Hacker News Reader

Comment by xor99 | Hacker News Reader

I think these basic arguments are valuable and musicians should be focussed on whether a better understanding of music theory actually produces music with desirable qualities such as surprisal (e.g. that moment when Dj Screw slowed the record or groups of monks decided to chant together etc).

IMO the answer is a big nope. One reason is that music theory is always explicated in retrospect and contributes little to the invention of new music or enjoyment. It's useful (not devaluing it wholesale) if you want to do x in the style of y (e.g. I want this to sound like Miles Davis!). H/w an accurate picture of musical performance and general cultural activity surrounding would never reduce it all to just that.

View on HN

Trad theory will enhance existing talent but do nothing for people who have no instinct for music, no matter how much learning they do.

It's very directly and obviously useful for certain kinds of music, especially Hollywood pastiche and some genres of game soundtracks.

It's also very handy in some areas of pop. Pop's dirty secret is that a lot of it is written/arranged by professionals with some kind of classical background. The lead band/artist are typically front people for an entire team which includes a producer, various engineers, and possibly session players and arrangers. These people don't get a lot of attention, and only industry insiders have heard of them. But they have a huge impact on pop of all kinds.

Vocal harmonies, string parts, and sometimes brass parts have to be written and arranged, and that's a challenge for anyone without dot-writing skills.

But there's also a kind of fluency and ease that comes with solid training, and that spills over into vocal and instrumental contributions of all kinds.

Trad theory on its own doesn't guarantee interesting or successful music. There are plenty of composition graduates who have no feel for the art of music at all.

It also doesn't help with transformative developments and new techniques.

But it's far from useless. People with solid theory skills and some creative flair are in a sweet spot that's hard to beat.

I find it best to think of music theory as a language musicians can use to describe what they just did, not what they are about to do.

That's likely to be true even if/when we improve "music theory" to cover much more than 18th century European harmonic forms.

Pretty much. It helps with giving language and notation to particular sounds. It condenses sounds to something you can write down and communicate, without having to think of each note individually.

It’s like design patterns for music. Not necessarily prescriptive (it’s your music, do whatever you want), but helpful for reducing music into something more concrete.

It has helped me a lot in learning (classical) music. It’s also kind of like watching a sport where you understand the rules vs. one you don’t - knowing the “rules” helps you engage more, and peek into the composer’s mind, or give you ideas for your own compositions.

That makes a lot of sense!

For me theory is most important as a debugging tool - I write without considering it and if something sounds “off” in a bad way theory will often help me pinpoint why. It’s also useful for analysis when I’m trying to capture a certain sound. Either way it is not a composition tool and shouldn’t taught that way except for exercises to understand theory.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com