Walk the Line: Convention in Country Music and Development
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EmberConf 20234 / 17
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World Wide Web ConsortiumMusical ensembleComputer animation
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Software developerMeasurementMusical ensembleVideo gameGroup actionBootingMultiplication signCore dumpOrdinary differential equationClassical physicsDemosceneDew pointComputer-assisted translationComplex (psychology)Row (database)CodecDisk read-and-write headSoftware developerConfiguration spaceConnected spaceCASE <Informatik>Computing platformWater vaporMereologyComputer animation
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Wave packetDemosceneLatent heatComputer configurationStreaming media
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DemosceneOnline helpPositional notationEndliche ModelltheorieRow (database)Water vaporCollaborationismProcess (computing)Computer animation
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Physical systemNumbering schemeComputer-generated imageryConstraint (mathematics)Block (periodic table)Different (Kate Ryan album)BuildingStreaming mediaKey (cryptography)Wave packetMultiplication signCore dumpQuicksortShape (magazine)Data structureReverse engineeringData miningStaff (military)Arithmetic progressionTheory of relativitySpacetimeSound effectUniqueness quantificationDisk read-and-write headNumbering schemeNumbering schemeAlphabet (computer science)Line (geometry)Order (biology)Control flowMusical ensembleAxiom of choiceGroup actionDemosceneTemplate (C++)Power (physics)File formatPositional notationSoftware frameworkChord (peer-to-peer)Row (database)CASE <Informatik>Numeral (linguistics)TelecommunicationDefault (computer science)Nichtkommutative Jordan-AlgebraBridging (networking)Point (geometry)Scaling (geometry)BackupRootResultantDistanceGoodness of fitCountingEngineering drawingComputer animation
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ExpressionConfiguration spaceMusical ensembleConstraint (mathematics)Resultant
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EvoluteGroup actionSmoothingResultantString (computer science)CurvatureShape (magazine)Computer animation
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Suite (music)Musical ensembleComputer animationLecture/Conference
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Motif (narrative)Musical ensembleOperator (mathematics)Point (geometry)Confidence intervalMetropolitan area networkChord (peer-to-peer)TheoryDependent and independent variablesSemiconductor memoryMereologyComputer animation
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Constraint (mathematics)Formal languageTunisMusical ensembleData structureRight anglePositional notationArithmetic progressionComplex (psychology)Perspective (visual)Video gameChord (peer-to-peer)Field (computer science)Programmer (hardware)ExpressionFrame problemVapor barrierDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Expert systemWordCollaborationismComputer animationMeeting/Interview
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Computer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
Hello world, yes. I'm Alyssa Nordmo. I was an actor until country music unexpectedly
00:27
took over my life about seven years ago. More recently, I also became a developer, graduating from a boot camp during COVID, shortly before arriving in Asheville, North Carolina, where I had the extremely good fortune of beginning my career with crunchy
00:42
bananas. I did, of course, also form a honky-tonk band called Nordmo and the Rodeo, in case you're wondering. You can find me on any of these platforms. So, I realize the connection between Ember and the Nashville recording scene in the 1960s might not be immediately obvious,
01:05
but the philosophy of convention over configuration plays an important role in both. And in particular, what I want to share with you today is a parable of distillation. The act of taking something complex and boiling it down to its clearest essence,
01:23
leaving you with something at once accessible and very, very powerful. There's a song I really love called Nashville Cats. John Sebastian of Love and Spoonful wrote it in 1966, and it's an ode to the prowess of the session musicians in the Nashville scene at the
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time. A core group of whom came to be known as the A-Team. That's just a few of them there. You might wonder why a rock band would go to the trouble of writing a song raving about country musicians, even going so far as to say any one of them are twice as good as he is. And yeah,
02:00
good question. So, what was the deal with these Nashville Cats? Where did this reputation come from? Sebastian says they play clean as country water. They're precise, they're intentional, there's no clutter, and they hit the nail on the head every time. He says they play wild as Mountain Dew, and that's moonshine for you Yankees. Make no mistake,
02:25
these guys were shredding, playing innovative, intricate parts with gleeful abandon. Now, before I go any further, a disclaimer, I'm not making the claim that country musicians hold the monopoly on skill, or that they are privy to some secret knowledge that somehow
02:42
jazz or classical musicians are unaware of. That's simply not true. Don't at me. This is not about one genre of musicians having more talent than another. This is about how a particular scene was able to make incredible use of the talents around them without having to
03:01
funnel their options through the filter of a specific training background, resulting in a steady stream of a very powerful brew. So first, let's talk about that clarity. Clean as country water. I'd like to tell you about how a better model of notation arose in this scene that both
03:20
accelerated collaboration and helped streamline the recording process. You might not have heard of the Jordannaires, but I would bet you've heard them. A gospel vocal quartet from Mississippi, Elvis was fond of using them as his backup chorus, and you can hear them oohing and aahing in many of the biggest hits of the 1960s.
