Lazz

No, it's not too personal. I'm happy to tell how it's worked for me, if that's useful. I'll need a little time, though, if that's ok - I have other pressing stuff to deal with first. .

So you prefer to be unfriendly. Lazz is my name - that's what my friends call me - no idea what we can do about that. I ain't changing it. You're also determined to get personal. I have no problem with that at all. It's clear we have stuff to get sorted. Might be better if we did that in private, though. You ok with that? .

Misrepresentation one of my favourites? I wasn’t aware of that. Maybe you can educate me and I’ll see what I can do about. “feigned misapprehension” is very presumptuous. What you choose to label feigned misapprehension are genuine attempts to clarify what you mean where I don’t get what you’re saying so we can avoid misunderstanding and the misrepresentation you tell me I am fond of. These two sentences, for example, proved tough for me to follow: “Sorry, but if I let people sign waivers, ASCAP should not be at liberty to bluntly ignore that” “They may *assume* people play covers anyway, but until that's established, they cannot simply dictate law.” I’m not clear about “getting verbal”, either. It is apparent that your intent is not pleasant. And I’m certain you’re not just talking about ‘using language. Apart from that, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Similarly, I honestly have no idea what an “agency shop” is. Sometimes I get the impression you don’t actually read what I say. Maybe I’m simply piss-poor at expressing what I mean. I have reiterated throughout that I have valid and legitimate question about the way PROs operate. That doesn’t translate successfully into regarding them as sacrosanct. Not to me anyway. What I take issue with is the tenor of emotional hysteria in the reporting. My questions about the way the media operates are also valid and legitimate. The fact that people use the mafia metaphor, and “extortion” & “intimidation”, however, is something I believe PROs need to take seriously. Hopefully they can learn how to avoid yet more embarrassing public-relations nightmares. .

C'mon, Rob. I said the landscape had changed. There's absolutely no need to stoop to misrepresentation. You're better than that. Are you really saying it is the same as in '54 ? Do you really expect me to accept a one-sided picture from Zappa 25 years ago plus the words to a song as proof of that ? I just can't take that seriously. Sorry. .

I don't see any legal & ethical cluster-f**k - delightful as it sounds - I see a bounty of sound-bite bullshit. Still very juicy. The last time rights issues were hot gossip here reflected the hot-gossip in the rest of the big and small media. The story back then was about negotiations for a new agreement between YouTube and the UK's Performing Rights Society. And the media narrative was played out in classic good-guy/bad-guy stereotypes. YouTube were the good guys who generously deliver a feast of music and video direct to the devices of choice amongst a market sector reared on 'free' (as in 'beer'). PRS were the bad guys, the party-poopers, the joy-trashers, who were threatening an end to the party of innocents unless they were given money. The reality was something else. But we never let facts get in the way of a good story, do we? People love a good story. And this one was a great story. This one mined a rich vein of emotional populist sentiment because the outcome looked to hit people where it really hurt - right in the home computer - ouch - right in that 'free beer' pocket. Battles have spilled out of the boardroom and onto our front pages before, of course. That's where the spin can help you win. Labour disputes, for example, are generally reported in a style which presents management as making "offers" while unions make "demands". Such clever and subtle emotional charge to language spells that same old dependable subtext for good-guy/bad-guy. And Google/YouTube, lords of the new universe, are even slicker at the game. No wonder PRS fell right over from the hammering. The constant battle for public opinion is a minefield of 'diss'-information. I'm not paranoid: I'm just suspicious of good-guy/bad-guy packages when they're punted at me. In this current instance, the good guys are “up and coming singers” and “local musicians”. Hey !!! That’s us – right? ASCAP, meanwhile, is “aggressive”, “attacking”, and “refuses to debate”. They not only cheat their own membership by exploiting small acts (that’s us, too, isn’t it?) to overpay the big guys, and by cutting back on member payments while raking-in more than ever, but their general administration tactics are on a par the mafia. No doubt these must be the bad guys Don’t you just hate ‘em already ? At least, that’s the story they want us to hear – so much is clear. And I know there’s always an appetite for stories that confirm our established or up-coming prejudices. But for me, faced with cheap attempts to manipulate my sympathies, telling me what I am supposed to be thinking and feeling, and breezing past basic fact-checking and substantiation on the way, my personal bullshit-detector tells me I’m being lied to. To me, it’s yet another scuffle in the general diffuse-media campaign of gradual background erosion working to undermine public sympathy for the simple notion that an individual should have rights over their own work. That’s the real story. One day, if it hasn’t been done already, someone will write it. Maybe “Legal & Ethical Cluster-F**k” should be in the title somewhyere. Apart from this missing commentary on the big battle, my most significant major concerns regarding PROs are to do with distribution mechanisms and ways to achieve greater proportionality and fairness. There’s a story there too But in the meantime we’ll stick to good-guy/bad-guy. Just like the Wrestling. It ain’t so bad. Just the friendly-fire gets to be a pain. .

