https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/ link takes you to the homeworks/assignments and everything else for a self-study/auto-didact to follow along. Neat!
I dunno. On first glance, for a "21st-Century" textbook, this seems to place a high emphasis on classical music theory, and moves very highly influential modern styles to the back burner -- notably jazz. And there is essentially no discussion of music theory in other cultures (middle eastern, african, east asian, indian), nor current analysis of pop and rock music.
I have a BA in Music Theory, I think maybe you should consider again. First off, Jazz relies on the same fundamentals and extends them, everything from Classical music is somewhat relevant in Jazz. So if it's only Jazz theory exclusive to classical, it'd be an advanced book indeed.
Second, it literally has a chapter on Popular Music and another on Jazz Theory, and "Classical" is not found in its chapter titles. So I don't think your critique is accurate.
Third, history and time matter. "Theory" came first in "classical" contexts, with codified rules pre-dating even Bach. Jazz was a much later invention that built upon these and other traditions. Both of the Jazz theory books I used in my BA in Music Theoryhad many elementary topics already covered in Classical contexts.
Yes, I think people have this fantasy that Jazz has anything new to offer in terms of music theory. That's false, everything used in Jazz was already part of the practice of classical music sometimes centuries ago. For example, improvisation was common in Mozart time and extended chords were common already in the 19th century. The only difference may be the terminology used in Jazz circles, but this is something that can be learned later if you want to specialize in that style.
I know a lot of people with music degrees. This is a widely acknowledged problem. It doesn't have a simple answer, especially as academic music programs are shrinking. You can't teach everything except at a survey level. You have to find faculty who can teach new topics at a college level. And students who are prepared to dive in. Music students tend to already be damn good musicians by the time they start college.
If programming is an analogy, it's said that once you've learned your first language, you can learn any other language in a jiffy. Also, a lot of higher level learning is "learning how to learn." Maybe it's better to have a standardized "first language" that students can learn in depth, and then let them move into other areas at their own discretion.
I don't have a college degree, but for me, classical music lessons were a great preparation for learning jazz, and I've picked up pop, rock, and folk music on my own. In fact, on the instrument that I play, the double bass, gaining proficiency and experience in jazz without that background is a brutal learning curve.
Anecdotally, I know a few people who spent decades working on and/or teaching middle eastern music in conservatories abroad, and they struggle greatly to find music departments in the US who will hire them. A problem I've seen firsthand is that there are a lot of senior professors who teach it hand wavy versions of it filtered through whatever books Euro orientalists wrote mid century and are threatened at the prospect of someone coming in there who has studied and practiced it for years in places where it's more of a living art form cutting into their position of expertise.
Where this ties in to your point is that part of the reason they really don't want experts is that they rarely have someone whose job it is to teach middle eastern music. They might have a guitar teacher with some experience with oud, a flute teacher who can passably play ney (usually with awful intonation), etc. For most schools, these other types of music are "add-ons" that they have their existing faculty teach.
> And there is essentially no discussion of music theory in other cultures (middle eastern, african, east asian, indian)...
To me, that above ^ looks like the biggest gap.
To be fair, the book doesn't claim to demonstrate theory of the "world music" (sic, a phrase as bad as it sounds).
My (brief and shallow) understanding is that most scholars of music in the western world just do not have enough knowledge to talk intelligently about non-western genres. Exceptions exist, of course, but they are quite rare.
[Other reason is that there is a lot of gate-keeping. I've seen that in Hindustani/Carnatic classical studies, FWIW, which is one my areas of interest]
I don't understand why this standard is always applied to westerners. When we go to other countries, are they explaining all the fundamentals of western music in addition to the theories of their own? "Yeah our students in Boston don't know anything about Carnatic rhythm, but over in Bengal they all learn counterpoint and fugue before they learn the traditional ornaments"
If you subtract the "meaningless phrase", the title of the book is just "Music Theory". Do this for every book written about music, art, mathematics and you'll just have a lot of books with identical and quite dull titles.
Suffers from the same problem that all music theory texts seem unable to avoid: they require the reader to simply accept a bunch of random facts to memorize with no context.
Example: memorize the major scale as a series of whole and half steps but we won’t provide you with any context or motivation for why this is so.
Similar: in a major scale all notes are played and none are skipped or repeated. Except if your scale goes D–E–F#–G, in which case you skip F. The only way for this to be correct is apparently we consider F and F# to be the same note for purposes of scales even though this directly contradicts a previous section.
I was expecting a “21st century” music theory reference to have an emphasis on building intuition. Music theorists are apparently allergic to good pedagogy.