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And like a lot of Southern musicians, their music education came from the church, where they learned to sing using shape notes. Notes with unique head shapes indicating where they fell within the space of the current key, rather than relying solely on their place in the staff. So do, re, mi, not C, D, E. And this practice enabled congregations to more easily read
04:06
and sing a melody together without necessarily needing to read music in the traditional sense. Now, the Jordannaires were frequently used in Nashville recording sessions, and the thing about recording in Nashville is this. You do not have a lot of time.
04:21
You gotta cut your songs before the next group comes in to record theirs, and the line is long, and that money better keep flowing. So as an informal shorthand for their own convenience, they took down their arrangements as a movable template, much like shape notes, only this time with numbers. Not do, re, mi, or C, D, E, but one, two, three. Works like this.
04:47
Notes are named by letters in alphabetical order, and you just replace those letters with numbers, counting from the note of whatever key you're in. And as this evolved, the use of Roman numerals became more common, which allows upper or lower case to indicate a major or minor chord,
05:02
and it's not always the case, but two, three, and six are usually minor. So let's say we have a song in the key of C, and our first few chords are C, F, and G, but the singer isn't hitting the low notes, so we need to bump it up to D or E. Well, so now your first few chords are D, G, and A,
05:22
or maybe they're E, A, and B, but the song is still the same. The only thing that's changed is our starting point, and when you write out a chord progression numerically, rather than writing each fixed pitch by its letter name, it never changes. The shape is always the
05:41
same. So now you've got very little time to record a song you've never played before, and when the singer needs to change the key and time is short, do you want to sit around writing new charts for everyone or hope everyone can think very quickly on their feet and transpose the old chart as they read it? How about the guy whose instrument is pitched
06:03
differently and he's already thinking in a different key from everyone else? So when you're using the Nashville number system, none of that is going to slow down your session. So writing charts numerically saves time, yes. It's very efficient, not to mention silently holding up fingers if you need to communicate mid-session. It's a hell of a lot
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clearer than trying to mouth one of seven letters, five of which rhyme. But the real magic of this isn't just that it saves time. The thing is, you don't need to know what two notes are called to be able to hear the distance between them.
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Listen to this walk up from the one to the five in Reba McEntire's Little Rock. So here's what's really fascinating to me. The notion of a key's root as its one
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and the rest of the scale numbered in relation to it has been around for centuries, and any trained musician learns how these intervals work together to achieve different
07:20
effects. But somehow, at least in my experience, this is rarely where music education begins. Certainly in mine, it was sort of treated as the bones you would find if you chose to dissect the frog. Like if you want to get smart about it and dig in, you'll find this structure buried
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underneath. But this approach turns the whole thing inside out and says, no, you start with the bones and then you dress them however you like. And by presenting the bare core of this structure, you now have a room full of musicians, some of whom have a traditional music education, some who grew up singing with shape notes, and some who came up never reading notation of any
08:04
kind and honed their skill entirely by ear, who can all understand the same chart, who can all now work together. It was session musician Charlie McCoy who spread this gospel from the Jordannaires to the rest of the recording scene. He said, quote, I copied it from the Jordannaires,
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but I knew what it was when I first saw it, because I'd been to music school. I recognized what it was, and once I saw what he was doing, I thought, this is better. This is better than what I was learning. And I still wasn't thinking much about it until another
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musician asked me to explain it to him. Now, other musicians particularly began to take notice when they saw how quickly this method enabled Charlie to learn one new instrument after another. And the rest is history. So now we have our musical Rosetta Stone. Let's add some more assumptions and sensible defaults to our framework, some building blocks,
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as Yehuda might say. A song typically will have an intro, and that's often the same as the last line of the chorus, and then a verse and a chorus, another verse and a chorus, an instrumental break, sometimes a bridge, which is a new chord progression,
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before your final verse and chorus, which often ends with a tag or repeat of the last line, sort of lets you know the song is over. You can add, subtract, alter any of these building blocks, however you want, but when everyone is familiar with this framework, it's easy to note any of these choices. The chorus on this one doesn't come until after the second verse, or there's a break
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after every chorus in this one. And add this to common shorthands for different rhythm feels, shuffle, a waltz, a train beat, etc. And the end result of this is something like a magic trick to behold. A group of musicians who've never played together before, who can have a brief huddle,
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jot some notes for themselves, and then make a flawless recording of a song none of them knew five minutes ago, in very few takes without any rehearsal. It's pretty amazing to watch. And again, it's not that this toolbox makes you inherently a better musician, although it
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absolutely did that for me, it's that with this practice, you'll never have to choose the musician happens to have the desired training over the musician who is actually the better player. And that's how you get your steady stream of that powerfully concentrated brew.
