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Comments
No. No.
😂
My experience (which is limited, so I’m not claiming undue weight to this - and note that I said I would find it a straightjacket), is that (some) people with a lot of music theory tend to think about music in that way all the time and find it difficult to break out of it.
Back in the 80s I worked with such a person, who always had to analyse keys/harmonies etc etc before he could contemplate playing a note. He’s also seemingly incapable of enjoying music that doesn’t fit his expectations of harmonic development because that’s always what he’s listening for. An example being Hallogallo (Neu!) which he thought wasn’t doing anything as he was waiting for a harmonic progression and completely missed the textural changes.
I don’t fancy wrapping myself in a framework that can so easily become a cage. But then I’m not trying to make a living from music and don’t have to be versatile in that way.
That only happens to people who choose to be that way. You could choose to be the other way, and find inspiration in what the great minds of the past came up with.
Come on @michael_m if you're going keep polluting this thread with noise, at least come up with funnier material
Sorry, dad jokes is my sweet spot, so you might be expecting too much of me there.
Circle of fifths? Pah! You’d expect heavy metal to use a Pentacle of Fifths
Yes, glad I know it.
I play with other people that don’t know much and it’s no problem.
I don’t really think when I make music. I am more focused on how I say something with rhythm & phrasing.
Except I don’t find that inspiring or particularly interesting, TBH. I’m much more inspired by sounds rather than notes per se. Probably explains why I’d written off the likes of Mozart and Beethoven until I heard their stuff played on the original instruments, where it develops a sonic edge and loses the chocolate box tendencies.
So…
Kinda…
Notes are sounds. Think of written notes on the page as tuned sine wave oscillators. Harmony becomes a recipe for additive synthesis. Orchestration involves wiggling filters to emphasize certain harmonics.
Beethoven heard all that in his head and wrote it down when he was deaf. We can read it and hear in our heads what he heard in his head. Physical manifestation is fun but unnecessary.
Sorry, no. For me the joy is in sonic discovery, happy accidents, and to an extent dropping the pilot and getting myself out of the way of the music flowing though (rather than from) me. I don’t regard notes as some abstract mathematical thing to futz about in my head with, and then get all frustrated because I can’t get that out into finished work, which I’ve noticed is a problem for some people. I let the tools and the sounds guide me, and I work directly with sound.
I don’t need a notation system most of the time, I have recording for that. I don’t need to consider orchestration using synth analogies, I don’t do orchestration. I combine and arrange sounds, yes, but I don’t need the constrictions of what some dead guys did a few hundred years ago to be able to do that. I use my ears and taste.
NB this works for me, I’m not peddling it as a universal method. I have no interest in persuading you to try working like this.
I’m glad the other path works for you, but it doesn’t for me.
Back to the original two part question: no, I don’t know music theory, and no, I don’t care. It’s not something I need. Really.
Just my experience but I agree that theory is worth having. I played for over 20 years with little more than note and chord naming theory. I never learned to read music but I'm fluent with TAB. I had to learn a little music reading to help my children with school band but they surpass me in that respect now.
Over the last 15 years I've been learning theory, mostly application of modes, different scales and chord structure and arrangement. I'm glad it was playing first then theory later. It has been a lot like playing in the dark and now there is a light on. It doesn't change what I do unless I want something different and then I have a huge range of guiding theory instead of floundering around (which is still not always bad, happy accidents and all that). Learning theory brought new life to the music making process and where I felt like I had reached a wall to some extent the theory gave me more to think about.
I worked (but couldn't continue to) with someone who was constrained terribly by theory. He would just take a rigid "no that is wrong stance" even when it sounded great (to me that is). But it doesn't have to be that way. Like I said, I started in the dark and learned the joy of playing to find a pathway I wanted. But now that I have started to learn what I am doing it is a help, not a hinderance, and really just another joyous part of making music. Its like there is a bigger picture, why ignore a single part of it when it is all so beautiful.
Music theory is a tool to fix problem when it sounds weird and you don't like that.
Theory is generative, not constrictive.
The trouble is, it’s just far too difficult to understand
It’s an inelegant, obtuse, gatekeeperishly badly designed set of systems
Almost any of us could come up with a better and more approachable way of having any of those component systems
I sometimes think that the reason I’ve been trying to learn music since I was young, many many decades ago, is because like any normal intelligent person I’d reject such shit approaches to presenting things & relationships between things in music, and instead find myself imagining better ways of doing any of this, hamstered by not knowing what it is we’re actually doing yet – but one can tell that this is certainly not how it should have been done and should be redesigned now so that I can start
Hence most of the time I’ve spent trying to learn music has been me imagining how to fix it, but without knowing anything about the thing I want to fix before I can begin learning it
The core of it is very user-friendly and easy to understand. You’re a smart guy; you must be doing something weird to be struggling with it.
