Is There Such a Thing as the 'Blue Note'?

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Is There Such a Thing as the 'Blue Note'?
Popular Music
20
99-116
2001/01
eng
Among the most frequently repeated formulae in the description of the traditions most often called Afro-American music, in particular the styles of jazz, blues, soul
and rock, is the concept of the 'blue note'. It may also seem that this is a most widely
accepted idea. The 'blue note' is usually thought of as a kind of basic element in
those styles, as constituting the 'ethnic' or 'African' aspect of those musics as
opposed to the 'Western' contributions of harmony. My main attempt here is to step into the somewhat muddy waters of musicol-
ogical and sociological/anthropoligical/cultural studies discourses of 'the blue' and
ask what the 'blue idea' really is about. In rethinking the concept of the 'blue note',
I find it necessary to differentiate between two concerns that often seem to be some-
what unconsciously or muddily mixed together:
(1) the idea of the 'blue note' as referring to pitch, thinking of the note as an 'item', commonly thought of as the slight altering of the minor third and the flattened seventh; and
(2) the general concept of 'blue feeling' linked to the idea of playing 'blue notes': in short,
the performance of music with a 'blue feel'.
From my analysis of performances, interviews and recordings, the conclusion
will be that most musicological analyses of these styles are still based on an over-
simplified idea of harmony: the applied Western major/minor theory concept with
the addition of 'blue elements'. My argument is that the harmonic foundation of
blues, rock, and some jazz styles, in emic terms and performance practice, in fact represents both a totally different conception of harmony to that of the Western
functional (tonal) harmony and also represents a different comprehension of dissonance/consonance ln muslc.
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