Back in my days at Opcode Systems developing Music Notation software, I was a big believer in descriptive variable names. I did this partly so I could understand the code myself, as opposed to some of the genius engineers at Opcode who could name variables things like “X24” and remember what they meant and how they all worked together years later.
One variable name I used was “acci” which meant “accidental”. Very obvious and totally my style. This is when C++ and Object Oriented Programming were fairly new and there were lots of objects and container classes that were direct reflections of objects on a page of music notation. I had variables (Objects) named Note, Notehead, Stem, Beam, Flag, Clef, Timesig, Line, Staff, Title, Composer… everything one would expect on a printed piece of music.
“Accidental” was a good word for something that would otherwise have to be referred to as “A sharp or a flat that is not in the key signature”. That would make a very cumbersome variable name. I needed to refer to the opposite of an accidental, “A sharp or a flat that IS in the key signature”. I used the word flarps for a little while until my friend Jarrell Irvin suggested the perfect name: Intentionals. The variable name became “intis” and I used it all the time; the opposite of “accis”.
Now 20 years later I teach for most of my livelihood. I find myself saying things to students fairly often about “pick-up notes” (anacrusis), like, “Don’t hit the chord ’til beat one, wait for the pick-up notes.” I find myself wanting to refer to the opposite of pick-up notes, but I have not been able to find a name for them. I have to say,” the first beat of the measure is a rest, don’t start the melody until beat two.”
I’ve been asking students what we should call them and the best suggestion I have so far is “drop-down notes.” Now I can say,” Wait for the drop-down note, the first beat’s a rest”.
As I’ve been saying this to my students since I first wrote this, I’ve discovered that it’s clearer to refer to the rest, instead of the note, as a “drop-down rest”, as in “Wait for the drop-down rest.”
Sometimes I say to students about various words, ironically, “I wouldn’t call it this, but they don’t invite me to the Worldwide Music Nomenclature Revision Committee meetings.”
When I am teaching chord inversions to students it is cumbersome that we do not call a root position chord an inversion. I want to be able to say that there are as many inversions as there are notes in the chord. For this reason, and another I will give shortly, I call the root position chord the “zero-ith inversion”. This should present no problem to MIDI users, or digital mathematicians, who are used to saying that 128 MIDI numbers range from zero to 127. When we get to “rootless voicings”, which are ubiquitous in jazz, there is no such thing as a root position. Calling the first one the zero-ith inversion, the one that is still stacked thirds, makes for consistency in referring to rooted chords and rootless chords.
Another very practical wish of mine is that all note names were one syllable. As you’re saying note names to a student you say,” C, B, A, F#…”, and the flow is broken by the two syllables when you have to say “sharp” or “flat”. I don’t know what the perfect solution is, but I have had European students who say “B” for B-flat and “H” for B-natural.
Some examples of words that came about historically that has never changed, even though there could be much more descriptive and intuitive things to call them now:
– The Mixolydian mode. Wouldn’t it be completely obvious if we called it the “Dominant mode”? Why are ancient Greek mode names still in common use? How many people say Ionian instead of major scale? How many people say Aeolian instead of natural minor? Let’s extend that to as many of the modes as are obvious. Phrygian is the Spanish scale. Super-Locrian is the Altered scale. There only needs to be one melodic minor scale; what we now call Ascending. Descending is already covered by natural minor. Jazz musicians who use melodic minor every day already do this. I call the fifth mode of harmonic minor the “Hava Nagila” mode, but I would be just as happy with the “Jewish Mode” or something else intuitive.
– Change the name of “major seventh” to just “seventh”. Change the name of “seventh” to “dominant seventh” or “flat seventh”. It confuses every music student who first learns our current convention. The reason we mean “dominant seventh” by default when we say “seventh” is because when they first started using sevenths in chords in the Renaissance, there was only the dominant seventh on the V7 chord. There was no reason to differentiate it from a major seventh because that wasn’t used yet. So we are stuck with a default that made sense in the Renaissance. One more thing here: Classical musicians, please stop using the term “minor seventh” for an interval. It indicates a four note chord with a minor third and a flat seventh and is confusing.
– The word “tone” is confusing. We use it to mean “timbre” and” pitch” and “note” and even “whole step”. Let’s just use it to mean “Timbre” like on a stereo control. No more “whole-tone scale”: let’s call it the “whole-step scale”. No more, “Leave a message at the tone”. Leave a message at the note.