It helps if you have a specific goal and someone to guide you. Theory has three uses: classification, generation, and communication. For most creators, generation is the main utility. For generation, theory gives you some abstracted combinations that have worked well for other people. You remix them into your own thing. It’s that simple. But to understand what those combinations are, you need to learn the language—the names for the abstractions that get combined.
You have a misconception about what music theory is or how one can use it. It is fine if you aren’t interested in it; many great musicians have been great without formal music theory training.
But, one shouldn’t spread misconceptions about what music theory is. It isn’t rules from hundreds of years ago..theory doesn’t prescribe what notes you choose… it’s just a framework or framework’s that describe relations between musical elements. Knowing those relation’s doesn’t mean you have to observe conventions of other periods.
I think perhaps you’re mistaking the analysis of certain styles and traditions with universal rules [of which there aren’t any].
One can be soulful and free even if one knows theory…being rigid doesn’t come with the territory. There are musicians with theory that might be rigid… but that’s their personality not some inherent in knowing theory. There are also musicians that are rigid who don’t know theory.
There are people that confuse the conventions of a particular theory with “the rules” but that is a mistake on their part.
Anything that sounds/feels right to someone is ok.
Very interesting points. Maybe the problem some of us have is not so much about not wanting to know the relationships and logic in music but how it’s taught. Let me go back to the Push/Launchpad grid vs the piano keyboard. The piano layout is pretty much the basis of music theory as we know it. But it’s just one layout out of many possibilities, one that was made centuries ago and hasn’t really been challenged. I don’t think the 🎹 is the best possible way to illustrate the underlying relationships. In that sense I agree with @u0421793 “It’s an inelegant, obtuse, gatekeeperishly badly designed set of systems”.
Why is the perfect fifth 7 semitones apart and the fourth 5 semitones apart?. That’s not a good start…
Keyboard layout is not the source of music theory. Sometimes teachers use it as a visual aid but theory is not derived from European keyboard layout.
I agree that a lot of music theory instruction is poor…but that is an issue of the teaching not the subject.
Mathematics is often poorly taught (in the US it can be pretty atrocious) … that says nothing about mathematics.
From the discussion here, I think many mistake teaching of the theory behind particular musical traditions/styles with music theory.
Before the keyboard became the main orientation to music theory, it was the human voice that was the main way people learned music. In the modern age we have gotten away from the culture of folk singing and shy away from singing because we don’t want to be judged in comparison to professional singing. Also actually producing a note by ear as with strings or woodwinds is great training to understanding notes and their relationships. Something I never had. As a keyboard oriented musician, I have a lazy ear. I can just press a key and assume it is the right note. The keyboard is useful, but perhaps not the ideal way to learn music for everyone.
By most accounts, BETAMAX was a superior format to VHS. Great!…unless you were the only kid in school who's parents bought a BETA machine, while all your mates were swapping Porky's on VHS
Same with the plain ol' QWERTY keyboard. Many so-called superior/easier/more ergonomic formats have tried to replace it. But knowing how to touch-type a QWERTY (or whichever regional equivalent) means being able to use 99.9% (True statistic) of any computers you’re likely to encounter.
No matter how archaic, rigid (dumb, even) the standard, Western piano keyboard might be, knowing how to play it will mean you’re never too far away from a tool that'll let you realise and/or perform your next musical creation. And by extension, knowing standard Western music-theory means being able to communicate in a language that opens the door to, arguably, a richer musical experience, and allows one to communicate with a much wider group of musicians.
None of this means you shouldn’t learn with an isometric or similar format. Do what you enjoy doing, to get the results you want to get. And none of that means that you or anyone else can't be the person(s) to completely shake up how we learn/teach music. But until such time, it seems a little strange to completely undermine a system that countless musicians have leaned-on (even unknowingly) to bring us so much beautiful music. Like it or loathe it, it works
+1
I always love the arguments on why someone doesn’t understand music theory as if it’s some personal choice.
It’s not, the truth is you want to understand it but can’t. The problem is not the theory itself but the way it is communicated and it can be hard to understand if you haven’t been introduced to it in the right way.
