I really dislike these kinds of headlines not because they are obvious (jazz and classical require different kinds of thinking), but because they make it easy to jump to the conclusion that the ability to play classical or jazz or xyz is dependent on the physical nature of the brain. From there all sorts of erroneous arguments stem from the "fact" that "oh I'm just not wired to play xyz"instead of the reality that it takes consistent work in a style to understand that style better. Basically the whole nature vs nurture argument, except that people tend to worry about nature rather than work on nurture.
It seems likely (to me, as a neuroscientist who studies learning and brain plasticity) that the ability to play classical or jazz or xyz (at very high levels) is dependent on the physical nature of the brain. But you get the brain you build through practice (nurture), not the brain you were born with (nature). The consistent work in a style to understand that style better is what wires a person's brain to play xyz.
But I agree that the article could be written to point out that nurture, not nature, is the cause of these neurobiological observations.
Would you happen to have any literature on practice in Computer Science? I've read through most of Ericsson's work on deliberate practice but would love to find more. My PhD research is on examining the benefit of different CS exercises used for teaching
Right, I guess it more has to do with the fact that some people don't realize that the brain itself (in my limited understanding) can be changed by our thoughts/actions.
I feel like you're building a strawman of people who would take this study as proof that nature being more effective than nurture. No one commented on such an argument here or within the article. The only allusion the article makes to either is maybe the quote, "Thereby, different procedures may have established in their brains while playing the piano which makes switching between the styles more difficult...", which -- in my opinion -- alludes more to nurture than nature. But it's only her hypothesis and hasn't been accounted for in this study.
I feel like you're spurring some sort of argument that is a non-sequitur to this study.
And to address your argument (yeah, I know, I see the irony here) do you not feel that it's dishonest to not take nature into account? What if a study does say, "99% of lumberjacking is nature compared to nurture." Should we discount it just because it goes against our preconceived notion that we can do anything if we try really hard to achieve it?
If it makes you feel any better, I had the exact opposite assumption when I saw the headline. I assumed it would be about the different ways of thinking to play jazz or classical strengthen different pathways and parts of the brain.
Like all types of publication, exaggerating and glamorizing academic research results is good for funding, because it works. The title "different tasks utilize the brain in different ways" might be just way too obvious and boring, so they have to spice it up and dramatize it.
I'm not sure it's possible or realistic, but I'd love to know what sorts of things we can do as a society or a species to make it so that clickbait ceases to be effective. I remember reading about a language that was designed to make it impossible to exaggerate or lie. It didn't work, but it's an interesting idea!
Pretty much this. I think that what you get into and decide to master is more a foundation of what you grew up listening to than what you're brain is innately wired to do (if that even has meaning).
I think that jazz is one of those genres that, to be legit, you had to have grown up in the culture where those dominate. While people who didn't grow up around jazz can mimic it, it's not quite the same. For this reason, I think jazz has a bit of mystique around it that other genres of music do not.
This isn't only for jazz, but several other genres of music as well.
Jazz can definitely be learned at a distance. Some of the all-time greats of the genre grew up thousands of miles from the traditional heartlands of jazz. Off the top of my head I'd name George Shearing, Michel Petrucciani, Hiromi Uehara, Barbara Dennerlein, Allan Holdsworth and Martin Taylor, but there are countless others.
Jazz is just really, really hard. Good improvisation is incredibly demanding on both a mechanical and cognitive level. A jazz pianist needs the physical dexterity and skill of a classical pianist, but they also need to think like an arranger in real-time.
The sad thing is that classical music used to be like this!
Beethoven would improvise for hours and bring his listeners to tears, and the classical concerto tradition of the "cadenza" was originally a time for the soloist to improvise and showcase his or her skills, finishing off with a trill to let the orchestra know it was time to move on. Additionally, it was commonplace for pianists to add their own flair to pieces they were playing, emphasizing or de-emphasizing elements, or adding extra musical content. (e.g., additional contrapuntal lines, turn some runs into octaves, replace some octave salvos with filigree., &c.)
In the late classical (Beethoven piano concerto #4 being the first prominent example) period, cadenzas started being written by the composer, and the composer's intentions started being seen as sacrosanct, a divine mandate from on high.
This slowly died off. Vladimir Horowitz was the last "great" pianist who regularly re-arranged the music was performing and, ironically, pianists today often perform his arrangements. (See, for example, the Rachmaninoff 2nd piano sonata, a hybrid of Rachmaninoff's two editions, which many feel is a better compromise between grandeur and thematic progression.)
Classical music was a lot more like jazz, but it has largely become a religion rather than just an art form.
Eliot Fisk has done a this relatively recently (~2015) with the Bach cello suites. Although they aren't improvised, they are re-arranged to take advantage of the fact that one can play more notes simultaneously on the guitar — to me they sound like warmer lute arrangements with some modern voicings. Definitely different than the arrangements I play.
This is getting off topic, but I cannot wait for the day when we will be able to transmit music from brain to computer. There maybe genius arrangers/composers who never had the time to master an instrument or software.
I definitely can wait. I love that music is a physical medium, requiring a body in order to experience it, not just cognition. That music originated with and continues to largely be based on human bodies generating rhythm and sounds either intrinsically, (singing, vocalizing, body percussion, stomping, etc.), or extrinsically using acoustic instruments. I also totally enjoy electric instruments and electronic music, as they don't necessarily imply losing the various embodied aspects of music creation and enjoyment. Which is to say, embodiment is something I feel is truly important for many reasons , and is one of the reasons why I love music (saying this as a musician, music lover, and temporary pilot of a mostly functional human body).
I love that to play an instrument with some level of proficiency, it takes physical practice. I love that to get good at dancing, sports, or martial arts - takes physical practice. That these things engage your whole beingThat part of the joy from these kinds of activities comes from the time that is invested, the changes and improvements that are experienced over time. I love that we have muscle memory - that our bodies can be trained to respond faster than our thinking mind in various situations.
