Subtitles section Play video
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Prof: Okay, ladies and gentlemen.
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Good morning.
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I think things are going to work better today.
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I'm optimistic about the audio equipment and about our slide
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material and things such as that.
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All cell phones off and we will begin.
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Don't forget sections start tonight at seven o'clock and
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there's another set at eight o'clock and then Friday
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afternoon at one thirty and Monday morning.
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We've got that all online for you.
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And you do your work product and you bring it to sections and
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hand it in to your TA in section each time.
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So that's the way this works.
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I'll be sending you a global e-mail bringing you up to date
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with some other things later on this afternoon.
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Okay.
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So today we--Actually, before I get to that,
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any questions from you?
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Student: Yeah.
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Is there stuff to do-- Prof: Is there stuff to
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do for section tonight?
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Yes, but only the stuff that was assigned,
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the Listening Exercises that are assigned early on.
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It's just one, nine through 11,
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which you've probably had done for days now so you just bring
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that material and hand it in.
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Others will be assigned tonight.
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This is shopping period.
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We're started sifting through things and then we'll get
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rolling.
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Gentleman.
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Today we're going to come to what I would call the
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nitty-gritty of the course.
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We no longer have any introductory material but we're
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going to jump into musical notation and we're going to be
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dealing with things such as half notes,
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quarter notes, things like that,
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but before we do this I'd like to say a couple of words about
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musical notation because it affects how we deal with music,
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how we treat music.
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Musical notation is a particularly Western phenomenon,
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and when you stop and think about it only we in the West,
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and by West what I mean is the United States and Canada and
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Western Europe and Russia, parts of South America,
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only we use musical notation and we use it principally for
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our high art music.
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That's not to say that the Chinese don't have an esoteric
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form of musical notation, that the Indians do not have an
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esoteric form of musical notation.
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They do, but it doesn't intersect quite as intensely as
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musical notation does in Western cultures.
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Most cultures around the world, if you stop and think about it,
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don't use musical notation.
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But we do here with our art music and that has two
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advantages.
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Let's talk about the advantages first.
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One, it allows the composer to specify rather precisely what he
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or she wants, to sort of write things out in
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the form of musical details, so as the result the creator in
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this Western art form takes on greater importance than the
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creator in other cultures where the composer so to speak is more
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or less anonymous and perhaps synonymous with the group as a
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whole.
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So again the process of notation allows the composer to
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loom larger.
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And secondly there's another advantage of notation.
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It allows us to preserve the work of art.
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We can kind of freeze dry this thing and store it and then
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bring it back to life more or less exactly as the composer had
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intended.
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But this, if you stop and think about it, takes the traditional
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balance of things and throws it out of proportion.
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In our art music, our symphonies,
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concertos, genres of this sort, the performer is actually much
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less important.
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Let's think of this as architect and carpenter.
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The great architect, the thinker,
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is the composer and the performer,
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the violinist, gets this piece of--gets this
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blueprint or black print in the case of musical notation and is
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expected simply to replicate the black print.
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Well, that's very different than what happens in other kinds
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of music.
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Let's talk about pop music for a second: jazz,
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rock, hip-hop, blues, that kind of thing.
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You go over to Toad's Place and you see the band come out and
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the first thing they do is plunk this in front of them?
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No. That'd be ridiculous.
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How many of you--I was walking with a student over to my office
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after lecture the other day to get some material to him.
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How many of you play in a rock band or have ever played in a
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rock band?
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Okay, a number of you.
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Young lady out there, did you use musical notation?
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No.
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That would be kind of silly.
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Right?
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It's--Okay.
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So how is it done?
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Well, it's all done aurally and we'll talk a little bit more
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about that as we go along.
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So the composer in the West is very important,
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more important than the composer in other cultures.
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Other cultures don't use this type of prescriptive notation.
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Here's a thought for you.
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Musical notation was the first graph in Western culture.
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"How could that be?"
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you'd say.
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How could that be?
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Well, if you go back to the formation of musical notation
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from the ninth through the twelfth centuries,
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we see that very early on these two dimensions of music,
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the two axes of music that we talked about before,
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pitch vertically and duration horizontally,
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are in place and we have these spots in this grid.
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So musical notation: the first grid pattern in
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Western culture-- but it does lock us in in
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interesting ways that we may-- you perhaps have never
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considered--compared to how music is made in other cultures.
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Let's see how some music is made in other cultures.
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We're going to play here now as our first excerpt an Adhan,
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and what this is is the Islamic call to worship which is sung
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across the world thousands of times every day,
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and as we listen to this I want you to think about the vocal
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production here.