There is a part near the beginning where he derives the diatonic scale from first principles. (There is a sequel as well, and a book if you prefer to read it in book form)
We recently had a long discussion about this. I come from the “music theory makes a lot more sense once one understands that 2:1, 3:2, 4:3 sound really whole and good to the human ear, 5:4 has a little more tension, and 6:5 has even more tension” school of thought [1] but for other people it is a distraction from understanding basic stuff like “this is a minor scale”. See here for the long discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49541888
[1] I understand ancient scales were 3-limit instead of 5-limit scales, and that modern equal temperament has thirds which significantly deviate from 5:4 and 6:5, but once polyphony became a thing, 5-limit temperament made a lot more sense because they reduce beating.
Man that top comment is such a combination of "sneering to show off" and completely wrong that I'm shocked I'm not on reddit.
Recommending The Jazz Theory Book to someone starting from scratch, especially someone self studying, is like recommending CLRS or TAOCP to someone who asks "I'm curious about learning the basics of algorithms and data structures, any good books for self study?" And of course that happens all the time too. Chapter 1 is "here's what intervals like major 3rd and perfect fifths are", Chapter 2 is "here's the major scale and all its diatonic modes and ii-V-I progressions", Chapter 3 is "here's how you might use the Phyrigian mode to play over a Sus flat-9 chord" (pg 48).
Recommending Schoenberg and Messiaen as steps to get a sufficient surface of topics covered for "music theory" is performance art in its own regard. Bravo!
Yeah, that guy tried to argue that Grade 5 ABRSM [1] is “very basic”. Like, excuse me no. “Very basic” is knowing the notes in a major key, and knowing the I IV V chord progression, as well as a basic 4/4 rhythm (8th note hi hats, quarter note kick drum, snare on alternating quarter notes).
I IV V chord progressions and major scales are basic enough I can explain them in a 400 word post from first principles (where no music theory exists except the assertion that the human ear finds the pitch ratios of 2/1, 3/2, 4/3, 5/4, and 6/5 pleasing to the ear, that the human ear wants at least three notes in a chord, and that the human ear wants at least three chords in a progression).
Those books get very complicated very quickly, and cover music that only a relatively few people actually listen to. It was pure gatekeeping, and I’m disappointed people pointing that out were voted down. Not a good moment for Hacker News. It would be like me recommending Lisp or Forth for one’s first programming language.
> I come from the “music theory makes a lot more sense once one understands that 2:1, 3:2, 4:3 sound really whole and good to the human ear, 5:4 has a little more tension, and 6:5 has even more tension” school of thought
Ah, well, that makes sense. I come from the "music theory is a quintessentially rigid, British-Schoolroom-coded subject that emphasizes rote memorization over actual understanding" school of thought. The musical equivalent to Americans requiring their children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance before they can even understand what the words mean.
The student seeking to build their understanding asks: why is the order of sharps FCGDAEB? Why is the mode with a sharp 4th note the Lydian mode?
Music theory responds: Because fuck you, that's why.
Some subjects are hard. Music notation is mathematical notation that is optimized for ease of consumption by notation experts. It is not optimized for learning.
Same with many activities. Pedagogy and real-world use are different goals. Result is a confusing and horrible learning curve.
My background is a field most would consider "hard", so I'm no stranger to jargon or dense notation optimized for real-world use. So, I don't buy the excuse that you can't have both good pedagogy and usable notation.
Some people are okay with being told "memorize this list of arbitrary factoids" and there's nothing wrong with that, I'm just not one of those people who can pretend that that's good pedagogy.
Even more, my experience as a person raised by and sometimes married to professional music pedegogs and who plays in a lot of professional situations is that the "theory" itself really isn't that hard when we understand the praxis.
I don't think rote memorization is super useful for me as a player- I've heard a lot of analysis that sounds "accurate" but often it doesn't follow my own thoughts and understandings.
If folks are playing, that raises questions about "why this here" and it's nice to have vocabulary for to understand. But I see a lot of folks (there are several in this thread) who think that is a bit backwards- that somehow folks could start with an abstract rule set and learn much. If that's the view on what is happening then I agree that "teaching theory is impossibly hard".
But if learning to play comes before the theory about why we play what we play the situation is a lot easier.
Almost all the theory I have comes from applying the stuff from "theory" books to what I do.
I learned what a secondary dominant sounds like by learning I should stay in an A chord instead of an Am in the turn around in G major blues songs long before I got the concept of what that C# might do to the local tonicity of the tune from whatever theory book.
And I think that's a reasonable way to learn: start playing whatever, try to pick up something you can read for (I read double bass and clarinet pretty well) take up a lot of piano (weather you read it or not), play a bunch with musicians, and eventually the arbitrary facts about your practice sort themselves out.
I’ve been studying Music theory along side guitar for two months (using Absolutely Understand Guitar and Hal Leonard method) and at least in the self-study space this is not this bleak.
