I am turning into a theory slut

[xander]

Sean, I never detected any ad hominem. This debate pops up now and again here, and people express their views. Some seem to get defensive when discussing it, but it's a common trait at KVR for a thread like this to go nuclear because the desired end seems to be more about posturing than learning from and trying to understand others' viewpoints.

There is neither the need nor any enjoyment in disassembling someone's post line-by-line, because it's counter-productive to understanding the root context of the subject and detracts from it, rather than adding anything constructive. So this sort of tete-a-tete repartee is a rather fruitless excercise (other than for perhaps ones' strange sense of amusement).

Theory is just that -- theory. It is useful to some, others feel it is a hindrance. I contend that it is an aid in learning and composing -- nothing more and nothing less than a useful set of tools. I want to make that case because I can't stand to see such baseless urban myths perpetuated. Like using a hammer, if you keep smacking your thumb, you should stop using it until you can use it without smacking your thumb. It's really that simple, IMHO.

As far as what Herodotus wrote -- Music theory and the evolution of notation styles is NOT dead -- just ask James Horner or any other composer that composes musical works for orchestras. However, I conceed that some people do think that orchestral pieces and the use of orchestras is passe, but these opinions are usually from digital music composers who are working in a different medium. KVR is a very small place in the scheme of things -- there are thousands of active BBS involving music composers of all types who create and exchange musical scores and experiment with new techniques -- many of who are fantastic commercial successes and are so because a huge number of people like their work, especially in film scoring and accompaniment. That such an activity is irrelevant to most at KVR does not make it an invalid or 'dead art'.

I've done a recent collab here in KVR with a mate who emailed me a jpeg of a score he wrote, I read it and ad libbed over the top. The point was that I understood the musical *feel* he was tryng to achieve from the score. It was neither limiting nor de-imaginative nor inhibiting. It was a quick and handy conveyance of musical thought.

That a lot of music composers now use the covenience of a myriad of virtual instruments and sequencers and store the results of their work in a digital format and do not use any form of notation does not invalidate music theory, because music theory is adjunct to that method, not counter to it.

The *other* debate that pops up inevitably here is much more emotive, with a vast number of proponents on either side -- that which argues what the definition of music is.

Some say that 'sound-scapes' and 'sound design' recordings are not music at all, but a mixture of ambient noises taken from life to invoke various moods and feelings and therefore cannot be scored. They say that this form of sound-making is a different beast alltogether. Some of the sound-design artists even defend this and call their pieces "events" rather than musical compositions.

That's OK, but composers have been scoring ambient sounds for hundreds of years and still do it. To state that they cannot or do not is false. There is Paluskar's notational system, Howard Risatti's 'New Music Vocabulary', Earle Brown's "The notation and performance of new music" and exploratories regularly published in such periodicals as 'The Journal of Musicology' and 'Musician's Quarterly', etc. There are many conventional (and many new) methods of scoring sounds and music -- from the sound of a thunderclap or a fierce wind, to a synth drone in any of it's complex modulations.

Of course, we being who we are here at KVR, we're happy to get on with our DAWS and VSTi and ignore the rest of the musical world, but that doesn't make the rest (and much larger) musical world go away.

The fact that we use orchestral samples and virtual instruments and can save our compositions digitally does not make the fantastic beauty of an orchestra of live human musicians and the scores written for them any less relevant or defunct simply because a heap of home DAW users don't need to/choose not to use notation and choose not to learn or employ any music theory.

Anyway, it is dead wrong to insist that notation and the employment of music theory in creating modern music is defunct or inhibitive. It's not weird voodoo or antiquated garbage at all. It may be for some users here, but not for many, and that is essentially my point.

For me personally, learning ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING about music and it's creation is pure enjoyment and merely adds more to my 'bag of tricks'.

WTF eh?

Cheers,
Alex

[ross g]

.. music is still like lego ..

Plastic, square and Swedish?

shit, my kids were watching the cartoon "Arthur" the other day, they had an episode about a band named "Binky" from Finland that had some repetative mountain chant pop tune, in the end they turn out to be CGI and synthesizer, the music machine looked like an ashtray...i guess there's a comment in there someplace, eh? (and they looked like ABBA too in cartoon form)

[Colonel Flashback]

Nice post, herodotus!

