Style & Convention
Where the derivations stop and the agreements start. The last of the courses, and the only one that cannot prove anything.
The other three courses were about what music cannot help being: the harmonic series, twelve into seven, the lowest common multiple. This one is about everything that was decided instead. That sounds like the soft option and it is not, because a convention can be stated exactly, can have a real mechanism behind it, and can be measured for precisely what it costs. What it cannot do is be true.
The argument
Lesson 1 makes the case for a rule as strongly as it can be made, so that everything after it is arguing against the best version rather than a straw one. The rest works outwards: single rules, then rules in combination, then whole forms, then traditions that reject them.
- 01A rule, exactly statedParallel fifths, implemented rather than described. What the rule forbids, why it exists, and why it is still not a law.Establishes: A convention can be stated precisely enough to run, can have a real perceptual basis, and can still be a choice.
- 02CadencesThe most reliable conventions in the tradition, written as formulas and then counted.Establishes: Closure is signalled by a small set of stereotyped formulas, and the strength ordering is conventional rather than acoustic.
- 03Four voices, many rulesEvery resolution of a dominant seventh, enumerated, with each rule applied in turn to see how many survive.Establishes: The rules together are far more constraining than any one of them, and they leave a handful of options rather than a style.
- 04Phrases and formsThe four-bar phrase, the sentence, the twelve-bar blues: conventions with a grammar, treated as one.Establishes: Form is a grammar of expectations about length and return, and its units are conventional rather than perceptual.
- 05Where traditions disagreeThe same rule applied to repertoires built on rejecting it, which is the sharpest test of whether it was ever a law.Establishes: Rules that contradict each other across traditions cannot be facts about hearing, whatever their local justification.
- 06Breaking them on purposeWhy a shared convention is a prerequisite for effect rather than an obstacle to it, and what a violation buys.Establishes: A convention is what makes expectation possible, and expectation is what makes satisfying or denying it possible.
How this course avoids asserting
Every other Battuto course computes its claims in front of you. This one has no derivation available, so it does the next most honest thing: it implements the rules. A convention written precisely enough to run is a convention you can interrogate, and the figures here enumerate exhaustively rather than sampling. When a lesson says a rule removes a fifth of the available options, that is eleven thousand transitions checked in your browser.
What it deliberately does not do is count frequencies in a corpus. Knowing that a rule is followed ninety per cent of the time is a fact about a repertoire and about whoever assembled it, and it says nothing at all about whether the rule had to be that way. Where a genuine corpus result is worth having, it is quoted with a name and a date and marked as quoted.
And where a rule turns out to have a real perceptual mechanism, as the first one does, the lesson makes that case at full strength before pointing out that a mechanism is not the same as a law.