To me, while it could take some cognitive work up front in terms of synthesis, composition, and arrangement - the otherwise instantaneous transmission of this product from thought to machine strikes me, at worst, as yet another technological solution for a problem that doesn't exist. Not to say that it would never be useful. Just srsly... do we need an app for everything that could ever possibly exist?
Jazz is just really, really hard. Good improvisation is incredibly demanding on both a mechanical and cognitive level. A jazz pianist needs the physical dexterity and skill of a classical pianist, but they also need to think like an arranger in real-time.
I tend to agree, but it's unlikely that jazz players possess all the skills of classical musicians plus other stuff. At some point, both start to bump into limits.
I remember Grappelli answering a question about classical. An interviewer asked him if he considered playing more classical pieces, and his response was along the lines of "I suppose I could, but why? I could take a few months to do it worse than a top classical musician would achieve in a few days. However, I do have other skills - for instance, I can improvise."
I like this answer, because Grappelli is really, really strong technically. But in the end, if you're going to spend the time developing the mental fluidity and improvisational ability for jazz... eventually something has to give. Top classical players can take on certain technical pieces that probably will elude the top jazz players.
Good point. Classical training aims to make the player as invisible as possible-- jazz training (one hopes, anyway)aims to train a player to value and enhance their personal idiosyncracies. It is difficult for a classically trained player to value all sound as texture and color and to feel free to play with less than "perfectly efficient" technique. A jazz player is making something of their own- while a classical player aims to channel the composer more-- and then make their own bold statement on whatever they are playing. It is unfortunate that classical evolved that way- to value a kind of technical arms race-- and then jazz education began to follow that too-- and as someone who switched, I can say that it was a difficult transition- my brain certainly felt like it had to change first before I could physically do the playing on call.
> they make it easy to jump to the conclusion that the ability to play classical or jazz or xyz is dependent on the physical nature of the brain
Unless you're a Cartesian dualist, everything is dependent on the physical nature of the brain. People just need to remember that a significant portion of this nature is mutable and gradually adapts itself to whatever you focus on.
I agree and it also seems like the truth is probably the opposite of what people are likely to take away.
Loosely, when you train a neural net repetitively in one way it adapts in order to be better at solving that specific case. While there may be some variation in initial conditions it seems likely that a lot of the variance is a result of the training itself.
Yeah these things are silly I have played both and they involve very different approaches to practice and performance its like writing an article that oranges have a different effect on the brain than peaches.
> For them it is about playing pieces perfectly regarding their technique and adding personal expression. Therefore, the choice of fingering is crucial. Jazz pianists, on the other hand, concentrate on the "What". They are always prepared to improvise and adapt their playing to create unexpected harmonies
I minored in music at college and studied both jazz and classical composition/theories. One key takeaway I had from my education is that notes that may considered to be dissonant in classical music are in many cases acceptable in jazz, given the chordal context and how a player chooses to resolve it as progression goes.
I'd even expand a bit further and say that not only musician's brains work differently, but also brain activities of the audiences might differ when listening to jazz and classical pieces. Typically a classical audience might be a bit uncomfortable hearing a dissonant note and treat it as a "wrong note" while a jazz audience might think a dissonant note as being temporarily "out of box" to create tension and expect it to be resolved later.
All music based on western harmony is about dissonance. Or more to the point, the movement of dissonance to consonance, tension to resolution. I once had an excellent lesson that explained it to me. Movement around the Circle of Fifths is a measure of increasing tension - each step becoming increasingly dissonant, until you hit the halfway point (the tritone) and start resolving back toward consonance.
So even a simple fifth is "dissonant". It creates tension and demands resolution. It's not perceived as "dissonant" because it is "normal". It's only when you push out of the listener's comfort zones that it becomes weird and wrong. In other words, the perception of dissonance isn't musical, it's cultural.
Jazz music pushes harmonic dissonance a lot farther than "classical" does, so jazz listeners are much more accustomed to it. It doesn't sound wrong to hear tritones, or minor seconds, or diminished and altered triads, or stacked fourths. Dissonance is welcomed and encouraged. Even resolutions are often decorated with dissonance.
>Jazz music pushes harmonic dissonance a lot farther than "classical" does
Not sure why you say that. Except you're imagining Mozart vs free jazz or something. Both musics have pushed dissonance pretty much all the way.
By "a simple fifth" do you mean e.g. the note G in the key of C major? (depends what harmony exactly) or C and G played together with no harmony, or..
And when you say a simple fifth is "dissonant", do you mean it's dissonant, or "dissonant" (i.e. not dissonant)? So, theoretically dissonant, but not really?
I once lived with someone who listened to no 15 (I think it was) of Messiaen's 20 Glimpses of the Infant Jesus constantly. It's very slow, nothing but super-weird chords. After a few minutes there's a major triad, which sounds sooo weird, like a super-weird chord. So.. that makes "the perception of dissonance isn't musical, it's cultural" not sound exactly right either.
It demands resolution? In what way? Like what? You need to hear a root note after it?
>It doesn't sound wrong to hear tritones
Like in a G7 chord?
>or stacked fourths
The jazz originators of this called it a Ravel voicing.
I put "classical" in quotes for a reason - I meant baroque/romantic kinds of classical music. Mozart, if you will. Listen to Charles Ives, and you'll hear dissonance as challenging as anything in jazz.
And yes, theoretical vs actual dissonance. All note combinations but unison are dissonant to some degree. C and G, played together, are more dissonant than C and C, but not as dissonant as, say, C and B together (which is also why there's some piquant clanginess in a maj7 chord, despite its lush sound).
Also yes, in the right harmonic context, a major triad can sound really weird. But being major isn't itself proof against dissonance. If you're in D major, a D# major triad is going to sound very dissonant. "Perception of dissonance is cultural" is a generalization, I'll admit, but it's a good one. What sounds terrible to ears accustomed to Pachabel is merely juicy to ears that dig Ellington.
