One of the world's great jazz guitarists, Vic Juris shares his insight into the wonderful world of harmony in this book. Not for the fainthearted, Vic teaches polychords and intervallic structures derived from the major, minor, harmonic minor, melodic minor and harmonic major scales in this must have jazz guitar book. Each section has etudes that will help students integrate each concept into their own playing. Includes access to online audio that gives students the opportunity to hear and play along with these cutting edge concepts
This book introduces path-breaking applications of concepts from mathematical topology to music-theory topics including harmony, chord progressions, rhythm, and music classification. Contributions address topics of voice leading, Tonnetze (maps of notes and chords), and automatic music classification. Focusing on some geometrical and topological aspects of the representation and formalisation of musical structures and processes, the book covers topological features of voice-leading geometries in the most recent advances in this mathematical approach to representing how chords are connected through the motion of voices, leading to analytically useful simplified models of high-dimensional spaces; It generalizes the idea of a Tonnetz, a geometrical map of tones or chords, and shows how topological aspects of these maps can correspond to many concepts from music theory. The resulting framework embeds the chord maps of neo-Riemannian theory in continuous spaces that relate chords of different sizes and includes extensions of this approach to rhythm theory. It further introduces an application of topology to automatic music classification, drawing upon both static topological representations and time-series evolution, showing how static and dynamic features of music interact as features of musical style. This volume will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of music, music analyses, music composition, mathematical music theory, computational musicology, and music informatics. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Mathematics and Music.
How is the Beatles' "Help!" similar to Stravinsky's "Dance of the Adolescents?" How does Radiohead's "Just" relate to the improvisations of Bill Evans? And how do Chopin's works exploit the non-Euclidean geometry of musical chords? In this groundbreaking work, author Dmitri Tymoczko describes a new framework for thinking about music that emphasizes the commonalities among styles from medieval polyphony to contemporary rock. Tymoczko identifies five basic musical features that jointly contribute to the sense of tonality, and shows how these features recur throughout the history of Western music. In the process he sheds new light on an age-old question: what makes music sound good? A Geometry of Music provides an accessible introduction to Tymoczko's revolutionary geometrical approach to music theory. The book shows how to construct simple diagrams representing relationships among familiar chords and scales, giving readers the tools to translate between the musical and visual realms and revealing surprising degrees of structure in otherwise hard-to-understand pieces. Tymoczko uses this theoretical foundation to retell the history of Western music from the eleventh century to the present day. Arguing that traditional histories focus too narrowly on the "common practice" period from 1680-1850, he proposes instead that Western music comprises an extended common practice stretching from the late middle ages to the present. He discusses a host of familiar pieces by a wide range of composers, from Bach to the Beatles, Mozart to Miles Davis, and many in between. A Geometry of Music is accessible to a range of readers, from undergraduate music majors to scientists and mathematicians with an interest in music. Defining its terms along the way, it presupposes no special mathematical background and only a basic familiarity with Western music theory. The book also contains exercises designed to reinforce and extend readers' understanding, along with a series of appendices that explore the technical details of this exciting new theory.
Serious about jamming, understanding, and creating guitar-driven music? Easy. With an approachable and engaging style, Guitar Theory For Dummies goes beyond guitar basics, presenting the guidance intermediate to advanced players need to improve their improvisational and compositional skills. Plus, with access to audio tracks and video instruction online you can master the concepts and techniques covered in the book. Key content coverage includes: pentatonic and major scale patterns; the CAGED chord system, chord progressions, and playing by numbers; roots, keys, and applying scales, plus modes and modal scales; intervals and chord extensions; popular song references and theory applications that help you understand how to play popular music and contemporary guitar styles, and create music of your own. This title also features companion audio tracks and video content hosted online at Dummies.com The expert instruction and easy-to-digest information provides comprehensive guidance on how to apply music theory concepts to fretted instruments If you already have a handle on the basics and want to know more about the building blocks and theory behind guitar music, Guitar Theory For Dummies has you covered.
Recipient of the Mathematical Association of America's Beckenbach Book Prize in 2012! Group theory is the branch of mathematics that studies symmetry, found in crystals, art, architecture, music and many other contexts, but its beauty is lost on students when it is taught in a technical style that is difficult to understand. Visual Group Theory assumes only a high school mathematics background and covers a typical undergraduate course in group theory from a thoroughly visual perspective. The more than 300 illustrations in Visual Group Theory bring groups, subgroups, homomorphisms, products, and quotients into clear view. Every topic and theorem is accompanied with a visual demonstration of its meaning and import, from the basics of groups and subgroups through advanced structural concepts such as semidirect products and Sylow theory.
Younger students will enjoy this creative approach to playing simple guitar chords. Chords are taught with exercises that build upon each other and eventually lead the student to playing logical and common chord progressions. These progressions include I-iii-vi-ii-V-I and twelve bar blues in many different keys. Chords are shown in chord diagram form with detailed illustrations showing finger positions in relationship to the fretboard. Open chords for folk music as well as power chords for rock music are presented clearly and easily in this text. A complete easy chord chart and capo chart is provided at the end of the book for easy reference. Examples and exercises are presented in strum bar notation.
John Weinzweig (1913–2006) was the pre-eminent Canadian composer of his generation. Influenced by European modernists such as Stravinsky, Berg, and Webern, he was the first Canadian composer to employ serialism, thereby bringing a spirit of innovation to mid-twentieth-century Canadian music. A forceful advocate for modern Canadian composition, Weinzweig played a key role in the founding of the Canadian League of Composers and the Canadian Music Centre during a buoyant and expansive period for the arts in Canada. He was an influential force as a teacher of composition, first with the Royal Conservatory of Music and later with the University of Toronto’s music faculty. This first comprehensive study of Weinzweig since his death consists of new essays by composers, theorists, and musicologists. It deals with biographical aspects (the social context of early-twentieth-century Toronto, his activism, his teaching, his early scores for CBC Radio dramas), analyzes his compositional processes and his output (his approach to serialism, his instrumental practice, the presence of jazz elements, the vocal works, the divertimenti), and examines various evaluations of his music (his own – in letters, interviews, talks, and writings – plus those of critics and scholars, of listeners, and of performers). The essays are framed by the co-editors’ portrait/assessment of Weinzweig and a brief personal memoir. Much of the content draws on new research in the extensive Weinzweig Fonds at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa. Included at the end of the book are a [http://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/General/beckwith-cherney-list-of-works-discography.pdf List of Works by John Weinzweig by Kathleen McMorrow and a Discography by David Olds] both available here as pdfs. Supplementing the volume is an audio CD of extracts (some in their first public release), ranging from a 1937 student work to a song cycle of 1994. Read the [http://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/General/beckwith-cherney-cd-notes.pdf Notes and Texts for the CD.]
This volume comprises a selection of papers presented at the first International C- ference on Mathematics and Computation in Music – mcm2007. The conference took place at the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung PK – National Institute for Music Research in Berlin during May 18–20, 2007 and was jointly organized by the National Institute for Music Research Berlin and the Society of Mathematics and Computation in Music. The papers were selected for the conference by the program committee and classfied into talks and posters. All papers underwent further selection, revision and elaboration for this book publication. The articles cover a research field which is heterogeneous with respect to content, scientific language and methodology. On one hand, this reflects the heterogeneity and richness of the musical subject domain itself. On the other hand, it exemplifies a t- sion which has been explicitly intended by both the organizers and the founders of the society, namely to support the integration of mathematical and computational - proaches to music theory, composition, analysis and performance. The subdivision into three parts reflects the original structure of the program. These parts are opened by invited papers and followed by talks and posters.
