Differences in editions?
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An open letter from Alice Russell. June 21, 2011, Brookline, Massachusetts. 1. DO NOT make insulting, mean spirited remarks about anyone or their work; there are a plethora of sites where you can rant unfettered. If you attack someone personally, your comments will be removed. You can post it, but I'm not paying for it. Go elsewhere, and let those artists who are actually interested in discussion and learning have the floor. 2. There will be NO posting of or links to copyrighted material without permission of the copyright owner. That's the law. And if you respect the work of people who make meaningful contributions, you should have no problem following this policy. 3. I appreciate many of the postings from so many of you. Please don't feel you have to spend your time "defending" the LCC to those who come here with the express purpose of disproving it. George worked for decades to disprove it himself; if you know his music, there's no question that it has gravity. And a final word: George was famous for his refusal to lower his standards in all areas of his life, no matter the cost. He twice refused concerts of his music at Lincoln Center Jazz because of their early position on what was authentically jazz. So save any speculation about the level of him as an artist and a man. The quotes on our websites were not written by George; they were written by critics/writers/scholars/fans over many years. Sincerely, Alice
An open letter from Alice Russell. June 21, 2011, Brookline, Massachusetts. 1. DO NOT make insulting, mean spirited remarks about anyone or their work; there are a plethora of sites where you can rant unfettered. If you attack someone personally, your comments will be removed. You can post it, but I'm not paying for it. Go elsewhere, and let those artists who are actually interested in discussion and learning have the floor. 2. There will be NO posting of or links to copyrighted material without permission of the copyright owner. That's the law. And if you respect the work of people who make meaningful contributions, you should have no problem following this policy. 3. I appreciate many of the postings from so many of you. Please don't feel you have to spend your time "defending" the LCC to those who come here with the express purpose of disproving it. George worked for decades to disprove it himself; if you know his music, there's no question that it has gravity. And a final word: George was famous for his refusal to lower his standards in all areas of his life, no matter the cost. He twice refused concerts of his music at Lincoln Center Jazz because of their early position on what was authentically jazz. So save any speculation about the level of him as an artist and a man. The quotes on our websites were not written by George; they were written by critics/writers/scholars/fans over many years. Sincerely, Alice
Differences in editions?
What exactly are the differences between the 1959 edition and the 2006 edition? What I personally heard was that there is more straightforward information in the older editions, is this true? I have the 62' edition and I see no mention of modal genres, nor do I have a grasp of what they are, do they have an alternate name in the older editions, or do they not exist?
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sandywilliams
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The biggest difference is that the new edition represents forty-two more years( think about it: ‘forty-two more years’) of thought about the subject. The new edition explores( in a very ‘straightforward’ way!)many of the inner workings of the Concept right of the bat. The old edition has a little of this sort of thing towards the back of the book. There are many new terms in the new edition. Although I have a personal fondness for the old edition because I studied it for so many years, I’m so glad the new edition came out because it illuminates many of the ideas Mr. Russell (and Ben Schwendener) expounded on during their 10-day seminar I attended back in 1988.
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sandywilliams
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bobappleton
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bobappleton
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The slide rule - and the idea that music could be understood as sound, or as feeling, or... as pure math - was very interesting to me.
I do think that the more different ways we can describe something complex, the more likely we are to understand it. The Roget's Thesaurus of Music would do that - it would tell us what a Primary Modal Genre is in many different ways.
So could you explain in your own words how you view the interval grouping using the slide rule?
And then tell us about Precursor Mental Visualization (PMV).
Bob
I do think that the more different ways we can describe something complex, the more likely we are to understand it. The Roget's Thesaurus of Music would do that - it would tell us what a Primary Modal Genre is in many different ways.
So could you explain in your own words how you view the interval grouping using the slide rule?
And then tell us about Precursor Mental Visualization (PMV).
Bob
I consider the 2001 edition as the same premise but with an entirely different approach. I was just recently able to get my hands on the 2001 version at a local library so I only have a basic overview of it.
