Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

Hey, thanks for the nice hug, everyone! It's been a fun night. :)

I updated the mirror that ewoodrich referenced; what was up there before was a slightly older version. The new one has a few more pages in it and a few typos fixed here and there.

I've also swapped out the page on my site with a redirect to the mirror, since my web hosting service has rebooted the server twice now. The mirror is on my faculty web space at work, so we'll let them worry about it now! :)

No worries, though. Glad you all are finding the materials useful.

A previous appearance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4807091.

(Normally we'd point the post at the URL that's working, but that pdf is already downloading so slowly that I fear we would just topple the next server over as well.)

You're wrong about categories of analogy, but I don't blame you - analogies are a pretty slippery slopes. In particular, you're most likely conflating these because of the implementation detail - you write HTML, so writing music is an analogy. Not really - writing HTML is closer to performing music.

You can teach almost everyone to perform "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" on piano or "Smoke on the Water" on guitar within 15 minutes, both of which are de facto "Hello world!" equivalents to many aspiring musicians.

EDIT: Removed attempt at drawing a HTML/music analogy which could be closer to truth. It is really fruitless endeavour, makes no sense.

Well I think there are a number of things going on here... If the equivalent set of documents were created for programming you might have all sorts of concepts ranging from methods, classes, pointers, monads, program structure, design, markup, protocols, API, ... and a whole bunch of other stuff. A newbie to programming would be completely overwhelmed and unable to put any of it into context.

I know for me, the stage at which I was doing the very simple HTML examples you listed was when I was 13. Back when you're that young, just playing around with that stuff was SO FUN for some reason. As a 29 year old guy if I were just starting out I'd be much more inclined to try to skip that step and make stuff more real-world.

The equivalent in music theory would be simply playing around with the white keys on the piano (C major). Making interesting melodies (but ultimately kinda boring melodies like mary had a little lamb). To your young ears, this would be very interesting and fun. You'd play around with this for weeks and weeks and make small observations. For example, you might notice B->C has a sense of resolution to end the melody, or internalizing what C->G feels like by just playing it a lot and singing it. You might notice that E->F feels smaller and has more of a "pull" to it than A->B (in the context of C major). It's this stage that's so crucial for later understanding music theory.

Adults want to skip the simple exploration and just dive right into Beethoven. We think we can use our strong analytical sense to just book-learn music theory. What I've learned is that it's much more fruitful to make observations first and then learn what music theory calls those observations.

When you're writing HTML at 13 years old, you don't really know the high level concept of a "mark-up language" and how it might be manifested, you just know that there are parts in angle brackets that don't show up on the page but control the content. Later in high school when you learn the concept of a mark-up language you make that connection to HTML with extreme ease because all those memories of changing background="green" to background="black" flood back to you.

One of the best way to learn music theory (much of which is harmony) is to play jazz, or jazz-inspired styles of music – you'll get the most exposure to the most diverse array of concepts in the least amount of time (not saying it will be a short amount of time – just compared to, say, being a classical musician). The emphasis on improvisation requires players to have comprehensive understanding of the underlying harmonic concepts – you can play jazz completely by ear, but this is not the norm by any means.

As a couple of commenters have said, your HTML analogy just doesn't seem to fit here, music theory is descriptive, not prescriptive. The best way to learn it is through playing music, a lot, and then using concepts from music theory to go back and gain more insight into why certain things sound the way they do, why certain progressions work well, why an F natural sounds ethereal and sublime on top of a B∆9 chord while an E natural sounds awful, and so on.

Again, I believe the optimal way to learn music concepts is to play (not study) music.

If jazz doesn't interest you, I would ask you what your musical goals are, and what genres do interest you, and just encourage you to play, and then play some more. Ideally, play with musicians who are better than you - you'll learn more, faster, just like anything else. It takes thousands of hours to get good at this stuff.

Analyzing and writing music aren't the only things you can do with music theory. For me the main application at first was playing music by ear. For example, you could learn what a dominant is and how it sounds, then sit down at the piano and figure out the chords to some song that's mostly tonic and dominant, and so on. And once you have that down, you can compose some stuff meaningfully.

Consider learning jazz. The whole approach of many basic kinds of jazz is to take some chords and turn them into music.

I'm not sure how parent became the top comment, but "music theory" is absolutely appropriate here. This terminology is commonly accepted by musicians, educators, and practitioners. OP's link could say "western music theory", but that seems unnecessary given the audience.

Secondly, why would you call this junk? This is actually very useful for people learning to play, and for those who want to understand the basics of harmony and rhythm.

What you are talking about is typically called "music perception theory", "music cognition", or "music psychology".