I liked this explanation of harmony using different levels of musical comprehension (by Jacob Collier, featuring Herbie Hancock)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRkgK4jfi6M
my favorite part is how he explained harmony to the professional musician, very enlightening. I have been a big fan of his Youtube content and wish to see him live when he comes to my town.
> It doesn't sound wrong to hear tritones, or minor seconds, or diminished and altered triads, or stacked fourths.
That depends on the composer. I'm doing Hollander currently. I got to sing a hell lot of tritoni and chromatic progressions. That's pretty difficult.
But it doesn't sound that way at all. If you hear it "from the outside" you just think "yeah, that's how it's supposed to be.
I also did a contemporary Serbian opera a couple of years back than. Serbian folk music as I experienced it always sounds a litte "wrong but cool". Was near impossible to sing, but to the listener: Yeah, sounds good.
Some of the intervals in this Frescobaldi piece sound dissonant to modern ears, but a lot of the effect comes from a pre-equal-temperament scale tuning.
>Jazz music pushes harmonic dissonance a lot farther than "classical" does
I'm both a jazz fan and a "classical" music fan. I seriously disagree. The latter pushes the harmonic envelope far more -- listen to Olivier Messiaen, Schoenberg, Varese, Hindemith etc etc... and i'm only listing guys from the early part of the XX century!
Something funny I noticed in me. I was pretty much into funk and jazz harmonies all my life. But lately when life became harsh. Classical music harmonic fluidity and lightness appealed to my mind a lot more.
Also because I got less thrilled by microlevel effects and paid more attention about larger movements which seems prevalent in classical music.
Jazz feels like forever tripping without ever falling. Everything is twisting and tilting, and somehow the goal is almost to make it the most daring move (after all syncopation is about that) that keeps the rotation going.
> Everything is twisting and tilting, and somehow the goal is almost to make it the most daring move (after all syncopation is about that) that keeps the rotation going
haha, this is an appropriate description about playing from free jazz pioneers like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman
Late Coltrane is as out there as the most out that of Coleman's work. Ascension and Science Fiction are both going to be tough sells to people without some familiarity with free jazz.
I've studied jazz for many years, and my experience supports your points in your third paragraph. I've heard a lot of questions about the 'wrong notes' when introducing someone to a recording or something. I've also heard a lot of people express the sentiment that they aren't sure a jazz pianist isn't just playing random notes, which I think is in line with the way of thinking you mentioned.
Yet Prokoviev is among them most played orchestral music in the USA, and he was definitely not someone who played in consonance. Quite the opposite, actually.
I was going to mention that in my comment, but forgot. If you define "classical" as composed, academic music, then much of its 20th century output is just as dissonant as jazz, sometimes more so.
Are you referring to atonal music using composition systems such as the Scheonerg method? In that case, even if most of it sounds dissonant, it's still composed through a systematic approach, meaning notes/harmony are carefully choosen and left little room for 'out-of-box' improvisation
hence it's important to have a good understanding of the chordal context when performing jazz. Outside notes that are too far away from the progression would likely be mistakes, but then there is this exception of atonal music. The more I studied harmony and theories, the more I'm overwhelmed by the possibilities when it comes to composition and improv.
With skill, yes. But if you're at my level as an improviser, it's possible to play notes that sound like mistakes, followed by additional notes that don't sound like recovering. ;-) Sometimes, the whole passage just sounds like it didn't work, or that I was lost, which I probably was.
There are also chord changes that are too complex for me to interpret in real time.
Adding to my woes, between any two wrong notes, there are infinitely many wrong notes on my instrument.
No huge surprises here - classical training focuses on playing a piece exactly as the notation goes + personality on tone, emphasis of notes, tempo. When playing a classical piece (in typical classical training) you don't generally start dicking around reharmonising it, changing voicings or playing an improvised solo.
Jazz charts (and training focus) looks very different - basic chord structure and the main melody is written down, everything else is up to you - chord voicings, on-the-fly reharmonisation, improvised solos. It's a different type of training and thinking.
Of course these are the "textbook" or cliche interpretations of classical and jazz music. Classical and jazz are very broad, ultimately meaningless terms, and many musicians have experience playing a wide variety of music.
Many classically trained pianists are excellent at improvisation. Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart were respected pianists. Wagner wrote the Hollander by improvising on the piano reciting the lyrics. Beethoven was feared by other pianists for his level of skill at improvisation. Mozart improvised most of his piano sonatas as far as I remember.
Gould made a recording of Strauss songs I think. The singer said in an interview, that Gould just started to improvise in Strauss' style and harmonics (Strauss is pretty damn difficult).
Contemporary pianists often know both. Anecdotal evidence: A colleague of mine from music university studied classical piano and was a regular at jazz clubs in Dusseldorf.
It is very interesting to see differences in brain structure from classical to jazz pianists. Maybe a hint at how (muscle-)memory and motion planning is stored? A hint at how volatile brain structure is? It would be interesting to see, if e.g. a classically trained pianist switching to jazz exclusively also has a significant restructuring of his brain.
Edit: Now that I've read the article and the abstract of the paper (the paper is behind Elsevier's paywall), I understand that jazz pianists are quicker at planning new movements (a.k.a. Chord progressions) with the downside of making making more mistakes, while classically trained pianists are slower here, but faster at recognizing and repeating unlearned ("unusual") finger movements.
Would be interesting to see a comparison to pianists doing both jazz and classical music.
> Many classically trained pianists are excellent at improvisation.
I would not say that, the example you give are the most reknown composer of all times. I think they are more the exception than the reality of professional musicians. Not every one is able to reach such level of genius. It seems, proficiency in both style seems rather rare. I don't think I could name a single current world class contemporary jazz player which could reach the same level in classical music interpretation.
Regarding jazz improvistion, from my little experience of amateur player, jazz musicians mostly improvise together as a band, this is not a solo activity.
And as my top poster dharma noted: Jazz and "classical music" share many similarities. Definitely true. Think of Scriabin piano somata No 5 written in 1907. Or even go back to Beethoven No 32, 2nd movement.
