I just heard this story yesterday: Several years ago, a friend of mine was going to see a Bobby McFerrin show at Ohio University. The day of the show, the student newspaper wrote an article warning everyone that if McFerrin heard a lot of shout outs requesting Don't Worry Be Happy, that he was very likely to storm off the stage and not return.
Which if you think about it, Don't Worry Be Happy would have to be the most ironic possible song to cause a person to storm off.
I guess the audience kept mum on the requests, because my friend says it was one of the best shows he's ever been to. And he's been to a lot.
Note: coming from me, this is just heresay. I can't actually testify to Bobby McFerrin's hatred of Don't Worry Be Happy.
He wrote it in an hour or so because of being frustrated. I can imagine if you have 'great plans' and all people recognize you for is a thing that you whipped out like that it could get a little frustrating.
The real compliment is in that his musical genius is such that he could even do that.
There are other examples of that, I think that such huge popularity of a thing you whipped out in a short time causes people to think of you as a 'one hit wonder', and I'm sure that is not what Bobby McFerrin is all about.
He's actually a tremendously talented musician and singer.
It's a bit non-traditional, but one of my favorite classical CD's is where he sings the violin solos for various pieces. Link to album "Paper Music" is here:
For all the tracks marked "Voice", he's using his voice as a solo instrument, but not singing words. The description sounds cheesy, but the result is surprisingly effective -- simple and haunting.
Incredible pedagogical demonstration. Rapid learning via call-response, game-like interaction. Beautiful thing... web apps could gain some inspiration from this for UI teaching as well.
I was really impressed with this, and sent it to my wife, who pointed out that it's not all that impressive.
If you watch, McFerrin gives the crowd 4 out of 5 pitches _first_. Assuming he starts on C, he gives them C-D-E, and then A. He also makes a point of making a bigger leap from C to A (a minor third) from between C-D-E (each a major second).
At that point, it's hard to see how the crowd could come up with anything _but_ a pentatonic scale! He's given them four notes, and established that a small jump is a major second and a big jump is a minor third. So when makes the big jump from E to G and the crowd follows along it's not all that magical.
If he'd just given them C-D-E and made a small step stage left, would they have gone for B or Bb instead?
It's still a fun little performance to watch, but I don't think it proves anything about the pentatonic scale being hardwired into the human brain.
He gives them three notes, they figure out the other two and extend the scale across two octaves. For a room full of laypeople watching a guy jump back and forth, that's remarkable.
Now, in this day and age, anybody who hasn't been raised by wolves has had the pentatonic scale drilled into them from the day they were born. Also, it's not an arbitrary bunch of notes. It's derived from simple harmonic principles.
Still, I would not have guessed that this stunt would be possible.
Ah, you're right, he doesn't give them E. However, my point remains the same. He gives them C and D. The audience comes up with E, which is totally natural for a _major scale_! Then McFerrin gives them the A (with the big jump). At that point the audience is either forced to go with A minor or a pentatonic scale. Considering the fact that he has established two jump sizes (minor third vs major second), it's pretty much impossible for them to choose A minor.
Before some Greek dudes put nice-sounding musical scales on a mathematical basis (octaves and other music theory concepts), music was either re-creating sounds from nature or stylized talking. It took a lot of experimentation and observation to find a musical system that consistently "resonated" with human emotion.
Are you sure about this? Can you post a reference?
My understanding is that the same sorts of scales (logarithmic, with any frequency f and f*2^n treated as equivalent pitches, usually with five or eight tones per octave, occasionally more) have arisen independently in just about every human culture, usually without a mathematical theory. I could be wrong, though.
You're off by a couple of millennia, the 'Wohl Temperierte Klavier' was only possible after some German dude called Werkmeister came up with a way to tune instruments across large ranges to allow them to play together.
That's where the math came in to it.
That other German 'dude' J.S. Bach then proceeded to cover the new possibilities exhaustively, see the music in the volume of the same name. The enormous jump music made in the relatively short span of 15 years or so during which this all happened is still quite unbelievable.
This makes about as much sense as claiming that before people figured out how to write and before linguists started codifying systems of grammar, all language was just unstructured simplistic animal utterances.
The irony of the pre-eminenct, western-only centered historical-musical view surrounding a McFerrin melody is thick as molasses. It's West African in rhythm, choral response, scale and spirit.
I don't think so. The Greek ideas have just survived, because they wrote a lot and their conquerors --- the Romans --- spread their stuff. Other cultures had well-developed music, too.
If someone was really interested in turning this into performance art, I strongly suspect that it wouldn't have taken more than another 10 seconds to tell half the audience to follow one leg and half the other.
Calm down, folks. Just words, and I think we all understood what he meant by "chord". There is a technically correct term for two notes played simultaneously (double stop also works for stringed instruments):
Of course, his instrument included a hundred or more voices, and several of them were on different octaves. So, I think one can say this was a "chord" by the general definition of "three or more notes from a key played simultaneously".
And, musicians do frequently refer to dyads as chords, as long as the third is there. The fifth has less harmonic weight (and never changes from major to minor) and the whole chord can be implied with just the first and the third. While pianists may mostly always have easy access to the fifth, stringed instrument players generally think of the fifth as the note you drop when you can't pick them all up.
That's a battle of pedantry that you lost a long time ago, and you will win it sometime after "begging the question" gets used correctly most of the time.
It's a good example of a picky use of language that adds nothing whatsoever to the understanding of the subject.
"Interval" has connotations I didn't want, namely that it's the same no matter what degree of the scale you start on. I really did mean "I, III" specifically. As far as I know, there's no term in music for that, but "chord", namely a major I chord (only without the fifth) seems to fit what I wanted to say better than "interval" to me.
Without more context it's really impossible to say whether that was a major I or not. It would be the only functional harmony in the entire pattern, so it seems unlikely it was a I. A pentatonic melody by itself doesn't infer much in the way of harmonic progression. The only reason we hear C# as tonic is because he starts there and emphasizes it with repetition and mini-cadences that are primarily rhythmic in nature. There aren't any IV or V chords available with those pitches (or iii or vii for that matter, you can imply a ii but not very well).
I would actually argue that interval actually is the most accurate term in this case. (Not that I didn't understand what was meant by the term "chord" though, and certainly wouldn't have been bothered by it)
A major I chord without the fifth is two pitches, the first and third degrees of the major scale. That's what I meant. Why is that not anywhere close, or even not precisely the same?
I did not mean a major third interval. They could have sung the correct interval, but the wrong pitches. For what I did mean, I do insist that in the limited terminology of music, chord is a better fit because it implies the pitch where interval doesn't.
This necessitates terms like "Power Chord". Pedants are going to say this is wrong. (And oh yeah a Koala Bear isn't really a Bear either.) But it does get around a limitation of the language.
The fifth is hardly essential to achieve the sound of a major I chord. Fifths are omitted all the time in classical music to avoid parallel voice-leading.
Semantics are important. What's not important is correcting a term that was good enough for its intended purpose and derails an otherwise fruitful discussion into nitpicking about the meaning of words being used.
In this case I don't think it was really a big deal either way. Discussion about the major 3rd in the video wasn't really harmed much, and a few mildly interesting posts about semantics resulted.
How timely! At lunch today a couple of colleagues were talking about the ability to play a note just by feel and intuition, on whatever musical instrument you are proficient in.