After only two months I have learned that there are seven modes of the major scale that you have to memorize, memorizing their names and order was not hard, if I know the major scale (which I do, and was not hard to memorize because it is only 8 notes) you can derive the other six by playing the same notes but starting at a different root note. If you start on F and play the same notes as the C major scale you have the Lydian mode. C and F are a perfect fourth a part so Lydian is the fourth mode. Where the sharps and flats are I can figure out just by playing it and listening where and how it differs from the major scale.
Sure, I knew what they meant. But if they are sloppy with their terminology on the knucklehead stuff then it doesn’t bode well for the esoteric stuff to follow.
My point was not to showcase my confusion, rather to reinforce the fact that music theory texts are just generally low quality, and music theory as a field seems to be okay with that.
I was hoping to see if by "21st-Century" it meant "music theory that is applicable to the way modern music is generally written and interacted with". With details on things like microtonal music, increased focus on rhythmic theory, an increased appreciation for the role that timbre plays in the sound of music, the theoretical frameworks that underpin long standing musical traditions of other cultures and contrasting what makes each musical theory unique as a way of better understanding both western theories of music as well as the breadth of musical expression....
Nope! Just the same old, well beaten, rotting corpse of a horse in the form of a musical theory that entirely exists to prop up schenkerian analysis. The one that that racist, elitist music programs have been teaching since well before the 21st-Century. (The way you can tell is because it includes figured bass, which is totally irrelevant to any discussion that isn't about the harmonic style of 18th century european musicians.)
God forbid I want to, oh I don't know, make music that's similar to the kind that I actually listen to on a regular basis? Better understand its underpinnings and what makes it work in the ways that it does? No. Figured bass.
How can this be fairly labelled "for the 21st-Century Classroom" when even 20th-century techniques aren't adequately represented? Electronic and computer music techniques are conspicuously absent. Microtonality has a rich history as well which is not even footnoted here.
Am I the only one who thinks that the classic music notation is 3x harder to learn than the basic music theory (without the rules of notation)?
I think that you can learn music theory (to play an instrument or to compose music e.g. in a "piano roll tool" / MIDI editor) much faster if you skip the classic notation. And I think that it is even better to learn the notation AFTER you understand the music theory.
This is a bit off topic, but since you mentioned your guide:
I hope this doesn't come off as hostile, but the guide you linked contains a number of inaccuracies and oversimplifications - it's kind of naive in an endearing way, but also leaves the reader with the impression that it covers all there is to music. I guess what I'm saying is it's fine to restrict yourself in what you include in the guide, or even simplify things, but it should be clear that the topic (i.e. music) is far richer and more complex.
Yeah, I think a good discussion on music theory is starting from first principles, explaining Pythagorean tuning, then explaining 5-limit just intonation, the explaining we compromised on 12-tone equal temperament because it made tuning and changing keys a lot simpler, at the expenses of some notes being slightly out of tune (e.g. the minor and major thirds deviate by about 15 cents from their 5-limit just intonated “ideal” tunings).
Of course you can, but that's not what's implied by the quote.
In addition to microtonality, many instruments (and the human voice) are capable of infinite tuning, and musicians will deviate from the "correct" note (as played by an even-tempered instrument) based on chord structure, voice leading, etc.
It kind of reminds me of the periodic declaration someone makes on HN that textual programming sucks and we all need to switch to something else, usually visual programming in this case.
If someone takes time to deeply understand the advantages of the textual approach and then builds an alternative, I'll listen.
But at this point, anyone who is doing this and their criticism of the original approach is shallow and uninsightful, where it's basically just "it's old and it must therefore suck", is unlikely to produce a good answer.
I think that applies to the music notation case too. "Conventional" music notation isn't just a staff and a couple of types of notes. By the time you handle all the use cases that conventional notation handles, or even just a solid subset of it, your brand new notation is probably a lot less elegant than it started out as in someone's head.
Exactly. Music theory is a programming language for musical composition and performance.
Unlike most languages it's inherently two dimensional because music includes both horizontal (time, rhythm) and vertical pitches (chords/colours, harmony) information.
And - especially important - melody is an element that needs both.
You can't represent the same information with text without losing a lot of important content, which is why toys like Sonic Pi are more limited than they seem.
You can kinda sorta represent the same information on a piano roll, but it's not any easier to read than dots - in some ways harder, because you're not going to see the relationship between a bass line and chords as clearly.
Is it a good programming language? It's quite dense, but not denser than some code idioms. The 2D element is unique, and hard to represent in other ways.
The learning curve is steep, but it's probably as good as it can be given the requirements and constraints.
I know neither is about music notation per se (but about fixing the piano), but it is analogous: Music notation has exactly the same problem as the piano -> it defaults to C, which makes everything else relative to C and overly complicated.
