definition of music theory

[jopy]

Herr Haydn didn't study Rameau like you did. He studied counterpoint. Therefore I think if we are to make assumptions about how composers plied their wares, we should at least get the theory that THEY learned.

Yes, good point. Nearly everything is a little bit more interesting when you can step into the ears of the person who originally wrote it. Up till a few years ago I never really liked a lot of baroque music, but then I spent a month listening to nothing but baroque as a mental experiment. I listened to all the Baroque I could find, good and bad even some Baroque opera that I still don't get at all. Once I had that sound firmly in my ears, I could really hear why Bach and Vivaldi are so exciting to so many people, how much different they were.

The other thing I still challenge is that ANY theory can be applied to the compositional process. It's like a Kurt Goerdle kind of theorum of music which states: "Any theory of music proposed is a analytical tool and is therefore reductive in nature thus rendering it permanently incapable of producing what it describes."

I can't tell if you think that's a bad outcome. Personally, I love me some Goedel, at least as far as I can understand it.

[jopy]

do you know what its like growing up with an uncle who is recognised as an elvis impersonator )

i'm almost curious enough to know what that's like that i might well try to invent some sort of time travel machine so i can go back to the 1960's and convince one of my uncles to start working on an act.

[Danno]

Can I reply without having read the whole thread? Great.

To me, music theory is studying ways to quantify and talk about how music SOUNDS.

Anyone know what I mean?

D

[The Fex]

my hatred of elvis from another (he was an irish elvis impersonator, do you know what its like growing up with an uncle who is recognised as an elvis impersonator )

I once shared a coach from Portsmouth to Manchester, a distance of 194.73 miles, with the northern contingent of an entire convention of Elvis impersonators. They were, of course, singing and dancing all the way. I feel your pain.

(Sorry, I've nothing to contribute to the actual topic at this point. I don't eat rabbit.)

[tapper mike]

But I was also wondering how many other theories there are, like the theory of how to make rock music based on the accepted principles of verse-chorus-verse, 4/4 time, and some of the stock chord progressions and phrase lengths.

An honest to goodness question about rock theory finds it's way out of the clutter.

The most common rock form is ABCAB
A = Verse
B = Chorus
C = Bridge

Of the three sections any key can be used. or all three sections can have the same key. The heart of rock and roll is not the key it's the beat. Most times they are related keys however many like to write the bridge in a non familiar key to the rest of the song. It creates a sense of tension.

Usually the chorus is written first. The chorus is the most memorable part of the song. It has a different feel then the verse and uses a riff sometimes it also employs a hook.
The riff is tonal based on the key and does not modulate as the chords change.
The riff can act as either call or response to the melody line. Occasionally it is the melody motif and the riff is used to reinforce the melody.

Unless it's blues-rock chord progressions are rarely stock. That pretty much died out when the beatles came around. One would be hard pressed to find an artist that uses an exact progression twice in a lifetime if it's not a blues r&b progression. Progressions can be based on the blues scale or diatonic scale.
Minors can be majored with or without the dominant7
You don't have to start on the tonic to form your progression.

The heart of rock and roll is in the beating. Within the beat there are endless variations. Part of the experience is both in exploring and then refining the variations to build a cohesive structure.

Because Rock is primarily intended for vocals your melodic phrasing is based on the fact that humans breath. Most of us speak in sentences. We have a tendency to breath at the end of a sentence. We, also pause mid sentence to emphasis a key word or if the sentence structure is too long.

Read a sentence or a group of sentences aloud against a straight 8 pattern. It doesn't have to be a lyric or even poetry. Soon you'll find yourself structuring your words to greet the flow of the pattern.
Vary your starting point. You don't have to start on the One beat of bar one.
You may find yourself accentuating words. Now try to create a melodic values as you have the beat framework. You can use diatonic or pentatonic outlines and color outside the lines a little but try to avoid too much of it.

You now have a framework for a melody line and the number of measures to work with. Time to harmonize and get some chords behind the melody. While it's easy to justify the first note of your melody as a guide tone for your first chord. Don't try to over rationalize your harmonic choices or thier rythmic implications. Chord progressions don't have to have equal value. You can stay on a chord for a bar for two bars for three bars or only for a half bar.
You can use harmonic justification. Listen to Paul McCartney If he's playing in E and he reaches an E note he has no issues with playing a C chord
Now lets do some refining.