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Now I know some of you, maybe a lot of you, might be thinking, okay what's so great about repeating the same format and churning out a bunch of stuff that all sounds the same. And yeah, I will be the first to admit, these powers can definitely be used for evil as well as for good.
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But I want to talk about the freedoms of constraint, how as in ember, convention over configuration in country music enables complex creative expression. Allow me to introduce you to the pedal steel guitar, the result of a long evolution from
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a Hawaiian style of playing a guitar flat on your lap by sliding a smooth steel bar against the strings. They come in all shapes and sizes, but typically there are at least three foot pedals and four levers coming down from the undercarriage that you can manipulate by moving your knees side to side. And these pedals and levers each bend the pitch of whatever string they're attached
11:44
to creating a buttery smooth sliding transition and an evocative often mournful sound.
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It's such a cool suit, but it's a terrifying instrument. I mean this is activating my fight
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or flight response right now. I got one of these in January and it's been taunting me like the furnace in Home Alone ever since. Most musicians I know, myself included, regard the prospect of learning the pedal steel with about as much confidence as they'd have taking the bar exam
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or performing an operation. But while it takes a lot of practice to dedicate all these moving parts to muscle memory and a background in music theory certainly helps, all you really need to understand before approaching this is your intervals. If your one starts on the third fret, how far away is your four? If you want to change the composition of a chord using pedals or levers,
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which notes need to go up or down? JD Maynes, a legendary steel player, one of the greats, said he never learned to read music. But I bet you one thing he can do is count to seven. Now more to the point, remember those frog bones I was talking about,
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how you can dress them however you like. Check this out.
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So cool. So now here's what a numbered chart of that chord progression looks like.
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I mean that's an extremely well-dressed frog if you ask me. And this is the freedom of constraint right here. The simple structure of this old western swing tune clearly didn't stand
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in the way of Barbara Mandrell absolutely burning the house down, making it her own, showing flair, skill, originality, and complexity. And if this were an explicitly configured arrangement, it would still be impressive, but it wouldn't really make a difference who was playing
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it so long as they were competent. But the simpler the frame, the more room for expression and the broader the possibilities. There's an expression in country music that all a great song really needs is three chords and the truth. But there's nothing simple about the truth.
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Songwriters like John Prine, Tom T. Hall, and Lucinda Williams are masters at telling rich, nuanced stories in a straightforward language that anyone can understand. My favorite example of this is Tom T. Hall's song Homecoming, a road-weary musician's sanitized
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account of how life is going on a visit to his father. It's told in as plain a language as can be, but the layers are many and the story is devastating. I believe everyone has their own unique and complex truth and that you don't have to sacrifice any of that complexity to express it with economy. As my grandfather always said,
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never use two words where one will do. He would have made a great programmer. Now in any field, when you're learning a new skill set or joining a new team, it can be frustrating to have exciting ideas before you've gained the language
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to communicate them in a meaningful way. And it's a shame when a collaborative effort misses out on the contributions or perspectives of talented people on their unique truth because of the unnecessary gatekeeping that comes from bad notation. And this bones-first approach,
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starting on the 20th floor, if you will, along with clear established conventions, helps the beginner and the expert alike. The beginner by making something complex or intimidating feel more accessible and the expert by removing constraint and allowing them to shine. And the team as a whole by eliminating what is essentially a simple language barrier.
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There's a science to music and an art to programming. The two are not as different as they might seem and it's no surprise that the same philosophies would apply and that Ember's approach is effective no matter where you happen to find it. Thank you.
17:03
Thank you.
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