For the record, I don't think this means we should switch to a new system, but it is usefull to recognize that it is suboptimal, if only to be able to accept it and continue (because nobody is going to translate everything to some new notation)
love that video, it made me lol so hard the first time I saw it :D
Classical composer and software engineer here. One of my goals is to help update score notation. I use something called "harmonic coloring" which is like a reduced MIDI notation: You color a note by its functional role (harmonic value) rather than an arbitrary hue in 0-11.
What this view shares with MIDI: Long rectangles representing the applied durations.
How it is different: Occupies a minimal amount vertical space.
The color palette I'm using is intended to support people with colorblindness. The shades/hues of a color encodes the functional harmony. The root key signature (origin) is always the same color; and chords some distance r away on the circle of fifths is the shade/hue at that offset r.
There is a similar concept described in the Tantacruel video towards the end.
You can explore it here on Monic Theory.
(mobile view should be fixed within 48 hours)
Note that in historical Byzantine musical culture, there are no absolute pitches at all. Their notational form is entirely intervals from some arbitrary root note.
Similarly, in Carnatic and Hindustani classical traditions, the note names (Sa, Re, Pa etc) do not denote pitches - Sa is always the root, whatever it is, and the rest have a somewhat well defined intervallic relationship to it.
I personally would not use "harmonic value" to describe this, since it occurs in music that (broadly speaking) lacks harmony. The key point, IMO, is that what matters are sets of intervals (ratios, if you prefer) rather than actual pitches (as frequencies).
Hindustani (and Carnatic) music indeed do not denote pitches for a very sound (pun intended) reason: They let singers choose the root note (Sa), and thereupon the melody is built. Most (all?) of Hindustani music is melody-based, not harmonic based (like Western music). And the melodies are themselves created within the Raga framework. Raga is like a mode (but not exactly that), and is hard to explain within the constraints of Western music theory precisely because that concept does not exist in western music per se. Which is why most Indian classical theorists call a raga a "melodic framework", and leave it at that (or expound on it, as the case may be).
A great reference for Indian classical music is [1] and and more recent one [2]
As a semi-professional trombonist, C clefs are very important to me. Alto and tenor as-written, tenor as a means of transposing Bb treble, mezzo-soprano as a means of transposing F parts… they are not obsolete.
My favorite genre of hacker news comment is when someone lacks sufficient imagination to wonder why something that’s commonly used by many people is still in use
I suppose it makes historical sense, and even ingeniously designed.
But it, and the piano black keys with it, are definitely not optimal. It makes playing in C easy, and playing in anything else hard. I've picked up a new instrument since ~2 months, and 1 month in I could already play all scales by by deliberately staying away from music notation, learning the raw distances/steps that make up a scale and how to play them, rather than the 'delta from C', which is how classical training taught me to think. (Same story for chords etc)
> But it, and the piano black keys with it, are definitely not optimal. It makes playing in C easy, and playing in anything else hard.
I don't think this is true—I was under the impression that, at least on piano, keys other than C major are sometimes chosen specifically to make things easier on the fingers.
Easier on the fingers - maybe (I don't know what you reference), but not easier on the mind: Instead of learning each chord once, you have to learn it 12 times (for each key).
It's all about the integers modulo 12. Classical notation obscures that (while making it easier to figure out which of the integers modulo 12 you're using, minus being able to assign them to integers in an obvious way).
I fun little exercise is to work out what would be different if we found aliens that also used 12 tone equal temperament, and also used a subset of 7 of those 12 notes to make their major scale, and also followed the same convention that we do of naming the notes of the major scale C, D, E, F, G, A, B like we do and naming the other 5 by naming a major scale note and adding modifier to tell how far away the not is from that like our # and b modifiers, and we both have the convention that when naming the notes of a transposed major scale we use each letter exactly once--except they picked a different 7 notes to be their major scale.
Our 12 tone scale with the major scale note names and notes not in the major scale marked with dots looks like this:
C.D.EF.G.A.B
Suppose the aliens have a very different idea of what makes a good sounding major scale, and their system is:
CDE.FGAB....
Suppose we transpose ours up 7 tones. We can represent this graphically by drawing out major pattern for two octaves, and below that drawing our major scale pattern with names replaced by X (X.X.XX.X.X.X) shifted over by 7, then look above to see how to name the notes (remembering we can only use each letter once):
C.D.EF.G.A.BC.D.EF.G.A.B
X.X.XX.X.X.X
Our major scale transposed up 7 is G A B C D E F#.
Let's do the same 7 tone transposition for the aliens. Their major scale pattern is XXX.XXXX..., so we get
CDE.FGAB....CDE.FGAB....
XXX.XXXX...