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What's interesting are all of the vocal nuances,
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so let's listen to just a bit of this please.
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>
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Let's stop there.
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Fascinating.
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What a wonderful sound, but the beauty of it is all
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between what we would call the notes.
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We would specify a precise frequency here,
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another one up here, but what that gentleman was
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singing was all the stuff in between.
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That made it very beautiful, and there's no way in God's
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earth that we could replicate that to the Western system of
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musical notation.
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Let's take another example.
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We're going to go to the realm of Western jazz here and I'm
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going to pick on Chuck Mangione.
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Anybody ever heard of Chuck Mangione?
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Yeah. Okay.
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Brian, our tech guy, has.
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He's an older fellow.
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He's sort of my age, and the reason I mention Chuck
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Mangione is that years ago I went to school with him.
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He was a couple of classes ahead of me at the Eastman
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School of Music.
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I was a fledgling pianist.
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He was a very good trumpeter.
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Indeed, he was winning Grammys when he was in his twenties and
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has been recording sort of esoteric jazz and sometimes more
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pop jazz thereafter.
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Now you can go to a Mangione concert.
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He will sometimes play the Shubert Theater there and
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they'll have two hours of spectacular jazz,
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but what you won't see, again, is any sort of music in
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front of them.
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So how do these musicians generate two hours of music with
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no music in front of them?
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Does this mean he doesn't read music?
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Of course not.
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You can't get through these conservatories like Eastman or
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Juilliard or Curtis without being introduced to an intense
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regimen of musical notation, but it would get in the way of
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the music.
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So let's listen to a track here, a sax solo,
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and I am going to try to keep--make some sense out of
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this-- because it gets more and more
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complex-- by following the electric bass
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underneath so let's listen to an old tape.
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I used to go to bars in Rochester and listen to this guy
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and tape his stuff.
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So here's Chuck Mangione with his saxophonist and a saxophone
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cadenza.
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It's a wild riff for saxophone.
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>
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That's probably enough.
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It gives you an idea.
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Now how in the world would you ever notate that?
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To produce this as a pre-scripted document that
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anybody else could follow?
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It was all improvisatory.
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If they tried to notate it, again, it would take all the
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spirit out, all the heart out of the music.
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Well, how do they do that?
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How do these performers play such long spans of music without
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any notation?
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Is it all memorized?
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Well, it's not memorized as we think of it,
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and you may have had music lessons along the way and your
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teacher and your mother said, "Go memorize your
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piece."
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It's not memorized like that.
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There are certain basic patterns that they have.
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They might say for that sort of music:, "All right.
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We're now going to have a thirty-two-bar solo.
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We'll be in the key of E-flat.
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We're going to work through a one, six, four,
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five, one chord progression as--We'll come back to that.
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We'll sit on the dominant chord for eight beats and I (Chuck)
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will look over and everybody else will come back in at the
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end of Chris's solo."
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It would be that kind of thing, kind of head charts,
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general plans, and within that general plan a
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lot of freedom of expression.
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So having said that about musical notation--
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something about a cautionary tale about musical notation--
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we should think about how it affects the way we compose music
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in the West and how we perform music in the West.
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When you go to a concert of classical music and the music is
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played and you start to talk, what happens?
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Somebody will go, "Shh."
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Right?
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We go to these concerts and we have to be so quiet.
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Why do we have to be quiet?
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That doesn't sound like much fun.
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Why do we have to be so quiet?
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It's because we have these performers up there that are
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reading this blueprint and everyone is listening,
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basically, to see how accurately they can reproduce,
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revivify, this artistic artifact.
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So that's sort of what's going on, but it really does
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affect how we behave, even, in a concert.
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Now if you go to concerts of other cultures and they are
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engaged in their own classical, not just popular,
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but classical music, Indonesian gamelan music for
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example, the audience will be there
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swaying back and forth, clapping, applauding with the
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performance with particularly good solo,
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the same thing with Indian sitar music,
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that classical tradition.
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Oddly, it's much more like going to a jazz concert where
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the audience is sitting maybe around tables or something like
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that and encouraging and interacting with the performers,
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but again in those cultures no notation.
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, everybody sits there sort of mummified, waiting for this
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great work of art to come back to life.
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It's an interesting thing.
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And isn't it typical of us in the West to take something,
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music, which is expression and feeling and motion and movement,
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a response to sound, and turn it into complex
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patterns, complex patterns that can be
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visualized and rearranged and analyzed,
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and nowadays even digitalized.
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What we've done is take this spontaneous response to the
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creation of sound, and bodily movement with sound
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and replaced it.