Well I am glad someone noticed it!

I spent an hour of my employers time writing that!!

And I didn't even get a 'screw you!' from anyone.

And then a much hyped fight between nuffink and whyterabbyt came to naught....

What a rip off!!

lol!! poor herodotus

i found it very interesting (and a bit inspiring as well - music theory challenged as i am)

[xander]

Mathematical Theory isn't dead either it seems:

Researchers discover largest prime number

Cool

Cheers,
Alex

[VicDiesel]

Classical music like Debussy and Bach defines music theory, yet it sounds natural and beautiful.

Funny. The first time that the Concertgebouw Orkest played Debussy they got angry letters denouncing this newfangled nonsense that completely broke all the rules of musical theory.

Apparently there existed (I believe it's only known by being cited somewhere else) a theory text book that claimed that "Bach has not written anywhere in the 48 a correctly constructed fugue".

Theory is always after the fact. And great composers know how to break the rules / make their own.

[Guitarjeff]

‘Theory’ type two is a practical form of instruction for musicians and composers. The great old representative of this type is Fux (ca.1660 – 1741).

I just wish I could have a cool last name like this guy!!

Seriously, I find theory useful although I'm certainly not a slave to it.

When I write music, I'm not really thinking in terms of theory, but when I'm stuck looking for a cool part that works with what I already have, calling on my (not stellar) knowledge of theory usually gets me something good!

Jeff

[herodotus]

‘Theory’ type two is a practical form of instruction for musicians and composers. The great old representative of this type is Fux (ca.1660 – 1741).

I just wish I could have a cool last name like this guy!!

Jeff Fux?

[Frippertronix]

...and by the way. Theory isn't rules. It's more like a map of possibilities. Without it you're unlikely ever to get out of a very small cul-de-sac.

Unless you're very good at drawing new maps from scratch, which is admittedly fairly rare.

I don't think Lennon or McCartney ever knew much theory, beyond learning obscure chord forms.

[Guitarjeff]

Jeff Fux?

It'd be a conversation piece with the ladies anyway.


Jeff

[G&L_player]

Personally, I've read this whole thread as an attempt to balance the spirit with materialism (i.e. theory taught in the dominant schools). One comes with a euphoric somethingorother and the other includes all these neat little handles and stuff.

[Sascha Franck]

Nice post, herodotus!

And then a much hyped fight between nuffink and whyterabbyt came to naught....

Yeah well. Business as usual. Almost at least.
They really seem to like taking it into public. I don't know why, because it doesn't interest me at all. More to the opposite, it sometimes simply makes me scroll through the whole thread quickly, so I may miss a post such as yours, which was exactly what a thread such as this would need. Highly informative and very well written.
A shame such things are going under in meaningless personal debates.

[phankiejankie]

I don't think Lennon or McCartney ever knew much theory, beyond learning obscure chord forms.

Here we go again master Lennon... Why do most people have such obsession with the first boy band ever appeared on planet earth... Back then, there were bands much better then the “POPular” boys... Oh "Imagine aaaalll the peoooople". Yeah Lennon damn right, what a statement, such humanitarianism... Only you master Lennon, only you... you opened our ears and hearts!

Sorry, I can’t help it. I hate this band. Beatles occupy the 1st position in my most overestimated bands of all time list.

I mean, you do not seriously put in parallel Lennon with someone like Prokofiev or Stravinsky do you?

[vurt]

oooooooooooooooooooooom!

[Wopelka]

OK, I can no longer resist.

Here’s the deal: people habitually speak about “music theory” (or just plain “theory” as it is usually called) as if it were a single non-problematic body of knowledge. The underlying assumption is always that Music Theory is some sort of well-regulated academic discipline like History or Anthropology or Linguistics. People then go on to argue, based on this assumption, that theory is either good or bad or necessary or helpful or harmful or whatever.

But music theory is not a well-regulated academic discipline like History or Anthropology or Linguistics.

Not at all.

Music Theory is in part the vestige of something that is now almost completely forgotten. The historical documentation of this version of theory goes back much further than the historical documentation of music itself. It started with the mythical figure of Pythagoras (ca. 569 BCE – 475 BCE) and his putative discovery of one of the coolest facts ever: that if two simultaneously sounding pitches have vibrations that conform to some basic very basic numeric ratios (i.e. 1:2, 2:3, 3:4) it sounds really nice. This discovery lives on to this day in the fact that we call the intervals of an octave (1:2), a fifth (2:3), and a fourth (3:4) “perfect” consonances as opposed to major or minor consonances.

