The Harmony of Ted

Of all the popular and scholarly writers on music, the one that tends to irritate me the most is...

....wait for it...

...no, not Norman Lebrecht...

it's Ted Gioia.

It's partly because he is so darned prolific, tossing off a thousand or more word essay every couple of days. And yeah, I could do that too if I didn't have a lot of other things to do, plus, laziness.

But it's mostly because while he is so deeply mistaken on anything having to do with music history, he is also utterly self-assured about it with no hint of the awareness that his knowledge might be a bit off-kilter. I guess that is a valuable quality to have when you are preparing acres of click-bait, but want to appear as a wise oracle. Sigh.

Ok, let's take a run at his latest effort: Is There Such a Thing as Western Harmony? That really captures the Ted Method which seems very similar to the approach of many YouTubers. Make a flat, challenging, controversial statement that is only controversial to people who are unacquainted with the topic. Here are some similar titles from YouTube: "How The Beatles wrote their most ambitious song," "The greatest 30 seconds of Classical Music," "Top 10 metal moments in classical music," "HOW TO READ MUSIC IN 15 MINUTES," "The string Quartet explained in less than 5 minutes," and so on and on.

Mr. Gioia operates on a higher level, of course, he does not purport to explain harmony in three minutes or less. Instead of promising something impossible in a jiffy, he takes a well-established historical fact and shows how roguishly cool he is by calling it into question. And he does it by an age-old technique named after those clever Greeks: sophistry: "A plausible but misleading or fallacious argument."

He starts by muddying the water by throwing out the absurd statement "After all, how can anybody own harmony?" This is fiendishly clever and misleading at the same time. No-one is claiming to "own" harmony, but it opens the door to the possibility of attacking the adjacent claim that harmony, in the sense we understand it today, did indeed originate with that clan of horrid reprobates Dead White Males of Western Europe, hereinafter abbreviated to DWMWE.

Here's how he puts it:

I’m aware that much of our theorizing about harmony came out of Europe. But what does that really mean? European music itself originated from intense cultural intermixing—including elements from outside the Western world.

He is referencing, without mentioning, the work of Martin Bernal in Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Well, sure there were a lot of threads of influence from Egypt and other Middle Eastern civilizations that found their way into Greek culture. A while back I mentioned how the form of the classical pillar and capital came originally from Egypt. But failing to notice that the Greeks transcended their influences in every possible way is a peculiar kind of intellectual failing.

He follows this up with "The birth of so-called Western culture is the ultimate case study in diversity." Which is a brilliant misreading of cultural history. Western culture, including Western harmony, is anything but a case study in diversity, instead it is an example of focus and elimination of extraneous elements. For example, the use of complex microtones tends to interfere with the development of harmonic clarity so Western music went to great lengths to develop an efficient tuning system that would enable modulation. Exactly the opposite happened in classical Indian music where harmony was reduced to an octave-fifth drone in order to enable more melodic complexity and a variety of microtones. Oh, and that "so-called" is the perfect weasel expression. Beware the sneering shibboleth!

Reading this "It’s no coincidence that the Greeks named their musical modes after a range of ethnic and national groups—Lydians, Phrygians, Dorians, etc.—some of them disempowered and enslaved." I don't want to read any further. How did he managed to drag "disempowered and enslaved" into this discussion?

And in fact, I am going to stop there. Life is too short to be reading Ted Gioia's travesties of music history.