> When playing a classical piece (in typical classical training) you don't generally start dicking around reharmonising it, changing voicings or playing an improvised solo.
This is a recent thing concerning "classical" music.
Quite a lot of music even at the time of Bach had improvised parts. (Figured bass springs to mind, but I don't know enough detail from this period. I'll let the music nerds handle this.)
I especially appreciate pianists who seem to bridge this divide. Jon Schmidt of the Piano Guys seems to be able to fluidly combine classical style and jazz improvisation in the same song. Check this out:
If anyone is interested in exploring this style of music in more depth, I recommend looking into "Third Stream" music. It's meant to be a sort of fluid combination of both jazz and classical styles, and is often pretty interesting. There's a whole lot of things that third stream music /isn't/ (and famously, a list that attempts to define the genre in terms of what it's /not/ supposed to be), and as such, many people who try to write third streammusic end up creating music that's a lot less subtle.
It's not really my cup of tea (more of a jazz guy), probably because there isn't a huge repertoire of third stream music out there, but it's definitely worth checking out if you think you might be interested.
Conservatory grad here. I used to joke with fellow music majors when one of us would do something particularly clumsy that it was very ironic since we were essentially majoring in hand-eye coordination. This study is news to me, thank you for sharing.
Hmm...but most of the required fine dexterity is in your non-dominant hand. I wonder if some right-handed brain real estate is being repurposed for your left hand (if you are a righty).
This is something many people think, but isn't necessarily true. Yes, the left hand fingering requires dexterity, but the dynamics, timing, and much of the tone come from very fine movements of the right hand. If you think about the bow as a lever, tiny movements at the fulcrum make enormous differences to the forces applied in the middle or at the end. So there's less finger motion, but more fine adjustment happening at the right hand than many people think.
Right brain controls left hand (the brain brain is weird that way) so the dexterity required for fingering in the left hand is governed by plasticity and over-representation in the right brain.
Right, but there is also a lot of evidence (or at least it looked like there would be when I was in the field 5+ years ago), that it isn't that simple, and there is also considerable ipsilateral motor control in the cortex as well. This would make sense for activities that require coordination between both hands, so that, in the motor cortex, we wouldn't have the case where "the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing." So, if there is MORE coordination required than in a typical cortex, maybe non-coordinated tasks become clumsier? I have no idea. Maybe musical people tend to spend less time doing non-musical athletic things, and aren't as graceful? Maybe both, or something else? Sounds like a cool imaging project for a neuroscience or BME grad student.
Study: Musical genre-dependent behavioural and EEG signatures of action planning. A comparison between classical and jazz pianists
Citation: Bianco, R., Novembre, G., Keller, P.E., Villringer, A., Sammler, D., Musical genre-dependent behavioural and EEG signatures of action planning. A comparison between classical and jazz pianists, NeuroImage (2018).
Abstract: It is well established that musical training induces sensorimotor plasticity. However, there are remarkable differences in how musicians train for proficient stage performance. The present EEG study outlines for the first time clear-cut neurobiological differences between classical and jazz musicians at high and low levels of action planning, revealing genre-specific cognitive strategies adopted in production. Pianists imitated chord progressions without sound that were manipulated in terms of harmony and context length to assess high-level planning of sequence-structure, and in terms of the manner of playing to assess low-level parameter specification of single acts. Jazz pianists revised incongruent harmonies faster as revealed by an earlier reprogramming negativity and beta power decrease, hence neutralising response costs, albeit at the expense of a higher number of manner errors. Classical pianists in turn experienced more conflict during incongruent harmony, as shown by theta power increase, but were more ready to implement the required manner of playing, as indicated by higher accuracy and beta power decrease. These findings demonstrate that specific demands and action focus of training lead to differential weighting of hierarchical action planning. This suggests different enduring markers impressed in the brain when a musician practices one or the other style.
Highlights:
• Real-time imitation of piano chord sequences with unexpected harmony or manner.
• Genre-specific strategies at high (harmony) and low (manner) levels of planning.
• Jazz pianists revised harmony faster (earlier negativity) at the cost of manner.
• Classical pianists had conflict in harmony (frontal theta) but excelled in manner.
• Focus of practice may cause enduring brain marks at different action control levels.
My college degree was in classical piano, while I've mostly emphasized pop and jazz since then. I honestly don't really understand the study they're writing about here, but I have to say I don't really identify with Keith Jarret's quote here. Jazz is just another way to do music and it requires a different way of thinking, but I've never really looked at it as requiring any kind of "rewiring" or context shift.
In general when playing classical I miss the playfulness and individuality of jazz, and when playing lead sheets I miss the narrative sweep of classical music. At least with my pop songwriting I can try to bring in a little of both.
> Jazz is just another way to do music and it requires a different way of thinking, but I've never really looked at it as requiring any kind of "rewiring" or context shift.
They're using overly dramatic language like "rewiring" to talk about a different way of thinking. Of course it's a different way of thinking, classical is performance, and jazz is improv. Nobody would be surprised if they said that doing dishes vs differentiating polynomials used different parts of the brain, but somehow it's supposed to be news that classical and jazz music do.
Thanks, yes, the article doesn't use that word specifically. I quoted the parent comment. The article, and especially the headline, does use somewhat misleading language (as both @tunesmith's comment and the very top comment here is pointing out, among others) that is trying to imply that the brains of these two types of musicians is fundamentally different, e.g., "their brains started to replan the actions faster than classical pianists" and "their brains showed stronger awareness of the fingering". The language is implying a rewiring, and objectifying the brains of different musicians as being static and responsible for the difference, rather than talking about the plasticity of the human brain and the learned differences between wildly different tasks.
I would also say that in Jazz the rhythm of the music plays an outsized role as compared to classical. If you don’t “swing”* you can’t play with anyone and certainly can’t play jazz. On the other hand, classical musicians care about dynamics and tone in a way that doesn’t register wth Jazz musicians. Neither way is better, but they are almost like opposite approaches to music.
