I've just returned from holiday in Menorca. I took a couple of books to read on the flight. One was Terry Pratchett's "Witches Abroad", the other a collection of short stories by Arthur C Clarke. In the introduction to "Witches Abroad" TP muses on the nature of stories. On reading this passage I realised that if I were to change "story" to "tune" and make one or two minor consequential changes I would get the following:
"Tunes, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling round the universe since the beginnng of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the replaying ... tunes, twisting and blowing through the darkness.
And their very existence overlays a faint but insistent pattern on the chaos that is history. Tunes etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh musicians play the tune, the groove runs deeper.
This ... means that a tune, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other playings of that tune that have ever been."
A short story in the Arthur C Clarke collection that caught my eye is called "The Ultimate Melody". It is about a physiologist specialising in the study of the brain who wonders just why it is that certain tunes grab you and won't let go. So he devises a machine to study the brain rhythms and how music affects them, and another machine to analyse all the well-known and popular tunes from all sources to find a common structure (this story was written in 1957, btw). He realises that all these tunes may be faint reflections of a fundamental ultimate tune. Then he reprograms his machine to reconstruct this ultimate tune. [I'm not going to tell you the rest - you'll have to read the story!]
All superb fiction, of course, from two of the world's greatest imaginative writers of the last half-century, but it does make me wonder "What is a tune?"
BTW, when in Menorca I made enquiries about sessions on the island. No luck - but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The closest thing I found was "Joe's Bar" in Son Bou on the south coast where the barman was happy to put on cds of Irish music at customers' request. And I did see a derelict pub on the other side of the island with a Guinness sign flapping outside.
Trevor
>The intervals may be tones or half tones (to Western ears), or may be defined by relative change of frequency.
A friend of mine, who had never heard any irish "tunes" before and is an excellent Jazz Pianist, listened to a Kevin Burke rendition of Bonnie Kate. His first comment was that he thought it had alot of affinity with Indian music!
"He realises that all these tunes may be faint reflections of a fundamental ultimate tune. Then he reprograms his machine to reconstruct this ultimate tune."
This sounds hella lot like what Heinrich Schenker did with western classical music - essentially, that all of, say, Bach, could be boiled down to a few notes, which defined the underlying "ultimate tune".
I've always thought of it the other way around (and I assume many of us do)--that the "ultimate" tune is the aggregate of all the tunes we play in a sitting. It's the bouncing one tune off the next that gives each its lustre and full personality.
Sounds needlessly Messianic, this notion of an ultimate tune. I like the idea of tunes being flapping great lumps of space-time - although they're really only vibrations of air molecules, with a time course. Auld Ciaran Carson whitters on a fair bit about tunes occupying mystical time courses in Last Night's Fun. Also reminds me of that New-Age pseudo-science interpretation of the Schr
Jamie, maybe your mate was on to something. Didn't the celtic tribe originate from the Indian region?
On the subject of this discussion, I don't feel like there are tunes floating around out there. But I do feel that Music is. And some players and listeners in different cultures, traditions, styles, genres (folk, classical, rock, jazz - whatever they are?!) and competencies can feel that Music, or sense it's there.
Which celtic tribe, Greenman? I've been very interested watching the influence of the La Tene civilization's artwork spread into Irish stepdancing costumes. I wonder how many of the designers and dancers realize the Eastern influence on the artwork? Not too many, I'd wager -- maybe among the designers, but doubtful among the dancers.
Nah they didn't. The first recorded Indo-Europeans were the Anatolians, about C19thBC. Even by then the proto-Indo-European tongue had branched into at least three groups, the Hittites, Luwian and Palaic, the Hittites being the masters of the other two. These were all in modern-day Turkey, fairly near the Caucasus mountains, so I presume that's where the term Caucasian came from, referring to people with pale to brown skin, straight-ish noses and long heads!