This is one of those discoveries that just seem really portentous. And indeed, Pythagoras became the figurehead for an Orphic mystery cult. This discovery gave birth to the vague notion of The Harmony of the Spheres that was to obsess cosmologists for centuries. This is the ‘music’ that was one of the ‘seven liberal arts’ of the Middle Ages. And it provided a cage that the church attempted to keep musical practice in for centuries.

So that is ‘theory’ type 1.

‘Theory’ type two is a practical form of instruction for musicians and composers. The great old representative of this type is Fux (ca.1660 – 1741). It contains a sprinkling of type 1 theory, but not much. This type of theory is where the ‘rules’ of ’proper’ composition come from. These rules were in reality a sort of codification of composition as practiced by Palestrina (who was Fux’s teacher). But the attempt was still made to derive these rules from the insight of Pythagoras, albeit in a very strange and idiosyncratic way.

For instance, there is a rule against parallel fifths (because they are ’perfect’ intervals) but not against parallel thirds.

Then there is theory type 3, which is a sort of hybrid of the first two. Rameau ( 1683 - 1764) was the greatest proponent of it. This is the beginning of the theory that most of us are familiar with. In Rameau’s “Theory of harmony” there is some discussion of acoustical phenomena as well as a whole bunch of taste-derived pronouncements concerning what should and should not be done when composing. Our contemporary concept of a triad was first codified in this book.

Now at no point do any of the above authors attempt to justify their rules based on the practice of musicians. They may derive from that practice, but the attempt was still made to give these rules a grander justification than “That’s how Pachelbel did it, so just shutup and do it”.

Finally we have the crazy German named Heinrich Schenker( 1868 - 1935)). With him we finally arrive at the notion of theory as a conscious codification of the practice of ‘the best musicians’. His method of analysis is too complicated to get into, but suffice it to say that it is rather far removed indeed from the monochords of Pythagoras.

So you may ask: ‘what is the point of all this blather’?

Well in the first place it’s to correct the idea that theory is somehow scientific. It is no more a science than alchemy. It was once a primitive science, and it has certain elements that could be worked into a science, but that is all.

In the second place, it is to correct the idea that ‘theory’ is a description of how music works. This is a gross oversimplification. At the present time there is no systematic understanding of how music works that is anywhere near worthy of being called a science. Historical musicology is a venerable discipline that has accomplished much in the past 100 years, but that is different subject. Music as a whole (assuming that that makes sense) is as much a mystery today as it was when Pythagoras was a boy.

And that brings us to the final reason for all of this blather: If we are ever to understand the mystery that is music, we must first rid ourselves of the notion that we already understand it.

There is nothing wrong with giving chords names, but there is a great deal wrong with the notion that those names are anything more than our own inventions. And there is nothing more counterproductive than an argument about whether a collection of tones in a piece by Bartok is really an augmented ninth chord, a major/minor chord, or a seventh chord with an added fourth. Because while this argument goes on in the halls of academe, a whole new world of rhythmic practice is being ignored, a whole new world of noise-music is being explored and created and neglected, and ancient musical cultures every bit as interesting as our own are relegated to that bastard offshoot of anthropology called ethnomusicology.

So learn 'theory' if you want. And don’t worry about it if you don’t. If you want to understand music certainly learning theory can help, but then again, you might just end up wasting your time learning enharmonic equivalents that used to mean things about 200 years ago, but which now are just there because no one has the guts to point out just how f**king dated some of this stuff really is.

Learn how to read music by all means. That isn't theory, it's literacy. Follow scores while you listen to stuff if you want to, play with things like Chord space, and have fun.

And rid yourself of the notion that you know what music really is.

Because at this stage of the game, all we have are guesses.

This post deserves a bump.

herodotus, once again, you're the man.

Saved for further reading and use. Hope you don't mind if i cite it in the next thousand theory threads that will pop up on KvR?