*By swing I mean more than just syncopate with the rest of the band. “To swing” in a jazz context means to be able to play exactly in time with the rest of the band, except when you don’t (but you are in control). A very confused concept, read wikipedia for more info.
> I would also say that in Jazz the rhythm of the music plays an outsized role as compared to classical. If you don’t “swing” you can’t play with anyone and certainly can’t play jazz.
A great deal of European jazz (represented by, for example, ECM) does not have have the concept of rhythmic swing. Unfortunately, there’s a tendency to talk about jazz as if the genre is purely the music of the New Orleans-Chicago corridor in early 20th century America, and jazz now has far too many subgenres in order for a claim about one to hold true for others. (Even improvisation is no longer de rigeur, and an artist may well perform from a written score.)
ECM has recently become available on streaming platforms, but the label acts quite aggressively against YouTube uploads of its music, so you’ll either need to use a streaming service or seek out the physical disc. However, I think that releases on the label like the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble’s The Zoo is Far or Vassilis Tsabropoulos’s Archirana would serve as good examples (just two among myriad) of how certain forms of jazz exist quite apart from traditional American expectations.
Well, they don't use the word jazz. It's Manfred Eicher's German label. Keith Jarrett, for example, has released dozens (100+, I imagine) of recordings on ECM.
...which since the 1970s has had a huge amount of Norwegian and Swedish (and more) musicians recording for the label, and recording sessions are often held in Oslo or Lugano. German headquarters, but more than just a German label.
Tone isn't that important in jazz. Hence, the importance of the saxophone, an instrument rightly reviled in classical music for mostly sounding awful.
I'm only half joking here. I'm a guitarist, and was having a conversation with a trumpet-playing friend once. I was talking about the technical struggle of legato playing at speed, something hard for trumpet players as well, but easy for saxophones. My friend was like "Yeah, but they have to play the saxophone". Few players can get a beautiful sound out of it, and only after years of struggle. Brass and guitars, on the other hand, have naturally beautiful tone, and are easy to get to sound nice.
The importance of melody over tone, and the melodic advantages of the saxophone, explain its popularity in jazz.
>Tone isn't that important in jazz. Hence, the importance of the saxophone, an instrument rightly reviled in classical music for mostly sounding awful.
Jazz doesn't have a fixed ideal of timbre. The saxophone has immense timbral versatility and expressiveness, which is integral to it's role in jazz. The saxophone emphasises every nuance of breathing and embouchure. The smoother, sweeter-sounding clarinet disappeared from jazz with the dawn of bebop. The clarinet will still do those silky legato runs, it's only marginally more difficult to finger, but it just doesn't speak with the same expressiveness. A similar argument could be made about the use of brass mutes, especially plungers - they don't make a particularly pretty sound, but they're tremendously expressive.
The obvious example here would be Albert Ayler, whose playing is either exquisitely expressive or grotesquely ugly depending on your perspective. Compare his tone with Ben Webster or Johnny Hodges and you'll see my point.
Mildly cantankerous sidebar: if classical musicians really cared about quality of tone, they would have adopted the cornet a century ago. British brass bands rightly revile the trumpet as the vulgar, shrill cousin of the cornet.
I agree with all of this. Saxophone is a highly expressive instrument... just not a pretty one. And I'm a huge Albert Ayler fan (which also gets back to melodic ideals... Ayler's great compositions are great in part because they're such simple, euphonic Circle-of-Fifths things, like folk music or gospel. To jazz nerds, Ayler is difficult. To non-nerds, Ayler is much easier to understand than most jazz.)
I think part of the reason classical saxophone is reviled is because the "correct" tone for saxophones in a classical setting is kind of bad (with apologies to my old saxophone professor). In classical music you are expected to play with a particular tone that sounds kind of harsh and honky to me. In jazz, on the other hand, having a unique and identifiable tone - especially on saxophone - is extremely important. At least, it used to be. Compare the sounds of Ben Webster [1] (breathy, rich vibrato, almost cello-like sound in the upper register, as around 2:32 in the linked video), John Coltrane [2] (harder-edged, brighter, more pure), Stan Getz [3] (light, airy, "pretty").
But yes, you have to work at it. Unlike, say, guitar, where you just pluck the string and that's that ;)
Oh, I wish good tone from a guitar was as simple as just plucking a string! It's an inherently pretty sound, but control and expressiveness are quite challenging (moreso because two different hands are involved in tone, each doing completely different things that must be coordinated).
As an aside, I've been intensely practicing a particular Miles Davis three-note riff (seven, if you count sounded notes rather than pitches), in part as a tonal exercise. The quarter notes need to be as intense and snappy as possible; the sixteenth notes need to be smooth and flowing. It's a really difficult shift to get the pick from "I'm gonna KILL this note" to "I'm going to gracefully flow these notes" - especially at fast tempos. I have no idea how Miles pulled it off on trumpet.
You don't like the sound of saxophones? Wow. Well, everyone has their own sound on saxophone, 'the sound of saxophones' doesn't mean much.
Not sure why you think trumpet is vastly easier to get a beautiful sound from than saxophone. That's silly.
The importance of melody over tone? Wow, never heard of that. All you say sounds like you are judging jazz by classical (I imagine) criteria, and of course it doesn't do well.
Saxaphone is 'reviled' in classical music because its tone is very crunchy and uneven compared to most of the other instruments of the band. I think in tone it is pretty similar to the bassoon, but even a chunky, honky instrument like the bassoon is very smooth compared to sax. Bassoon 'sings'[1], saxaphone 'yells'[2]. Given that, sax has very little place in a classical setting because it doesn't have that bell-tone or sine-wave sound that most other classical instruments try to achieve.
There's also some history to it. Saxophone is a relatively new invention, dating only to the mid-19th century, well after what people think of as "classical" was mostly done. By the time classical music could adapt, it had already moved in other directions. Saxophone was adopted readily by marching bands because it's portable and loud.