I would assume most people using music apps actually know more theory than they think. Once you know intervals and how they sound as well as tension & resolution you are pretty much set. Rhythm theory would also be something I assume most app users would know already.
You don't have to start with European classical theory though. You could learn the maqam system instead, for example.
We should also not forget that the theory that originated from Greek systems via church music has been extended further by musicians who want to push beyond the confines of the Common Practice Period. Then there is microtonal music, which can be notated (to some extent). Musicians aren’t using a fixed system that has been in place since time immemorial.
Also, it isn’t the case that music is always created either by a person who uses their theory knowledge for 100% of the composition or a person with absolutely zero knowledge of theory. There’s a huge swathe of gray area that probably accounts for the majority of musicians.
It’s a tool. Use it as desired.
If the goal is to reach the pinnacle of a mountain then the path chosen is entirely up to the climber.
I’m listening to a book tape called “Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words” and she drops dozens of clues that
Show theory can be avoided and great achievement by discovering music through a series of creative
Sessions of song writing that comes from listening carefully for something truly new and moving.
One of Joni’s most famous techniques was to tune the strings of the guitar (or any stringed instrument) to some new arrangement she hadn’t tried before and seek for new combinations of sounds that could be used as the basis of her new song.
Later in her career she needed to work with highly trained “jazz” players that could notate her rhythmic surprises and push her chordal sequences into modern music chord theory.
Wayne Shorter who had played with Miles Davis told her she broke a lot of rules he was taught like:
“Never follow a suspended chord with another suspended chord”
Joni replied: “I didn’t know they were suspended chords… I call them chords of inquiry because they are a musical question.”
Her piano playing also started with a teacher that only let her play scales for the first year so she quit and just started creating songs at the piano that are very similar to the combinations she finds on the guitar. No theory just a life long search for a musical indentity that is not a copy of anyone that came before.
So while all these jazz musicians were going through the mill at Berkeley School of Music learning from the best theoreticians in the business Joni was climbing to the peak alone on the other side of the mountain and they all met at the top and made wonderful music together:
But it all started in a quiet room with a guitar and a piece of paper and pencil:
Long Story Short: There is no pinnacle… but there is a journey and it’s made of a millions steps.
We put these nomads on the pinnacles. They know they are just a work in progress and keep discovering new ways of making the music tangible for us.
When Jazz Musicians asked Joni what key a song is in she’d often say “I have no idea.” It was a series of
Shapes on her guitar in a specific tuning pattern.
I'll echo the saying "use what works best for you". 🙂 And I will go back on what I said earlier and say that "Western Classical music theory isn't always a 'must'." I've thought about it the past couple of days, remembered how I got started composing music, and want to impart a better perspective.
I forgot that a lot of the first pieces of music I've ever written were without proper knowledge of Western Classical music theory. I started writing music as soon as I knew how to read music when taking piano lessons. I wrote several piano pieces between ages 9-12. Some pieces were rubbish, but most were imaginative. The best piano piece I've ever written was "Lora's Day".
I remember when I first started learning basic Classical Western music theory in highschool. It was cool to learn what intervals and chords and scales and such were called, things I knew instinctively but didn't know how to name.
But then I attended uni and learned more intermediate and advanced music theory. It felt so restrictive to my creative process for the longest time. Especially counterpoint. That was a pain in the bum. I mean I scored high on all my tests, earning "A's", but it stifled my creativity. I've eventually learned to utilise said advanced music theory in my works.
But back to my original point - music theory isn't necessary for writing amazing music. It definitely helps give a musician a leg up, but isn't required. I mean, when I create Ambient, I toss music theory out of the window and focus on textures instead. Sometimes I don't even make tonal Ambient. 😅
There is no pinnacle; there are many pinnacles.
I love Joni. My first introduction to her was via 'Shadows And Light' due to my love of Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays and Jaco Pastorious. But I stuck around due to her beautiful song-writing.
Her experiments with various tunings definitely offered a rich bed from which jazz players could harmonise, and really help elevate her music.
But I don’t get the comparison with Berkely. These jazz musicians could jam with Joni, but her lack of formalised theory would’ve left her at a huge loss had she tried to sit in with a jazz band. So, even though they made sweet music together, Joni's pinnacle would’ve been very different to that of Michael Brecker etc.
Anyway, this is no judgment on not having theory knowledge, as I’m within that camp.