I first started playing bass when I was 11 or 12 and I relied on muscle memory and consonant progressions... that was it, all I did was listen, I knew no note names or theory, so in other words I was a very inefficient atonalist. I was 15 when I received it and still am, I first got my hands on the revised version, second edition, of the Concept and I made my first attempt at viewing notes as a chromatic whole instead of as preset perfect fourths, sound, and muscle memory, and the slide rule helped me get out of that. Another major flaw in my learning foundation was the fact that I viewed everything enharmonically, I could not calculate flats fast enough, and the old edition really emphasized the use of flats until chapter 3.
I would define (PMV) "precursor mental visualization" as a beforehand mental feeling of the endless chromatic scale and the intervals that make up it. Even if you comprehend it as feelings, colors, numbers, etc. the slide rule in my personal opinion helps you view the Lydian scale as a balanced body of intervals, which helps further the theoretical foundation, and the classical Ionian as a lopsided gravitating scale.
Not to leave anybody out because I am currently new to this forum but, Bob and Sandy you guys are basically the most frequent and thorough posters and I would really like to see this forum pick up as a tool to help clarify the misconceptions of the Concept. I would like to say thanks for replying and for many of your previous posts that helped clarify things for me.
I first started playing bass when I was 11 or 12 and I relied on muscle memory and consonant progressions... that was it, all I did was listen, I knew no note names or theory, so in other words I was a very inefficient atonalist. I was 15 when I received it and still am, I first got my hands on the revised version, second edition, of the Concept and I made my first attempt at viewing notes as a chromatic whole instead of as preset perfect fourths, sound, and muscle memory, and the slide rule helped me get out of that. Another major flaw in my learning foundation was the fact that I viewed everything enharmonically, I could not calculate flats fast enough, and the old edition really emphasized the use of flats until chapter 3.
I would define (PMV) "precursor mental visualization" as a beforehand mental feeling of the endless chromatic scale and the intervals that make up it. Even if you comprehend it as feelings, colors, numbers, etc. the slide rule in my personal opinion helps you view the Lydian scale as a balanced body of intervals, which helps further the theoretical foundation, and the classical Ionian as a lopsided gravitating scale.
Not to leave anybody out because I am currently new to this forum but, Bob and Sandy you guys are basically the most frequent and thorough posters and I would really like to see this forum pick up as a tool to help clarify the misconceptions of the Concept. I would like to say thanks for replying and for many of your previous posts that helped clarify things for me.
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bobappleton
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johnlynch4492
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- Location: Florida
I have one of the old editions and just ordered the new and I guess I will be noticing some of the differences soon. What I have was $35, white cover, red title and red plastic binding. Some of the content references released and to be released albums suggest it is from around 1971, if I am remembering right.
I would like to sort of introduce myself and give a sort of feeble and limited testimonial in regard to the edition I already have and this might possibly be a suitable spot. I am not a professional musician or music academic but music has always been very important to me. I believe that most or all human beings want to belong/participate/connect/love and yet while young it seemed that there were drives in the world towards conflict, competition, domination, hierarchies among people, ideologies that there could not be an "us" without a "them" . . . even Christ sometimes found his disciples in argument about who was best and some of what I seem to have encountered in the world seems almost like a civilized form of cannibalism . . . . although in music I have certainly seen ego and competition and the music business itself seems to have tales of cutthroat activities, music itself has always seemed to me to have this spiritual potential, a heart to heart potential and an honesty that transcended a lot of the posturing or bluffing or getting around someone that seemed to be what was being played socially in the non-musical realm . . . one of the wonderful things about seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan was that they were having a good time, not trying to hurt anybody or fighting to prove who was best and singing songs about things like love transcending time and distance, a show tune about how an encounter with some apparently loving other could change perceptions and broaden awareness of bells on a hill and birds in the sky, and of wrong perception separating people yet there being the possibility of reconciliation in humility . . . for those of us around in those times that had just a few months before included four little girls being blown up at Sunday school because of their color and our President being assassinated, this musical appearance so many of us watched was, perhaps, like it was for me, a wonderful thing . . .