That's B Cbbbb Dbbbb Ebbb Fbbbb Gbbbb Abbbb.
At first that seems very different from our 7 tone transposition. We only need one sharp and they need 23 flats! But wait...mod 12 we have -23 = 1.
It turns out for all transpositions if you count sharps in your key signature as +1 and flats as -1, the key signature for a transposition by N tones will have 7N sharps or flats mod 12 in both our systems.
In general if you have a T note equal temperament scale with an M note subset major scale, transposing the major scale up N tones gives a key signature with NM mod T sharps/flats.
I'll leave it as an exercise to prove that. Hint: you can think of a transposition as a two step operation: (1) a shift that keeps the same letters and just adds sharps or flats to move the notes, and (2) a renaming that changed the name you use to name the first note of the transposed scale. Think about what each of those operations does to the number of sharps and flats needed.
24, 128, approach infinity -- I know there are microtonal systems, but if you want to understand them, choose the nearest multiple-of-twelve (or really, choose whatever TET contains the closest approximations to the exact notes) TET and look where their intervals land with respect to the symmetries (factors) within that TET, and where those symmetries are broken by a note moving by a perceptual 'slide' (one note 'moves' into the other position) rather than sounding like a new distinct voice.
More like, only if you're playing Schoenberg it's about modulo 12.
Almost all sheet music that you play uses 5 or 7 unequal subdivisions of the octave, and occasionally the rest. Sure, sometimes you'll have one or two of the rest on a regular basis (blues, harmonic/melodic minor), but still most music won't use all twelve.
Isn't modulo-twelve (if we ignore microtonal) the core underlying structure, and then you pick scale (like 2 2 1 2 2 2 1) and a key as a mapping, and then use degree as an 1-based index into the scale?
I don't really know a thing about music, so I could be wrong here - but that mental model at least made some sense to me when I tried to map all the concepts I've heard about into some sort of a mental system.
The point is that to a player the mapping is more important than the core 12-note structure, because highly chromatic (12-note) passages happen but they are the exception.
At least in western music you pick the seven basic notes on the scale, and that gives you the sharps and flats you place at the beginning of each line. That choice, from the point of view of notation, is even more important than the exact scale. And the choice is constrained to 15 sets of sharps and flats because it implicitly tells the player (veeeery roughly) to expect some patterns that probably will occur.
It doesn't always work great, for example if you want to write the Simpsons theme the set of notes in the scale doesn't fit any of those 15 sets. But it uses an unfamiliar scale in any case, so there's not much to gain and as a player you just deal with it.
I feel that quote more likely is pointed at "music appreciation" as a written work, versus understanding the theory. I know a few musicians who are happy to use terminology from theory, "I love to write songs with diminished and sustained chords".
This seems like a great resource to me, a classically trained pianist who is now playing different types of music.
Music theory for the 21st century with notation from several centuries earlier. Hmm.... sorry but tracker's table-like views are much easier. And so are most DAWs gantt-like editors. 100 times easier to comprehend than notation having the same not written in three different ways, and then some.
The English language is messy as hell, and yet, here we are using it because it's a shared set of rules and symbols that pretty much everyone who wants to join in on this conversation already knows.
Same with staff notation: If you want to communicate music to other people, learning the slightly clunky but universally-known written language is generally the way to go.
The choir director at my church, Michael Dodds (UNCSA), covers the early development of musical notation, "From Modes to Keys in Early Modern Music Theory" [0]. Currently on sabbatical at Cambridge. Once in a while during rehearsal he will give an impromptu lecture on music history, always interesting.
Second, it literally has a chapter on Popular Music and another on Jazz Theory, and "Classical" is not found in its chapter titles. So I don't think your critique is accurate.
Third, history and time matter. "Theory" came first in "classical" contexts, with codified rules pre-dating even Bach. Jazz was a much later invention that built upon these and other traditions. Both of the Jazz theory books I used in my BA in Music Theoryhad many elementary topics already covered in Classical contexts.
If programming is an analogy, it's said that once you've learned your first language, you can learn any other language in a jiffy. Also, a lot of higher level learning is "learning how to learn." Maybe it's better to have a standardized "first language" that students can learn in depth, and then let them move into other areas at their own discretion.
I don't have a college degree, but for me, classical music lessons were a great preparation for learning jazz, and I've picked up pop, rock, and folk music on my own. In fact, on the instrument that I play, the double bass, gaining proficiency and experience in jazz without that background is a brutal learning curve.
Where this ties in to your point is that part of the reason they really don't want experts is that they rarely have someone whose job it is to teach middle eastern music. They might have a guitar teacher with some experience with oud, a flute teacher who can passably play ney (usually with awful intonation), etc. For most schools, these other types of music are "add-ons" that they have their existing faculty teach.
