Django and music theory

Teddy Dupont

stuart wrote: »

He had no interest in discussing music either.

Something's been bugging me and you are probably the best person to ask. I'm sure I've seen a quote from Django somewhere which says something like 'I'm not interested in the melody, I'm more interested in the harmony' - something along those lines.

I've seen it quoted both as "....... I'm only/more interested in the harmony" and "..... I'm only/more interested in the chords".

gatsby

This post is quite funny. It's as if you asked Maradona or Pelé, "Did you ever study the aerodynamics of a soccer ball after you hit it with your right foot at a certain angle, knowing that the humidty rate is 23% and the outside temperature is X degrees?" Come on...

Django Reinhardt couldn't even read for most of his life!
However Django did say that the bass line in music was extremely important, an idea he got from J.-S. Bach.

NylonDave

THIS post is quite funny.

'It's as if you asked Maradona or Pelé, "Did you ever study the aerodynamics of a soccer ball after you hit it with your right foot at a certain angle, knowing that the humidty rate is 23% and the outside temperature is X degrees?" Come on.'

You don't think that he went out in all weathers and did things like jog through the streets with a football or hit a ball against a wall over and over and over ? If this isn't studying football then I don't know what is. Or to put it another way if you don't think that this amounts to studying aerodynamics then you have a problem with your understanding of the word study.

But the question needs refinement a little I think. Maybe Pele would have pointed out that a balls trajectory is not affected in any significant way by the humidity or the temperature ( given that ball is pumped to a standard pressure for professional games). He might mention that in Peru the ball seemed a little lively and that that was down to the change in atmospheric pressure at high altitude.

Of course it may be true that Pele was completely uneducated in Science and may have gotten the joke and nothing else from the question. And that is fine, not everyone has to have the same interests. But I for one would be uncomfortable in presuming so. And if I noted such a presumption in myself I would probably be interested in where it came from and what it meant about me.

Possibly though he would have deflected the question by talking about the rather large effect of the toe profile of the shoe on the effectiveness of adding spin or having the ball fly true without spin.

Or yet again maybe the conversation would fizzled out with that question because he realised that the barrel had already been scraped.

There really is no such thing as a dominant chord in Gypsy Jazz or any music really. There are at least twenty four different colours and they depend on the structure of the melody and the overall tonality, people with perfect pitch don't have to worry about that too much as they just play the note they hear. But if you want to have stuff to play 'over a dominant chord' and are prepared to play the same Beef Stew regardless of the tune then you are going to sound inept and that was what makes the question about what to play over a dominant chord silly.

I made this point already but apparently refining questions doesn't lead to neat but largely untrue blanket answers.

If you don't have perfect pitch the idea that, because those who do don't 'have to' think about it, you will become more like them by refusing to study well........ if that was the case you would already be doing so.

But if you are going to study be wary of simple solutions, as they usually only work in special cases (like not studying for example, only works in special cases) and if you try and apply them in every instance then you will get badly stuck.

D.

gatsby

Exactly. But this post --I'm quoting the title-- is about "music theory" (studying music on paper), not music practice. I guess I could rephrase my question, since we're talking about Django Reinhardt: "When Duke started playing a tune on the piano, did you need to know the key and the various arrangements before jumping in?"

NylonDave

I don't think that you are working an a very useful definition of music theory.

I know a few folk with absolute perfect pitch. One of them an old lady talked about how much she loved Oscar Pererson but hadn't studied enough to be able to find the notes even though she heard all of them and if you played the tune slow enough she would write it out for you on two staves in real time.

Yet another lady pianist I know (actually a Viola player who worked as the audition pianist for a local professional orchestra) used to lead a band for some musical theatre I toured with when I still played electric regularly. She couldn't play a lot of the syncopated parts and cut them. Sure she could hear everything no problem but hadn't studied the coordination to allow her body not to trip her up.

Once you have identified a problem you want to solve and set about doing so then you are building theoretical models and testing them. This is study.

But people are different, and child can learn a language with no effort just by being in that environment. An adult not so much.

I do agree that if one studies half truth one ends up in the position of having stock phrases and not really being able to take part in a conversation. This sells well. I'm not really for that either. I don't particularly like being in the middle arguing against both sides. I do like truth and moving, however slowly, towards it.


D.

gatsby

You're making this more complicated than it is. I'm sticking to the original question of this thread: "I am wondering: was Django mostly a by ear player (=practice) or was he schooled in music theory (=books, theory, intellectual study)?"

I'm not trying to work on any definitions, let alone useful definitions, of anything.

Charles Meadows

It's an interesting discussion. And I've made a point to ask various artists how they come up with stuff (ear or theory based).