An analogy isn’t supposed to be the same thing – just similar enough to be useful. And if my analogy failed to communicate itself successfully. then it was crap. But your analogy about speeding didn’t work too well for me either. What I was hoping and trying to express is that premises needing a licence to use music was like you having a licence to drive a car, and that playing original music or not was akin to speeding or not, and that neither of them has any bearing whatsoever on need to have a licence in the first place. That’s all. I thought you might have been aware that I am European. I know how it works in the EU. Yup. Historically, in the US, the mob has been closely enough entwined with some unions to be pretty much one and the same. Things appear to have changed a lot though since the old times depicted in “On The Waterfront”. These days, in my mind, as an outsider here, widespread anti-union sentiment is part of the legacy from that corrupt period. There seems no great respect given to concepts of individual rights and protections as they are regarded in Europe, though. There is ideology instead based on ‘freedoms’ which are opposed to any such controls or restraints. Very largely, the union landscape in North America has changed – although I don’t see that old mythic mafia model ever being an appropriate or productive tool for looking at the way rights organizations work. I think that European model works much better in expressing the ways a PRO represents us as a group and negotiates terms and conditions on our behalf. And I’m not certain of your intention, but if you do actually mean to suggest they operate through obligatory membership without which you have no right to work, then that is a complete misrepresentation. Are you saying you believe that, in the US, ASCAP does have that right ? For all I know, you’ve probably got loads of dynamite ideas about how to organise a much better, fairer, more effective system, wouldn't surprise me at all. It could all be so different if you had the power to create and enforce your own rules. But at the moment, there are laws and rules already in place whatever we might think of them. And those are the facts we have to deal with in reality. They don’t charge fees on the basis of some chance that a promise would be violated. That’s just plain silly. The licence is for using music. That it is not copyrighted by others has nothing to do with anything. When I play a gig, I am doing music copyrighted by myself. If I am lucky enough to be working a place where they pay their licence, I am glad to be able to complete my PRO form, get it signed, send it in, and look forward to getting paid my composer’s due. If another artist is performing music copyrighted by myself in similarly licensed premises, I have to hope they do the same paperwork properly on my behalf. And if any of us performs work written by someone else, we are expected to fill in the same forms on their behalf so those composers eventually get paid too. The system works reciprocally and pretty much the same in Europe and North America. It doesn’t actually matter whether we think another method might be preferable, that’s how the system operates. You can talk about how it should be, and those ideas might be commendable and sound, but we still have to deal with what is. In the US now, it seems clear, according to the document links posted by Coises, that there are conditions under which premises would have no need to a licence for music. Whether that principle would work the same in other jurisdictions is yet untested and unresolved. .