The first phrase is the same as the second.
The first phrase is the same as the second.
-------------------------What does it mean?

The above is a demonstration of call call response or a hook.
It gives closure to your phrasing.

A common technique based on the above is to take a section of a phrase (usually the end) and wrap it around into a riff that starts a different section. or is used as fill at the end.

[jancivil]

you should check out what I typed. it tastes great.

believe me, ive eaten more rabbits than most other people have had shits.
quite regularly a few dead rabbits curing in our shed as i was growing up.
sadly it has very little nutritional value beyond protein, you can read up on trappers dieing when all they had to do was thrw in a few bits of veg.

well the 'bunny' I was supposedly boiling tastes like chicken.
in a nice red pepper sauce with mole.

I had rabbit in one bizarro place a court sent me when I was bad. (a lot like that school in the movie Billy Jack) dint like it much. boiled. tough. Gamey.


sorry. but hey if we get things like this: "The heart of rock and roll is in the beating. Within the beat there are endless variations." in here...

without the context of, say, is the beat straight up and down eights, or swung?; or what's the actual deal-o, yet 'variations' are endless, hey, we're in Elmer Fudd's forest basically.

[herodotus]

A lot of people forget that music theory as we know it has a much longer lineage than music as we know it. The basic Pythagorean insight concerning superparticular ratios and concordant intervals predates the birth of Christ by many hundreds of years.

Which means that the people who accept a 'normative' view of music theory (i.e. theory tells us what musicians do and why it works) are at least partially mistaken.

It's not just Pythagoras either. The study of musical proportions was understood to be a part of mathematics and as such was one of the 7 liberal arts of Martianus Capella. This notion of theory was regnant for a long time, and still exists as a 'ghost', haunting our conceptions of music.

It was only after Guido D'Arezzo worked out practical methods of understanding music, for the use of choral singers, that the other, more practical types of theory came into being.


Music theory needs a major overhaul. This will never happen in academia, where radical new thoughts are discouraged by a weighty tradition and a hidebound state of mind. Every new idea either gets poured into the same old skins (which are stretched and misshapen beyond recognition) or ignored. Given that theory is a labor of love to so few, and an obligation to the vast majority who encounter it, there is little hope of any change in the near future.

Music theory needs a Wittgenstein.

[Meffy]

Music theory is the difference between a C# and a Db.

[tapper mike]

you should check out what I typed. it tastes great.

without the context of, say, is the beat straight up and down eights, or swung?; or what's the actual deal-o, yet 'variations' are endless, hey, we're in Elmer Fudd's forest basically.

Find a rock song you will find context.
If that brain with too many holes in it can only percieve Chuck Berry as rock
or a few Chuck Berry songs as rock then that is all you will be able to percieve.

For me to post 10 or 20 or 30 rythmic values and variation to demonstrate the variation of patterns would confuse most and those who didn't catch the subtlety of variaion it would be lost on. For me to isolate a few rythmic examples it would diminish the variance within that realm.

Rock is not a field for reductionists. Nor is it a linear evolution. Those who excel at rock take only as much as they need when they need and aren't afraid of moving in a different direction because they read somewhere they couldn't.

[Musicologo]

Theory is a way to explain and understand the practice. And then we can use it to produce more pratice more easily because we understood "how it was done". It is a system we create with rules so we can make general assumptions on "how something usually works and works well". So theory is important in a way to decode something we just listen and don't think about. After we decode it, then we start thinking about it and we can make something similar.

After that we can start up breaking the rules we have created to produce anything we already know that's going to be different.

[bugs]

Music theory needs a major overhaul. This will never happen in academia, where radical new thoughts are discouraged by a weighty tradition and a hidebound state of mind. Every new idea either gets poured into the same old skins (which are stretched and misshapen beyond recognition) or ignored. Given that theory is a labor of love to so few, and an obligation to the vast majority who encounter it, there is little hope of any change in the near future.

