from Hacker News

Did Bach “invent” the rules of music theory?

by revorad on 8/17/22, 5:02 PM with 64 comments

• by mmcclimon on 8/21/22, 10:27 PM

  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.

• by Bud on 8/21/22, 10:03 PM

  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

  or here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm41dm8K6pS5Grt-LqYLVSg/vid...

• by heikkilevanto on 8/21/22, 9:55 PM

  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.

• by AlbertCory on 8/22/22, 5:37 AM

  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.

• by sdwr on 8/21/22, 11:31 PM

  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.

• by strangattractor on 8/22/22, 1:15 AM

  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.

• by erwinh on 8/22/22, 5:16 AM

  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?

• by pierrec on 8/21/22, 9:43 PM

  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.

• by rdtennent on 8/22/22, 12:59 AM

  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.

• by jimbob45 on 8/21/22, 8:40 PM

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

• by musicale on 8/23/22, 7:46 AM

  Palestrina should sue.