Great document links, Randy. Thanks. I didn't think there was any question licences are issued to premises. But can it really be true that there is no legal requirement for premises to get one ? Hard for me to believe. Why on earth would anyone be worrying about ASCAP lawsuits if the licence has no legal basis? Must be some misunderstanding. Yes, other territories have one single agency. But rights holders are under no obligation to join. And those of us who do join can still choose to waive royalties – generally mechanicals. Performance royalties for useage is where licences for premises come in though, And even there, thanks to the heroic persistence and resolve of Richard Phillips, the documents you linked to make clear that because, in his case, where the premises make no use of recorded music or is otherwise exempt, where he is the only live performer of music at the premises, and where the repertoire is either owned by him with no rights transferred to BMI or made up of traditional public domain works which have nothing to do with BMI either ….. then in his case they don’t even need a waiver because the Assistant General Counsel to the US Copyright Office says clearly that BMI’s presumed entitlement never existed in the first place. That seems to make sense to me – I hope I got it right. And that precedent must mean something – a secure argument at least that, for those guys whose circumstances meet the same criteria as laid out by the Assistant General Counsel, they have legal right to tell BMI to go forth and multiply without compromising the integrity of copyright. With other performance premises, however, the circumstances may be very different. They usually will be. So why don’t they just get a licence? It’s not as if we’re talking loads of money. For the type of small venues I understand to be involved in these incidents, the cost can’t be much more than ten bucks a week. First, I don’t see what his membership status has to do with it. Second, when you say ‘the old way of doing business is overdue to perish’ it prompts me to consider that maybe you’re conflating issues of composers’ copyright with the evils of the big bad record company scenarios – largely long dead anyway – and that maybe your understanding about what’s really going on for musicians and composers is incomplete.. Thirdly, when you say it makes you a little pissed, it starts to do the same to me, but for different reasons. The professional organizations, collection agencies, PROs, which represent the interests of their membership of ordinary composers and musicians, have their efforts under attack from a lot of directions right now. It’s a real fight for our rights on many fronts concurrently. You, on the other hand, sanguine and philosophical with your expectations, choose to concern yourself less with rights protection and embrace creative commons as a more appropriate alternative, and seem to have found a path that suits you just fine with no need for any involvement in these rights-fights. Still, it confuses me that a putative songwriter, albeit one with your talents, irrespective of any contented amateur status, could take sides against the rights and interests of other songwriters. Richard Phillip's narrative (great and useful documents you provided - thanks) describes tactics he wants to name as 'extortion' – you enjoyed using the same word yourself – and I know that Prometheus (have you met?) has other stories about petty abuses of bureaucratic licensing power in Scotland that he feels passionately about. There are two things I know about this: one- that what makes a good story isn’t always the truth; two- that I’d have to be stupid to believe any organisation was perfect and couldn’t afford to learn more about graciousness and service. But whatever valid criticisms exist about ASCAP or PRS or whichever agency – and I have my own, remember – that is no reason to go selling the rights of their membership down the river by joining the attack on our means of collective representation. I’m unhappy if we should see our interests as divided on this, but the issues are pretty crucial for me and other songwriters, so I’m even more unhappy thinking you may have picked the wrong side. Could easily be viewed as back-stabbing. And it's not even your fight. I hope you understand those of us who are actually involved might get a little pissed as a result. .

I'm sure are easily capable of writing your own licence. Synchronisation licences might offer a good model. Some for prospective projects are usually short and sweet and recognise the fact that funding may never appear. If and when it does, of course, that's when payment details are finalised - but, until then, use can be effectively 'free'.

Thanks. Speaking personally, payment evasion may always be my own preferred option where there's a chance of getting away with it - like getting away with speeding when there's no cop around. But maybe a better analogy would be the requirement, speeding or not, to have a valid license - plus the fact that a waiver wouldn't save you there either. Personal opinions aside, the law is the law, and we just have to deal with it one way or another. The law requires a licence for the use of music, and we know that it will be copyrighted music because all music is under copyright law, so that can't be what the waiver is for. I think the argument was that they would be playing only their own original music and not 'covers' - and yet copyright still applies to both categories. Any waiver would have to come from ASCAP, not from the performers, who might not even be ASCAP members. If they were ASCAP members, and the venue had paid it's licence, and the artists filed their performance repertoire appropriately, then they would eventually receive some share of monies collected. That's how it works - theoretically - and I do have legitimate questions about how PROs' distribution formulae eventually shake out in our direction - but, given the long struggle to put our protections in place together with the constant battle to maintain them, the constant pressure to undermine those rights sometimes smells akin to some kind of mealy-mouthed quisling union-busting cloaked in a seductively innocent ideology of 'free'. Why aren't these people working with ASCAP to make something happen? Why don't the venues just get a licence? It is hard for me to imagine that Dutch law would be any different from any other EU member. .

