Download Blue Notes 2 ^HOT^
Kam Bergmann
The blue notes are usually said to be the lowered third, lowered fifth, and lowered seventh scale degrees.[1][2][3] The lowered fifth is also known as the raised fourth.[4] Though the blues scale has "an inherent minor tonality, it is commonly 'forced' over major-key chord changes, resulting in a distinctively dissonant conflict of tonalities".[4] A similar conflict occurs between the notes of the minor scale and the minor blues scale, as heard in songs such as "Why Don't You Do Right?", "Happy" and "Sweet About Me".
Blue notes are used in many blues songs, in jazz, and in conventional popular songs with a "blue" feeling, such as Harold Arlen's "Stormy Weather". Blue notes are also prevalent in English folk music.[5] Bent or "blue notes", called in Ireland "long notes", play a vital part in Irish music.[6]
The blues has likely evolved as a fusion of an African just intonation scale with European 12-tone musical instruments and harmony.[16][7] The result has been a uniquely American music which is still widely practiced in its original form and is at the foundation of another genre, American jazz.
Gospel and the blues are pretty much identical from a music perspective. The content of the lyrics is different, but the chords, scales, and beats are the same. Anything you learn about the blues will apply to gospel (and vice versa.)
Blue Notes offers an assortment of poet Yusef Komunyakaa's writing on contemporary poetry and music. The book is arranged in four sections. The first gathers essays on the work of poets and blues and jazz musicians influential to Komunyakaa's work, from Langston Hughes and Etheridge Knight to Ma Rainey and Thelonious Monk; the second collects a gallery of Komunyakaa's poems and the poet's commentary about each of them. The third selects interviews that reveal the development of the poet's aesthetic sensibility. The final section consists of four artistic explorations that reflect the poet's current interests. Two of of these texts, "Tenebrae" and "Buddy's Monologue," have been recently performed.
As editor Radiclani Clytus makes clear in the volume's introductory essay, although Komunyakaa's poetry has its roots in the stylistic innovations of early twentieth-century American modernists, his writing often reflects his understanding that a "black" experience should not particularize the presentation of one's art. This volume, according to the editor, is an attempt to understand Komunyakaa's critical eclecticism within the context of his own words.
Yusef Komunyakaa's books of poetry include I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head, Magic City, Thieves of Paradise, and Neon Vernacular, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 1994.
This study will attempt to quantitatively characterize note pitch from the earliest recordings of the blues scale by its seminal practitioners with respect to 12 tet intonation. Given that the blues is likely a fusion of an African "world music" scale with the 12 tet system, that contrast will be utilized throughout this study. While any exponential ratio of note pitch over tonic system could have been used, this study employed the 12 tet cents system to numerically describe scale pitch (Ellis, 1884). This was done for several reasons: The human ear perceives pitch in a roughly logarithmic fashion; the cents format has an implicit transposition of different performances to a common tonic at zero cents; the blues is inextricably linked to 12 tet, and is a vitally important part of jazz and rock music which are invariably played on 12 tet instruments; and finally, while the major and minor third in rock music have been widely known to "blend" into an intermediate "neutral third", its numerical characterization in cents format has only recently been approached (Temperley, Ren & Duan 2017).
The blues are at the very foundation of jazz and rock music. Early New Orleans jazz was dominated by a blues repertoire (Gioia 2008; Kubik 2005). The blues remains the most common chord progression in the jazz repertoire today (Levine, 1995). Early rock and roll was also dominated by the blues progression (e.g. "Rock around the clock" by Bill Haley and the Comets, and "You ain't nothing but a hound dog" by Elvis Presley). Even the most sophisticated rock music, deeply infused with European harmonic practices, is often blended with a blues base (Doll 2009). A solid blues foundation is essential in building an eclectic understanding of today's jazz and rock music.
