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From: | Lukas-Fabian Moser |
Subject: | Re: New feature: automatically invert chords or drop/rise chord notes (issue 365840043 by address@hidden) |
Date: | Sun, 3 Feb 2019 12:14:41 +0100 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.4.0 |
This statement surprises me. I always thought of 'drop n' (with 'drop 2' being the most common one) as a means to transform closed-harmony _upper_ voices into open harmony _upper_ voices, without changing the bass at all.[...] Much like continued bass, what we’re dealing with here is the "right hand" positions, which most certainly does not affect the bass line, except in jazz music it will typically be played by the _left_ hand (or with both hands) whilst the actual bass line (often heavily anchored in root notes, much more so than in baroque music) is left to the bass player. In this regard, what I referred to as "changing the bass note" would actually be better phrased as "changing the lowest note played by the guy in charge of chords, regardless of what the global bass note will be". At least, that’s my understanding of how jazz music is conceptualized, which YMMV with.
Yep, I think we can absolutely agree on that. (This reminds me of the famous virtual sing-post that some teachers like to attach to everything below c on the piano: "Keep off here - there's a bass player around!") I just wanted to point out that IMO it's not helpful to call the lowest sounding pitch played by one specific non-bass instrument (i.e. the piano) the "bass" note.
BTW, there’s no proper notion of inversions as such in jazz music (AFAICT); so the purpose of an \invertChords function here is left to our appreciation, with the minimal requirement being that the lowest note of the chord changes each time -- but traditionally, I think the lowest note of the previous inversion *should* become the highest note of the next inversion (and reciprocally when proceeding in reverse). If that means moving said note by two octaves instead of just one, then so be it (IMO).
Agreed - I just might add that, IMHO, as I tried to point out, the concept of chord positions arising "by inversion" is not that helpful in a classical context, either.
By this, I do not mean that a 6-chord shouldn't be derived from a root-position chord containing the same pitch classes (even if that notion came up comparatively late in the history of music theory - probably as late as Rameau). Rather, even if one considers <e, c g c'> as being derived from an abstract c major chord, which of course is absolutely adequate in most situations[1] at least for everything from Baroque and later ages, I do not think that one should think of it as having arisen from some actual chord voicing by a procedure like "inversion".
Lukas[1] More specifically, situations where chords do not arise by contrapuntal voice-leading patterns.
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