Historically, "jazz" started in the 1890s in New Orleans, when black performers were first allowed to play music in public. They played what was available to them - marching band instruments. Saxophones, brass, bass drums and snare drums. String bass and piano were added as the music moved indoors. Banjo dominated the string section until the electric guitar was invented, as guitars aren't loud enough to compete with all the horns and drums.
Unvarying unvarying belltone or sine wave sound would be more appropriate for something focused only on melody and not on tone, which is the opposite of OP's point. Sax tone has a lot of variability and control.
The melodic advantages of the saxophone are mechanical, not tonal. For example, to play a scale fragment on saxophone, one need only move fingers, while continuing to blow, creating a smooth, legato sound that can be done very fast. Contrast with guitar, where a note must be fretted and then picked, two separate motions that are difficult to coordinate. Smooth legato playing at high speed is extremely hard. Trumpets have a similar problem, tonguing notes to make changes.
And yes, saxophones have a great deal of tonal expressiveness available, especially once overblowing is brought into play. It's just not pretty tonal expressiveness, compared to other instruments.
Meh. Legato on guitar comes at a cost of expressiveness and note choice. When hammer-on and pull-off are your only ways to sound a note, you lose all the coloration available from dynamics, palm muting, distance from bridge, pick angle, and the million other little things guitarists do to make a note special. And note choice? Scales of any substance will force either difficult position shifts, or legato-breaking string switches.
It can be done, and I certainly do it. But it can't be all that's done, or your sound falls flat.
But it fits poorly into an orchestra. Your tone needs to mesh nicely. There is a reason why the well known classical sax pieces tend to use it as a solo voice (e.g., Pictures at an Exhibition).
It's my observations as a jazz musician and a tone nerd. The buzzy, shrill reed sound of the saxophone is difficult for the ear. Trumpets are much closer to the human voice. I've come to prefer saxophonists who revel in the ugliness of its tone, and push its other forms of expressiveness - not just melody, but the marvelous squawky tones only a saxophone can make. (That said, I'm a huge fan of modern master Kamasi Washington, who has a luscious tone.)
Look at it another way... would you rather listen to doves, or geese? Tonal beauty is objective.
A trumpet tone is famously close to a pure sine wave. Among all instruments, trumpet offers perhaps the least natural texture. I suspect all good trumpet players have worked at enriching their tone to avoid sounding synthetic, especially when it's most likely, as in classical music.
(Tries not be be snarky) You didn't respond to any of my points. Why don't you start playing trumpet, see for yourself how 'easy to get to sound nice' trumpet is. Everything you say seems wrong to me, except when you say what you like.
Like Dizzy Gillespie once said, "None of them blow easy". Yes, it's difficult to get good tone out of trumpets. Or violins, or guitars, or drums, or any other instrument. But assuming a skilled player, the tone of trumpet is more appealing to our ears than the tone of saxophones. It's ultimately easier to have nice trumpet tone than nice saxophone tone. Doves vs geese (or more correctly, elephants vs geese).
I've put in a couple of solid decades trying to improve my tone, and practice regularly to work on tonal issues. I appreciate the difficulty that any instrument represents.
Oh I totally would argue that position. (I am much more familar with jazz than classical). My main argument would come from how the two camps tend to practice. Generally jazz musicians will learn the 'changes' (key changes, common chord progression shapes) to a song, and the melody if it has one. At that point they start improvising. If they are really good their improvisation will include dynamic shifts and they will have good tone, but that tone may clash with other instruments. A jazz player will often learn a song before knowing in what arrangement they will be playing, and will play the same song in many different arrangements.
On the other hand, classical music has tone and dynamics written into the score itself. The entire point of the conductor is to anthropomorphize these features of the music, so you know when she is flailing violently you should play differently than when she is shushing you. Additionally, the tone/timbre of the whole piece is set in stone by the composer; A classical orchestra would never think it was ok to let the flutes take a melody written for the trumpets, etc.
yes. for those confused- where you put things relative to the metronomic beat (center of the beat) matters hugely. depending on styles and settings, bass will be slightly ahead, drums behind, guitar right on top etc. its cruical to hear everyone else in the band the way they hear themselves, relative to the beat. otherwise people think they are being rushed or dragged and it just doesnt congeal. and the feeling when it congeals is like being weightless, its truly great. it may sound trivial to the uninitiated, but its maybe the most important thing for bands, at least in my experience
Some of my best music lessons were around rhythm. Early on as a musician, I spent time playing reggae, with a bassist who wanted a guitarist, and was willing to put up with my innocence. He taught me a beat isn't an exact point in time, but rather sort of a region of probability, where sound is more or less likely to occur. Notes can begin or end at any point in a beat. The difference between reggae and ska is largely that in reggae, guitars and snare drum happen late in the beat, and in ska, it happens early. The former sounds languid, the latter frenetic. Same chords, same tempo, same "beat".
The other great lesson came from the jazz/rock drummer, Steve Smith. He describes "swing" as the simplest possible polyrhythm - a diminishment of three against two. Once you have three against two, you can start stripping out duplicates, until your down to ding ding da-ding ding da-ding ding... sound familiar? You get a strong backbeat (2 and 4), and an anticipation note at the very end of a bar before starting the next. Now, that anticipation note can be shifted earlier or later within its own beat, making things tighter or looser.
well there is one rub with swing which is that at faster tempos i think alot of people imply it less with note length and more with strong-weak dynamic, since its kind of hard when you are at 280+ to really keep the triplet legit. for drums i guess think of the "mueller stroke". angelo debarre is a counter example i guess, he still uses triplet like eight notes at crazy tempos, but for the most part i think people dont do that.
whenever I need to explain swing, I refer people to some Texas shuffle playing from SRV. Not jazz per se, but most of his blues rhythmic playing accentuates swinging quite a lot.
