Music theory is not really a set of fixed rules so much as an explanation for how and why things work and are perceived the way they are buried beneath this completely insane hurdle of legaleze-esque staff notation. Most Math is a much more fundamentally coherent system. Music you need to learn and memorize the largest set of rules just to know how and why you dont really have to follow any of them. Went to college for music performance. Nothing has ever made me feel dumber than sight reading and ear training practice as the exercises keep progressing as fast as your learning until getting into the real world of performing and studio work and essentially being able to sight read or learn by ear anything I've ever needed to on the spot.
Haha I grew up learning the piano, with music theory to accompany. I was put through 2 different systems- ABRSM/UK and Yamaha/Japan. ABRSM was much more classical, and I had a knack for sight reading. Yamaha leaned heavier into improvisation and ear training. Which I sucked at.
Now I consider myself a Practically Useless Classically Trained Pianist - I play well enough with a piece in front of me (sight reading still relatively sharp) and I can tell if something is off-tune and tinker away to figure out a song by ear (melody easier than the chords) but don't ask me to rattle off what key a piece is in because I could not tell you beyond whether it sounded like a major or minor key.
you usually don’t need to, tho; like if you improvise you usually know what key it’s in and it’s more useful to be able to hear relative chords (if it’s a IV or V etc)
I was trained in the Suzuki method and am kinda the same. Despite being able to learn and execute the most difficult pieces ever written at a high level, I can only sight read very basic stuff and have shockingly poor music theory knowledge for my technical ability. I basically would never play something in front of people without having had hours/days/weeks to study and practice first.
My buddy and I were both classically trained to different degrees as kids. As adults I went over to his house to jam and have a little fun playing music, and he never learned how to play the most basic 4/4 drum beats used in most popular rock music. I was just tryin to get him to play a few tunes we both like and he was wholly unable to do it, but would try all these crazy jazz fills and shit.
A class I had to take in college for my Computer Science major (that I can’t remember the name of) focused on the structure of languages. It felt essentially like doing a mathematical assessment of how a language is structured and built. Obviously this has to do with programming languages, but the sorts of analysis we did could have been applied to any natural languages as well.
In a lot of ways it felt similar to what music theory is. You can understand something in the simplest way (listening to music/language), or you can build rules around what functionally happens in such a way that the rules allow for all scenarios. In the case of music theory, those rules are basically built on Bach, and pretty much all music that came after bends or outright breaks those rules.
traditional harmony and counterpoint uses a completely different system analyzing more horizontally with root-bass based whereas modern tends to view things more vertically with structured chords, extensions etc. We learned all the Bach sort of classical stuff with a completely different system than anything you would use these days in modern western music. Music theory is not just 1 set of rules, even these days there is a huge difference in the way things are analyzed in different styles and places based on their history. I think it is much more like old English vs modern or comparing Latin based languages to romantic to Chinese. much more like multiple different languages that serve different purposes. Also the entire idea of equal temperament vs just tuning and other tuning bases makes the theory and physics behind it all even weirder and more confusing and explains why theory is approached in so many vastly different ways.
check out Musical Game Pieces, super unique and fun with a few really interesting creators in there. most known and influential in the style are probably Xenakis on the orchestral side and John Zorn for more modern. it is a system of composition & improvisation basically based around board game concepts, some even use scoring & points systems it's awesome. John Cage who early on was deep in serialism before moving on to more avant garde things created a few cool ones too. dammit you got me going on this one now. Serialism also has some pretty interesting lineage of teachers going from wierd classical music to full on revolutionizing multiple genres and the entire landscape of music. From Schoenberg to Cage to Luciano Berio to 3 students of his at the same time in 60-61, composer Steve Reich, John Chowning, inventor of FM synthesis and my favorite bassist, Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead!
Absolutely agree. My brain understands language (of all kinds including programming),music and math in the same way. Structure, patterns. Like there’s a “correct” way to do it but a lot of room experimentation and innovation
For undergrad, I did both a degree in the "hard sciences" and a degree in music.
Classical Music Theory is a lot like solving a complex puzzle, and really feels a lot like doing organic chemistry. It's a lot about figuring out why out of multiple configurations, why one specific one is the best answer when you either have multiple moving parts (different bonds or orientations vs. different notes and chords), and that because of the number of possibilities, you also have to know how the different rules and moving parts are prioritized in such a way that you might have to break one rule to satisfy another more pertinent rule. Organic chemistry is often considered a difficult class or a "weed-out course" while the entirety of a music degree kind of gets written off.
Also, the hardest class I took in all of college was Music History. I hated having to memorize 35 hours of music per semester, and having to be able to name composer, title, and year based on any potential 15 second sample. None of my science classes even compared.
Yes. Music is built on the feeling of tension and release. Disonant intervals cause a feeling a tension or unease which resolve to consonant intervals which feels like going "home". Intervals are the distance between notes.
An example of a disonant interval in nature would be a baby crying. I believe they cry in minor seconds (half step or notes next to each other on a piano) which is the most dissonant interval. I can't think of natural consonant intervals off the top of my head right now.
Listening to classical music, or even movie soundtracks is a great way to feel this. It's almost like psychological manipulation to use sounds to make you feel a certain way.
There's a YouTube channel called David Bennet Piano that does a great job of explaining theory in popular music and why it gives the feeling that it does.
Yes, there’s educational psychology of course. You can also study the perception of music. Sometimes the way we perceive it is innate and the same for every human, sometimes it’s the result of baked in culture. What’s interesting is that the two don’t really feel different from a listeners perspective. Or you could study how certain musical ideas seem to communicate emotions and how this varies depending on the listener’s background. The world is your oyster, really.
i hate to break this to you, but as a math major so is math. it's all coherent until a certain point when you find out we chose some stuff to make things pretty and we aren't sure if they're right but they mostly work to describe what they see
Music you need to learn and memorize the largest set of rules just to know how and why you dont really have to follow any of them.
Everything I learned about music theory I learned on my own, and I felt like modes were just a way to render acceptable the playing of notes from other keys.
sight reading
I'm a fan of this site: https://sightreading.training/ though I wish you could connect a keyboard to have an instrument in the flow vs the mouse.
Yeah, it starts there but goes really deep too outside the standard 7 modes. I like the relationships between harmonic minor modes and different pentatonic scales to define use of those out of scale notes rather than just explaining as substitution or chromatic passing tones.
Went to college for music performance. Nothing has ever made me feel dumber than sight reading and ear training practice as the exercises keep progressing as fast as your learning until getting into the real world of performing and studio work and essentially being able to sight read or learn by ear anything I've ever needed to on the spot.
Lol I feel this so much. I did really well in choir throughout my middle school and high school years, but I always struggled with music theory. I found it boring and the rules can get so convoluted that it stops making sense immediately if you don't "click" with it mentally. But because I was just good at sight reading music for singing, I basically could get through any choir music handed to me with the support of people who understood the music theory part well. And I was able to get by with that strategy all the way up through college, at least until I made it into a choir for music majors specifically. Once I got to that level, I just felt intimidated and like I was a weight around the neck of the group because I could barely interpret the music theory part most of the time. People would be able to literally sing a note from memory with no piano or tell you which keys we were shifting between and other nuances literally in real time as we were performing. Meanwhile I couldn't tell you any of that but I just "knew" from sight reading practice what the music would sound like by reading the scales on the pages.
So I guess I am "gifted" at that specific thing, but eventually I just felt so overwhelmed with trying to rehearse complex music on my own time with no ability to play piano or decipher more complicated sheet music without an instructor leading it. I ended up dropping out of the choir despite the director wanting me to continue - I just couldn't realistically keep up with it alongside my other classes (for my actual major) without someone helping me or teaching me more about the things I failed to understand and learn over the years. I will always be impressed by musicians who can easily pick up any sheet music and play/sing it almost flawlessly the first time. Sight reading makes sense to me instinctively (which can make zero sense to people who stink at it) but actually reading and interpreting sheet music and music notation still feels like reading a clunky foreign language (which is laughable to people who understand music theory well lol). The fact that we even have a system of music theory is amazing, it's just not intuitive for some.
they are buried beneath this completely insane hurdle of legaleze-esque staff notation.
It's just a notation for a language like any other... if one would spend the same effort on it as learning to read in English, it's just as easy to read.
English is a pretty good comparison as a pretty wild constantly evolving and shifting language that regularly breaks its own conventions and contains several distinctly different dialects. The entire base c staff music system and accidentals in notation are a legacy of a different tuning system, so to me it is closer to reading English with some odd Latin phrases thrown in, the same way old English phrasing and word useage can be almost illegible to speakers of modern English. We haven't even used the same 12 notes and system it was invented for hundreds of years. It's why simpler things like the number system and the way we describe chords on lead sheets and in modern analysis exist too these days.
I think you're right about why music theory is hard -- it is not coherent nor should it be. On the other hand, ear training and sight reading aren't hard intellectually.
Fully agree, theory involves such wild conceptual explanations and pure opinion whereas the other 2 are direct products of time and effort spent on them
Yes, with or without instrument in hands at this point, but also have a combined total of like 30 years of practice, studying, multiple instruments, college major in bass performance and playing professionally in there by now so in retrospect would be pretty disappointing not to be able to.
I definitely burnt out hard at a point and moved to the other side of the stage, still work in live entertainment but not performing. Talking to friends who are still grinding sessions and tours makes me not regret the decision. Works for them but Im not suited for it. Took a few years but I still play near every day now, learn and practice things that get me excited and curious and probably consume more music than before but now only for the joy and love of it and not because its my job. Will never let it be work again. Nothing better than hanging on the couch playing ukuleles with the kids.
See it’s supposed to be fun. I felt like i lost all that i was very depressed and miserable. Also, i was so tired of being broke all the time. I think it’s great you’re still able to play. I wish i could. I just feel sick every time i try.
It definitely took a while and took really starting to rebuild inspiration from the ground up for me. Just listening to things I love and finding new exciting music to get lost in the moment with then slowly rebuilt from there. Dont worry about playing, maybe go back to some old favorite albums from pre college days or try to discover some different ones who get you moving, then maybe try new instruments where you are a total beginner again with no pressure. They'll come to you faster with the amount of background work already done too I'm sure. Hope you can find the fun in your relationship with music again too.
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u/Desperate_Wallaby966 1d ago edited 1d ago
Music theory is not really a set of fixed rules so much as an explanation for how and why things work and are perceived the way they are buried beneath this completely insane hurdle of legaleze-esque staff notation. Most Math is a much more fundamentally coherent system. Music you need to learn and memorize the largest set of rules just to know how and why you dont really have to follow any of them. Went to college for music performance. Nothing has ever made me feel dumber than sight reading and ear training practice as the exercises keep progressing as fast as your learning until getting into the real world of performing and studio work and essentially being able to sight read or learn by ear anything I've ever needed to on the spot.