– Academicians might get mad at me for this one, but of what use is solfége (do, re, mi…)? When you teach someone to sing scales using “1, 2, 3…” instead of nonsense syllables, they are learning intervals and music theory at the same time for free. They are training their ear to know intervals by the names everyone uses instead of by names no one uses.
– This is one I am less sure of but would like to suggest: Our system of note heads, stems, flags, and beams uses one more symbol, and a lot more ink on the page, than seems necessary for quarter notes, eighth notes, 16th notes, 32nd notes… any note with a solid note head. A whole note uses just a white note head. Great! Then for a half note we add a stem. Makes sense to me. Then for quarter notes we jump to solid note heads with a stem. We never use a solid note head with no stem. I hypothesize we could use a solid note head with no stem for quarter notes, a solid note head with a stem for eighth notes, a solid note head with a stem and one flag or beam for sixteenths notes, etc.; one less glyph for every note with a solid note head.
The reason I am unsure of this system is because I’m aware that cognitive scientists have long known that our eyes follow text in paragraphs better when there are serifs on the letters. This isn’t necessarily true for billboards and headlines where people tend to use block letters, sans serif. Maybe there is something about introducing stems at the quarter note level that helps our eyes follow the music, or maybe there would be something confusing heirarchically about going from half notes with stems to quarter notes without stems.
– The sustain pedal on the piano is also called the damper pedal. Sustaining and dampening are opposites. It should be called the “un-damper pedal”, if we need a second name.
Clearly I like to invent names for musical entities that have not been named. The value in descriptive labels is that when you see the same thing again you can easily identify it. This helps us reuse and modify musical material in a variety of contexts, in different keys, different styles and grooves, etc. We have names for scales and chords, although not always descriptive. We also have cultural names for some other musical entities such as chord progressions. Many musicians are familiar with terms like “blues changes”, “rhythm changes” (the chords to I Got Rhythm), and Blue Moon changes (I VI II V). Other chord progressions I have named include La Cucaracha changes (Iko, Iko; Dreidel, Dreidel; Deep in the Heart of Texas…) and Spooky changes( im7-IV7; Evil Ways; Right Place, Wrong Time; Mr. Magic…).
I have also taken to naming licks that are in our cultural consciousness. I teach the Blue Monk lick; backwards and inverted it becomes the Rainy Day Women lick. I’ve listed a few dozen tunes that use variations on this lick, from Magical Mystery Tour to Sentimental Journey to the Entertainer.
There are other common licks I have named: the Fats lick (Fats Domino), the Allman Bros. lick (could have just as easily been called Jeff Lorber), the Cruella Deville lick (Thelonious Monk fans might prefer the I Mean You lick), a Chromatic Miles lick, a Hot House (bebop) lick, etc. I find my students are able to identify, reuse, and further develop these melodic snippets much more readily when they have been identified and labeled descriptively. It would be much less useful to have named these licks X24, X25, etc.
There are also many commonly used hybrid scales that have not been named to my knowledge. Speaking in musical set notation, what is the union, or superset, of Mixolydian and Dorian (an octatonic scale with both a major and a minor third and a flat seven)? What is a minor pentatonic scale with just a 2 or just a 6 added( adding both gives you Dorian)? What is the scale implied by the Cruella Deville lick (1 b3, 3 5, 6, b7)? These are scales used every day by blues and rock players, and they have no names?
Sometimes people think that labeling all these musical entities will somehow make them play more mechanically. There are many examples I use to show that people already know musical snippets by labels. Ask anybody to sing the Adams Family theme song. (duh, duh, duh, duh, snap snap). Their ear is already trained to be able to sing that when cued by the label, “Adams Family Theme Song”. Wouldn’t it be more meaningful if their ear was trained to sing it by the cue “5, 6, 7, 1, (snap, snap)”?
This can be a faulty argument in some instances because the musician doesn’t have to parse the phrase “Adams Family Theme Song” the way they do a list of intervals. But once the set of numbers is said enough times, musicians respond to the phrase by sound without having to parse it. This is true of the phrase “I-VI-II-V” which musicians recognize phonetically just as easily as the phrase “Blue Moon Changes”.
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