Hypergamy aka The Servant Takes The Money…

The concept of hypergamy originates in India: the word was introduced in a nineteenth-century English translation of Indian law. It referred to marriages where the partners did not come from the same caste, and hence (since the caste system is linear) one had a higher caste than the other, and the other had a lower caste than the one. The concept made sense because the caste system was codified and widely understood in Indian society.

That the translators had to invent a word suggests that there wasn’t already one in English, and so the behaviour had not been identified as a thing-in-itself. Possibly because there wasn’t a defined social hierarchy in English society at the time. This doesn’t mean that some groups of people didn’t think they were better than other groups of people, it means the law or some other institution didn’t codify and enforce those judgements.

Applying the idea of hypergamy without referring to an established social hierarchy is a tricky bit of concept-stretching. There’s a temptation to define it in terms of the economist’s generalised “value”, which might include anything, and which, crucially, depends on each person’s evaluation of whatever it is that carries the “value” - money, status, kindness, influence, social skills and so on. Two people may agree on the facts, on the things to be valued, but assign different values to each of the things. For example, social skills that are valuable to one person, are useless to another.

This makes arguments using the concept of hypergamy tricky. One partner in a relationship may think of it as having an equal flow of value, and hence assortive, while the other sees a consistent net transfer of value from them, and hence sees their partner as hypergamous. At this point, the concept ceases to be useful, because it has dissolves into unresolvable disputes over evaluations, rather than facts. Transfers of “generalised value” are not matters of public fact: the what of the transfer is, but the value each person places on it is not.

So to define hypergamy, we need a bunch of resources that can be publicly observed and measured (in some equally public) way. Typically this would include wealth, income, social standing, political influence, and similar. Secretaries marrying bosses and nurses marrying doctors used to be the romantic staple. This can’t include everything, for a reason we will see shortly.

A question is whether the consistent net transfer of hypergamic resources from A to B, creates an obligation on B to balance it by doing things outside the hypergamy-criteria, that A finds valuable on a personal level. For instance, a man with money, reputation and social standing may have a partner who provides a sunny attitude, support, loyalty and a splendid cooked breakfast. That’s what’s been missing from his life, and that’s the balancing personal value she provides.

Answers can be argued in all directions. We might say that the institution of marriage puts men under an obligation to provide a net flow of resources without thought of “reward”: ask not what your wife can do for you, but what you can do for your wife. We might say she was being a free-loading ingrate if she didn’t provide a balancing personal return. We might say that relationships are not supposed to be zero-sum transfers of resources and favours, but opportunities for each partner to show their love by selfless sacrifice to the needs of the other. And other such sophistries to support our chosen side of the argument. This is a dead end.

The attitude of the partners is important. If she chooses to be a sourpuss to demonstrate that she damn well feels no hypergamy-induced obligations, that’s her decision. She might have chosen to be graceful instead. If A is domineering because “it’s his money”, that’s also his choice: he might have chosen to be gracefully generous instead.

As I understand Dr Orion Taraband’s discussion of hypergamy, his claim is that a) hypergamy is a feature of female nature (and indeed “female nature” may shape the list of hypergamic resources), b) the net transfer of hypergamic resources from him to her effectively makes her a servant (because in all societies, the servant takes the money), and c) women don’t like being in that position, so they turn into sourpusses. Unless they decide to be graceful, and since Dr Taraban practices in the San Francisco Bay Area, he doesn’t see much of that.

There is no causal link between being a (hypergamic) “servant” and being a sourpuss. It’s an understandable consequence, but it’s not inevitable. It shows us that the key question to ask about a possible partner is: will this person turn into a sourpuss if she thinks she’s being paid? To see that question is to see that the real questions is simply: will this person turn into a sourpuss given the way I think I’m going to be behaving in this relationship?, because my behaviour is a factor as well. Some of you can do relationships, and some of us can’t.

