How to be better at theory ?

[Roman Empire]

It´s not clear why you want to learn anymore musical theory than what you know already.
I myself´s been around classical and jazz theory because I love to (also) experiment with that kind of music, but I wouldn´t need it for making trance. Not saying there´s anything wrong with trance, it´s just not the kind of music you need a heavy theoretical background to compose in. Of course, if you want to make trance with elements of jazz and classical in it, it´s a different story but that´s not what you´re saying.
And if that´d be what you´re after, for classical stuff, you could download classical midi files and use them..

[stratology]

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Quote from the last one, at MI:

"Has music theory always been the same?
No, music theory, like any other science or art, has developed throughout human history. Some of what we understand and use today as practicing musicians would seem strange to Mozart or Beethoven, and positively alien to musicians from the Renaissance! If we travel further back to the ancient cultures of Greece or Mesopotamia, their music systems seem to have very little in common with what we use in the present-day.
Today, we use a system of music staves made up of 5 lines and 4 spaces that serve as the canvas for musicians to notate both pitch and rhythm. This system was developed over hundreds of years and has evolved through many different stages."



This is very, very basic, not sure why it's so upsetting...

[stratology]

You're as full of shit here as anything I can even imagine.

Haha, throwing another hissy fit.

[jancivil]

So instead of addressing what I wrote there's this crap? What the hell is that supposed to show? It's just generalistic and looks like it was copy-pasted from Music Theory for Dummies.

Either you don't even understand the point, or it's just easier to stick with that line, because you're arguing with your straw man of it. Compounded now by a fallacious appeal to authority. Which indicate you aren't really up to the argument using your own chops (or prove me wrong and address an actual point one time and/or make your point work for us).

The actual point is, the music theory of 'Bach's era' is used all throughout the common practice period. it's essentially the dominant-tonic paradigm. It still is in late romantic practice, as I showed really beyond any doubt.

Did practices within it evolve? Clearly enough. You're the one displaying such wild emotion as to tell us I lack the very basics, which in context seems rather unhinged.

[jancivil]

You're as full of shit here as anything I can even imagine.

Haha, throwing another hissy fit.

No, that's my honest assessment of someone that is so mistaken about who he is talking to and where they are. You had the unmitigated audacity to say I lack the very basics, a remark which doesn't resemble a true statement in the remotest way, obvious to anyone that can grasp my point, and reveals you yourself are rather freaking out.

Instead of some links, can you show us an instance of your analysis of any Beethoven Symphony that's impossible with the tools of analysis we use for JS Bach. If you have that, it would be enlightening to us all. As it stands, there is nothing, it's not my fault I can't see it and I've shown my thinking on it. You have yet to show yours. Posturing doesn't cover it.

[jancivil]

At this point, based in how you comport yourself when challenged, I tend to doubt it's more than a sense that the music changed; but the language in a Beethoven Symphony is not so radical.

Show your work, sorry but an assertion with no support isn't that.

[jancivil]

By contrast, here's a bit from David Lewin's look at Schoenberg's [analysis of his] notorious 9th chord in 4th inversion in Verklarte Nacht:

4th inversion.jpg

He is still talking about half-cadence and deceptive resolution. He is still talking about the dominant-tonic paradigm. He is, in the first place talking about an inversion of a tertial harmony.

So my point remains what I meant to begin with: the tools of analysis are the same.
Now, I chose this particularly as this is where talking in these terms gets a little hinky.

It's evident from our reading that this was upsetting to people, a performance was refused just based in this, that there is this 9th in the bass which shouldn't even be. So certainly practices evolved but theory? Sorry, as far as I can tell it had not.

[Aleatoriac]

I have a basic knowledge of theory (I want to say I took 3 years of piano and basic theory lessons), but I want to go far more deep in theory, I want to have a broad an a real comprehension of music.

Transcription, spending some time on sight-reading unfamiliar pieces...

And... this is my favorite bit, the bit that I always share with my Mum (because of course Mum is the only person to ever hear my music)...

STEAL bits of those unfamiliar pieces, change the key, change meter, change some inversions around... and incorporate them into your owns songs, and claim it's YOURS! MWA HA HA HA HA HA

[Jafo]

After a certain point, music theory is just a game of words. Modern classical and jazz theory shows that every chord can function as any chord (every note in the scale exists in extensions of the I chord or its alterations), and any note can function within any chord as an extended alteration or coloring or substitution or a borrowing from the minor (or major). There are constructions that can justify ANY note or chord, if you find or invent the necessary theory.

