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To the theorist:(MUST READ SEND ME HATE MAIL LATER)

It seems to me that, yes, even on this great musical site(a four page discussion on accoutics""), there seems to be, like everywhere in the world of music, excessive, and even pointless analysis of things that, at the end of the day mean nothing.
The simple question that must be addressed is that why when reading the writtings of the great composers, there is clarity and sense, when on the other hand when reading the great players or musical academics, there is no sense, and in fact the writtings upom most subjects of musical conception-theory, harmony, meter, technique, and the like, written by the best in the field are crappy, nonsensical, and for the most part not very helpful. Check this out for yourself-go to your local library and check out even a basic book on music and you will find it to be mostly pointless. The most we know of Bach, and upon the brown of his own views comes down to the simple point of putting the fingers in the right place at the right time, yet when one reads a musical analysis by a great harvard man on Bach, there is hundreds of pages of nonsensical rubbish, every measure is unclearly analyzed to the point where you do not know what is going on after the first page of the commentary. Yet when Bach speaks it is simple and downright concise, practice and develop the feel, in other words gain confidence through rigourous practice, and henceforth the key and eternal element of music will arise and that is instinct. A biologist may think that they know the wolf, yet are they one.AH"""
Another simple example of this argument is this-video games-you may have played a very physical video game where only practice dicatates the move, and someone watches and says-man-how do you do that-well the person perfoming the move has no answer-for it is now part of the subconcious mind. The mechanism of perfoming this great move is now encoded in the instinctual apparatus of the brain, thus leaving the peformer at a loss for words, I dont know how I do it, I just can.
Thus we are dealing with hundreds of years of musicology written by generations of musicologists who have no real feel for the instinctual underpinnings of what a great composer thinks or really feels, they believe that the composer like themselves were musical robots, devoid of feeling and filled with analysis, scrutininizing every note as if music was written in only one way. Yet Bach and all the rest were inventive, mystic, extremely imaginitive, and of course spontaneous in there music. Thus the anylytic aproach employed by our payed genuises at the universities is largely masterbatory material, or at best it is meaningless.
Thus to conclude this newest rant, remember play, think playing, and question, yet never microscopically analyize your playing; all that this exercize will do is lead to doubt, and double tracking. You will find no certain answers for as we have found all along is that the greatest lesson of music is its mystical subjectivity, and not it scientific certainty. If we try to give music a one and done formula it will cease to exist. Thus feel music, for god sakes dont think it.
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Re: To the theorist:(MUST READ SEND ME HATE MAIL LATER)

2/9/2010 5:55 PM

Adam Furay (1713) wrote:

learn all the scales and arpeggios you want. Heck, go ahead and learn about voice leading, inversions, serialism, figured bass, modulation, tuning theory, keys, sight-reading, counterpoint, or playing 16ths @ 200 bpm. YOU WILL STILL BE YOU AFTER THE SMOKE CLEARS! If your musical abilities can't handle a little schoolin' they must have been rather fragile to begin with. This anti-theory crap is for the birds. You all have more than likely met the someone you would consider a "schooled" musician whose playing was boorish and lifeless. Trust me, it isn't THEORIES problem. Take a second and consider that the person playing may be boorish and lifeless. Novel, yes? Alot of you like to bring Bach in to this argument, trying to show off how you can see both sides of the equation. You simply make yourself look worse. While the concepts you percieve as rules due to your lack of education, were catalogued long after Bach's death, they did gave us some insight in to why Bach's music had as large of an impact as it did. The glaringly repeated musical techniques Bach used showed us how music functioned. Imagine that. Music trying to tell us something. There is a 30,000 year old aborigine saying: Just as much as you would like to express yourselves with music, music is trying to express itself. Music theory is a guide that tells us what music DOES. Not what we would do with it. So next time any of you go on one of your "rants" about a topic you know nothing about, consider that the oldest existing culture on the planet believes in it. Wisdom i can't even begin to fathom.



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Re: To the theorist:(MUST READ SEND ME HATE MAIL LATER)

2/13/2010 5:43 PM

Jon Hermansen (3886) wrote:

You have a grave problem with reading, because the text is quite clear, it is not theory it is those who present it, and to those who write on it. Our modern academics in all fields are s---, look at my home state of Wisonsin, we just got a D- by the feds in terms of our academic system. Now you see of course theory is the essential, yet are we dealing with thery or the analyis of the analyis of theory. We are now two states away from the orginal source, and it is up to all of us to find the source, and that takes work. Thus read not the garbage, dive for the gold, yet here is the real problem we are dealing with haystacks of over written over done theoretical rubbish that largely has no real point. So Adam, I believe in reading music, I believe in transosing music, I believe in harmonic theory, yet when I read sources on these subjects, they are not practical for composition. Thus would you rather hear it from Bach, or the harvard man writting on Bach, you will find that Bach was much more simple in his musical musings then the best in the field. So who do we care for the harvard man's pesepecive on theory, or the man himself



