For some actually useful music theory, I can recommend the goldmine that is Ethan Hein's blog: http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/category/music/music-theory/
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.
No, you hear Koyaanisqatsi, etc.
And this is exactly why you should never try to understand a popular genre by crossreferencing its stylings against some other style or genre.
Because other people hear other things - many, many other things - which perhaps you're not aware of.
But this particular combination is like saying, "Listen to Billy Joel and you hear piano." ;) House and techno really are direct lineage from the minimalists in many ways. This is not a blind cross-reference. Any artist learns and borrows from what has come before. Some borrow more heavily than others. (As an aside, check out the 2006 album "Reich Remixed" for some really cool interpretations... )
Listen to Portrait of Tracy (or any great harmonic jazz) and you hear the same open chord structures of Impressionist works like Debussy's Preludes or Ravel's Valse Nobles.
Listen to the impressionists and you go many places...
Ravel and Debussy's piano music is barely one step removed from jazz. Makes sense, because the early jazz greats lived and played around the same time. There's a famous picture of Ravel at a birthday party when he was in his 50s, with George Gershwin standing beside him. The early 1900s was an amazing time in music... classical was mixing with early jazz was mixing with vaudeville was mixing with the first stirrings of delta blues was mixing with gospel was mixing with african folks songs...
(I can do this all night... ;)
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 You might as well complain about mathematical cheat sheets containing arithmetic, geometry, and other outdated concepts that were cooked up by ancient Greeks wrapped in sheets.
Some of my favorites: Steve Reich - Music for 18 Musicians & New York Counterpoint Phillip Glass - North Star Morton Subotnick - A Triumph of Reason Iannis Xenakis - Pleiades, Musique Concrete 1959
...
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...
With a foundation in classical music theory, you can go beyond what anyone is doing in popular music today. I strongly believe that (for example) Beethoven's 5th, from a compositional perspective, has more rhetorical power than any music produced in the last century. I think this is largely due to popular music being very simple structurally. Where is the counterpoint? Where are the modulations? All we get is simple chord progressions repeated ad nauseum. Imagine how much farther we could go if we combined the lyrical and textural variety of popular music with the compositional depth of classical music! I salivate at the thought of an electronic or metal musician[1] delving into this territory...
[1]: Phish is one of the few bands I know of who actually focus on this stuff. Some of their pieces even include bona-fide fugues. I'm not the biggest fan, and it's a simple example, but I love listening to the motifs and variations in "Stash": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OfQCAj2Ppg
In the sound design, the rhythms, and the production, where they never trouble the hearing of anyone who has been trained to believe that musical structures are defined almost entirely by pitch patterns.
Even the idea that music exists to 'express rhetorical ideas' is... actually quite odd, outside of classical training, anyway.
I happen to like fugues very, very much. (The fugue in BWV 542 is a favourite - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6Kul3JzKI0.)
But the idea that music should aim for that always? Uh, nope.
An ideal string (or any oscillator) when disturbed (e.g. plucked) will tend to vibrate at a fundamental frequency of x Hz as well as modes of 2x, 3x, 4x, etc. These higher frequencies at integer multiples of the fundamental frequency are called harmonic partials. This is a physical phenomena unrelated to music and human hearing.
But the basic elements of harmony come from the fact that our auditory system seems to be "tuned" to identify harmonic partials.
If we start with a fundamental frequency x Hz (let's call it C), the first partial is 2x Hz, and it is another C an octave above (multiplying or dividing a pitch by a power of 2 will give you the same pitch in another octave).
The next partial is 3x Hz, and it sounds like a G. This is the interval called a perfect fifth, and is the strongest, most stable sounding interval (other than the octave). The next partial is 4x Hz, which is just another C, two octaves above the C we started with.
The next partial is 5x Hz, which sounds like an E. This is a major third, which is another strong and stable interval which is ubiquitous in most music.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0892815604/ref=oh_aui_detai...
Also, I believe instruments with arbitrary pitch (violin, voice) tend to naturally drift closer to just intonation.