Anyway, these all subsequently branched out into several linguistic groups, all on the Indo-European language tree. These groups include the Celtic group, Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Iranian and Indo-Aryan, as well as many others. Curiously, very, very ancient Greek, known as Aryo-Graeco-Armenian, is closer to the Indo-Iranian languages than what it is to most other European languages. Even more curious is the Tocharian group attested in Chinese Turkestan (ie Western China) from manuscripts dating from C6th to C8th AD. Don't ask me how, cos I can't speak Tocharian, but this group shares more grammatical features with the European languages than it does with its Indian neighbours. Maybe this is the lost Celtic tribe to which you refer!
So, I just thought I'd throw in some fascinating (to me anyhow) but totally useless facts.
I've looked up Heinrich Schenker in my online encyclopedia, and he seems to have been a monumental example of 19c German scholarship - you know the sort of thing, a work in 3 volumes of 600 pages each, and the 3rd volume contains the verbs ...
I'll try not to be unjust to the late Herr Doktor Schenker, but I can't help wondering if this was a classic case of if you can't do it effectively then you become a critic. Schoenberg and Webern weren't in this category of course.
Trevor
What is a tune?
What is a tune?
I've just returned from holiday in Menorca. I took a couple of books to read on the flight. One was Terry Pratchett's "Witches Abroad", the other a collection of short stories by Arthur C Clarke. In the introduction to "Witches Abroad" TP muses on the nature of stories. On reading this passage I realised that if I were to change "story" to "tune" and make one or two minor consequential changes I would get the following:
"Tunes, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling round the universe since the beginnng of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the replaying ... tunes, twisting and blowing through the darkness.
And their very existence overlays a faint but insistent pattern on the chaos that is history. Tunes etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh musicians play the tune, the groove runs deeper.
This ... means that a tune, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other playings of that tune that have ever been."
A short story in the Arthur C Clarke collection that caught my eye is called "The Ultimate Melody". It is about a physiologist specialising in the study of the brain who wonders just why it is that certain tunes grab you and won't let go. So he devises a machine to study the brain rhythms and how music affects them, and another machine to analyse all the well-known and popular tunes from all sources to find a common structure (this story was written in 1957, btw). He realises that all these tunes may be faint reflections of a fundamental ultimate tune. Then he reprograms his machine to reconstruct this ultimate tune. [I'm not going to tell you the rest - you'll have to read the story!]
All superb fiction, of course, from two of the world's greatest imaginative writers of the last half-century, but it does make me wonder "What is a tune?"
BTW, when in Menorca I made enquiries about sessions on the island. No luck - but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The closest thing I found was "Joe's Bar" in Son Bou on the south coast where the barman was happy to put on cds of Irish music at customers' request. And I did see a derelict pub on the other side of the island with a Guinness sign flapping outside.
Trevor
# Posted on June 8th 2003 by Trevor Jennings
Re: What is a tune?
A bit like quantum theory, where the act of measurment changes what you measure, the deffinition of "tune" changes every time you play one.
# Posted on June 8th 2003 by ...
Re: What is a tune?
A tune is a sequence of intervals.
The intervals may be tones or half tones (to Western ears), or may be defined by relative change of frequency.
The length of each note of the tune is also a sequence of relative note-lengths which makes up the rhythm.
# Posted on June 8th 2003 by geoffwright
Re: What is a tune?
>The intervals may be tones or half tones (to Western ears), or may be defined by relative change of frequency.
A friend of mine, who had never heard any irish "tunes" before and is an excellent Jazz Pianist, listened to a Kevin Burke rendition of Bonnie Kate. His first comment was that he thought it had alot of affinity with Indian music!
# Posted on June 8th 2003 by Jamie
Re: What is a tune?
"He realises that all these tunes may be faint reflections of a fundamental ultimate tune. Then he reprograms his machine to reconstruct this ultimate tune."
This sounds hella lot like what Heinrich Schenker did with western classical music - essentially, that all of, say, Bach, could be boiled down to a few notes, which defined the underlying "ultimate tune".
# Posted on June 9th 2003 by elia
Re: What is a tune?