When I first took up an instrument, it was the violin, because I saw something that said it was the most like the human voice, and I felt that I had things I wanted to express even though I did not know the words for them . . . strangely wearing glasses and carrying a violin case was almost a bully magnet . . . plus a girl two doors down suggested that I take up guitar, this sort of thing of connecting with the opposite sex, I believe it inspired Lester Young to change from drums to saxophone and was an influence on me as well, maybe even Segovia would have said he took up guitar to try to connect with girls . . . But also around that time I saw a television show where some men were playing the blues on guitar, for some reason I think it may have been T-Bone Walker and Otis Rush or Buddy Guy jamming, I really do not know who this was but it was a revelation. It blew me away. Something happened that happens to some people. This was back in the mid sixties, I believe. There seemed to be more potential . . . I was just blown away . . .
When I went to get a guitar and take guitar lessons, two things came up pretty early on, I wanted to go pickless on an electric and was sort of told you can't, which made me want to even more and also I had this reaction "but you are trying to teach me these 'right' notes and I want to play the wrong notes" . . . I am not sure that is how I said it but it was a bit like that . . . those guys that were playing the blues seemed to be doing something more heartful than Mel Bay showing me how to hold a pick and play "On Top of Old Smokey" . . . and I believe there was some response that it is important to learn the right before you explore or that you have to have a skeletal structure first . . .
I am very grateful for everyone I have ever known, if I am right-minded, and I am grateful for every teacher and every path I have gone down, but one of the things that soon started to happen was that I got ideas that certain things could not be done or were not permissible. And it was limiting and perhaps not true to what was in me or to some of life in its dimensions and expansiveness. And one thing that I might say that might seem like a digression, but I believe it is important, as a human being I was very troubled with things like fear, shame, and perfectionism, wanting to connect without being condemned . . . if you can imagine, if there is a lot of that near your core there are certain ways you can get offtrack and I did. And part of getting more ontrack involved dealing with some of those emotional or attitudinal things and it is perhaps so that getting a bit freer of them and even coming to know what seem to be moments or spaces of complete freedom from it and experiencing and learning something that might be unconditional love, this may be something that is conducive to what I might call my musical growth, and I am lately finding that as I come back to music more after years a bit away there are some new things happening.
I need to be attentive to some other concerns this morning and this could go on quite a while if I were to try to detail the journey but I want to move "forward" a bit and say, and this is not meant as any kind of bragging, but I did things like read Rameau, P.D.Q. Bach, Schoenberg, Schenker and others and am grateful for some things there, but I think I would also see things like Schenker say the 9th chord isn't really even a chord and feeling like "but it seems to work" and certainly the first time you hear "Stormy Monday" you maybe go "oh wow" at something that is perhaps being viewed as a systematic pariah.
And there is a riddle some of you may have heard of about a father and son are out riding and get in an accident, they are taken to the emergency room, the father is pronounced dead. The doctor walks in and looks at the son and says "get another doctor in here, I can't help him, he is my son" . . .
you ask people to explain this . . .
you will often find that even if they are the president of the local chapter of N.O.W. they will go into explanations involving adoption, remarriage, grandparenthood etc. They are not even aware that when they heard the word doctor, they had grooving inside that made them unconsciously or semi-unconsciously think "doctor equals man" . . .
And I believe that in many ways, I got things engrained in me that ain't necessarily so . . . and I may not even know that they are there and taking over my perception, judgment, navigation, limiting my choices . . .
In spite of the references I made above I believe I am saying these things in the presence of people many of whom are a good bit more sophisticated and experienced than myself. And yet I also want to say, this is going back to a more personal note above, I am sometimes in a room where someone will say "I did not know anything when I got here" and I myself I feel like "as for me, I was 'The Man Who Knew Too Much' and so much of my growth has been an UNlearning process!"