To me, that above ^ looks like the biggest gap.
To be fair, the book doesn't claim to demonstrate theory of the "world music" (sic, a phrase as bad as it sounds).
My (brief and shallow) understanding is that most scholars of music in the western world just do not have enough knowledge to talk intelligently about non-western genres. Exceptions exist, of course, but they are quite rare.
[Other reason is that there is a lot of gate-keeping. I've seen that in Hindustani/Carnatic classical studies, FWIW, which is one my areas of interest]
https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/mt21c/frontmatter-5.html
Example: memorize the major scale as a series of whole and half steps but we won’t provide you with any context or motivation for why this is so.
Similar: in a major scale all notes are played and none are skipped or repeated. Except if your scale goes D–E–F#–G, in which case you skip F. The only way for this to be correct is apparently we consider F and F# to be the same note for purposes of scales even though this directly contradicts a previous section.
I was expecting a “21st century” music theory reference to have an emphasis on building intuition. Music theorists are apparently allergic to good pedagogy.
I recommend "What Makes Music Sound Good?" by Prof. Dmitri Tymoczko: https://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/files/pdfs/MUS105hando...
There is a part near the beginning where he derives the diatonic scale from first principles. (There is a sequel as well, and a book if you prefer to read it in book form)
It's the culmination of years spent chasing an explanation of where all this stuff came from.
Highly informed by Tymoczko, who was mentioned in a sibling reply, and a bunch of other thinkers on the topic.
[1] I understand ancient scales were 3-limit instead of 5-limit scales, and that modern equal temperament has thirds which significantly deviate from 5:4 and 6:5, but once polyphony became a thing, 5-limit temperament made a lot more sense because they reduce beating.
Recommending The Jazz Theory Book to someone starting from scratch, especially someone self studying, is like recommending CLRS or TAOCP to someone who asks "I'm curious about learning the basics of algorithms and data structures, any good books for self study?" And of course that happens all the time too. Chapter 1 is "here's what intervals like major 3rd and perfect fifths are", Chapter 2 is "here's the major scale and all its diatonic modes and ii-V-I progressions", Chapter 3 is "here's how you might use the Phyrigian mode to play over a Sus flat-9 chord" (pg 48).
Recommending Schoenberg and Messiaen as steps to get a sufficient surface of topics covered for "music theory" is performance art in its own regard. Bravo!
I IV V chord progressions and major scales are basic enough I can explain them in a 400 word post from first principles (where no music theory exists except the assertion that the human ear finds the pitch ratios of 2/1, 3/2, 4/3, 5/4, and 6/5 pleasing to the ear, that the human ear wants at least three notes in a chord, and that the human ear wants at least three chords in a progression).
Those books get very complicated very quickly, and cover music that only a relatively few people actually listen to. It was pure gatekeeping, and I’m disappointed people pointing that out were voted down. Not a good moment for Hacker News. It would be like me recommending Lisp or Forth for one’s first programming language.
[1] https://www.abrsm.org/sites/default/files/2023-09/music-theo...
Ah, well, that makes sense. I come from the "music theory is a quintessentially rigid, British-Schoolroom-coded subject that emphasizes rote memorization over actual understanding" school of thought. The musical equivalent to Americans requiring their children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance before they can even understand what the words mean.
The student seeking to build their understanding asks: why is the order of sharps FCGDAEB? Why is the mode with a sharp 4th note the Lydian mode?
Music theory responds: Because fuck you, that's why.
Same with many activities. Pedagogy and real-world use are different goals. Result is a confusing and horrible learning curve.
Some people are okay with being told "memorize this list of arbitrary factoids" and there's nothing wrong with that, I'm just not one of those people who can pretend that that's good pedagogy.
I don't think rote memorization is super useful for me as a player- I've heard a lot of analysis that sounds "accurate" but often it doesn't follow my own thoughts and understandings.
If folks are playing, that raises questions about "why this here" and it's nice to have vocabulary for to understand. But I see a lot of folks (there are several in this thread) who think that is a bit backwards- that somehow folks could start with an abstract rule set and learn much. If that's the view on what is happening then I agree that "teaching theory is impossibly hard".
But if learning to play comes before the theory about why we play what we play the situation is a lot easier.
Almost all the theory I have comes from applying the stuff from "theory" books to what I do.
I learned what a secondary dominant sounds like by learning I should stay in an A chord instead of an Am in the turn around in G major blues songs long before I got the concept of what that C# might do to the local tonicity of the tune from whatever theory book.
And I think that's a reasonable way to learn: start playing whatever, try to pick up something you can read for (I read double bass and clarinet pretty well) take up a lot of piano (weather you read it or not), play a bunch with musicians, and eventually the arbitrary facts about your practice sort themselves out.