I've always thought of it the other way around (and I assume many of us do)--that the "ultimate" tune is the aggregate of all the tunes we play in a sitting. It's the bouncing one tune off the next that gives each its lustre and full personality.
# Posted on June 9th 2003 by Will Harmon
Re: What is a tune?
schenker should have been sent straight to bed with no supper and a slapped arse.many people would have been a lot happier.including me.
the tune is what's going round your head at the moment.
best wishes
# Posted on June 9th 2003 by biggus dave
Re: What is a tune?
Sounds needlessly Messianic, this notion of an ultimate tune. I like the idea of tunes being flapping great lumps of space-time - although they're really only vibrations of air molecules, with a time course. Auld Ciaran Carson whitters on a fair bit about tunes occupying mystical time courses in Last Night's Fun. Also reminds me of that New-Age pseudo-science interpretation of the Schr
# Posted on June 9th 2003 by Rudall the time
Re: What is a tune?
Webern did similar reductionist things as Schenker. And just made a racket.
# Posted on June 9th 2003 by ...
Re: What is a tune?
>Webern did similar reductionist things as Schenker. And just made a racket.
> michael gill
Ah, God, I love statements like this.
cjs
# Posted on June 10th 2003 by coyotebanjo
Re: What is a tune?
Jamie, maybe your mate was on to something. Didn't the celtic tribe originate from the Indian region?
On the subject of this discussion, I don't feel like there are tunes floating around out there. But I do feel that Music is. And some players and listeners in different cultures, traditions, styles, genres (folk, classical, rock, jazz - whatever they are?!) and competencies can feel that Music, or sense it's there.
That's my tuppenceworth!
# Posted on June 10th 2003 by greenman
Re: What is a tune?
Which celtic tribe, Greenman?
I've been very interested watching the influence of the La Tene civilization's artwork spread into Irish stepdancing costumes. I wonder how many of the designers and dancers realize the Eastern influence on the artwork? Not too many, I'd wager -- maybe among the designers, but doubtful among the dancers.
zls
# Posted on June 10th 2003 by Zina Lee
Re: What is a tune?
Nah they didn't. The first recorded Indo-Europeans were the Anatolians, about C19thBC. Even by then the proto-Indo-European tongue had branched into at least three groups, the Hittites, Luwian and Palaic, the Hittites being the masters of the other two. These were all in modern-day Turkey, fairly near the Caucasus mountains, so I presume that's where the term Caucasian came from, referring to people with pale to brown skin, straight-ish noses and long heads!
Anyway, these all subsequently branched out into several linguistic groups, all on the Indo-European language tree. These groups include the Celtic group, Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Iranian and Indo-Aryan, as well as many others. Curiously, very, very ancient Greek, known as Aryo-Graeco-Armenian, is closer to the Indo-Iranian languages than what it is to most other European languages. Even more curious is the Tocharian group attested in Chinese Turkestan (ie Western China) from manuscripts dating from C6th to C8th AD. Don't ask me how, cos I can't speak Tocharian, but this group shares more grammatical features with the European languages than it does with its Indian neighbours. Maybe this is the lost Celtic tribe to which you refer!
So, I just thought I'd throw in some fascinating (to me anyhow) but totally useless facts.
Danny.
# Posted on June 10th 2003 by Rudall the time
Re: What is a tune?
I've looked up Heinrich Schenker in my online encyclopedia, and he seems to have been a monumental example of 19c German scholarship - you know the sort of thing, a work in 3 volumes of 600 pages each, and the 3rd volume contains the verbs ...
I'll try not to be unjust to the late Herr Doktor Schenker, but I can't help wondering if this was a classic case of if you can't do it effectively then you become a critic. Schoenberg and Webern weren't in this category of course.
Trevor
# Posted on June 10th 2003 by Trevor Jennings
Re: What is a tune?
Dear Danny,
Interesting AND useful! The Celts' Indo-European ancestry could be reflected in their music.
You don't speak Tocharian? Shame on you!
# Posted on June 11th 2003 by greenman
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# Posted on June 11th 2003 by greenman