The moral of this tale is that men and women need to know what a good partner looks like, and whether they are one themselves. Men need to understand that she’s a good partner because she had (by today’s standards) an exceptional father and mother, and if he doesn’t match up to Dad, she’s going to get upset and leave, or stay and turn into a sourpuss. Women need to understand that he’s a good partner because he had (by today’s standards) an exceptional father and mother, and if she doesn’t match up to Mom, she’s going to feel very out-of-place around him, and will get upset and leave, or stay and turn into a sourpuss.

I can’t stress this last point enough. Men who want “good women” must be “good men” themselves, and women who want “good men” must be “good women” themselves. How likely is this in a society in which forty per cent of sixteen year-olds are not living with both their biological parents?

A large proportion of the population simply has no idea what a “good partner” looks like, or how a “good partnership” works. They never see it.

A lot of people make lousy choices of partner: always have, always will. If they didn’t have hypergamic criteria to help them make those lousy choices, they would invent others. If they didn’t make lousy choices, around half the population would wind up single and childless. That’s what is starting to happen now, but not because people are making better choices or preferring to go without. It’s because they can’t find a hypergamically-acceptable partner who makes them think a bad choice might be a good idea.

Electric Piano + Boss Katana - With Added Sound

(Now updated with sound file)

Plug one end of a guitar (or other male-male) cable into the Katana input. Connect the other end to the Headphone socket of your electric piano (a Roland FP-10 in my case). You may need a 6.35mm to 3.25mm adapter. Turn on the Katana. Select the Clean channel, turn the Pre-Amp Gain to zero, and also turn off any boosters / drives. These don’t work so well. Modulations, reverb, echo and delay all work really well. Adjust volume and power level to taste.

(Blogger doesn’t seem to want to embed audio files on their own, there’s some complicated business with links to upload sites instead. So I put it in a movie file. This was played through the FP10’s internal speakers and recorded on my iPhone.)

You’re welcome.

The Lockdown Policy Test

I propose the Lockdown Policy Test. A policy supported or promoted by anyone who also supported lockdowns, masks, social distancing, the Rule of Six, or other Covid measures, is most likely to be as economically damaging, and socially disastrous as any of the Covid measures. After all, if they were dumb enough, or weak-minded enough, to fall for the obvious stupidity of Covid policies, they will probably fall for other dumb policies as well.

Since the House of Commons, the Civil Service and Local Government is still almost entirely populated with the people who voted for and imposed the Coronavirus Act, and the media is still populated by journalists who went along to get along, and the Universities are still full of academics who stayed silent rather than risk losing their grants…

…we can dismiss just about any policy or issue that any of them are pushing, from the so-called “climate emergency” to sending illegals immigrants to Rwanda, and from Diversity and Inclusion to Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, electric cars, zero-carbon, and yadda yadda yadda.

Judge the quality of a policy by the quality of the people, regimes, and societies that adopt it.

Because now and for the next ten years, we will have a test to judge the quality of the people: did they go along with the Lockdown measures?

London From Shooters Hill

 The Met Office changed its mind about Tuesday being sunny and decided Monday was going to be, so at the last moment Sis and I set out for Falconwood and points towards Greenwich. We found ourselves at the top of Shooters Hill - a high point on the old A2 - and saw this view over London. I may go back with a telephoto lens, but until then, cropping will have to do. Open up the original and zoom in on it. There aren’t many places where the whole length of the town, from Canary Wharf to Westminster appears in one panorama.

Guitarists and Triadic Chords

Not only can we not play full-fledged triadic extended chords on the guitar, but we can’t always play the notes of a special-effects chord in triadic order. (We can always do that on a piano.) So guitarists jumble the notes around the fretboard until they find a combination they can play and call that the “D♭13”. If they can’t manage that, they drop one of the notes and try again. This is why guitar chord books will show two different chords in different positions under the same name with nary a word of explanation.

These variations are called “voicings” of the chord. Because that sounds like they meant it.

What does it mean to say you’re playing B♭minor 7♯9 on the guitar, if there are three ways of doing it and each of them has a different set of notes in a different sequence (from the sixth to the first string) and each voicing may be a third or more higher than the next?