[Sascha Franck]

I'm not as confident with classical theory, but as a probably interesting add-on for the jazz/rock/pop realm:
Quite some of what is commonly teached as "theory" these days has been "invented" (or established in printed form or whatever) when people were allready actually using it.
In the pre bebop days there's allready been some players (usually piano dudes, such as, say, Fats Waller, if memory treats me right) who used exactly what is now to be found in theory books, just that their approach was sort of upside down.
It was a lot about things such as tension they wanted to create.
As an example, when you want to resolve a plain Dom7 chord to a tonic (e.g. G7 to C) there's not all that much tension being resolved. There's the F that would resolve into the E and the B that'd resolve into the C. The D to E movement probably doesn't add much of a tension/release effect.
Now, apparently two further things went hand in hand. One thing being the appearance of more "unclear" or "instable" final chords in jazz-style music. Even a Cmaj7 was pretty much unheard as a final chord so far, but those nasty jazzers even took it further, such as in using Cmaj9, Cmaj9/13 and even Cmaj9/#11 and the likes. Heck, they may even end on some Cminmaj7.
Once these were sort of established, the preceeding dominant chords (obviously) sounded rather boring. So more tension had to be injected. That's when things such as b9s (well they were established before), b13s, b5s and even #9s popped up.
All of a sudden, the aformentioned chord progression would offer a whole load more notes that could move up or down chromatically to create a tension/release effect. Ab (b9) to G (5), even Ab to A (6), Eb (b13) to D (9) or E (3+), Db (b5) to D or E, and finally even A# (#9) to B (j7) - the last one almost being a contradiction as *the* main tension/release relation (third of dominant to root of tonic) would become washed out for the sake of further tensions to be established.

And of course, at the same time, blues got mixed into jazz a lot - allready offering some more tension notes (commonly known as blue notes). All of a sudden those #11s on, say, tonic chords became plausible.

Now, while quite a few musicians might have been quite literate allready, while they might have studied Wagners weird chords and the likes, most of them were doing this intuitively though.

These days it's pretty much vice versa. In common theory books the explanations preceed the practical aspects. You will read stuff like "you can use alterations for properly resolving dominant chords". And while there might be some notions of proper voice leading (which is what tension/release was/is all about), you usually won't find them in theory books but only if you proceed to the jazz arranging books. So the "history" is kinda neglected.
As a result quite some players will just think "oh, G7 to C, I'll throw in whatever tensions on the G7", without ever thinking about what they're exactly there for. The intuitional "let me see what tensions *I* can add" aspect of things being completely gone.
Gets even worse with guitar players, who would just look up the voicings in their "1200 barré chords", books that completely ignore any aspect of voice leading.

Similar things go for the jazz "bible", the "Lydian Chromatic Concept" of George Russel. While being a truly innovative concept in written form, players were using that stuff before allready. Sure, Miles Davis might've been partially inspired by it when coming up with modal jazz, but I'm sure he didn't take it literally, and I'm again sure that he might've come up with it anyways.

What I want to say is that very often the theoretical books and concepts appear when things are established allready.
Having said that, they will be (more or less) perfect tools to analyze something, they might also help you to get a basic understanding of some theory and they may even help you to quickly come up with, say, a 4-part horn arrangement for some pop tune, which would be expected to sound like "this or that".

But most likely they won't help you with bringing up something new (now, we won't discuss whether this is possible at all anymore...).
At least in jazz (and losely related music) it has been about "breaking the laws" a lot. As said in the beginning, maj/9/13 and whatever chords weren't established as "final" chords. They were even "forbidden" as you had to have something "stable" to end your progression (or tune).
The fact that everybody and his mum is now using them isn't related to them being mentioned as "final-able" chords in theory books, but solely related to the people that just used and established them, looking for something going beyond what has been there before.

I could imagine it's been pretty much similar in classical theory. Revolutionary ideas and their realisation coming first, then someone might try to fit them into some theory building.
As said, unfortunately in a lot of educational environments things are the other way around. That's why you can see a lot of clones coming from the music universities.
"Learn Parker and the principles behind his playing, then proceed". Highly questionable, if you ask me.

As an amusing sidenote: Especially when it comes to Parker, there's a shitload of lines that escape from any theoretical explainability. Major thirds used over minor chords, major 7ths on a dominant chord, etc etc. That sort of stuff, all over the place.