Quote:
Originally Posted by JonPR
I suspect you're misunderstanding me.
What I meant by "understanding music" is the way that a non-musician understands music. Music communicates its essential meanings to everyone, not just to musicians! You don't need to read a book to pick up what a piece of music is trying to tell you. You feel it!
This is really important, because all human culture has music of some kind, and every member of each culture understands its music.
With more complex music, we don't always get it, at least not deeply. E.g., I don't really understand a lot of classical music. I can kind of guess what it's trying to say most of the time, but because it's not my culture it doesn't really mean anything to me. I could probably understand it better if I read a book explaining what the composer was trying to do, but I still wouldn't get the actual musical message, because to me it's like a foreign language.
But when I listen to any 20thC popular music, I get it straight away, I know exactly what it all means. I knew that before I became a musician. Any fan knows what their favourite music means, they understand it perfectly, on its own terms.
Music is made for non-musicians. If they didn't get it - in its entirety - there would hardly be any point in making it. This is what I'm getting at. It's nothing to do with music theory. Music theory is not interested in explaining music to non-musicians. It's for helping musicians discuss their craft, and to help them learn the rules.
Well if it was sung in that style, of course, but what's your point? It sounds like you're saying traditional folk music would not have existed without medieval modes!
All I'm saying is that folk music followed its own rules. Not all of it was influenced by the church modes. Those same modes occur in the music of other cultures, not connected with the Catholic church.
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What's my point?
as a child I was taught scales as an exercise but I never understood that organised and predetermined systems of intervals are the basis out of which western music arises. I realised at some point that if I just stuck to the white keys
there wouldn't be any nasty surprises, smarter kids would have noticed they were using the C major scale but then again as I have no memory of what terminal note I chose perhaps I was using the church modes?
Now back to my point.
We know that historically by the medieval period church music was already being actively composed and written down by musicians operating a system which was already too complex to be arrived at by the kind of childish exploration described from my own experience, to achieve that level of complexity the composers of such music had to be thinking already in terms of what we now call intervals and using their knowledge to creatively compose melodies, therefore their understanding and use of music theory was not confined to accademic discussions with other composers but was an intellectual tool or idea if you like which they used knowingly to create music as oposed to the creation of music being an unconcious process where the choice of notes used is based on what sounds pleasing ( for example the Yoiks of Lapplands Sami)
As you must know several folk songs use melodies shared with church music so we know that the boundary between church and lay communities has long been a porous one , but for how long ? How far back does this interchange go ? Star of The County Down uses the melody of Diverus and Lazerus but that church song is in English and so is remembered.
Obviously there are many forms of folk music such as dance tunes which have no parallel in the church but if the scales used to create melodies originate from people who were aware that they were using scales and modes from which to create tunes can you really say that folk music is an entirely oral tradition in the way that Sami Yoiks and that traditional
Native North American songs are?
It does not sound to me that the similarity between She Moved Through The Fair's melody and medieval chants is just based on using a church mode it's also down to the way the melody flows and the free timing which contribute to the whole sound and feel.
Edit: to try and make my thoughts clearer, at least one classical composer has written that Irish folk music is the most sophisticated of all Europe's music traditions and it seems to me that that level of complexity did not arise by chance, it's only conjecture on my part but it seems likely to me that the source of that complexity is trained specialists and the most likely contenders were musical members of the church.