Manny About Town
From Bach to Bird: The Devil’s Note
How Two Geniuses Changed Music

By Manny Meland

	Johann Sebastian Bach

Though separated by geography and time, Johann Sebastian Bach and Charlie Parker, popularly known as “Bird”, embraced their music with the same mind and soul and both fundamentally changed the music of their time.

The Pythagorean scale in music was innovative in 500 B.C. The common Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do, the eight-note octave is still somewhat in use today. The problem is that it lacks the power to move through the keys. There are no overtones. Each key is in major, has a different feeling and gets full treatment. And mathematically, the fifth note is out of sync. When I play my harmonica for example, I blow through the reeds for the Do note, draw through the reeds for the Re note, blow for a Mi, draw for a Fa and draw again for the So, the fifth note. In fact, the early music sung by the Gregorian monks during the dark ages avoided this “flatted fifth” note in their Gregorian Chants. They called it the devil’s note.

We’ve all seen guitarists move a bar called a capo across the neck of their guitar to change keys. In the 1600s, Johann Sebastian Bach broke out of this constraint when he innovated “equal temperament” tuning. Equal temperment is a system of dividing the octave into 12 equal intervals, called half steps. This is necessary because the pure notes of the overtone series do not divide the octave evenly. In the past, instruments were tuned to play some keys well and others badly. With equal temperament, all keys are equally out of tune. This can be heard in the major thirds on a well-tuned piano. This simple complexity of equal temperment tuning freed Bach to compose his all-important “Prelude in C”. It opened a floodgate of creativity with his 12 preludes and 12 fugues in major key and 12 preludes and 12 fugues in minor key. All this and much more were accomplished, especially his monumental composition, “The Well Tempered Clavichord”. The piano and modern orchestras had not yet made their appearance. Furthermore, Bach didn’t need an oscilloscope. He tuned his instrument by ear.

	Charlie “Bird” Parker

So did Charlie Parker three centuries later. Charlie Parker, known as Bird, burst on the scene in the mid-1900s. Musically, Bird could weave his way through different chords using equal temperament tuning on his saxophone. He had a profound mathematical sense. He could combine two or more chords. His new symmetries were all over the place. He created the Be-Bop sound by jumping from sharps to flats. Birdland in New York was named for him. It became a mecca for music aficionados. Although he died at the young age of 34, Bird left us with a great collection of his records. These were wax records played on a phonograph with a needle.