It means two things: first that the triadic naming convention rapidly becomes unwieldy above sevenths; second, that you’re hip to the tricks of the trade you have the musical taste a) not to make a fuss about the ambiguities, and b) to know which of the “voicing” of an extended chord fits which situations.

It’s even worse than that. Many guitar chords are “voiced” across all six strings. So we can strum an accompaniment easily.

The strummer’s F-major chord in the first position is F-C-F-A-C-F. An F-major triad is F-A-C - in any key. The six-string chord has the 6-4 inversion (C-F-A), the fifth (F-A-C), and the sixth inversion (A-C-F). Two are major fifths (C-F-A, F-A-C) and a minor fifth (A-C-F). All in one chord. It’s triadic sludge. So are all the other cowboy chords (so-called because they can be strummed across all six strings in the first position).

Classical guitarists don’t strum, so this mess does not happen in classical music.

So does this mean (non-classical) guitarists are doing something wrong, or does it mean that conventional triadic harmony is not the best way of understanding what kind of harmonic contributions the guitar can make?

I would say the latter.

There’s a story about Joni Mitchell working with Tom Scott. She’s playing piano and Scott - a fearsome jazz session musician - is in the recording booth. Joni plays one of those “Joni Mitchell” chords, and Scott hits the mic and asks “Is that an A-flat 4th diminished 6th” (or some other such). Joni looks at him, then at her fingers on the keys, and then back again.

“Tom. Ignorance is bliss.”

I’d suggest that guitarist-harmony / chords is more bliss than book. The better songwriters find their “odd chords” by experiment as much as theory. The theorists then rave about so-and-so’s use of a minor ninth sus-2 (or whatever) as if so-and-so thought about it, when in fact, it’s a chord that results when playing something fairly ordinary and moving one finger forward a fret and another backward a fret. Experimenting. And do-able on stage.

Every guitarist has to learn the cowboy chords in all the shapes. And the sevenths and major sevenths, and the sus-2’s and sus-4’s. After that, it depends on what genre they are aiming for. As for learning lots of arpeggios? Only be-boppers do that, and be-bop dominates (non-classical) music teaching, because it has rules. (Of course, classical guitarists learn arpeggios, but that’s because a) Bach, and b) treating a sequence of notes across the strings as an arpeggio - and therefore a “chord shape” - is a way of learning the piece.)

Extended Chords

Next up are the chords made up of four notes. These are seventh chords, because four notes each a third apart are a seventh apart from top to bottom. (Weird interval arithmetic again.) In D-major these are:

D-F♯-A-C♯ I₇ 

E-G-B-D ii₇ 

F♯-A-C♯-E iiI₇ 

G-B-D-F♯ IV₇ 

A-C♯-E-G V₇ 

B-D-F♯-A vi₇ 

C♯-E-G-B vii₇

Look at the cyclic permutations of (say) ii₇ (E-G-B-D). These are: G-B-D-E; B-D-E-G; and D-E-G-B. These are a sixth wide, and have two notes next to each other, the D-E. The first is major, the second diminished (two semitones), and the third can be described as a sus2 (D-E-G) with an add 7 (B).

For a long time classical musicians stopped at seventh chords, with an occasional foray into a ninth as a stunt. Jazz musicians, however, started with sevenths and worked upwards, notionally to five note chords (ninths), six note chords (elevenths) and seven note chords (thirteenths). A jazz pianist or guitarist thinks nothing of playing D♭13, which is

Furthermore we can shift the fifths, sevenths, ninths and so on, up a sharp or down a flat, to get truly wonderful monstrosities such as D♭13: D♭(1)-F(3)-A♭(5)-C (7)-E&flat(9)-G♭(11)-B♭(13).

We can’t play the full-fledged Triadic D♭13 on the guitar, or with a string quartet, and it would need some skilful orchestration to be heard if played by an orchestra. Even if we could, we would only do so very rarely. It’s a mess. As are full-fledged elevenths.