I had never been aware of them at all prior to your post and my only reading of their stuff is through your links. But I did find them to fabricate, enough to signal questions about credibility. .

Sorry Rob, I'm not quite clear what you're saying here. Help me make sense of it, please. .

I don't necessarily agree with TechDirt's rabble-rousing opinions, Randy. They claim: 1. that ASCAP is aggressively closing venues. 2. that ASCAP overpays large acts at the expense of small acts. 3. that ASCAP is attacking groups like Creative Commons, EFF and Public Knowledge -- who “help artists find more ways to take control over their own careers”. 4. that ASCAP is cutting back on payments to many of its artists: 5. that ASCAP is bringing in more money than ever. For #5 – bringing in money is their job, it’s what they’re supposed to do, and doing it well is good. Bringing in money by leaning on venues to pay their licence for use is a policy pursued by collection agencies in other territories. And the complaints in those territories echo #1, also. Personally, I don’t see any problem with expecting premises to pay for their music use. It’s a simple cost of business like everything else. It’s not a huge amount, after all – contrary to what TechDirt want you to believe - and yet people still expect it to be free. The small open-mic venues don’t want to pay anything, of course. Too cheap even to pay their performers. They would sooner claim they have been forced to close and lay the blame at ASCAP’s door. I’m not convinced that view is just. I feel that TechDirt are trying to manipulate my opinion. As if they have their own agenda and objective reporting is not on it. For point #4, ASCAP are quoted as saying “because of the fiscal climate, less money was available this year for the award program”. So at face value the cut-back applies only to some ‘award program’, while TechDirt are still keen to tell us without any further substantiation that ‘many of its artists’ are affected. Point #3 – I remember your own chosen preference for ‘Creative Commons’ licensing – and I remember presuming you had made that choice based on ethical ideals of some sort – which is why I regret having to say this - but, to be perfectly honest, I see it all as a bit of a con. In the UK, whenever you make any kind of purchase as a consumer the transaction falls automatically under the law of contract much as the situation whereby when you write a new song it automatically falls under the laws of copyright. For a consumer already protected by common law, this means that the only times you are offered any kind of guarantee document is when rights are being removed from you. If you tried to purchase a brand-new car in the UK, for example, and were to refuse the accompanying “guarantee” papers, they would flatly refuse to sell it to you. They don’t want you to have your full entitlement under law. It’s cheaper and better, for them, to restrict your protections. Same with copyright. The law allows you to do whatever you choose with your work. You’re not prevented from anything and your work is protected. These other initiatives aren’t giving you anything extra that you don’t already have. Like the consumer guarantees, their only purpose is to take rights from you. So where they claim to “help artists find more ways to take control over their own careers”, you know it’s a bald-faced lie. If I was at all attracted to conspiracy theories, I would be tempted to suspect Creative Commons, EFF and Public Knowledge of colluding in a campaign to undermine copyright. Point #2 subsumes some very legitimate and contentious issues. TechDirt don’t even begin to address those. Appears not to understand what they are. And I’m even more convinced they’re trying to manipulate my opinion by talking bollocks. Sorry. But there are issues at point #2. .

I don't remember how old I was - no idea whatsoever. But I know how old I was when I first wrote a song-lyric with which I was perfectly happy and proud. 54 years old. Finally I know how to do it. I am a late bloomer. Or just slow. .

Yay D.D.!!

