John Howell wrote:
A parallel can be drawn with the figured bass of the 17th and 18th centuries. (This, by the way, is a no-longer-living language, but one that served for generations to solve exactly the same problems that were faced in 20th century pop and jazz.)
I have to object to this. Above and beyond the large number of contemporary musicians associated with historical performance practice who have mastered extemporaneous realization of figured bass accompaniment, figured bass has never left "classical" musical training, and in some areas, for instance church organists here in Germany, performance from figured bass has a continuous, unbroken, tradition.
As I've written here before, figured bass has one great advantage over vernacular chord symbols: by notating the intervals over the bass, the full content of the chord is indicated umambiguously. What figured bass does not do is indicate functions, and I suspect that a large portion of the problem with vernacular practice is a confusion between the need to indicate the pitch content and a desire to locate the chord functionally, thus the continued discussions over whether a chord should be labeled x or y. This is problematic on several accounts, the first being that musics of all sorts delight in functional ambiguity, and the second that the analysis, the labeling, is introducing a second level of abstraction into the notation. If the idea is to make reading more fluent and playing more fluid, then one would presumably prefer to be free of an additional abstraction.
The one objection that I could imagine to the use of figured bass in vernacular musics is that specific voice leadings are too tightly described. I may be entirely wrong about this, but it is my impression (based on, for example, a long discussion with George Russell) that voice leadings, and treatments of dissonances in particular, while subject to some conventions, are much less consequent in these traditions. Indeed, in textures in which seventh (and even more complex) chords predominate, regardless of function, it may be necessary to have a substantially different concept of dissonance, and with that, voice leading.
Daniel Wolf _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
