Medieval Math Music feat. Adam Neely | Team Recorder

hello everybody i'm sarah and i'm a recorder player hi everybody i'm adam and i'm a recorder player yeah okay learn me good okay fun banter starts fun banter welcome back to team recorder i am here today with a very special guest so i'm sure you'll recognize the one and only adam neely i hope you're ready to get incredibly nerdy about medieval music and rhythmic proportions this is going to be crazy i am i don't know what i'm getting myself into this is gonna be great are you the biggest music youtube theorists just basically you can call me the biggest nerd i'll accept that i'm the biggest nerd that's brilliant but i'm coming for your title i'll have to fight for it recorder we can do it yeah i didn't actually bring my bass recorder which is which is very sad that is very sad if we would have had a bass competition i would have not won because my lowest note is uh you have a piano here so uh yay the lowest note on my bass recorder is this oh really there we go so mine is this yeah anyway today's not about bases um that's every day is about basis yeah what are you talking about we're getting into the rhythmic complexity microtonal mathematical games of medieval music so i have a question so i i know that poly polyrhythmic stuff we generally think of that as being like 20th century innovations like you know schoenberg and and like stravinsky yeah but this stuff i'm learning now came about in like the 14th 15th century like some really crazy stuff too exactly let me introduce you to the arseptilio i'm doing like a text thing oh i see it yeah the text is going to come up here generally when people think of medieval music i get the feeling that people have a preconception that the earlier music is the more primitive it is yeah that it's simple that it's so pure and that as time went on it got more complex as if composers didn't know all of these things that they do today it's like scientific discovery like a lot of times people think that about music like we're always discovering new science we're always discovering new music but it's super cool to know that you know all this crazy stuff has been here for oh yeah yeah hundreds of years exactly that notion that music then was simple and primitive happily is yes let me start off saying but the medieval period is vast when we talk about medieval music that's like 900 years near the end of this we get this fascinating period called the a subtilior the subtle arts we're talking like 1360 to 1420 centered around avenue on in france characterized by being really really complicated let's say the composers were just getting all of their wildest ideas and experiments some real jacob collier in the arsenal exactly like the 14th century jacob collier but yeah let's not forget we're coming out of a period where mathematics music astronomy geometry it's all one thing the idea of the quadrivium that's something that i've been checking out recently uh math is applied number geometry is applied space music is like applied time and then astronomy is a combination of number space and time all of these mathematical proportions the idea of translating this into music is really obvious so basically i thought we'd get together and just try playing some of this okay you said this was uh music for the pros yeah cool all right i'm just gonna play the bassline the first thing we're going to try and play is something that the team recorder super fans amongst you will recognize because i've featured it in about 40 videos that's lay by johannes circonia who i'm sure you know and love spotify top 25. so the original is this oh cool we got them noims yeah so how do you how do you how do i read this how does one read this i don't okay i i rely on modern notation but what this is lara soleil is a single melody line and then there's a little bit of text at the end that says um gives the instruction to play in three different proportions got it that's super cool while three traversed four counts the third one an octave below but it makes white delays what yeah i think that's some like latin i think that's some translation thing apparently people also have argued about what it means and how to uh how to realize it but i like this version so okay yeah if you are a scholar of chiconia and you have a different rhythmic realization for us leave it in the comments all you latin scholars out there while adam is practicing i should tell you how the music actually works there are three voices that play the same melody in different speeds or proportions [Music] so here what we're doing is well let's talk about poly rhythms versus poly pulses okay so we're following the same pulse and you are subdividing in three and i'm sub dividing in four dot how that changes into a poly pulse will get you later i'm curious what the traditional practice would have been is everybody feeling the same was it tactus what we know of what they felt then we have no idea okay yeah true but i can give my insight as a performer when i perform this we all start feeling the same beat yeah and i usually play the top line which is subdivided in four so to get the speed i'm going duck but as soon as we get going i leave that behind and i start feeling it in three but just faster and then we have poly pulse interesting [Music] and then yeah this is what we call a poly pulse poly pulse that's tricky because it's the same melody in both pulses so it's just keeping that wow yeah that's very different from how i would try and and feel like i guess because it's the same melody that was originally written in three uh yeah okay well let's try i mean there's no right or wrong way at the end of the day with this piece it's you've got to do whatever keeps you hanging on one two three [Music] that's the first rule of music ignore the people that you're playing with yeah i'm so used to he like i'm playing this melody but then you're playing it slightly faster i'm like i want to play it with you but i can't i have to slow down yeah yeah it kind of reminds me actually of phasing you know the steve reich pieces where you have two people who are playing the same thing and one person speeds up ever so slightly and then they like interlock in a different way yeah and then you're like whoa wait hold on yeah and you just have to like be really really conscious of where you are you do and that's the thing that um as you get to know this piece what we have is anchor points so chords along the way one two three [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hey we're together that's so wild yeah yeah i was trying to think of like how we could get that bass voice in there [Music] [Applause] [Music] i can't believe i've never tried to do that before laura soleil is an example of a prolation cannon prolation cannon this is a handful i put a list on the screen because in all my research the same like handful came up are you familiar at all with conlan nancrow yes the composer who wrote for player piano he wrote for proportions like this that he felt humans couldn't do so he had the player piano do this he has a canon at the proportion of pi to e like so it's just just like the nerdiest stuff but what's so cool about listening to his music is that it it feels musical the prolation cannon stuff is in service of a very particular sound and that that's what's cool exactly so this is one of many insane polyrhythmic experiments thank you chiconia should we go a couple 100 years into the future let's go 100 years into the future yes we're going to skip forward to the 16th century all the way into the renaissance to a lesser-known english composer by the name of nathaniel giles okay yeah so not much is known about nathaniel giles he was an organist and a teacher he wrote miserera a lesson of descant descamp will be the top singing voice of 38 proportions of sundry kinds made by mr giles oh my gosh looking at this one this looks okay yeah okay page one the notes are aren't the issue it's for the rhythms the notes are not these so in this he goes through 38 proportions so a proportion is like something against something so he's basically taking uh all the different possibilities but the way he structures them is really nice because it's not arbitrary it never goes from for example three against two to five against seven because you always have to have a reference gotcha okay yeah okay wow that looks complicated jeez so this little styles come on man i see yeah okay well seven against two is not that bad it's more when it's like this where it's within the seven against four then there are these nested tublets where it's like the there's like a triplet within the septuplet and you can do all the you can do all the polygraphs so this is the kind of thing without the metronome it's not that hard yeah because you just you have you're just doubling speed halving speed or choosing whether to subdivide into two or three that's that's the interesting thing so i'm so used to metronome and subdivision is everything so everything has to be felt very very specifically to the metronome so how you would subdivide that to the metronome like how would you reconcile the two pulses in other words like if you're doing five against four you can do oh five against four is easy you just do every fourth quintuplet right and then then it all calculates out right rather than trying to feel the two different pulses and then reconcile the pulses and that's something i don't know at all i'm happy you mentioned that because with this kind of music there's there's the two ways of courses counting and calculating out and feeling it and to be honest to be able to play i have to combine both ah so the techniques i use for this i was taught this through a program uh deriving techniques from south indian carnatic music oh cool that makes sense yeah wow and this is a whole curriculum put together by uh a musician called bc manginat he's on youtube and a composer called raphael reiner and they descend they designed a program there are some really cool indian uh vox guru is a really good one for like learning carnatic stuff oh and there's there's a hindustani youtuber by the name of anuja kamat that is just like every one of her videos i'm like whoa do you want to try something sure let's try it [Music] me [Music] [Music] okay i i feel what you were doing with all of that which was having and that but how that relates to the other pulse i just i i don't know that's crazy and me neither okay all right so if i play it like that without the bass i'm like oh it's pretty okay but putting it together and staying together is just like wildly difficult okay so can we try that and based i'm gonna be following you basically if that's okay yeah we're just gonna end at the uh like at the bar line when things change right and then i'm just gonna try and take these long pulses and just divide into four [Music] me [Music] me [Music] yeah so conclusion this is hard for me i i was trying to really hear that and try and hear that in relationship to when you were breaking that down even if that wasn't necessarily where it was how i would approach this is to be honest i would take each tiny section calculating out so i know where everything should fall right and then repeating it until i can feel how that feels yeah yeah and then comes the process of switching between the two yeah i don't have that time to practice like at the time how would i don't know how would people do that like that's a really good question i'm really curious the thing is there's there are examples of this kind of music but not many okay i'm assuming that these are like a fun pastime for composers rather than the performers and the list the audience is saying yeah give me those polypulses yeah because this this does feel very much like a an etude rather than something that's like you know let's go down to the let's go down to the let's go down the pub and play these yeah more for mr giles's benefit than anybody else gotcha that sounds that sounds like kayla's all this time so giles also wrote another piece a similar piece but for a trio oh wow called salvatore mundi um same idea going through all the proportions because the three people is harder and i'll be honest i have performed this we worked super hard on it but it's not the most beautiful piece of music i mean we performed it and we were like this is how impressive we are but the audience are just like i guess we played it right but it's interesting to look at what he was doing yeah i mean it's also interesting the process of it like people are thinking about these things like what what would it sound like if it was a nested or like they're not thinking of it as nested tuplets that's a modern term but they're thinking about uh proportions within proportions