After only two months I have learned that there are seven modes of the major scale that you have to memorize, memorizing their names and order was not hard, if I know the major scale (which I do, and was not hard to memorize because it is only 8 notes) you can derive the other six by playing the same notes but starting at a different root note. If you start on F and play the same notes as the C major scale you have the Lydian mode. C and F are a perfect fourth a part so Lydian is the fourth mode. Where the sharps and flats are I can figure out just by playing it and listening where and how it differs from the major scale.
D major: D E F♯ G A B C♯
D minor: D E F G A B♭ C
Db major: D♭ E♭ F G♭ A♭ B♭ C
Db minor: D♭ E♭ F♭ G♭ A♭ B♭♭ C♭
My point was not to showcase my confusion, rather to reinforce the fact that music theory texts are just generally low quality, and music theory as a field seems to be okay with that.
Nope! Just the same old, well beaten, rotting corpse of a horse in the form of a musical theory that entirely exists to prop up schenkerian analysis. The one that that racist, elitist music programs have been teaching since well before the 21st-Century. (The way you can tell is because it includes figured bass, which is totally irrelevant to any discussion that isn't about the harmonic style of 18th century european musicians.)
God forbid I want to, oh I don't know, make music that's similar to the kind that I actually listen to on a regular basis? Better understand its underpinnings and what makes it work in the ways that it does? No. Figured bass.
Are you this guy? https://youtu.be/u2NKodxRO4A?si=xdOd7I1f_rnFN85C&t=255
by Robert Hutchinson
88 keys (usually) and unlimited notes.
I think that you can learn music theory (to play an instrument or to compose music e.g. in a "piano roll tool" / MIDI editor) much faster if you skip the classic notation. And I think that it is even better to learn the notation AFTER you understand the music theory.
I even made my own guide to music :D https://www.jampea.com/learn
> Only a limited set of frequencies is used in music. All these frequencies (that exist in music) can be played by a piano.
In addition to microtonality, many instruments (and the human voice) are capable of infinite tuning, and musicians will deviate from the "correct" note (as played by an even-tempered instrument) based on chord structure, voice leading, etc.
> To describe tones that exist in music, we can describe tones that exist on a piano. There are only two rules:
> the first key must play a tone of 27.5 Hz each next key must play a tone 6% higher than the previous key
(This is not to mention that at a 1.06x increase per half step you're going to be sharp by 1 cent / octave which starts to add up).
The parts that are really weird (like the C clef) have mostly been obsoleted, unless you play the viola I guess.
If someone takes time to deeply understand the advantages of the textual approach and then builds an alternative, I'll listen.
But at this point, anyone who is doing this and their criticism of the original approach is shallow and uninsightful, where it's basically just "it's old and it must therefore suck", is unlikely to produce a good answer.
I think that applies to the music notation case too. "Conventional" music notation isn't just a staff and a couple of types of notes. By the time you handle all the use cases that conventional notation handles, or even just a solid subset of it, your brand new notation is probably a lot less elegant than it started out as in someone's head.
Unlike most languages it's inherently two dimensional because music includes both horizontal (time, rhythm) and vertical pitches (chords/colours, harmony) information.
And - especially important - melody is an element that needs both.
You can't represent the same information with text without losing a lot of important content, which is why toys like Sonic Pi are more limited than they seem.
You can kinda sorta represent the same information on a piano roll, but it's not any easier to read than dots - in some ways harder, because you're not going to see the relationship between a bass line and chords as clearly.
Is it a good programming language? It's quite dense, but not denser than some code idioms. The 2D element is unique, and hard to represent in other ways.
The learning curve is steep, but it's probably as good as it can be given the requirements and constraints.
I know neither is about music notation per se (but about fixing the piano), but it is analogous: Music notation has exactly the same problem as the piano -> it defaults to C, which makes everything else relative to C and overly complicated.
For the record, I don't think this means we should switch to a new system, but it is usefull to recognize that it is suboptimal, if only to be able to accept it and continue (because nobody is going to translate everything to some new notation)
Classical composer and software engineer here. One of my goals is to help update score notation. I use something called "harmonic coloring" which is like a reduced MIDI notation: You color a note by its functional role (harmonic value) rather than an arbitrary hue in 0-11.
What this view shares with MIDI: Long rectangles representing the applied durations. How it is different: Occupies a minimal amount vertical space.
The color palette I'm using is intended to support people with colorblindness. The shades/hues of a color encodes the functional harmony. The root key signature (origin) is always the same color; and chords some distance r away on the circle of fifths is the shade/hue at that offset r.
There is a similar concept described in the Tantacruel video towards the end.
