Music 30/30 – Day 2
These updates will be a bit sparse for a bit, I’m afraid. There’s a lot of basic ground to cover before I can start to make any actual music (though astute readers and viewers will note that I have already fudged out some very basic music in the past, and even slipped it onto the site in various places).
That said, in addition to today’s piano practice (primarily focused on a straightforward “Straight Beat Gospel Style” rhythm, but also dipping a bit into a few video game themes) I spent some time going over the beginnings of some basic music theory around scales. While I’ve never been a particularly good musician, I’m also not a complete novice, so there wasn’t really anything in the lessons covered today that I wasn’t already familiar with, but it’s good to have the refresher all the same.
I was reminded of something that was mentioned in the first part of this music theory course, which I of course cheated and watched a little over a month ago, which is the use of solfege around the world. You may think you don’t know what that is, but I’d bet that you are wrong. Solfege is a fairly standard note notation method for music that represents the notes with a set of basic syllables, specifically: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, and ti. See? You do what it is. Thanks, Sound of Music.
What I found interesting is that according to the instructor, in other parts of the world, specifically parts that are not the United States, (and possibly the UK?), the solfege are often used as the actual note names themselves. By which I mean, as I understand it from the course, and the instructor has the credentials to know, we’re pretty much the only ones that name the notes with the letters A through G. Which is fantastic to know. Some places use the solfege with a fixed “do”, meaning that what we call a “C”, they always call do, “D” is re, etc. Apparently other places use it a bit more like we do, with a flexible “do”, where “do” is always the root of whatever key you are in.
It’s one of those things that you don’t really think about until you start to dive into this stuff, but it is fascinating to learn. It also kind of addresses at least some of one of my main gripes with music theory, which is the question of why C is C. What I mean is, if you want to use letters for the notes, fine, I get that. You want to use A-G, sure, why not? But, you’ve got a key, literally one single key in which the major scale, the basic pattern that is kind of the basis for everything else, lines up with that letter grouping exactly to have no flats and no sharps. And for the tonic, the root note of that scale, you choose the letter “C”. The third one. Why?
C Major is one of the first scales anyone learns, it’s what the piano keyboard is built around, we even refer to the center of the keyboard as Middle C. If the letters are just arbitrary and really just represent concepts, and are looping around anyway, why in the world would you not just call that note “A”? Let that be the beginning note, and have the whole thing make a lot more sense.
I’m sure there’s probably some advanced technical reason out there as to why the actual A makes a better starting point than C, and if and when I find it I will take this rant back, though to be honest I would have hoped that whatever the explanation is it would be important enough to come up at least from time to time. I have a sneaky suspicion that it’s just one of those scenarios where someone simply didn’t think things through, or more likely when they decided to go with letter names just started with their favorite scale, and worked up from there. Which is a classic case of A+ favoritism.