Talk:Avoid tone

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hi: is there a citation of who uses this term? I've taught theory and evaluated quite a number of texts and journal articles and haven't come across the term. Thanks. --Myke Cuthbert 23:00, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm not familiar with it either, but that isn't my main objection. My main objection is that it sounds like Pidgin English or baby talk: Avoid is a verb, not an adjective. Tone to be avoided would be a much less objectionable phrase. I have a third objection as well: Tone to be avoided and the original phrase are markedly more proscriptive than conventional pedagogical theory is. I should like to see this stub deleted altogether, and if I discover no further comments here, I’ll likely nominate it for deletion myself in a about a week or so. TheScotch 05:56, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

If the term exists, then we have to call it by what it's been called in scholarship, rather than what we'd like it to be called. But, we both seem to have our doubts about the existence of the term in scholarship. Examples of other terms with similar names do exist, escape tone, immediately comes to mind. --Myke Cuthbert 21:17, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Actually, I think I haven't been doing enough to Wikipedia:Assume good faith on the part of the contributor yet. I've removed the prominent links to this term from high traffic pages, but I'm not sure I'd support a deletion yet. --Myke Cuthbert 21:36, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Searching around more, it seems to come up in jazz discussion boards and in at least one professor's handout, so I'd think to keep it. I changed "music theory" to "jazz theory," since that seems to be the only context it's used. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Mscuthbert (talk • contribs) 21:40, 14 April 2007 (UTC).

Jazz pedagogy is in general a mess, but let's put that consideration aside for the moment. I traverse both worlds, and as a player I'm primarily a jazzer. If this is part of jazz theory, it's a minority usage and a neologism, and I don't think the circumstance that somebody somewhere uses a term is enough to justify it, especially not in a case in which the term is blatantly contrary to the logic of English syntax. TheScotch 05:36, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Re: "Examples of other terms with similar names do exist, escape tone, immediately comes to mind. ":

An escape tone is a (non-harmonic) tone that escapes, whereas an "avoid tone" is not alleged to be a tone that avoids--and even if it were thus alleged, we'd still have a problem, considering that to avoid is a transitive verb: it requires an object. I'll concede that escaping tone might be (or have been) a better term than escape tone--and one parallel in form to passing tone--but I will not concede that escape tone is comparable to avoid tone. TheScotch 08:02, 21 April 2007 (UTC)