Oh, I'm just focussed on identifying the 1-3-5-7 in the context of the scale I am looking at as a thinking exercise - chord generation. Plus - in that answer - my intention was to clarify (if there was ambiguity) that it was NOT about voicing "all seven notes of the major scale, stacked up in thirds". So in that context it wouldn't really matter - you are just as likely to find me stabbing at the keyboard with 2 fingers from each hand. If I was trying to voice the chord for real, I would be choosing to look for the shell-voicing of just the 3rd and the 7th, and maybe picking a third note for colour - depending on the direction it was heading. So I might voice it upwards: 7-9-3; or 7-3-6; probably with two fingers from my right hand and one from my left. If I was working on searching for a melody with fingers of my right hand, I would be finding the 3rd and 7th with two fingers of my left hand. But then, not being an instrumentalist, I don't need to worry much about technique. As singer, writer, and tyro arranger, all I need is a productive way of making sense that I can use to interpret chord changes. Two thankfully slim but helpful little starting volumes: "How To Create Jazz Chord Progressions" by Chuck Marohnic "Jazz/Rock Voicings for the Contemporary Keyboard Player" by Dan Haerle They may be more use in terms of specific voicing suggestions.

Yes – I am looking at chords as being derived from scale-tones. (Where else are we going to get the notes from, right?) But we’re not using all seven notes to express the chord. We’re just using four fingers for the first four notes: 1-3-5-7. And being aware of what those other notes might be if we wanted to go there In spelling out those extensions we are giving clear notice that, should you choose to include a 9th in your version of a III chord, it needs to be flattened, same for the 13th. I view the I chord as I Major7: C-E-G-B. But I know the rest of those notes are there if I ever want to use ‘em. Yes. That’s about the size of it. Except that the 5th carries much less significance. The 3rd and the 7th are the characteristic defining chord tones That’s the important bit, I think. Chord progressions do their thing through voice-leading. Moving around round the cycle of fifths in the normal world of regular functional harmony – the same one described by Hariosa – we can see this voice-leading job is done by the 3rd and the 7th That’s why it just seems a lot handier using a concept embracing the 7th as fundamental, rather than the simple triad. Having a concept which also illuminates upper extensions at the same time introduces extra potential to our palette in the way of extra passing-tones available to expand our voice-leading with yet other intervening chords or substitutions. For progressions, I would argue that these qualities serve to make the approach more productive than sticking with triadic thinking. I think of it as a 13th because, in terms of the model of stacking thirds through the scale, that’s what number that note counts itself as by the time I reach it. But I might still prefer to voice it as a 6th, with no 5th, and a dropped 7th : 7-3-6. .

That’s part of our mistake, I think. My thinking was the absolute opposite. To slightly rephrase from that same page back: Perhaps we might ask the question: "ubiquitous amongst whom?" – and it then became self-evident (to me, at least) that one bundle of ideas played the Major role in Rob’s universe while another slightly different perspective was Dominant on planet Lazz. Different contexts; different ubiquities. But in terms of Coises’ question about relative utility, I didn’t see equivalence established. Neither do I see incompatibility or contradiction: I see development and growth. A way to gain access to more rooms in the same house. The same house of regular functional harmony. So we seem to be having different conversations. Thanks. Good questions. Why are there differing perspectives? Inventions in response to need. Different musical environments have their own characteristic demands and expectations. Ways of thinking which are the most sensitive to, and appropriate, for the problem-context. Survival of the hippest. Does it matter? Only if a person is interested. Only if it solves problems for them. Matters to me. What a novel idea! (You’re wasted here, John. Wasted.) Can I try to move forward by addressing Coise's specific questions to me ? I know Andrew (King Retro) might still be interested. .

Please Rob, I would welcome correction if my assumption is mistaken. (nothing too kinky, mind) .

Yes. Meat to the grill. Mist to the great. I'm sure I knew your gran. Rather well. .