It almost seems as if what they're really testing is the difference between practice and performance. Some of jazz is actually making a mistake "work" for you by how you recover. (It's a myth that jazz improvisers always know what they're about to play.)
>half of them were specialized in jazz for at least two years, the other half were classically trained
Two years only? Uh..wtf. I didn't read the original paper, but that sounds ridiculous. Why not compare them with people who'd been playing, nay, specializing in, classical for 'at least two years'. Oh, because that would be ridiculous.
If someone is classically trained prior to studying jazz, 2 years is rather reasonable to pick up given they might already be well versed in basics such as proficiency in certain instrument(s), fundamental theories, sight reading, ear training, etc.
Well, it doesn't sound reasonable to me. 2 years sounds like 'pretty much total beginner' level. No-one will be a good jazz player after so little time, and I doubt their brains would be those of jazz musicians with decades of experience either.
I recently attended a Joey Alexander concert at SFJazz and was amazed how mature his playing is at his current age, given my standard of 'good musician' is rather high as a professionally trained jazz musician myself. He started playing jazz at age of 6 and started performing professionally when he was 9.
I agree that people need SOME time to learn the ropes but with proper training, 2 years is enough to be good. Note that proper training doesn't mean practicing certain technique, scale or etude hundreds of times. Nowadays there are systems designed over the years by schools such as Berklee effective enough to make someone a good jazz musician within 2 years, similar to many athlete training systems. No system can make legends, but decent musicians for sure.
Nice to at last read someone making sense on this page. :-) Ok, but 1 child prodigy learning in 3 years (?) hardly disproves my point.
Also, I don't believe in "proper training". I believe in learning from the recordings of the greats, and from playing music with people. Sounds like that's how Joey Alexander learnt[0]. I believe that, like many things, jazz can be learnt but not taught. Someone trained in some system will sound like the music equivalent of the academic artist - expert at following someone else's rules, but nowhere as an artist.
This is amazing. I'm a classical guitarist and pianist (not any good, but it's very clearly the way I'm oriented). Jazz just seems to escape me, although I work much harder at it.
Depends a bit on what you're trying to do, but jazz requires a lot more theory up front in order to be good at it. It might be extra difficult to approach jazz as a classical musician, to try and use the same tools and techniques. There might be ways to think about jazz that make it a lot easier for you, if you are interested.
One of the things that has really helped me with jazz is going through the older standards and singing the voice line while comping the chords on the guitar. Not only is it super fun to play and sing at the same time, but it gives a much better understanding of why the chords are there and what they're trying to do.
Within my own self, I have a dichotomy. When I am on the piano and reading from sheet music, I feel "classical." I am a bit more deliberate and I stumble a few times. When I am on my guitar, I mostly play by ear and feel. I throw on a backing track and just improvise the entire time. Anything accidental slips I have get incorporated into what I am playing.
I have tried to reverse the two (play classical guitar, and improve piano) and I simply cannot, or I look like an absolute beginner.
“Similar to research in language: To recognise the universal mechanisms of processing language we also cannot limit our research to German."
As an American living in Germany who taught English between IT jobs, I’ve come to describe spoken English as playing jazz, and German as performing classical music. Sure, you can put some personal touches on spoken German, and new expressions do crop up, but there’s a lot more latitude for improvisation in English, and the catchy improvisations are more likely to be picked up by other English users and become part of the language.
I thought this was my bias as a native speaker of English and very academic learner of German, but my German colleagues agree with the comparison.
> there’s a lot more latitude for improvisation in English
Lately I've been hanging out on the English Language Learners Stack Exchange. It can be a discouraging place. Too many people answer simple questions with complicated explanations of English grammar, when the real question they should answer is "How can I say this the way a native speaker would?"
"Your kindness has (and will continue to) made a difference."
The top-voted answer explains that "This sentence is an attempt at parallelling, where a sentence branches into two or more parts. In this case, it also rejoins at the end. The parallelled part must join on to the common part in the same way." And that's just the beginning. The answer goes on to explain about "eliminating the duplicated word sequences" and finally arrives at this sentence:
"Your kindness has made, and will continue to make, a difference."
That's grammatically correct, but hardly any native English speaker would ever say or write it. In fact, someone commented that the sentence "sounds more German than English to me."
My zero-rated answer was "I like to find the simplest way to say things. You can thank a person for their past, present, and future kindness all at once: 'Your kindness always makes a difference!'"
I don't care much about the votes, I'm just a bit sad that so many of the high-rated answers on ELL seem to answer the technical questions of grammar instead of helping people sound like native English speakers.
I suppose in the context of this post it's similar to asking "How can I sound like Mozart" and expecting an answer along the lines of "press these keys in this order" rather than any technical information about scales, progressions and dynamics. The end result may sound the same but there will be no actual understanding of the "why".
(gross oversimplification of music theory follows:)
You've probably heard of complementary colors and the color wheel in the context of art. The idea there is (afaik) that some colors are thought to go "better" together and they're used more often together to create certain effects that seem more naturally fitting. If nothing else, there are color pairs used often together, by convention.
Music has a similar construct in chord progressions. Chords (combination of pitches played simultaneously) sound as if they "naturally progress" from one to another when played in certain orders. For example, lots of pop songs will use a I-vi-IV-V progression over and over again, because 1) it's conventional and popular and 2) it sounds "natural" i.e. like it belongs together, the same way some colors might to an artist.
What they mean here by _harmonically unexpected chord within a standard chord progress_ is that they started with a standard, conventionally popular progression of chords, then (I assume) replaced one (or more) of the chords that follow that progression with one that doesn't, which creates a feeling of dissonance since they aren't supposed to belong together, classically speaking.
Hopefully this is an adequate portrayal -- not trained in theory, just a casual songwriter.
A chord progression is sequence of chords that defines the harmony of a song. A chord is a few notes played simultaneously. Think of a guy strumming a guitar, he would play the harmony with his guitar, and sing the melody.