I am grateful for many things I unlearned because in the clearing my heart was able to speak a bit more and I was able to hear it more.
In spite of a lot of things getting engrained in me, just in experience I would sometimes note things like that you can use flatted ninths playing "Wildwood Flower" but it maybe helps to at least briefly start introducing that sort of thing early on [this is how it seemed to me] and that in many ways music seemed to be about things like tension and release or going home and suspensions or detours on the way and things of that sort, having more than just one home, maybe a home and a mountain cottage and a beach bungalow and that this was there with or without reference to symbols like letters and numbers and century old ideas of how the letters or numbers should relate to each other.
If you are reading this, you may feel like I am going yada yada yada and perhaps that is so and I suspect I may be silent for a good while after this but I want to say that the Lydian Concept that I had, even though I did not get out of it all that I could, it was a liberating thing that encouraged some re-examination and gave me some kind of orientation in territory where I had been traveling by somewhat limited or pre-existent manmade maps or conventions . . . I think someone once said "the map is not the territory" . . . and so the edition that I had, even though I may not have the familiarity most of you do, it was something that seemed to increase my awareness of the real territory and bring home to me that there was more than what I was seeing on the old map and that I could experience and express a bit more . . . it did not really invalidate what I sort of already knew or had already been exposed to, in fact, there is a concept, the French have a verb "ressortir", it is kind of like the Black Velvet ads, where they have a blonde and black velvet, one actually brings out the other . . . it did not mean that Hank Williams was passe, if anything, it seemed to enrich Hank Williams and I maybe even heard the heart in it more than before and some old things seemed a bit new but they did not, the first word that comes to me is "dominate", maybe that is strong, but they did not dominate me like before and in not being dominated, I somehow had deeper appreciation. I was able to be more receptive of all . . .
And perhaps if I thought this out more it might be more coherent or expressive but even though it may seem a bit feeble or limited, I hope that if anyone reads this they can pick up some of my gratitude for what I got out of the edition that I have that was $35 . . . I have lately begun some re-exploration, among other things I had two kids with a woman who did not like music around and that constraint ended . . . I am re-exploring a bit . . . I may be somewhat silent in here but I did not want to just be a lurker and I also wanted to try and say something, even if personal and incomplete, about the earlier edition before I received the newer edition.
I would like to sort of introduce myself and give a sort of feeble and limited testimonial in regard to the edition I already have and this might possibly be a suitable spot. I am not a professional musician or music academic but music has always been very important to me. I believe that most or all human beings want to belong/participate/connect/love and yet while young it seemed that there were drives in the world towards conflict, competition, domination, hierarchies among people, ideologies that there could not be an "us" without a "them" . . . even Christ sometimes found his disciples in argument about who was best and some of what I seem to have encountered in the world seems almost like a civilized form of cannibalism . . . . although in music I have certainly seen ego and competition and the music business itself seems to have tales of cutthroat activities, music itself has always seemed to me to have this spiritual potential, a heart to heart potential and an honesty that transcended a lot of the posturing or bluffing or getting around someone that seemed to be what was being played socially in the non-musical realm . . . one of the wonderful things about seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan was that they were having a good time, not trying to hurt anybody or fighting to prove who was best and singing songs about things like love transcending time and distance, a show tune about how an encounter with some apparently loving other could change perceptions and broaden awareness of bells on a hill and birds in the sky, and of wrong perception separating people yet there being the possibility of reconciliation in humility . . . for those of us around in those times that had just a few months before included four little girls being blown up at Sunday school because of their color and our President being assassinated, this musical appearance so many of us watched was, perhaps, like it was for me, a wonderful thing . . .