Music theory needs a Wittgenstein.

I totally agree. The last two significant theorists were John Cage and Iannis Xenakis about fifty years ago. Much of popular music can be readily explained by 19th century theoretical principles. The prevalence of guitar (an instrument designed to play 16th century modal music) in Rock & Roll has driven that idiom into a clever mix of African rhythm and the aforesaid 15th and 16th Cnetury modalism. Where theory needs to be fleshed out is in the area of electronic and computer music.

[jopy]

A lot of people forget that music theory as we know it has a much longer lineage than music as we know it.

Formal music theories also have a much more diverse history than we often think. Jancivil has noted the history of maqam. There's also a long history of theorizing in China and India.

What would be very interesting is to see how all these theories either converge (e.g., Chinese music did develop systems that are similar to or different from the Western tradition). Sort of like comparative mathematics--there's a lot that mathematicians learned by examining completely different modes of organizing and developing ideas.

Unfortunately, I have nothing really substantive to contribute, which is sort of annoying, isn't it?

p.s. one contemporary theorist I think should get more attention in classical music circles is George Russell. His Lydian Chromatic Concept is quite unlike anything else, but he demonstrates quite convincingly that it's appropriate for everything from Ornette Coleman to J.S. Bach.

[nuffink]

p.s. one contemporary theorist I think should get more attention in classical music circles is George Russell. His Lydian Chromatic Concept is quite unlike anything else, but he demonstrates quite convincingly that it's appropriate for everything from Ornette Coleman to J.S. Bach.

Do tell. I've been looking for a succinct explanation of this for a long time.

[jopy]

p.s. one contemporary theorist I think should get more attention in classical music circles is George Russell. His Lydian Chromatic Concept is quite unlike anything else, but he demonstrates quite convincingly that it's appropriate for everything from Ornette Coleman to J.S. Bach.

Do tell. I've been looking for a succinct explanation of this for a long time.

I'm sorry in advance for a couple of reasons:
1) I don't know how familiar you are with the basics of Russell's ideas.
2) I am not certainly not an expert on his writing. I read his book and tried to make up exercises involving the harmonic modes he introduced in a jazz context. I think it's something I get more intuitively than explicitly yet, and in my experience the people who finally do get it explicitly lose all capacity to explain it to people who don't get it. It's like zen that way. The more you know the less you can explain.

With those caveats in mind, here's my sort of summary with a few statements that I'm pretty sure are wrong, but might get the basic idea across quickly. If anyone knows this system better than me, please correct me, I'm reaching for an understanding of this book all the time and it's still not totally sinking in.

Russell starts from the premise that leading tones are central points for understanding harmony; chords are not necessary. The traditional western harmonic system is just one specific flavor of using leading tones. Triadic harmony is one way to think about chord relationships, but if you know jazz theory, you know that it's sufficient to use the 3rd and 7th degree of the V chord to create a strong voice leading relationship that pushes towards the tonic. He refers to conventional western harmony as "vertical," and proposes that an alternative "horizontal" system can also be developed using the lydian mode as the home basis.

From this premise, he introduces a system that allows for changing or modulating modes within a key, with varying degrees of consonance or dissonance. Chords are replaced with "chordmodes," which is a combination of the concept of a chord with the concept of a mode. The most consonant chordmode is the lydian, then introducing the #5, b3, and b7 as progressively more "outgoing" modifications to the chordmode, followed by wholetone and diminished chordmodes. The lydian is seen as most consonant or "at rest" because the notes don't have the same drive towards the tonic that you get with the major and minor scales.

In essence, this is moving towards the concept that some jazz musicians have of "harmonizing every chord" as a completely unique mode and eliminating the rule of using a ii-V-I resolution. This liberates the composer from the strict rules of functional harmony if the composer so chooses, while still preserving a logical system for explaining how dissonance increases by the alteration of certain notes within the lydian scale.

HOWEVER, this system can still explain functional harmony as a specific flavor of the lydian concept because it has the tension in the fourth and seventh degrees that pushes towards a resolution.

[Rottweiler]

Music theory is the difference between a C# and a Db.

WOT?