Here's the proof. I'll use a tonic of C Major, just to avoid (most) accidentals. No problem with any white key (or all of them!): the full extension of C is c-e-g-b-d-f-a-c -- every single note in the scale is in CMaj13. Want to play any other note? No problem: f# is a Lydian extension to CMaj, a borrowing from C's dominant, G (or from G's dominant, D), a colorful alteration (many jazz guys just add and subtract accidentals at will), and a lot of other things. eb/d# is a borrowing from CMaj's relative minor, cmin (very Common Practice!), a borrowing from F7 (the subdominant* of C), or just another colorful alteration. I like the jazz guys' justification best, because it ignores sense -- "it adds color, you ungroovy Philistine!**" In short, not only is every note in the diatonic key (7) acceptable, but also any note from the full chromatic range (all 12) is also fair game.

Hence, it's all just a game of words, theories theorizing about theories that theorize about theories that theorize... receding ever further from actual sound and experience -- from actual music. Not unlike being in grad school. Hunh... maybe I do understand electronic and post-modern theory.

"Just shut up and play yer guitar."

* "subdominant"... maybe composers spend too much time in the sex dungeon -- or not enough; I'm not sure which!

** how is "Philistine" not a racist term? Is it only racist if it's a living people?

[Jafo]

STEAL bits of those unfamiliar pieces, change the key, change meter, change some inversions around... and incorporate them into your owns songs, and claim it's YOURS! MWA HA HA HA HA HA

+1000. If it's good enough for Mozart, Beethoven and Bach, it's good enough for you. (But stick to composers without lawyers.) Enjoy!

[jancivil]

I should have made more of the distinction, common practice period or common practice paradigm [CPP]...

Now, you can see some novel 'theory' here; I was interested to see what people did with Debussy.
Debussy had a pretty orthodox musical education...
So I googled "harmonic analysis of debussy' and this is a result

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=ha ... gQgQMIJjAA

So, no you can't really imagine the CPP fully making sense of a lot of this. I don't find statistics very interesting but just as examples of theory that diverges significantly from the CPP. Most of that is pretty esoteric.

After a certain point, music theory is just a game of words.

I find the Lewin analysis just fascinating. He says things like "We are quite puzzled by the meaning In this context of the chord..." but then he finds his place in it. So, even as I have looked at this, and it's famous for exactly this, I'm puzzled by many things of it and I think even Schoenberg might have been a little vague on it, after all he states that 9th chord wasn't theory at all, "I was working by ear..." but then after the terrible reaction to it he came up with explanations for why there may well be a chord of the ninth in fourth inversion; rather amusing to see.

[jancivil]

* "subdominant"... maybe composers spend too much time in the sex dungeon -- or not enough; I'm not sure which!

Susan McClary has a book called Feminine Endings, whose chief argument is the Dominant-Tonic emphasis is all about the male drive to orgasm (as something, well, crass).

Ben Watson in The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (where I found out about this writer) likens Frank Zappa's 'classical section' in the middle of the 1980s versions of Easy Meat to that thesis, which is actually quite apt if you know the song.

[jancivil]

** how is "Philistine" not a racist term? Is it only racist if it's a living people?

I know you're pretty much taking the piss, but:
fascinating word. As a race, I'm not sure what that even was, it seems speculative. some say it amounts to Palestinian.

As a cultural thing indicating narrow-mindedness, it originally seems to have meant uneducated.
I don't know where that came from.

Nabokov:
A full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time. I have said “full-grown” person because the child or the adolescent who may look like a small philistine is only a small parrot mimicking the ways of confirmed vulgarians, and it is easier to be a parrot than to be a white heron. “Vulgarian” is more or less synonymous with “philistine”: the stress in a vulgarian is not so much on the conventionalism of a philistine, as on the vulgarity of some of his conventional notions. I may also use the terms “genteel” and “bourgeois”. Genteel implies the lace-curtain refined vulgarity, which is worse than simple coarseness. To burp in company may be rude, but to say “excuse me” after a burp is genteel, and thus worse than vulgar. The term bourgeois I use following Flaubert, not Marx. Bourgeois, in Flaubert's sense, is a state of mind, not a state of pocket. A bourgeois is a smug philistine, a dignified vulgarian . . . generally speaking, philistinism presupposes a certain advanced state of civilization, where, throughout the ages, certain traditions have accumulated in a heap and have started to stink.

[jancivil]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvAQLiwydrA

[jancivil]

theories theorizing about theories that theorize about theories that theorize... receding ever further from actual sound and experience -- from actual music.

I was only ever a practical musician. I learned the things I learned for direct use value.

If I had a gig where I was getting paid to deal with Verklarte Nacht, confer Lewin there, well it's a lot of work just to be talking and here we are past the point of usage, easily. I'd want to not be poor if I had that much on my table for not really much use. The use of all that would be to grok Arnold's thought, but good luck with that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqODySSxYpc