Final Blog: Problem Solving - Creative/Critical Thinking

For my final blog I have chosen the skill of problem solving, and the abilities of creative and critical thinking. The focus area for which I was responsible was “tonality and composition” focusing mostly on music theory. Let me begin by saying that I firmly believe the study of all history to be a very scientific endeavor, but especially music theory in an historical context. However, the problems that arise in the study of music history are not the same as in other sciences. For instance, in a discipline such as astronomy, the problems are able to be worked out in a (for the most part) strict, laid out mathematical approach. In music history (or history in general) the problems that arise are typically ones of origin, adding complexity to this is that the origin being discussed is usually origin of thought, this can be an incredibly frustrating task for any researcher.

The task then, becomes one of finding trends in thoughts or style that transcend generational ideas of art and culture. For instance, during the chapter on Russian late-Romantic composition the whole-tone and octatonic scales were discussed, but little if any background was given to their origins as a compositional device. As I am concerned with the problem of finding where this unique style came from, my task was to see if I could find any historical trends that would lead to the use of such scales. I remember reading the introduction from “A Russian Songbook” which discussed the heavy influence of Greek/Byzantine chant on Russian folk music (because the Eastern Orthodox Church had been a significant prescience in Slovak lands since the 8th century CE). I happen to also own the 19th century text; “A Treatise on Byzantine Music” which discusses the theory of integrating tetrachords at the whole and half step, these liturgical scales in many ways represented proto-whole-tone or proto-octatonic scales. At this point I felt confident that I could compose a blog based on my simple research to speculate on a solution for the problem of the origin of these unique scales.

Another problem arose when we encountered the chapter on the use of noise in music (specifically dealing with the Italian futurists and continuing all the way through the remainder of the text). From a topical reading, one might conclude that prior to the futurists there was not noise, and after the futurists there was. Again I was fortunate enough to remember a sound design course in which I participated through Open University that discussed regular and irregular sound waves. Regular sound waves are sounds our ears perceive as a pitch whereas irregular waves are perceived as noise. Virtually all percussion (save for timpani and xylophone instruments) produce irregular sound-waves which by themselves are noise sounds, and yet percussion has been a part of music making since the beginning. From there it was easy to see a gradient where noise was included in compositions such as L. Mozart’s “Toy Symphony,” the use of “thunder machines” in Romantic compositions all the way to the futurists and beyond. I included a clip of a current hip-hop song “Chicken Noodle Soup” which uses no pitched instruments to illustrate how valid noise in composition has become.

The above are simply two examples of the kinds of problems that arise in researching trends in musical development. In truth, I had to modify a couple of my blogs after contrasting them with my fellow students’ pieces. This is probably the most healthy aspect of problem-solving through creative and critical thinking, that every step towards a hypothesis is able to be tested by a built in peer-review committee being the fellow students who ask questions and challenge. This shows that the problem solving process is never really finished, as in all sciences; the best we can hope for is a very well founded theory.