> A theory is something that explains an observed phenomenon.

That's true, but if you take the "observed phenomenon" to be "Western, common-practice tonal music (and notation)," then this certainly helps to explain it. It's certainly what gets taught in undergraduate music theory classes (much of it in "fundamentals" courses). Graduate work in music theory involves doing exactly what you say: explaining observed phenomena, in both "classical" music as well as about any other musics you might imagine. That's not to say that all music is Western, common-practice tonal music, but a great deal of music comes out of that lineage; an understanding of these basics are often necessary (or at the very least, useful) before branching out.

You see this sort of thing in all disciplines. I might find an "Introduction to computer science for normal people" that explains big-O notation, or teaches some basic Python, or what have you. Someone might well say "This isn't 'computer science,' but instead 'jargon and programming.'" This person might be right, of course, but for "non-computer scientists and normal people," the distinction is not so clear.

This is music theory, or at the very least, the bulk of the document is about the theory of harmony. The first few pages may give the impression of solely exposing jargon, but as you progress through the pages, the author moves on to the theory of harmony, or what has been referred to as such for the last century and a half (at least). I'm not saying the expression is semantically perfectly sound, but it's been in use for long enough to be considered correct. It's true that a better expression may have been "Harmonic Aspects of the Practice of Composition".

Schoenberg's classic 1910 Theory of Harmony is a shining example of this. It's pretty much a practical guide for composition, and follows a structure strikingly similar to that of this document.

"music theory" is the widely used and accepted term for "music jargon and notation systems" and their related concepts.

It is not a "scientific theory", as, say, Thomas Kuhn might have used the term.

"Music theory" uses the word "theory" as the colloquial antonym of "practice".

As in the adage, "In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they aren't".

Music practice means strumming an axe, blowing a horn, banging a drum or tickling ivories, and so on, whereas music theory is ... any study related to how to do these things, away from the instruments.

> If you want real understanding of music in a useful way for real people, I recommend Bob Snyder's book "Music and Memory: An Introduction" which was actually written to teach creative artistic people about how music actually works rather than how aristocratic European music notation works.

Thank you! I've long been suspicious of so-called music theory for exactly the reasons you outline. I always wanted to learn more about music and why it "works" as you say, so I assumed what I wanted to learn was music theory, but then when I tried to learn it it didn't seem to explain any of the things I was looking for. I'll have to check out that book.

> A theory is something that explains an observed phenomenon.

That's equivocation. Nearly everything in this document is widely considered to be part of music theory.

I wanted to thank you for one of the best comments on HN I've ever read. Having studied music "theory" for years your comment was actually the first words that described what I thought about this topic, and that book recommendation is fantastic. I honestly haven't been this informed on this site in...ever. I'm serious.

Thank you.

James Tenney's thesis "META Meta / Hodos" is another great attempt at constructing a real music theory. https://www.scribd.com/doc/167561563/James-Tenney-Meta-Hodos

>Our first sensory impression as we float in our mother's womb is the rhythmic sound of her heart.

http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/htmlRT/1%20intro.html

Umm..what?

>This isn't "music theory" (although almost everyone thinks it is).

Isn't that how language works though? If everyone calls this music theory aside from a small minority of people, then it is music theory. "Music Theory" as a term is a study on it's own, it's not "the theory of music" and you can't really use the terms interchangeably like that.

Thank you for this comment, seriously. I hear a lot of producers talk about the importance of music theory, but I've never actually seen anything useful. All it is is notation. Notation by itself is meaningless and does not make anybody a better musician.

I would certainly consider species counterpoint and harmonic analysis to be "theory", although the first sections are clearly notation and not theory.

this perhaps? http://arxiv.org/html/1202.4212v1

My PhD is in musicology, so I've spent a few hundred hours in music theory courses (the differences between music theory, music history, musicology, and ethnomusicology are shrinking, but that's a whole other topic). I can confirm that this is the kind of stuff that we teach in 1st or 2nd year music theory classes. But yeah, this isn't what graduate students study. This is the kind of thing that can help you learn the language of music scholars.

If you want to see a small sample of what music theorists find interesting nowadays, just look a the latest issues of some of the major journals to get an idea. For example:

Journal of Music Theory: https://www.dukeupress.edu/Journal-of-Music-Theory/ Music Theory Spectrum: http://mts.oxfordjournals.org/content/current Perspectives of New Music: http://www.perspectivesofnewmusic.org/ 19th-Century Music: http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublication?journalCode=19th... Journal of the American Musicological Society: http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublication?journalCode=jame...

I appreciate your attempt at balance, but I still fundamentally disagree. Math is universal. The arithmetic and other math basics we learn in grade school is both (A) not very culturally-biased and (B) often not taught well.

