Whammy Bar – Part 2

Now if notation cannot even handle one of the most popular present day western instruments, imagine how bad it gets with other cultures. Bach tried to emulate tribal music – he was even further off than he thought since their entire scale system was different, he could get a near fake but the notation he worked in was simply not able to represent the melodies of his inspiration.

This is where I get annoyed by a lot of my fellow protestants, the more orthodox among them still believe that psalms must be sung to the somber orderly music of the renaiscance church. Firstly I’ll argue the “orderly”, rock has no less order in it’s structure than the others, in fact all music is equally ordered – that’s one of the basic things that make it music.
More importantly, to claim that this is higher art is ridiculous, not that some of it isn’t pretty, but it was written in a clasistic system that measured the quality of art by how difficult it was to reproduce and more importantly by the ammount of specialist training you needed to understand it. The problem with this “classical” church music is that it goes against the very grain of what protestantism is supposed to be about – it makes church songs unsingable to most people. Worst it was almost certainly not the
music those songs were written for !
We have no idea what those melodies sounded like of course, since David and his contemporaries didn’t have ANY notation.
We do know that no two cultures’ music sounds the same so we can almost certainly guarantee it didn’t sound like renaiscance western music.

So let’s try a thought experiment. We could try to guess how David’s songs might have sounded, by comparing it to modern day music with a similar lyrical structure. Ignore all gospel, there is no resemblence at all between modern gospel and the psalms. Structurally the psalms, particularly those of David find their closest contemporary paralels in rock balads. Rock balads themselves have a lot of
inspiration from minstrel balads of the middle ages, which it turns out were played on the later descendants of the same instruments that David used (particularly the lyre).
So if authenticity of worship (supposedly the prime protestant goal) was truly sought -we should be singing psalms to the acompiment of melodies more similar to “Low man’s lyric” or “Cold November Rain” than to the stuff we normally get !

Not that my point is to talk much about Church, or even to single out protestants that much, it’s just that I know them because it’s the church-culture I was raised in.

So what am I talking about ? Music as a universal. We’ve established that music sounds different for each culture, yet all people can recognize it as music. Why is this ?
Scientists have no fixed answers, but they believe that music is not handled by the speech centers of the brain (which is why lyrics are so often heard wrong, thousands of people love a song “This guys’s in love with you” which ACTUALLY goes “The sky’s in love with you”), it’s handled by something much deeper, the same rhythm centers that control other rhythmic things in our bodies – like heartbeat.
Music reaches right down into the soul, into the absolute lowest levels of our brains and triggers emotions from their most ancient “on” buttons. Music remains a human universal, because of this – because in a very real way even the most contemporary music will always be primitive, if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t BE music.

Whammy Bar

Music is quite possibly the most culturally universal thing on the planet. Every known culture has music. A lot of people have this idea that western music is “modern” and other cultures’ music is “primitive”, this is of course horse-figs. Music made in China or Tobega today is as contemporary as music made in the West today – they are both made today.

So Bach got it wrong when he used tribal music as the intro to “The rites of spring” to give it a “primitive feel”, the reality is that music he took inspiration from was just as contemporary as the music he was creating (for that time), this doesn’t change that he created one of the better symphonies, it does mean that what he intended to achieve with it was impossible in that way.

Music is a universal, but there is no universal music. Every culture has a different musical scale. Music notation as we know it, can in fact only be used to write down western music, and even then only those newer than the 1500’s or so.
This is because for starters, western music before that used completely different scales (which ones we don’t know for sure, but some of them like Gregorian chants still survive). And worse, it cannot even truly represent all western music since then.
A good example is guitars, notation can and does efficiently encode most known classical guitar pieces (with only a few exceptions like some Spanish balads that incorporate moments of using the guitar box as a percussion instrument – slapping it – in between the notes). Classic guitars however have only two ways they can be played, strumming or chords, both of which notation knows about.
Electric guitars on the other hand add several other techniques. For starters there’s “choking” (what Hendrix invented), where the guitar is played like usual, but the notes are pressed right up against the guitar-base – this doesn’t work on classical guitars because the notes would be too soft, but electric guitars have amps. Notation has now way of indicating -play this A right up against the head, yet it gives your songs a very different emotional feel.
And that’s not the worst of it.
Now try sliding, sliding is a technique where electric guitarists press the strings flat using a hollow object of some sort, a short metal pipe can work but beer-bottles are often employed. Sliding causes the slide-object to vibrate a note in harmony with the chords played – effectively you’re playing two instruments at once in harmony now – try writing notation for THAT one.
And that’s not even the most important electric guitar technique of all – what electric guitarists are most famous for is the “rapid strum” where the same note is played over and over so fast that it sounds like it lasts for a very long time, usually introducing a “howl” sound into the note.
Metal-players particularly love the howl as an emotive expression. But notation has no idea what to make of that, since no other instrument can be played that way, a a violin with a six meter bow would maybe come close.
So guitarists, especially rock-guitarists tend to prefer writing their songs down as riffs.