For any innocent by-standers who are scratching their heads and wondering what happened here and what bearing or relevance old jazz and blues and be-bop bollocks might conceivably have on the world of rock'n'roll......... And subsequent to having heard Coises' music..... You might find the following enjoyable and illuminating: Donald Fagen talking with Warren Bernhardt about PEG PART ONE PART TWO Same guys talking about JOSIE PART ONE PART TWO

Probably right - I am sure there must be a whole herd of others who continue the same way. Music educators today, however, on the whole, generally don't do that anymore. There does remain today, and it may even continue into the future, a huge chasm between the classical academies for orchestral studies and those other, more recent, institutions which prepare musicians for working as professionals in other broader areas of popular music. Outside of pure composition, classical instrumental specialists have little if any need for deep theory other than some retro-active functional analysis. For a non-classical jobbing musician, however, who needs to survive on wits in a variety of different environments, it is theory as praxis which becomes absolutely essential, rather than the highly trained motor-reflexes which enable your classical geezer to stay in the game by being able to read fly-shit. He doesn't need to know why in order to play his note while our contemporary jobbing dude has to have practical theoretical understanding in order to find the note to play. In that modern world, chords have four notes. That's where we start. There is neither contradiction nor incompatibility. Do we have to ? I always feel weird about the alleged need for sources in these contexts as it seems to me that ideas and perspectives stand on their own merits and demonstrable worth above and beyond any proposed 'he said, she said' back-and-forth of referencing. I only listed some books on my shelves so you would see there were actually other places where you can find this stuff discussed and that it isn't something I am inventing out of thin air and just making up on the fly. Interestingly - on thumbing through them once more last night - I find in truth I have no one single volume which really codifies the system definitively and formally - rather, these are books I have on arranging and orchestration and voicings and such which all rest implicitly on the assumption that the reader already knows the theory. Seems a reasonable taken-for-granted assumption, after all. because, as I said earlier, it's pretty basic and fundamental knowledge as a way of thinking amongst players. The only place I find it codified complete in one place is the two loose-leaf files where I have stored all my notes from each private lesson that I have bought. I wouldn't have expected you to be. I have no reason to have ever thought of you as a student of music theory. Ok I tend to snort. And indeed, the introduction of EB in a context which I understood to be 'books on music theory (which I have read)' was something I found amusingly snortworthy. Sorry. .

