician placed approximately where Bach would have had them. Enjoy. http://spiritsound.com/operationbach/index.html http://spiritsound.com/operationbach/index.html or here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm41dm8K6pS5Grt-LqYLVSg/videos?view=0&sort=da&flow=grid https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm41dm8K6pS5Grt-LqYLVSg/vid...

galaxyLogic 4y ago
Cool

mmcclimon 4y ago

Oh boy. Music theory, as such, has no "rules," and so of course Bach did not invent them. Music theory is a descriptive enterprise, which aims to make sense of music as composed/performed/enacted by humans. (I have a PhD in music theory.) Bach's chorales were functional music for the Lutheran church, and to the extent that they form any sort of "rules" in music theory, it comes from the fact that they have been used to teach harmony for a long time (since at least the 1940s, as evidenced by this article). The reason for that isn't so much that they're prime examples of Western common-practice harmony, but rather that they have a homogeneous texture that's easy to use in classrooms, because they're easy for one person to play at the piano or for students to sing. Recent music theory pedagogy has largely been moving away from the reliance on Bach chorales to teach harmony, especially as music theory has taken a broader perspective on what music we should be studying anyway. Studying the Bach chorales is just fine if you want to know about how Bach used harmony, but there's a whole lot of music in the world, and there's no meaningful sense in which Bach's music intrinsically defines a set of rules any more than Mozart's or Clara Schumann's or AC/DC's or Meredith Monk's defines a set of rules.

hooboodoo 4y ago
I find it interesting that all of your examples to help define the broadness of musical theory as you see it are all, themselves, descended from western musical thought. That might speak to the point being made in a different way than any of us consider it.
- mmcclimon 4y ago
  Fair point; that's partly my own bias (I know basically nothing about non-Western musics), and partly because of the article I'm responding to ("Bach doesn't tell us anything about gamelan music" isn't an interesting observation). But also: the majority of academic music theory at the moment does focus broadly on the Western tradition. That's changing, I think, but a quick scan of recent articles in Music Theory Online (https://www.mtosmt.org/issues/issues.php https://www.mtosmt.org/issues/issues.php) reveals quite a broad spectrum of music, most (not all!) of it is from the Western tradition.

yomkippur 4y ago

a4isms 4y ago
Perhaps, but this is true of all subjects: Sports, economics, politics, most hobbies, &c. On the one hand, this shows the arrogance of the techie: A belief that since we're rather clever in one application of intelligence, we must be clever at all of them, as if intelligence is the ultimate fungible skill. Intelligence is remarkably handy, and it is a lever: It takes whatever we know and multiplies its value. But it can't do much about fields in which we have little experience. It's simply not possible to have expertise in many fields without actual experience and study in those fields. But we can't resist assuming that whatever people are talking about, we can derive everything of interest from first principles and not from absorbing a body of knowledge that others have assembled over decades or even centuries. But let's not demonize ourselves over it. This is a social forum, a kind of digital saloon. And if we visit real-world saloons, we will find armchair political scientists, armchair coaches for every popular sport, armchair police detectives and so forth. It seems we're just like everyone else, we're just better at sounding articulate when we pontificate upon subjects with which we have little practical experience.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  And to add to that: there are plenty of HN'ers who do have a pretty solid grounding in music / music theory. (I'm not one of those, but I'm patiently working my way forward in this super interesting field.)

sdwr 4y ago

Just like everyone else, I love baiting questions designed to provoke engagement.. I heard a small child playing giant wind chimes (?) at the park today. She had fully-formed musical taste, as far as I could tell, and sounded really good. It helped that the instrument was easy to make good tone with, but all the pieces were there. Tension, release, playing around the root note, rhythm. Music is the intersection of sound and us.

InCityDreams 4y ago
Pentatonically tuned? I enjoy showing people that "can't play" that just using the black notes on a piano can be pretty enlightening. A sense of rhythm, sometimes however....
- sdwr 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure there was a full scale in there!

rdtennent 4y ago

I heard a delightful story about a student who submitted as his own composition a chorale harmonization by Bach that he'd found in an obscure place. He was surprised to receive a failing grade from the professor. When he went to ask why, the professor simply said that it was too good and he couldn't possibly have composed it.

strangattractor 4y ago

I feel like like the term "theory" is somewhat subjective with regards to how it is being used for music. In science a theory is "a well-substantiated explanation of an aspect of the natural world that can incorporate laws, hypotheses and facts". From the discussion I would interpret theory as a set of rules used to achieve some musical effect. It is much squishier because there is likely a large set of music rules that can achieve similar results. In science that is also true but usually the simplest set of rules are chosen that satisfy the conditions. Seems like the scientific approach would be rather limiting for music - making it rather tedious and boring instead of inventive and interesting.

erwinh 4y ago

A lot of the early music theory comes from discovering resonating overtones before having the full physics & mathematical model to describe it exactly scientifically. The opening chapters of Theory of Harmony by Arnold Schoenberg are a very interesting read from that perspective. In a way its the same question as for math. Do mathematicians invent new mathematical theories or do they discover structures and concepts that exist in the idea world outside of our physical reality?

AlbertCory 4y ago

When I was a senior, I took the basic Music class, pass-fail, just in the hope that I'd finally learn something about classical music (spoiler: I did it on my own, well after college). Surprise, surprise: I had an African-American woman teacher, and she exposed us to a lot of blues & gospel music & jazz, as well as classical. We actually had Thomas Dorsey (Take My Hand, Precious Lord) and Furry Lewis visit the class. How many times are you going to luck into something like that? Since I spent lunch time at the library rather than go home, I also checked out jazz records and listened to them, like Monk, Miles, and Trane. What was supposed to be a primer in classical music instead turned into a lifetime passion for American roots music. This is no disrespect to either Bach chorales, or whatever is the opposite.

musicale 4y ago

Palestrina should sue.