Jazz Brain

I've been trying to fill in some of the gaps in my music education (which was heavy on technique and pretty light on theory) so that I can hold my own with the jazz band or at least feel a bit more confident up there with all those theory pros who can toss around words like "Dorian mode" and "half-diminished 7th" as though they're talking about their grocery list.  Despite a literal lifetime of playing music (as a toddler I sat on my mother's lap while she played piano, and I started tapping out my own tunes on the keys before I was even tall enough to see them or get on the bench by myself), my training has been patchy, to say the least.  Some things I discover I do know, but not the terminology for them.  Other things I've never been taught—or wasn't paying attention when I was. 

Lately I've been working on scale patterns: the intervals used in major, minor, blues, and pentatonic scales.  I have a book and CD set I got from the library that I've found really helpful (Music Theory Made Easy, by David Harp), and I sat diligently playing all the scales in every key, studying the intervals on the keyboard, trying to memorize the patterns (I + bIII + IV+bV+V + bVII + I), getting more and more frustrated as I once again couldn't get them in my head.  I still carry the burden of watching our piano teacher put gold star after gold star on my sister's scales chart while I lagged far behind and only just managed to get blue or green stars.  Partly, no one ever gave me a convincingly good reason to practice my scales, and I think I was born refusing to spend energy without a good reason.  If I'd been introduced to all the fascinating mathematics and social history of scales, my imagination might have been captured—even as a small child I loved math and weird history (the flatted 5th interval was banned for a long time because it was considered diabolical)!  But partly I also think my brain didn't know how to handle scales.

Last week after I struggled for hours without making much progress, I stopped looking at the keys on the keyboard and the rows of Roman numerals in the book and just played out a scale with my eyes closed, searching for the next interval by ear.  Hey, wait a minute!  That was easy!  I picked another starting note and played its major, minor, blues, and pentatonic scales by ear.  A few bobbles but better than when I was trying to "see" the scales.  I had the definite sensation of moving from one place in my brain to another, where suddenly things became much clearer.  (I've also since discovered that I can sing scales easily in any key, given the starting pitch, "without even thinking about it."  Or thinking in a whole different way that feels like not-thinking.)

Later I told my husband about it and found myself pointing to my head—I could physically locate the place I had to turn off (towards the front on the left side) and the place I had to turn on, or move to (further back on the right side).  I know that the left side of the brain tends to specialize in linear, sequential thinking while the right side is more holistic, but I was curious as to whether those particular areas have to do in some way with my scales travails.  So today I went online to find a map of the left and right sides of the brain, and lo and behold, those two spots are very much in accord with my experience.  (I photoshopped a visual aid with the downloaded images.)

 

In the left brain, the place I felt I had to turn off "takes ideas, actions and words, and puts them into linear sequence."  The place in the right brain has to do with music—specifically, "(spatial) harmony" and "intervals."  I'd been trying to learn scales as linear sequences, which maybe with enough repetition I could finally embed, but rote memorization has never been my strong suit.  When I shifted my approach to the spatial harmonies and intervals and let my ear take over, the music began to flow freely.  Pretty amazing that I could point right to those two places!  This kind of stuff fascinates me!  It certainly makes learning scales more interesting.

My next venture is going to be into all those modes the Greeks came up with ("Dorian" being one of them).  I've been reading about them and how Socrates thought all but two should be banned because they have deleterious effects on humanity, etc.—sounds like great stuff!