yes and all that can you define nested tuplet for hour sorry yes a nested tuplet is basically when you have a tuplet like a triplet or something and then you take one of those note values and then you tuplify it again you can then add another layer you can nest the tuplet within a tuplet you know i don't see that that often to be honest it seems like it's a thing that's very like new music kind of like rhythm inception it's very much rhythm inception for western classical music it's something mind-blowingly complicated but it's it's also a staple of carnatic music to my understanding a lot of the the carnatic music is cycles and these cycles can fit within other cycles and it's it's this very like layered thing uh which is i mean it makes a lot of sense for this because it's kind of the same vibe [Music] i'd like to look at bar 57 i think it's a pretty cool bar not that we have to play it yeah i mean you can play it if you want um wow okay so it's 13 beats i guess um and then we have so they're both doing for four half notes against three but they're but they're displaced [Music] that was amazingly like two professional musicians amazingly i'm a bass player it's so cool like uh for me i don't come from this world at all it's it's like discovering a whole new side of music entirely it's like i'm so used to music starting music the way that it's taught started in 1720 like there was no music before that and it was only in europe but like there was a thousand years of really cool stuff going on in europe at the time and this is all really amazing music really thoughtful music really people were trying stuff out like the same thing that people are today which is more part of the just the the discourse but it's cool it is isn't it i love that you say that for you it starts at 17 20. i get to 1750 i'm like box dad well no no me for me like that's how it was taught like not how i think about music but that was like yeah in terms of the popular understanding of where classical music begins it's hugely complex and hugely not that something has to be complex to be good it's so much more nuanced than i think people realize oh my gosh yeah um and that's like that's exciting just to see it and discover it and play it i think we should at least attempt to play it even if it's gonna just like let's go all right okay yeah two three [Music] my [Applause] [Music] did we do it yeah we did i think we did it yes yes yes we have we can play renaissance music these pieces are really the extreme end of rhythmic complexity um that we see in medieval and renaissance music but we've got lots of pieces that play with this interplay of three against two are we in three are we in two you know you're courants you know [Music] i mean thank you so much for sharing this stuff this is so this is so exciting for me how do you uh conceptualize this stuff and it's really you know it's super humbling to try and play and like nope because the thing is it doesn't look that hard i don't know speak for yourself i'm like like they're not that many notes on the page right right right yeah especially at the start of the piece yeah it's like that's easy oh yeah and then you're like [Music] are there any kind of examples of this type of writing in in your scene uh yeah so i mean when you have all these different kinds of subdivisions on top of one another i know it like in a lot of modern big band music like i keep talking about her buddy uh brian crock who has another amazing youtube channel a lot of things um that they'll do is you have all the different instruments playing different subdivisions but kind of it's understood that people will fail because the end result is supposed to be this soup of texture and then it all comes together at a certain point so it's a different approach where it's not you're not trying to get the mathematically perfect way it's means to an end yeah and i know like brian fernando like a lot of the new complexity composers are just like yeah to see everything together exactly but i have to say so i mean i play mainly contemporary music actually and what i don't like is when composers use these proportions and subdivisions arbitrarily yeah yeah they'll be like a nine against eight and then a 15 27 and if it's not structured well right it's just like you could have written get faster yeah and these pieces like carnatic music there is a structure to them they accelerate they decelerate there's a there's a reason there's a reason behind it yeah yeah a musical purpose what a lot of people like composers who write polyrhythms don't understand is that they aren't responsible for feeling them or performing them and the thing i would say is like if you write a polyrhythm you better be able to play it just as well as you expect your players to play it because otherwise you're just writing equations and expecting people to make them music yeah to solve them exactly whenever i write anything for people i want to be able to play every line and feel every line and understand it the way that a performer would because that means you have responsibility for it yeah um so whether or not giles could do any of this stuff i don't know this is a giles call out let us know what you think oh i'm up for some arguments argue argue give that sweet algorithmic engagement okay i think i think this video has gotten suitably nerdy enough you have your work cut out for you and editing this i think my audience are up for it cool good yeah i know we got into some a lot of good stuff today adam thank you so much yeah of course if you don't know adam lily already where are you go over to his channel as always you can subscribe to my channel by clicking on my face down here in the corner over here is my patreon if you'd like to support team recorder and here's another video thanks for watching and have a great day [Music]

Channel: Sarah Jeffery / Team Recorder

Views: 117,243

Rating: 4.9475894 out of 5

Keywords: adam neely, bass, bass tutorial, bass guitar, music theory, medieval, mediaeval, medival, renaissance, math, mathematics, quadrivium, recorder, team recorder, sarah jeffery, ciconia, nathaniel giles, prolation canon, jacob collier, carnatic music, recorder lesson, early music, ancient music, rhythm, rhythm lesson, polyrhythm, polypulse, geometry, nerd

Id: 5csDElRvCkU

Length: 24min 58sec (1498 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021