You can explore it here on Monic Theory. (mobile view should be fixed within 48 hours)
https://monictheory.com/project-templates
Similarly, in Carnatic and Hindustani classical traditions, the note names (Sa, Re, Pa etc) do not denote pitches - Sa is always the root, whatever it is, and the rest have a somewhat well defined intervallic relationship to it.
I personally would not use "harmonic value" to describe this, since it occurs in music that (broadly speaking) lacks harmony. The key point, IMO, is that what matters are sets of intervals (ratios, if you prefer) rather than actual pitches (as frequencies).
Hindustani (and Carnatic) music indeed do not denote pitches for a very sound (pun intended) reason: They let singers choose the root note (Sa), and thereupon the melody is built. Most (all?) of Hindustani music is melody-based, not harmonic based (like Western music). And the melodies are themselves created within the Raga framework. Raga is like a mode (but not exactly that), and is hard to explain within the constraints of Western music theory precisely because that concept does not exist in western music per se. Which is why most Indian classical theorists call a raga a "melodic framework", and leave it at that (or expound on it, as the case may be).
A great reference for Indian classical music is [1] and and more recent one [2]
[1] The Ragas of North Indian Music, N.A. Jairazbhoy, https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.26725
[2] Rāgs Around the Clock, A Handbook for North Indian Classical Music, with Online Recordings in the Khayāl Style, https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0313#r...
But it, and the piano black keys with it, are definitely not optimal. It makes playing in C easy, and playing in anything else hard. I've picked up a new instrument since ~2 months, and 1 month in I could already play all scales by by deliberately staying away from music notation, learning the raw distances/steps that make up a scale and how to play them, rather than the 'delta from C', which is how classical training taught me to think. (Same story for chords etc)
I don't think this is true—I was under the impression that, at least on piano, keys other than C major are sometimes chosen specifically to make things easier on the fingers.
See http://terpstrakeyboard.com/about/
... or is it geek, i can never remember the difference ...
Our 12 tone scale with the major scale note names and notes not in the major scale marked with dots looks like this:
Suppose the aliens have a very different idea of what makes a good sounding major scale, and their system is: Suppose we transpose ours up 7 tones. We can represent this graphically by drawing out major pattern for two octaves, and below that drawing our major scale pattern with names replaced by X (X.X.XX.X.X.X) shifted over by 7, then look above to see how to name the notes (remembering we can only use each letter once): Our major scale transposed up 7 is G A B C D E F#.Let's do the same 7 tone transposition for the aliens. Their major scale pattern is XXX.XXXX..., so we get
That's B Cbbbb Dbbbb Ebbb Fbbbb Gbbbb Abbbb.At first that seems very different from our 7 tone transposition. We only need one sharp and they need 23 flats! But wait...mod 12 we have -23 = 1.
It turns out for all transpositions if you count sharps in your key signature as +1 and flats as -1, the key signature for a transposition by N tones will have 7N sharps or flats mod 12 in both our systems.
In general if you have a T note equal temperament scale with an M note subset major scale, transposing the major scale up N tones gives a key signature with NM mod T sharps/flats.
I'll leave it as an exercise to prove that. Hint: you can think of a transposition as a two step operation: (1) a shift that keeps the same letters and just adds sharps or flats to move the notes, and (2) a renaming that changed the name you use to name the first note of the transposed scale. Think about what each of those operations does to the number of sharps and flats needed.
Only in 12TET.
Almost all sheet music that you play uses 5 or 7 unequal subdivisions of the octave, and occasionally the rest. Sure, sometimes you'll have one or two of the rest on a regular basis (blues, harmonic/melodic minor), but still most music won't use all twelve.
I don't really know a thing about music, so I could be wrong here - but that mental model at least made some sense to me when I tried to map all the concepts I've heard about into some sort of a mental system.
At least in western music you pick the seven basic notes on the scale, and that gives you the sharps and flats you place at the beginning of each line. That choice, from the point of view of notation, is even more important than the exact scale. And the choice is constrained to 15 sets of sharps and flats because it implicitly tells the player (veeeery roughly) to expect some patterns that probably will occur.
It doesn't always work great, for example if you want to write the Simpsons theme the set of notes in the scale doesn't fit any of those 15 sets. But it uses an unfamiliar scale in any case, so there's not much to gain and as a player you just deal with it.
See around 32:30 in https://youtu.be/Eq3bUFgEcb4?t=1950
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
This seems like a great resource to me, a classically trained pianist who is now playing different types of music.
Example: https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/mt21c/DiatonicChordsInMaj...
Same with staff notation: If you want to communicate music to other people, learning the slightly clunky but universally-known written language is generally the way to go.
[0] https://a.co/d/0bLcrlyE
A certain Amazon Web Services comes to mind…
The instruments, music, and notation all evolved together in a shared tradition that make them well-suited for one another.