There is so much cultural baggage and assumption in the notation-focused "music theory" that is not present in mathematics. When we talk about numbers of things in math, there's no doubt we're describing something objective about reality external to culture. There indeed exists two apples or four apples. The concept of "four notes" is rarely objectively valid because almost everything in music is subjective.

"Music theory" basics are much more analogous to the elementary-school versions of linguistic grammar. And most elementary teachers' understanding of grammar is actually full of claims that are wrong, even though there's something to the gist of it. When we go to "English" class, we expect to learn about English and don't think our lessons apply to all languages. We should similarly not teach one particular language of music and call the lessons "music" without qualification. We should further recognize that grade-school definitions of nouns and verbs do not all hold up under scrutiny.

When "music theory" of the sort here is taught well, it is about as valid and useful as grade-school pedantic, prescriptivist, grammar — the sort that treats minority dialects as "bad grammar". Insisting on music theory being this notation-jargon from classical Europe is like saying that African-American dialects have poor grammar, when actually there are careful and consistent implicit rules in those dialects that sometimes carry useful meaning that standard American English doesn't even have a way to achieve.

I'm curious, what do people who get PhDs in music theory study for all those years?

I'll second this even though I only checked out the site once a bit back. I'm still quite the newb at this stuff but it got a great response on the EDM production subreddit.

This successfully gives you links that fail. I was hopeful that Google caches the PDFs, so that the links might not fail (with a bit of finagling) but apparently the cached PDFs are modified to be unreadable. :(

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tobyrus...

You might want to just learn tablature for the time being, unless you're thinking of doing classical guitar.

Not to say don't read them of course; you can read what you like, just that tab is what you'll be using I would have thought.

Listen to techno, house and tribal, and you hear Koyaanisqatsi, 18 Musicians, and the work of Glass, Reich, and Riley.

Listen to Glass, Reich, and Riley - and you hear the deconstruction of symphonic structure.

Listen to Beethoven's symphonies and you hear the struggle of form from Mozart's classical era construction to what would become Beethoven's pure romanticism.

Listen to the interplay of an Alberti Bass and melody in Mozart's Piano Sonatas, and you hear the beauty in the evolution of counterpoint as written by Bach, Scarlatti, and their band of powdered wigs.

Listen to Bach and Scarlatti, and you hear the echoes of Gregorian Chant and the Diabolus in Musica (and why Black Sabbath sounds like Black Sabbath.)

Those who forget the past are doomed to be Miley Cyrus.

I see what you did there, TOBy Rush!

Seriously, I make techno and am intensely interested in music theory. You might as well complain about mathematical cheat sheets containing arithmetic, geometry, and other outdated concepts that were cooked up by ancient Greeks wrapped in sheets.

I completely disagree.

For one thing, a lot of what one learns studying Common Practice music theory most definitely is applicable to modern styles. Things like dominant function, for example, aren't going anywhere.

That said, I agree with the point that is implied by your post, namely, that "music theory" as the term is usually used is actually a description of a specific period of music (Common Practice) and it is a mistake to view modern popular music as some kind of degenerate case of it. I suggest that people who are interested in learning a theory that applies to more recent music take a look at "What to Listen For in Rock" by theorist Ken Stephenson. http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300092394

I also don't think the link you sent is going to make things much clearer for a beginner. I think that Desi Serna's guitar theory lessons in podcast form actually do a great job of explaining the basics, even if the guitar isn't one's primary instrument. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/guitar-music-theory-less...

The blog you linked to is full of conventional music theoretical discussion such as:

"The blues is based around a very different set of harmonic expectations than the ones underlying classical music. In the blues, major and minor tonality are freely intermingled. Dominant seventh chords can function as tonics. Tritones need not resolve."

Although the blues uses devices not commonly found in classical music, the language being used to discuss it is conventional, main stream music theory: "major", "minor", "tonality", "tritone", "dominant", ... No surprises!

Someone looking for basic music theory will not get into this at all.

Secondly, parallel major and minor does occur in classical music. So do dominant sevenths functioning as tonics: at least secondary tonics.

Moreover the people who came up with the blues tradition (and jazz) were not completely isolated from hearing classical music.

Lastly, there is orchestral music that doesn't consist of "powdered wig" scales conforming to cycle of fifths progressions. Let's see what comes to mind: Moussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain", or Ravel's Boléro, ...

Wait, what? You're claiming that basic intervals and chord are useless for understanding music that wasn't written by people in powdered wigs? I'm very confused. You need that to understand playing Brown Eyed Girl on an acoustic guitar. In fact, Hein's blog covers much of the same material.