Composers and songwriters know that chords extending above sevenths are a special effect. (Hindemith says as much in an aside in his book on Harmony.) They may want, say, the effect of the root and the eleventh (fourth an octave up), with the third to indicate that the chord is “really” a minor, and a flat (aka dominant) seventh, because that flavours the chord, but the fifth and the ninth don’t do anything musically useful, and are just clutter. So they write the root, third, seventh and eleventh, and everyone calls it an “eleventh chord”.

Suppose we want the special effect of a sharp nine against the eleventh? Write the root, sharp nine and eleventh. How about the third? Sharp nines are flat thirds an octave up, and that sounds messy, so let’s leave out the third. Dominant sevenths are a special effect of their own that will distract from the one we want, so let’s leave out the seventh. Let’s put in the fifth so that the chord doesn’t sound too thin. So that’s root, fifth, sharp nine and eleventh. Which is also called an eleventh chord, strictly an “eleven sharp nine” chord.

Nobody plays or writes full-fledged triadic extended chords. They play or write random carefully-chosen groupings of different notes spreading over two octaves. (Playing the same note an octave apart doesn’t “extend” the chord.) And no group of instrumentalists does this more than guitarists - and any other ensemble with less than five players.

Chords and Triadic Harmony

A tune is made up of a sequence of intervals.

Chords provide a background against which the melody is set.

Western chords start with Triadic harmony and get more complicated from there.

We start with… Triads. A Triad is a three-note chord. The simplest are fifths: the base note, the one a third in the scale above it, and the one a third above that. The triadic fifths of C-major are 

C-E-G      I
D-F-A      ii
E-G-B      iii
F-A-C      IV
G-B-D     V
A-C-E     vi
B-D-F     vii^o

Lower case indicates minor chords, upper case indicates major chords, the 'o' indicates a diminished chord. Minor chords have three semitones at the bottom (D-E-F is Tone-Semitone), and two Tones at the top (F-G-A is Tone-Tone). Major chords are the other way round. Diminished chords have two sets of three semitones (B-D-F is Semitone-Tone-Tone-Semitone). Augmented chords have two sets of four semitones (C-E-G♯ is Tone-Tone-Tone-Tone).

What happens if we play (say) E-G-C (in that order on the piano)? Now the interval at the bottom is minor, not major.

Flipping the notes of those triads around, we get the so-called Neapolitan Sixth chords

E-G-C I ₆ (minor)
F-A-D II ₆ (major)
G-B-E III ₆ (major)
A-C-F IV ₆ (minor / sort of diminished-ish)
B-D-G V ₆ (minor)
C-E-A VI ₆ (major)
D-F-B vii₆ (minor)

Flip once more, we get the 6-4 triads

G-C-E I ₄⁶ (major)
A-D-F II ₄⁶ (minor)
B-E-G III ₄⁶ (minor)
C-F-A IV ₄⁶ (major)
D-G-B V ₄⁶ (major)
E-A-C VI ₄⁶ (minor)
F-B-D vii ₄⁶ (minor / sort of diminished-ish)

The 6-4 triads get their major or minor flavour from the top of the triad, rather than the bottom, as with the fifth and Neapolitan sixth triads.

All these chords have the property that adding another note a third above the top one just produces the bass note an octave higher. A-D-F goes to A-D-F-A. This is because in the weird arithmetic of notes, a sixth plus a third is an eighth. So these inversions are a Triadic dead-end - though we can add whatever note we want to any of them, and later on, we will.

The idea of the root of a triad was invented to explain why it is that C-E-G, E-G-C and G-C-E are all I chords in C even though they have different bass (bottom) notes. The root of a chord is the note that would be in the bass, if it was re-arranged as a series of ascending triads, filling in any missing notes and allowing for modifications.

Simple enough, surely?

Bassists play the root note, so the rest of us don’t have to.

Classical harmony theory loves these inverted triads, jazzers barely know they exist.