When I first took up an instrument, it was the violin, because I saw something that said it was the most like the human voice, and I felt that I had things I wanted to express even though I did not know the words for them . . . strangely wearing glasses and carrying a violin case was almost a bully magnet . . . plus a girl two doors down suggested that I take up guitar, this sort of thing of connecting with the opposite sex, I believe it inspired Lester Young to change from drums to saxophone and was an influence on me as well, maybe even Segovia would have said he took up guitar to try to connect with girls . . . But also around that time I saw a television show where some men were playing the blues on guitar, for some reason I think it may have been T-Bone Walker and Otis Rush or Buddy Guy jamming, I really do not know who this was but it was a revelation. It blew me away. Something happened that happens to some people. This was back in the mid sixties, I believe. There seemed to be more potential . . . I was just blown away . . .
When I went to get a guitar and take guitar lessons, two things came up pretty early on, I wanted to go pickless on an electric and was sort of told you can't, which made me want to even more and also I had this reaction "but you are trying to teach me these 'right' notes and I want to play the wrong notes" . . . I am not sure that is how I said it but it was a bit like that . . . those guys that were playing the blues seemed to be doing something more heartful than Mel Bay showing me how to hold a pick and play "On Top of Old Smokey" . . . and I believe there was some response that it is important to learn the right before you explore or that you have to have a skeletal structure first . . .
I am very grateful for everyone I have ever known, if I am right-minded, and I am grateful for every teacher and every path I have gone down, but one of the things that soon started to happen was that I got ideas that certain things could not be done or were not permissible. And it was limiting and perhaps not true to what was in me or to some of life in its dimensions and expansiveness. And one thing that I might say that might seem like a digression, but I believe it is important, as a human being I was very troubled with things like fear, shame, and perfectionism, wanting to connect without being condemned . . . if you can imagine, if there is a lot of that near your core there are certain ways you can get offtrack and I did. And part of getting more ontrack involved dealing with some of those emotional or attitudinal things and it is perhaps so that getting a bit freer of them and even coming to know what seem to be moments or spaces of complete freedom from it and experiencing and learning something that might be unconditional love, this may be something that is conducive to what I might call my musical growth, and I am lately finding that as I come back to music more after years a bit away there are some new things happening.
I need to be attentive to some other concerns this morning and this could go on quite a while if I were to try to detail the journey but I want to move "forward" a bit and say, and this is not meant as any kind of bragging, but I did things like read Rameau, P.D.Q. Bach, Schoenberg, Schenker and others and am grateful for some things there, but I think I would also see things like Schenker say the 9th chord isn't really even a chord and feeling like "but it seems to work" and certainly the first time you hear "Stormy Monday" you maybe go "oh wow" at something that is perhaps being viewed as a systematic pariah.
And there is a riddle some of you may have heard of about a father and son are out riding and get in an accident, they are taken to the emergency room, the father is pronounced dead. The doctor walks in and looks at the son and says "get another doctor in here, I can't help him, he is my son" . . .
you ask people to explain this . . .
you will often find that even if they are the president of the local chapter of N.O.W. they will go into explanations involving adoption, remarriage, grandparenthood etc. They are not even aware that when they heard the word doctor, they had grooving inside that made them unconsciously or semi-unconsciously think "doctor equals man" . . .
And I believe that in many ways, I got things engrained in me that ain't necessarily so . . . and I may not even know that they are there and taking over my perception, judgment, navigation, limiting my choices . . .
In spite of the references I made above I believe I am saying these things in the presence of people many of whom are a good bit more sophisticated and experienced than myself. And yet I also want to say, this is going back to a more personal note above, I am sometimes in a room where someone will say "I did not know anything when I got here" and I myself I feel like "as for me, I was 'The Man Who Knew Too Much' and so much of my growth has been an UNlearning process!"
I am grateful for many things I unlearned because in the clearing my heart was able to speak a bit more and I was able to hear it more.
In spite of a lot of things getting engrained in me, just in experience I would sometimes note things like that you can use flatted ninths playing "Wildwood Flower" but it maybe helps to at least briefly start introducing that sort of thing early on [this is how it seemed to me] and that in many ways music seemed to be about things like tension and release or going home and suspensions or detours on the way and things of that sort, having more than just one home, maybe a home and a mountain cottage and a beach bungalow and that this was there with or without reference to symbols like letters and numbers and century old ideas of how the letters or numbers should relate to each other.
