Re: On the Grammar of Music

["O.T.Furnes" <oddtf@xxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: John Croft <mfmxhjcc@STUD.MAN.AC.UK>
To: <AUDITORY@LISTS.MCGILL.CA>
Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2001 7:11 PM
Subject: Re: On the Grammar of Music


> on 28/4/01 13:34, O.T.Furnes at oddtf@IMT.UIO.NO wrote:
> 
> > If I present myself saying: "hello, I'm Odd" - I'm afraid many would agree to
> > that - not in the Norwegian meaning of the word though. If English were
> > "techno" and Norwegian were "bebop" - a C7#5b9 would in techno sound odd in
> > the english use of the word and would in jazz sound "odd" in the norwegian
> > denotation.

John Croft replied:  
> I think one has to be careful with analogies like this -- it would be easy
> enough to make an immediately acceptable piece of music with elements of
> techno and bebop -- this kind of this is done all the time, and it is
> usually fairly easy to accept as music, in a way that a spontaneous hybrid
> of Norwegian and English would not. In other words, stylistic variation in
> music is (potentially) continuous -- it seems to me that this is a
> significant disanalogy with linguistic grammatical correctness.
> 
Stylistic variation is continuous. However, musical styles are not so unstable and fluctuating that one cannot register extraneous elements. Some "techno"-styles like drum'n'bass or BigBeat could very well contain this chord without anyone lifting an eyebrow. This would not be the case with Rave (also a techno or rather electronica genre) or euro-dance which is far more single-tracked when it comes to chords. My assertion is still that this chord would in this context be "odd" in the English denotation - up until now. And you would be surprised to know how many English words there are in Norwegian - and we get more of them every year....

Odd Torleiv Furnes
______________________
Odd Torleiv Furnes
Department of Musicology
University of Oslo
Norway
oddtf@imt.uio.no