I think it has always been quite explicit. Perspectives were (are) exactly the subject we had reached under this topic of 'how to create chord progressions'. Of those two perspectives which we had got around to intimating in only the vaguest terms, I wanted to offer some thoughts about relative usefulness and I harbour hope that some of the misunderstandings will begin to evaporate and stop interfering with the view. I think it depends entirely on what we want, where we’re aiming, and what makes us happy. If we want to explore other possibilities beyond the land of triads which I presumed your “standard guitar chord nomenclature” phrase was describing, beyond folk, in a harmonic sense, like ideas about how to create a chord progression, for instance, then we simply gain more mileage from the established and very practical ways of making sense that have been put together by those guys who went before in the strictly non-classical arena. When you and I were growing, opportunities for tapping into this body of accumulated knowledge and understanding didn’t exist anywhere outside of the active gigging musician’s community. Today, you can go to school to find out. There’s no need to re-invent any wheels. There’s no requirement or obligation for anyone to explore those perspectives of course – but I would say again that, in terms of thinking about how to create progressions, they can be useful big-time. One first big bit of usefulness is clarity - being unambiguous about key centre. Take an Em chord as example – a nice popular guitar chord. Slap two fingers on the neck – strum E A E A C E – and voila !! But what sort of Em are we looking at ? That may sound like a severely dumb question – especially if you’re bass player whose job it is to groove around the root and 5th of whatever chord is flying by, or if you’re the enthusiastic minimalist guitarist sticking with the simple triads….. but if you are someone else called onto a gig where you have to be able to fake your way through a chart and interpret appropriate note choices of your own, then it is very useful to know which chord function we’re dealing with. Most of the time, I imagine, we would be easily tempted to interpret the appropriate scale tones for Em as E F# G A B C# D and presume it is the II chord in the key of D. However…… if it turns out that our Em is functioning instead as the III chord of C, that C# and F# could have caused some unfortunate and avoidable ugliness. Spelled out carefully as Emin7, with the b9 & b13 in parenthesis, the tonality is made very explicit. C Major. There are times when the clarity of Em7(b9)(b13) proves more useful than Em NB - It doesn’t mean you have to squeeze all those notes into a chord. It’s just telling you where you’re at, what’s going on, and what to look out for. Like life – you have to use your own judgement about how to ‘voice’ it. And often – even while being aware of what else is out there – a simple triad can be the right choice. When I sent along a tune to be considered for a gig by one of our friends here, Joe Roxhythe, he voiced concern about the modifications and alterations in our chord spellings (Alt. chords, #9s, #11s, etc.). The tones being indicated by those spellings, however, were all contained in the melody – they are already being sung and so there is absolutely no need to repeat them, to ‘double’ them. The chord spelling on the lead-sheet tells us what’s going on. And the job of the supporting instruments is to support that melody. Joe understood, and his band renders it in simple triads as some kind of as rag-time bluegrass. In a more jazzoid context, where the song normally lives, using the broader vocabulary allowed to players in that context, the voicing choices will get made differently. But whichever style or idiom, we’ve got interpretation being made from the same package of information contained in the chord spelling. The differences in perspective are about how to make the best sense of the intention. Another big core of usefulness consequent upon seeing chords as being derived from scale tones – the process commonly known as chord-generation – alternate scale tones stacked in thirds, as Coises says – is that it enables you to recognize that a chord sequence which moves from our Emi7 to Ami7b13, followed by Dmi7 and on to G7, for example, it is still all happening in C Major. Whatever stylistic genre you might work with, if ever you’re in a position where you’re expected to be able to invent you own part, your own contribution to the whole, a pretty common experience outside the classical arena, that perspective is going to be pretty damn useful I reckon. Break - Off to work. .

Wow - you never struck me before as the sort of guy who would accept the Encyclopedia Britannica as unquestionable authority on everything. I think we would have reasonable grounds not to consider it "a book on music theory", at least. 5 years or so ago, 'Nature' magazine held a blind peer review of some articles from EB and Wiki - they found an equal number of serious errors (such as general misunderstandings of vital concepts) from each, and a whole series of factual errors, omissions or misleading statements shared amongst both. From the sample of articles used in the review Wikipedia had 162 problems and EB had 123, which they averaged out as 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 mistakes per article for Wiki. I can imagine and sympathise with the challenges of writing and editing a definitive encyclopedia article - but we still have to keep critical faculties switched on. What I stated simply - which still appears to be true - is that we obviously read different books on music theory. For my personal journey to figure an understanding, I have tended to depend on books by guys like Dick Grove, justly famous for his own music school in LA; David Baker, Chair of the Jazz Studies Department at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music; and Dan Haerle, Jazz Studies Division of the College of Music at the University of North Texas. I have also been lucky enough to get a couple of private workshops with Baker. I think they all know their stuff. You are of course quite welcome to question and critically evaluate any of my sources but, honestly, it seems faintly ludicrous to feel I am expected to defend and justify the type of theoretical underpinnings accepted as basic standards amongst musicians and educators everywhere apart from strictly classical academies - even though those ideas seem to come as a big surprise to you and others. One clear significant difference in perspectives appears to be that you and the EB are sticking with triads - whereas us other lot build a chord with four notes. The implications, the consequences, of this difference are quite profound, very illuminating, and highly useful for a musician to understand. But I wouldn't expect to find it in EB. What does mwuha mean ? .

Alright !! Maybe I should book the Encyclopedia Britannica to play piano on my next gig. What is it exactly you're taking issue with, Rob? .

Can't find a way of answering. Doesn't look like anything to do with me. Google Chrome is still running and showing your address while the track plays. I imagined the player was something to do with you. Is that possible ? Professional version 2002 Windows Media Player version 11.0.5721.5268 .