If you are reading this, you may feel like I am going yada yada yada and perhaps that is so and I suspect I may be silent for a good while after this but I want to say that the Lydian Concept that I had, even though I did not get out of it all that I could, it was a liberating thing that encouraged some re-examination and gave me some kind of orientation in territory where I had been traveling by somewhat limited or pre-existent manmade maps or conventions . . . I think someone once said "the map is not the territory" . . . and so the edition that I had, even though I may not have the familiarity most of you do, it was something that seemed to increase my awareness of the real territory and bring home to me that there was more than what I was seeing on the old map and that I could experience and express a bit more . . . it did not really invalidate what I sort of already knew or had already been exposed to, in fact, there is a concept, the French have a verb "ressortir", it is kind of like the Black Velvet ads, where they have a blonde and black velvet, one actually brings out the other . . . it did not mean that Hank Williams was passe, if anything, it seemed to enrich Hank Williams and I maybe even heard the heart in it more than before and some old things seemed a bit new but they did not, the first word that comes to me is "dominate", maybe that is strong, but they did not dominate me like before and in not being dominated, I somehow had deeper appreciation. I was able to be more receptive of all . . .
And perhaps if I thought this out more it might be more coherent or expressive but even though it may seem a bit feeble or limited, I hope that if anyone reads this they can pick up some of my gratitude for what I got out of the edition that I have that was $35 . . . I have lately begun some re-exploration, among other things I had two kids with a woman who did not like music around and that constraint ended . . . I am re-exploring a bit . . . I may be somewhat silent in here but I did not want to just be a lurker and I also wanted to try and say something, even if personal and incomplete, about the earlier edition before I received the newer edition.
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johnlynch4492
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there is apparently some kind of a filter and a few of my words were filtered out, one was the noun formed from "busy", the activity that Sinclair Lewis's Babbit focused on; another was the common word for "spectacles"; one was a reference to persons who don't have the same XY or XX chromosome makeup as one's self; and one involved an illustration of the "ressortir" concept using the Black Velvet ad campaigns, which feature black velvet and a woman with a very light hair color that it has been said is preferred by gentlemen, the latter word appears twice in a three word Bob Dylan album title . . . I am just saying this in case someone was wondering . . . so the Monty Pythonesque word that appeared is not that big a deal . . .
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johnlynch4492
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- Joined: Wed May 30, 2007 9:20 pm
- Location: Florida
I just received the 2001 edition today and have really only briefly scanned it, but it appears to be much more durable and attractive and the content appears to be arranged in a more outlined or "organized" manner. It looks like there is a good bit of additional content and more extended musical examples. The earlier edition which I had seems somewhat more like an assembly of some separate texts with different emphases, like a main house with with additions to it, separate garage, mother-in-law cottage, tool shed etc. The newer text appears to go into some of the purpose/effect and rationale earlier on. There was a chart that I think is new on the title page that made me slightly chuckle. The subtitle "The Art and Science of Tonal Gravity" seems formally new yet a concept that was there threaded into the earlier edition, as I recall it. It is saying that from the get-go. And that was maybe one of the more obvious things I sensed or gleaned from the earlier edition. I may have encountered something a bit similar in Schoenberg yet this seemed even more liberating. Schoenberg seemed to be wanting to break it down into things like "the V of the iii of the IV" but this seemed more like a breathing and walking thing and a thing that was ultimately more open to things that might possibly have seemed too ambiguous or ambivalent to Schoenberg or Schenker [if I am remembering things at all right, again, it has been a while and I am neither a scholar nor a professional]
Anyways, I am just getting a new look at this again and a first look at the 2001 edition.
Anyways, I am just getting a new look at this again and a first look at the 2001 edition.