In western music, chords and chord progressions are constructed according to certain rules (google "harmonization of the major scale") that are now familiar to most listeners. Actually, many pop songs share exactly the same sequence of chords. This contrats with jazz which tends to bend the rules.
One easy case can be attributed to the improvisational nature of jazz - it is hard for the average listener to predict where a solo is going, how a pianist is going to voice their changes with their left hand while operating in another separate but related space with their right hand.
I can't speak to to technical strictly music theory definition of jazz, especially given that jazz now is really just an umbrella for myriad sub-genres, but from my experience the beauty of jazz is that the resolution is not predictable, and more often than not it may make one feel vulnerable, or sad. See classics like Miles Davis, Bill Evans, or for someone alive today, Dr Lonnie Smith.
These [0] are examples of chord progressions. In other words, progression means nothing more than a series of chords. A "harmonically unexpected chord" would be if the chord progression was playing out and a chord you wouldn't normally hear was inserted. That's it.
Musicians, especially those focused on classical music, are so used to the standard chords that it feels really weird to play a "wrong" chord progression.
Basically there are a finite number of places that you can "go to next" in any musical context, and some of those destinations are more normal than others.
Like, usually we go to work and then home. But some days we stop by the bar. Maybe we planned a trip to the zoo and stopped for ice cream afterwards.
That all seems normal-ish to me.
But sometimes it's like, we are on our way to school for the day, but let's stop off in Times square for 5 min, and then Mount Rushmore, and then a dentist office in Iowa land on the moon, get a hot dog... and now we are at school for the morning.
Or like, in folk guitar you might play a C chord, followed by a C chord with a B as its root, then an Am chord... that happens all the time.
But very rarely would you play a C chord followed by an Eb major chord in folk music. But if you're playing Jazz, you might be more open to that possibility.
Many genres of music have songs that are mostly comprised of a handful of chord sequences, or 'chord progressions'. For instance, you will hear the I - IV - V all the time in western pop. An example of this (with a different chord progression):
Or to classical organists, one of the few classical specialties that has preserved improvisation as a major part of their skillset. (In the times that classical music was composed, musicians were encouraged/expected to be able to improvise. E.g baroque & classical period concertos where the cadenza was essentially an empty space in the sheet music that meant "improvise here". Some of Handel's organ concertos have no second movement written down because he would just improvise.)
Not sure whether parent is deliberately trolling but literally, the first two words of the article are Keith Jarrett. The statement describes how it applies to his music.
The mention of Jarrett in the article is what led to me asking throughout the article, "But what about musicians who are famously accomplished at both?!" They quoted Jarrett but didn't really expand on it, other than to use it as an argument from authority in support of what they think their study means about how the brains of musicians work.
The study included people who aren't at all like Jarrett (they are either/or musicians, while Jarrett is a both and then some musician), so the quote felt vaguely forced into place.
i feel like you can get a little bit of insight in to this if you arent a musician: imagine the difference between having a conversation with a friend (jazz) and reciting a piece of literature (classical). this is a borderline heinous simplification, but just imagine where your mind goes for each. you relax and let the thoughts flow in the first, you probably dont think very tangibly about diction. in the second you focus and probably think about the actual act of speaking more
To the extent that classical training is about 'flawless performance' and jazz 'training' is about 'fluid improvisation', in my experience these are very different skills.
The question is: how does such a study decide whether the 'brains ... work differently' because the tasks are so unalike, or because the brains themselves are somehow different.
Another question is proficiency: clearly 'virtuoso' pianists are different from 'amateurs' on both sides of the aisle. Are the brains of the 'virtuosos' more 'different'?
I remember reading a book decades ago about how people that play musical instruments tend to be good programmers. It might have been Jeff Dunteman's Assembly Language Step by Step, but not sure.
But that always stuck with me, and makes a lot of sense considering patterns and preciseness that you need when playing piano or some other instrument.
Last night my wife and I were talking and it turns out that my inability to "get" music comes from me not being able to listen to the music side and the words side of a song simultaneously. Is there anyone else out there like this?
I'm going to assume you would find the same difference between bus drivers and race car drivers. Airline pilots and fighter pilots. Poets and video gamers. Olympic triathletes and combat soldiers. Yoga practitioners and boxers.
I don't know how relevant this could be, but anyway, when I was like 11 or 12 there was this school mate of me who was a gifted classical pianist: he already played concerts at that age and apparently had its future already planned. Now one thing I recall vividly: at a friends party after playing some incredible piece of classical music he was asked to play some famous top-chart pop tunes and he failed completely: he was literally paralyzed for not having a sheet of what he was asked to play.
This reinforced my belief that classical musicians are trained to be perfect executors but lack a lot in creativity, or perhaps players with these characteristics are more attracted by the more formal world of classical schools.
Besides being trivially true, MOZART WAS A MASTER IMPROVISOR!!
Classical musicians were great improvisors for generations… until the late 19th century boon of the symphony orchestras and all these conservatories focused on getting musicians to follow the notes perfectly and watch the conductor and ignore creativity. In the 20th century, improvisation was rubbed out of classical music.
Today's classical pianists are pathetic improvisors. But don't think Mozart or Beethoven or Bach etc. were like that. They were much more like the jazz pianists.
This study is mostly just further proof of the tragic impoverishment of classical tradition over the last few generations.
I actually appreciate Jazz more than classical, and I’m sure I can play Jazz if i put my mind to it. Would that make my brain work differently before I even play jazz?
Miles playing piano on Sid's Ahead.[0] Sounds good too! Very hip. And there's this insanity[1]. The first time I heard it I thought "OMG who's the organist? That's amazing!!"[1] All keyboards on that are Miles I believe.
He was a keyboardist, though. His post-1970 live output is filled with him playing organ, often to set the harmonic context and direction for the rest of the band, as he was doing full-band improvisation at that point.
well, how many jazz musicians can most non-jazz people even name? Miles, maybe Louis Armstrong, maybe Duke Ellington. If they'd said "Cecil Taylor", who'd have recognized him?
