hey, welcome to 12tone! this week I thought I'd take some time to address one of the most
common criticisms I get on these videos.
no, not the way I hold my pen, or how fast I talk, or even what these things are… ok,
fine, they're supposed to be elephants but I've seen people call them pigs, mice, and
even tapirs, and honestly I don't really care as long as they're cute.
no, today I want to address the controversy over the way I write my roman numerals.
let's get into it.
first, a quick review of the topic: each key has a set of chords associated with it.
for instance, in D major you've got these (bang) whereas F major has these.
(bang) at a glance, they look completely different.
there are no chords shared between the two keys.
but if we take a step back, they're actually pretty closely connected: in both cases, the
first chord is major, the second is minor, and so on, all the way up to the 7th chord
which is diminished.
the structure's identical, the only difference is where we start.
compare that to, say, E minor.
(bang) this has a couple chords in common with D major, but the way they're laid out
is completely different.
since in most cases theorists don't really care about the specific note you're starting
on, we often want to talk about a chord's position in the key rather than its absolute
pitch.
like, if you hear G major, is that the fourth chord in D major, the third chord in E minor,
or something else entirely? in order to show that, we label chords with roman numerals
indicating their scale degree, so if that G major was a IV chord, we'd know we were
in the key of D.
now let's apply that to the entire major scale.
the most common method these days looks like this: (bang) the major triads get upper case
numerals, while the minor chords get lower case ones.
if you studied at a conservatory this is probably the method you're most familiar with, but
it's not the one I use.
instead, I'd write it like this (bang) where all the numerals are upper-case and the minor
chords are just marked like normal chord symbols.
so if I know this isn't what my audience is used to, why do it? well, the obvious answer
is that it's just the method I learned first, but if that were the whole reason I wouldn't
have bothered to make this video.
before I get into the rest of it, though, let's take a look at the history of roman
numerals in music.
as far as I can tell, the first person to use roman numerals to represent chord functions
was an Irish composer named John Trydell, whose 1766 essay on music probably used them
to describe what he called "harmonical figures" although I couldn't find the original manuscript
and some sources claim that he originally used arabic numerals, not roman ones.
still, his ideas gained a lot of traction when his essay was used as the entry for "music"
in the original edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1771. without being able to
read the actual essay I can't say for sure how he used them, but the reviews I could
find indicate that his contributions were largely forgotten for a long time and probably
weren't the direct ancestors of modern practices.
still, though, it's always good to know who came first.
this brings us to our next figure, a German composer and theorist named Georg Joseph Vogler.
Vogler is an interesting figure to research because he seems to have a small but dedicated
fan-base, and most of the things I could find about him were written in adoring tones more
reminiscent of a pop star than a eighteenth-century theorist.
even his wikipedia page boasts of "a long and colorful career extending over many more
nations and decades than was usual at the time."
anyway, Vogler was an eccentric and controversial figure, drawing the ire of contemporaries
including a little-known composer by the name of Ludwig Amadeus Mozart.
Vogler existed at an interesting time in the history of music theory, where harmonic analysis
was beginning to take center stage.
prior to that, the prevailing wisdom was that music came primarily from the overlapping
of melodies, and that analysis should focus on the structures and movements of those melodies.
that's a bit of an oversimplification, but this is a really complex topic that could
be a whole video on its own, so for now the important point is that theorists were starting
to look more at the idea of chord functions in harmony, and while Vogler didn't start
this trend, his work fit into it well.
his goal was to understand not just what the chords were but what they were doing, and
in order to do that he needed a way to differentiate between the same chord played in different
keys.
his solution was to mark them with roman numerals, and in his work all the numerals seemed to
be upper-case.
so I win, right? after all, my system came first.
well… not quite.
Vogler's system didn't actually include chord quality at all: it always accompanied the
written works, so he didn't need to duplicate that information.
besides, if you're in a major key and you see a III chord, you probably know the structure
of the scale well enough to know it's supposed to be minor anyway.
he also didn't bother including the actual key, at least not as far as I can tell.
when a piece changed keys he'd just switch his numerals to match and assume you were
following.
again, this worked because it accompanied the actual piece so if you saw that a new
chord was now the I chord, you'd be able to figure out what happened.
not ideal, but good enough for Vogler's purposes.
and finally, we come to the person who is generally considered the actual father of
roman numeral analysis: another German theorist, Gottfried Weber.
his most influential work, whose name translates as Theory of Musical Composition, is a long
and thorough text describing everything you might want to know about early 19th-century
harmonic ideas, and it features what appears to be the first recognizably modern system
of roman numeral analysis.
he advocates for the use of key markers to show which key the chord is functioning in,
and he includes ways of differentiating between different chord qualities.
the entire thing is actually really fun to read, and I've linked to it in the description,
but let's get to the big reveal: how does he write his minor chords?
drum roll please… yeah, they're lower case.
so y'all win, right? this is the dude who basically invented the modern system, and
he says I'm wrong.
case closed.
well, not so fast.
just because it's what they did then doesn't mean it's still the right decision now.
I mean, the staff used to have four lines, noteheads used to look like this, and D# didn't
used to exist.
musical notation has lost a lot of the idiosyncrasies of the past because they weren't actually
good or helpful, they were just the first things we came up with, and I think that's
the case here.
so… why?
well, let's start by looking at the benefits of the lower-case system.
besides just being a legacy, I think it has one main strength: speed.
if you're only dealing with major and minor chords, then using this system lets you write
them faster and read them more easily.
this, I think, is why Weber preferred it: he included some symbols for when the chords
were diminished or included a 7th, but most of what he needed to describe was just major
and minor triads.
but that's not really the case anymore: a lot of music, especially in more complex genres
like jazz and modern classical, features much weirder chords. in these cases, the process
is still simple: you just take the chord symbol and replace the note with a roman numeral
showing its position in the scale.
if it's augmented, you write that.
if it's a sus chord, you write that.
any information that would be in the chord symbol gets replicated exactly the same way
in the roman numeral… except for one piece.
for some reason, the status of the third degree is shown completely differently.
it's unnecessary, it's confusing, and it doesn't actually make anything clearer, it just adds
another thing you have to learn.
that's why I prefer my method: it's consistent, and when it comes to notation, consistency
is really, really valuable.
anyway, if the comments sections of previous videos are any indication, some of y'all have
strong opinions about this as well, and now that I've had a chance to spell out my reasoning,
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
just keep in mind that Weber also said to use lower-case letters to mark minor triads
in our chord symbols and we stopped doing that ages ago, so why can't we drop them in
our roman numerals too?
anyway, thanks for watching, and thanks to our Patreon patrons for supporting us and
making these videos possible.
if you want to help out, and get some sweet perks like sneak peeks of upcoming episodes,
there's a link to our Patreon on screen now.
you can also join our mailing list to find out about new episodes, like, share, comment,
subscribe, and above all, keep on rockin'.
No comments:
Post a Comment