Barbershop quartet music (and other a capella music) is a great place to hear just intonation. The consonant barbershop seventh chord was a relevation to me when I first learned of it. It's really close to the dissonant dominant 7th interval, but serves a very different purpose harmonically. The minor seventh is also a different interval. Thus there are actually 3 seventh intervals, all of which are approximated in ET by a single note. This blog post has a good summary:
1. Studying the history of Western music theory doesn't give you insight into any music, as you claim. It gives you insight into Western music. Check out music from another part of the world with a completely different notion of tuning, different scales, etc, and your music theory background isn't going to help very much. The only thing that is truly universal is the overtone series, because that's based on physics.
2. I think we could come up with plenty of structurally complex music from recent idioms, particularly jazz and jazz-influenced music. I would say that a bigger difference between something like, I dunno, Steely Dan, and Beethoven's Fifth, is length. Popular musicians don't seem to attempt such longer pieces. But for me personally, longer != more powerful. For that matter, more complex != more powerful, but I happen to share your desire for what we're calling "compositional depth", whatever that may be...
(EDIT: I just noticed that you said outside of Western music. Yes, that may be correct. Many systems of music in the world are very different from our own. But I think most people writing music today are writing with Western ears in mind. After all, we've been conditioned to understand this kind of music for hundreds of years!)
As for your second point, I think what I latch on to in classical music more than anything is the use of motif, and Beethoven's 5th of course epitomizes this. Don't get me wrong — I love popular music, and I listen to it more than anything — but most of the "top 100" songs in any popular music ranking feature wandering, improvised music more than any systemic use of motif to make a rhetorical point. And that's not a bad thing! I love Stairway to Heaven. But it just "sounds good" — it doesn't really develop its musical material.
Compare to something like this[1], where every single musical detail is repeated and developed across all the voices. It's so intricate. I've never heard this level of motivic development in popular music, and I've been looking for a few years now.
I am sorry if this is not making any sense, I am having beers.
I would say that the V7 gets it's power from the flatted fifth interval, aka the tritone, aka the most dissonant interval this side of a minor second. And like you say, it can be understood in terms of voice leading, e.g.the 7th (the "leading tone"!) "wants" to resolve up to the tonic.
It's interesting that you mentioned motif because I think that fits well with what I was saying about the length of the pieces. Seems to me that one isn't going to have much room to develop motifs unless writing in an extended form. But for me personally, this doesn't seem like a good requirement for a piece to be satisfying in the way that I think we are talking about. If you are seeking that kind of intricacy from modern music, have you checked out Bela Fleck & the Flecktones? Also, have you explored Zappa at all?
I don't think you need a long piece to develop motif. Look at something like "Vocalise"[2], or, heck, any of Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier.
One of my teachers used to stress the original meaning of the word "sublime". I think that's what's missing in modern music. A feeling of awe that leaves you speechless.
Zappa's been on my to-do list for a while, I'll have to give him a listen soon!
Your book recommendation looks quite interesting too, thank you. I'm not sure if Ethan Hein's blog is a great starting place for a beginner, but it's some of the best "theorizing" around recorded music that I know of.
"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, ...
Many of the most important jazz composers and musicians were classically trained and were intimate with the type of music theory we're talking about here. Thelonius Monk could reel off Chopin and Rachmaninoff etudes from memory. "Take the A Train" and many other tunes we associate with Ellington were written by Billy Strayhorn, who's main interest was classical music, but found that the classical music establishment at the time would not accept a black composer or musician. Jazz was the only genre in which he was allowed to work. (Ellington/Strayhorn and Monk are considered the most important composers in Jazz, and their initial training was in European classical music.)
Jazz is a development of Western classical music, and knows it. In fact, it's a rather miraculous revival of the improvisatory tradition that was central to European art music until it died out with the rise of symphonic music in the 19th century. If you listen to some contemporary jazz pianists, for example, Marcus Roberts, there's no mistaking the strong influence of European classical music.
only of Western classical music?
http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2014/blues-tonality/
Especially of interest.
I found the PDF using Google: https://www.google.com/#q=Ravenspiral+Guide+to+Music+Theory+... (Scripd.com is annoying, like a PDF download scam)