Skip to main content

Thinking Musically - review

It's difficult to know exactly how to classify Thinking Musically. It isn't a science of music book, though it does have a small amount of scientific content. Nor can it really be considered a basic music theory book, given it never mentions musical notation. I can best describe it as a book that gives a feel for what's going on in music without getting technical, so the reader can get think through, for instance, why some music sounds happy and other pieces sad, simply as a result of choosing a particular 'palette' of notes.

We start with some basics on the nature of sound and pitch. These are illustrated using wiggly side to side (roughly sinusoidal) waves to represent sound waves. Uri Bram and Anupama Pattabiraman qualify this by saying 'This is the easiest way to imagine what a wave looks like, even if it's not 100% accurate.'  That's fine, but it really wouldn't have been hard to explain that in reality sound is a compression wave, with alternating squashed up and thinner air, so the model waves they use could be considered a picture of higher and lower pressure areas.

The tone throughout the slim volume (I read it in a couple of hours) is light and conversational. This mostly works well, though when the authors resort to humour it can be rather wince-making, as when they suggest twanging a rubber band repeatedly close to someone's ear, then say 'What, you actually did it? We were kidding. Oh dear.' Oh dear.

I liked the way that Bram and Pattabiraman emphasised the importance of relative pitch, illustrating it with a coffee shop cups metaphor, and showing how, for example, semitones cannot be equally spaced but depend on that relative spacing. To be honest, though, I got a bit bored by the lengthy description of how the notes fit on a piano keyboard and how they are named. However, things got interesting again once we got onto scales, especially when exploring the way that different but consistent spacing sequences separate major and minor, though why the authors had to drag the obsolete tonic sol-fa system in, I'm not sure - it only served to obscure.

Something that came through strongly in this section was a need for wider context. Almost all references were to pop music, which led to the suggestion that almost all Western music uses the conventional scales - but this ignores pretty well all serious music pre-Bach (when, for example, in one period music was often effectively written in a different key in the same piece depending on whether the line is ascending or descending) and much serious music written post 1900 when traditional scales are often ignored. In fact, all the way through I felt I'd like a bit more. For instance in page 75 there's a reference to the tritone interval, considered the work of the devil (figuratively) in the Middle Ages, but just 7 pages earlier, the authors highlight the striking second note of the song Maria from West Side Story, without pointing out that the interval that makes it sound so dramatic... is a tritone.

All in all, this is a really interesting little book (perhaps a little overpriced for its length), presenting music basics in an interestingly different way, but it could do with a little filling out with context - both in musical history and, perhaps, some more stories about composers and musicians much as a good popular science book might tell us about scientists - to keep the interest going.

Thinking Musically is available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com.
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope