Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

My thought is, if you peel back the first layer of music theory, you discover a chaotic, lawless world. The main thing I've noticed is that this is extremely unnerving to engineers, who want to learn it as a precise hierarchical structure. Regular people are more focused on the fact that somebody is somehow making it all sound good, and want to learn how to do that.

On the other hand, most musicians are completely ambivalent to it, or even thrive in the chaos. Yet the "rules" are useful because they provide a common ground for forming ensembles, or connecting composer and performer. We've watched musicians go down the rabbit hole of nonstandard scales, innovative notation systems, etc., only to discover that nobody can play their material.

I'm a double bassist. I'm happy just to be able to coordinate my ears, brain, and hands, well enough to play the same note the same way twice if I want to. Claiming that I have conscious control over temperament would be laughable. I've got too much other stuff to think about: The notes on the page, the non-notated passages (many jazz bass parts are expected to be improvised), tempo and rhythm, connecting with the rest of the band and the audience, who's coming in the front door, and so forth. This stuff is all happening in real time.

> My thought is, if you peel back the first layer of music theory, you discover a chaotic, lawless world.

That's because some people think the theory comes first, and the music is based on it. But music is just art, like any other art. The rules are soft and broken and hardly gospel. And music theory is an attempt to have some way to communicate about music using ordinary language. It isn't math, it isn't science, it's just some basic terminology and observations, none of which have much to do with the actual artistic act of making music.

Absolutely. Music theory is descriptive, not prescriptive. It just so happens that some things that sounded pleasant to people in the past still sound pleasant to modern ears, so you sometimes get into a bit of “tail wagging the dog” when people use those descriptive academic terms and concepts when creating music today, e.g. saying “I’m gonna write a 16-bar AABA tune that’s based on a I-vi-ii-V progression and modulates to the mediant in the B section”, and therefore think these are “rules” to abide. One of the more unfortunate misconceptions when it comes to the study of music theory.

When you think of songs where 'bending' a note is used, or intentionally hitting a note a little bit flat or sharp for a desired aesthetic effect (or both), this all makes a lot more sense.

Music theory gives us a way to measure & more accurately describe what we were already doing.

Huh, that’s interesting. I bounced off learning music theory because it seemed to be all about putting everything into little boxes, and music doesn’t really work that way. What are some of the more interesting elements that you get to after the first layers?

As they say, music theory is descriptive not prescriptive. However...

A really rough analogy is a programming language. The rules of the language don't tell you what kind of program to write, but choosing a language gives you a huge jump start on creating interesting and useful programs. Likewise knowing algorithms and good patterns.

I think that very few people are interested in studying music theory as an end unto itself. Like, I have a friend who is a retired theory professor, and did his PhD in theory. (He also performs music, but treats it as a hobby). For everybody else, the purpose of learning theory is to make you a better musician. So you can take it as far as needed to make that happen within its applicability to the kind of music you're interested in.

And there are different approaches, such as "jazz theory," that doesn't spend a lot of time with (for instance) the forms of larger musical compositions, or Bach.

So, what aspect of your musicianship are you trying to improve? I can cite one example. I play mostly jazz. I'm not great at theory myself. Everybody I know who can compose good jazz, or create written arrangements for larger ensembles, studied theory in college. I'm stuck with playing their music, which I love, but am not capable of creating my own. The theory probably helps in terms of letting you go from a composition that "almost" works but has awkward bits, and make it really sparkle.

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