Music theorists have speculated extensively on the nature of the blue note and the blues scale. Unfortunately, application of the scientific method has not been possible due to the absence of a tool to empirically collect note pitches in a performance and statistically analyze the results. Peter van der Merwe (1989) identified three blue notes appearing above the tonic note in a "ladder of thirds", and felt that the penchant for the blues artist to sing a third somewhere between a major and minor third, explained the "bent" blue note. His view was that combining these notes with a perfect fifth above and below the tonic (i.e. the roots of the IV and V chords in the harmony) resulted in a hexatonic blues scale. A thorough theoretical discourse on the blues is provided by Kubik (2008, pp. 24-44), who describes the scale as likely derived from music of west central Sudan using harmonics 6, 7, and 8 from two tonics, I and IV; this results in a minor pentatonic base for the blues. He extends this framework to include a note between 12 tet IV and flat V based on the music of Skip James and others, and proposes that this is most likely the eleventh harmonic which is 49 cents flat of 12 tet flat V; this also results in a hexatonic blues scale. Inclusion of the fifth harmonic of I (386 cents) helps explain the large "margin of tolerance" for the flatted-third note of the scale, also called the "neutral third". Curry (2015, 2017) provides an extensive synthesis of these conceptions and adds chromatic elements from ragtime styles which occur later in the eclectic progression of the blues. Curry also points out a likely close association of the blues with the early African American derived barbershop quartet tradition based in just intonation (2015, pp. 258-9)
The most comprehensive empirical study of the blues to date was performed by Jeff Todd Titon (1977). He transcribed 48 blues performances from the late 1920s; this was done entirely by ear, as the computer tools required to do this analysis in a numerical manner were not available at that time. He used up and down arrows over the notes in 12 tet notation to indicate microtonal raising or lowering of notes. He transposed all performances to 'C' and noted three distinct microtonal note groups not found in the 12 tet system. He referred to these three "blue notes" as broad microtonal complexes near E, G and B. He presented his results in a quasi histogram, noting that the blues scale usually extended from the tonic to a tenth with notes in the upper octave being significantly different than those in the main octave (Titon, 1977 p. 155). Titon's book extends far beyond pitch considerations and is a major reference on the subject. David Evans also produced a major reference book on the blues (1982). He too identified three broad microtonal blues notes and referred to them as "tonal areas", which correspond with Titon's "complexes".
The empirical study reported herein examines the fundamental frequencies of blue notes relative to their tonic tone from original recordings of recognized early masters of the blues. A cluster analysis tool from the data mining and machine learning community suitable for interrogating dense, noisy data was selected for use in this study. Cluster analysis combined with computer-based frequency sampling was used to search for blue note clusters. Results will be discussed in the context of various theories proposed to explain the blues.
Determination of the instrumental harmonic background of a performance using the computer methods used in this study was not possible. The upper harmonics of a low string in a guitar chord merged together with the lower harmonics of the upper strings making determination of the fundamental of each string difficult. For this reason, attempts to examine the harmonic backgrounds of performances were abandoned and only isolated vocal notes were assessed.
Tonic tones were identified by the author by ear for each performance. Logarithms of tonic frequencies were averaged, then converted back to arrive at an average tonic frequency for each performance. Collected pitches were converted into 12 tet microtonal cents format with respect to the average tonic tone for each recording (cents = 1200*ln(noteFrequency/tonicFrequency)/ln(2.0)). In this way, all notes in this study were transposed to a common 12 tet pitch scale relative to their tonic (0 cents). Following Titon's (1977) early observations that blues performances usually spanned a range of a tenth above the tonic with data in the upper octave differing from the lower, data were organized in this fashion. Unlike the results of Titon's study, data were found multiple times up to -220 cents below the tonic. Given that Titon found that data outside the principal octave had a different character than the same note in the main octave, separate octave identity was preserved and the flat seven below tonic was not promoted up into the main octave for these performances. Three performances had the tonic in the middle of the range; in these three cases, lower notes were promoted up into the main octave. One performance presented as two split scale fragments with a 500 cent empty space between them. Raw range data before octave compression is presented in Figure 1.
Cluster analysis of the data was performed using the DBSCAN clustering algorithm designed for use with dense, noisy data (Schubert et al., 2017). This requires only a minimum cluster size and minimum neighbor distance as input parameters, and does not require the investigator to specify the number of clusters a priori. As a broad overview, its unidimensional variant begins with a single unvisited data point and agglomerates all points within a pitch distance neighborhood of each other; if this cluster reaches the minimum size, the cluster is kept or is otherwise labeled as noise. The next unvisited point in the data set is sequentially chosen and the process repeats until all clusters have been identified or labeled as noise. An open source DBSCAN clustering program (Yaikhom, 2012), originally written in C, was translated into the overarching C++ language by the author and dimensionality reduced to one for simple pitch distance clustering (source code is provided in the Appendix). If the two input parameters are too large, neighboring notes clump together; if these parameters are too small, many tiny sub-note clusters are produced. Overall tonic width was used to iteratively arrive at initial algorithm parameters that identified widely spaced notes (i.e. the fifth and flatted seventh). Fortunately, the range for these two parameters was relatively wide in revealing the note clusters identified by ear by Titon (1977) and Evans (1982).
df19127ead