Everyday tonality

What Hacker News says

1. cordellwrenMar 2021
   It's no longer musical notation, but audio recordings that are the "text," or primary source for popular music. This principle applies even only from a practical perspective, as the pedagogy of popular music has a heavy emphasis on listening to and replicating or transcribing audio recordings.

   But more fundamentally, you're approaching from an outdated common practice-period perspective what should be understood from a (post)modernist, electronic framework. Transcribing Stockhausen or Xenakis into notation would be a worthy endeavor, but the output of such an effort is secondary to the recording itself. Not just in terms of importance, but in that the recording represents the ultimate creative decisions and expressions made by the musician, whereas the notation is a mere reduction produced for convenience. This was certainly not the case for classical music, but music has changed since then.

   And so the same goes for jazz, rock, or any other popular genre. Our music has evolved in such a way that those musical elements that do not lend themselves easily to being written down in standard Western musical notation have become central to the expression and stylistic idiom thereof.

   Finally, if you're interested in what I've had to say, look up a concept called "notational centricity" by musicologist Richard Middleton, and a book called "Everyday Tonality" by Philip Tagg.

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2. nuxiSep 2026
   Do you have any opinions on Everyday Tonality II?

   https://www.tagg.org/mmmsp/EverydayTonalityInfo.htm

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