Christiaan van Hemert asserted in his lessons that his level of guitar playing is accessible to almost anyone who is willing to put in the hours of practice (correct practice that is). And his style of play seems very theory and licks based. memorize 2-5-1 licks, dominant chain licks, Christoph licks, etc. For someone like me for whom improvising doers not come easy Chrstiaan's approach has been very enlightening.

It seems like people like Bireli and Tcha Limberger (although he does know theory) can just pull stuff riight out of the air on the fly, seemingly being able to immediately translate a note or line in their head to their fingers. If you have this do you then rely less on theory? Obviously so since Bireli can play like he does with little theory knowledge. When I asked him Tcha said something along the lines of playing what he hears and dropping in licks here and there, like during turnarounds.

As always Denis' opinion means a lot. In playing with him at DiJ and other classes I've seen him do what he talks about. I remember playing an obscure Angelo Debarre triplet lick once in front of him. He paused for a second and duplicated it on his guitar!

So perhaps I would ask to what extent a person can "learn" the skills that Bireli and Tcha seem to have. Denis certainly seems to have done so. But I'm not sure whether that reflects the fact that it is learnable - or that Denis is just amazingly talented...

NylonDave

I've taken to listening to non fiction audio when I am out running. There are no pages, no ink, I write nothing down, there are no exams and the only point is enjoyment. I guess that you could say that this means it isn't intellectual study. Which raises the question, am I being schooled ?

By your definition which ,despite all protestation that you aren't trying to work on them, was offered above in your post in the form of an ad hoc boolean formula, I am not.

That assumption would make a refreshing change for me because often when people imagine that I am being schooled I find it difficult to agree despite their certainty.

Oddly enough in my sole thread (not available from the recent discussion page for reasons which can only guess, although it makes it clear that an exception can be created for any algorithm ...). I did mention boolean algebra and its temptations earlier today.

http://www.djangobooks.com/forum/discussion/14582/led-s#latest

NylonDave

Interesting point about talent there Mr Meadows. Here is what Gary Kasparov had to say about it.

'There is little doubt that different people are blessed with different amounts of cognitive gifts such as the long-term memory and visuo-spatial skills that chess players are said to employ...[but] where so many of these investigations fail...is by not recognising the importance of learning....THE ABILITY TO WORK HARD FOR DAYS ON END WITHOUT LOSING FOCUS IS A TALENT. The ability to keep absorbing new information after many hours of study is a talent."

Christian stuff is great and I enjoyed it greatly. As you say he focused on cadences and not single chords. Even the licks were presented in pairs and traversed cadences which put them in a bigger context and got away from the what to play over a single chord problem.

I applaude anyone who works hard as so many people here so obviously have.

Here is the link to the Kasparov article.

http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/chess-march-10-dominic-lawson-genius-garry-kasparov-magnus-carlsen

I would also recommend the charming and lovingly written Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks where he discusses at length his time spent with musical prodigies who were classically Sauvants (in that their global cognitive functioning was impaired through childhood brain damage) in every case he observed how hard they worked on their special abilites and how much of their time it occupied.

Without hard work and fascination musical ability will atrophy like anything else.

The classic example of this is the prevalence of perfect pitch in China and other countries where language is tonal. Since there is no strict tonal component to western languages we lose perfect pitch early in our development. However a child who is ethnically european who grows up learning a tonal language as his principal language is as likely to maintain perfect pitch as any other user of the language.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/speaking-tonal-languages/

D.

Hemert

OK, here's how I approached the guitar. I have been studying guitar with Stochelo for the past four years. Not like the traditional teacher-student model but with him before my cameras for dozens of hours, analyzing every detail about his playing endlessly, many disussions and jams it's basically the same thing.

I can now explain everything there is to know about his way of playing, both on a technical and musical level. Stochelo is always very interested when I answer questions during workshops we occasionally do together, because he finds it amazing students seem to improve immediately after I give some theoretical answer that is completely based on my study of him(=Stochelo) as a guitar player but doesn't really understand himself.

He used to think explaining gypsy jazz on a music theory level wouldn't really be helpful to anyone but he has changed his mind about that.

My approach on guitar (on violin it's very different) is based on licks on cadences (as NylonDave correctly noted), dim arpeggios and related licks, chordal soloing (like Django/Stochelo) and melodic octaves. I do no ear training and I absolutely don't believe in that, your ears will get trained automatically if you put in the hours doing pratical stuff. I can explain all these things very clearly and tell you exactly how many hours of practice it will take to get to the level you want after I hear/see you play.

Also, for most technical problems I have a solution because I dealt with all of them in the past four years. Sometimes I have to bite my tongue to not tell someone because I do not want to offend anyone.

I am absolutely positive anyone can get to the highest level of playing as long as he is willing to put in the hours, I made along post about that on facebook if anyone's interested. For reference, I've put in about 4-6 hours a day for the past four years and I plan to do that for another 3 to 4 years to get to 8000 hours after which I will slow down.