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Re: To the theorist:(MUST READ SEND ME HATE MAIL LATER)

2/13/2010 6:33 PM

Jon Hermansen (3886) wrote:

The key to understanding Bach is simple-he was a man who never, if rarely traveled. All right there is a rumor that when he was young he saw his hero Buxtehude in Denmark, yet that is conjecture. So here is what he did, he was not Handel he did not travel to italy, or to France, like Handel did,so what is one to do. He simply would order the compositions of Rameau, or Scarlatti, or Vivaldi, or Kunauh, or Mouret, Couperan, or Telleman and of course Purcell, and he would synthezize all these syylings into a new form. You see Adam, when studying Baroque music the key element is understanding how the continent itself produced diffferent ornamentation, the French style is different from the German, as is the Italian style from the english. Diffenebt trills, different dynamics and touch, yet Bach took the best from each school and molded it to what he was inventing at the time, and created the new age of Music, that would become the age of his son, Mozart, Hayden and Beethoven. Thus, I ask, when, in any of my writtings did I bash Bach, for he is the cannon of how not only to understand music, but of most importance how to study it. You are agreeing with my point through consternation, and it is rather confusing.



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Re: To the theorist:(MUST READ SEND ME HATE MAIL LATER)

2/14/2010 11:28 AM

Adam Furay (1713) wrote:

didn't bach study with Buxtehude for months in Lubbeck? which almost got him fired from his current job in wiemar, cothen or mulhaussen(sp) for taking such a long leave of absence? srry, my details are a bit sketchy. It's been a few years since I taught Baroque interpretation :(



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Re: To the theorist:(MUST READ SEND ME HATE MAIL LATER)

2/14/2010 1:35 PM

Garry Cantrell (3704) wrote:

No, no, it wasn't Lubbock, Texas - it was Luckenbach, Texas. Willie and Waylon were there about the same time and.....oh, never mind, I'm still working on my first cup of coffee.





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Re: To the theorist:(MUST READ SEND ME HATE MAIL LATER)

2/14/2010 2:17 PM

WILLIAM HULSEY (24493) wrote:

Dang lawyers, always looking for a way to re-word things! LOL!

Bo





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Re: To the theorist:(MUST READ SEND ME HATE MAIL LATER)

2/14/2010 5:33 PM

Adam Furay (1713) wrote:

my friend mark morton teaches bass at texas tech in lubbock TX :)



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Re: To the theorist:(MUST READ SEND ME HATE MAIL LATER)

2/16/2010 4:31 PM

Jon Hermansen (3886) wrote:

Not a bad point, I thought, it was when he was a young adult, and I also heard rumors that he was to marry the masters daughter. I will have to look up that odd meeting, becuase for Bach to travel anywhere to see anyone was a great honor, and by having it be Buxtehude, that meant that Bach found his idol. Also of note Buxtehude's organ works are great, I have them all in my collection

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Re: To the theorist:(MUST READ SEND ME HATE MAIL LATER)

2/9/2010 6:36 PM

Adam Copelin (12723) wrote:

Theory is our language; I like to speak as much of it as I can.
Granted, you don't need to be able to analyze Wagner to play 3
chord rock or pop punk, but would it be a bad thing if you could?
Instinct is fine, but instinct guided by theory is a much more
powerful tool.


IMHO :)



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Re: To the theorist:(MUST READ SEND ME HATE MAIL LATER)

2/9/2010 6:41 PM

Adam Furay (1713) wrote:

cheers adam. even matching the notes on your bass to the root of a power chord is a theory of its own. easily stumbled upon, but it is a theory.





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Re: To the theorist:(MUST READ SEND ME HATE MAIL LATER)

2/13/2010 5:36 PM

Jon Hermansen (3886) wrote:

And once you cognizize this information into the mind, and in becomes encoded, now you have theory embedded in the brain, I feel that tinkering can be a valuable asset, you just have to know how to analyize the good stuff, when it comes.



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Re: To the theorist:(MUST READ SEND ME HATE MAIL LATER)

2/13/2010 5:34 PM

Jon Hermansen (3886) wrote:

Now, here is the key Adam, theory is essential, it is just the modern academics who have destroyed what was once simple, so find the best sources, read, absorb, talk to a few masters, and of course, ta da, however, the sources are becoming very difficult to find, so scour your library, and examine everything you can find on the subject-something will crawl to the surface: I personally, being from Wisconsin am a huge fan of my alma matters library, -U.W.G.B great books, you just got a find them

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