Music is easy

Music is easy. That is what I try to convince my students. More specifically, jazz is easy. Yes, it takes years to master and is a life long pursuit but there are many overarching concepts that are simple. The sooner they are understood the quicker the student can become both comfortable and proficient. For example, how many chords are there in jazz? Well there's thousands right? That is why jazz is so crazy. What if I told you there are only three chords? Sure these happen in different keys and with added and altered notes but with all the insanity there is only three chords. More to follow...

norules4music

Music is all about a lot of things. There is an infinite amount of analogies that can be used with music and an infinite way to analyze any given piece. There are however, fundamental principles and ideas behind every piece of music.

Music is about human constructed patterns. We create a structure by making choices, choices of instrumentation, style, taste, genre, mood, and texture. All of these choices shape the piece we make into a structure. There are extremes but just like the great rush song says "if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice." That is why even if someone is creating something called "Free music" or "free jazz" it still has a structure. Both the highly serialized Sequenza 4 by Berio and the hectic chaos of Free Jazz by Ornette Coleman are unified by being written by human beings and therefore having human constructed patterns. They differ in what patterns are chosen consciously or unconsciously by the composers.

I know what you are thinking. What about bird songs? How do they fit into music being about human constructed patterns? Technically I would not consider them music. But, human patterns are also part of how we listen. Human beings can imprint patterns onto sound that they hear and then hear it as music. The simplest of this is with bird song and other animal noises but this can apply to rain or even street noise.

Now to my thesis statement. Here is the deal. There are no rules for music. I don't mean that there aren't guidelines or idea's on how to make something sound good or traditions that can be followed. What I mean is any pattern can be successfully realized in music in a way that is beautiful and convincing.

Music is all about expectations and I will continue this thought and explore why anyone and anything can write and play music next week.