This question gets asked a lot. It’s really four questions: 1) What is music theory? 2) Does music theory really teach you what music is? 3) Does music theory teach you how to create music? And 4) how do you learn music theory? Let’s take these questions one at a time.
What is music theory?
There is no singular “music theory;” there are many music theories. In American schools, they mostly teach a rule set abstracted from the tastes of the Western European aristocracy between about 1700 and 1850. Learning this rule set is very useful for understanding Western common-practice tonal music. If you want to write music using functional harmonies based exclusively on the diatonic scales, tonal theory is great. However, if you want to make or understand any other kind of music at all, tonal theory is not adequate, and in some ways actively harmful.
Western listeners like diatonic harmony to a point, but it sounds tame and boring in some contexts, and positively wrong in others. Tonal theory has nothing to say about the blues or any of the music derived from it, which is a pretty serious shortcoming if you want to operate in any kind of popular idiom. Modality is an advanced topic in tonal theory, but it’s a basic necessity for pop, which treats everything modally, including the major scale. Tonal theory places a ton of emphasis on the V-I cadence, but you can listen to non-classical music for a long time without hearing any cadences at all.
Jazz theory is better, because it maps more closely to contemporary popular practice than classical. However, jazz also has its specific conventions, some of apply generally, and some of which don’t. Jazz textbooks at least mention the blues, but don’t attempt to explain it, or when they do, they often explain it wrong. The final authority has to be your ears reacting to actual music.
Finally, music theory tends not to have much to say about timbre, production, mixing, copyright and authorship, or technology, all of which are foundational knowledge for electronic music producers.
Does music theory really teach you what music is?
It does in some respects. Classical theory naturally does a good job of explaining classical music; that’s what it’s for. Jazz theory does a good job explaining jazz. Both theories explain some aspects of contemporary pop well, but are silent or incorrect about other aspects. Theory is certainly not enough to learn everything you need to know about music. Actual practice is full of strange quirks and exceptions that are as necessary to your understanding as the basic rules are. Also, most current music draws from a variety of cultural sources, not just Europe and the United States, but every other continent as well. To make really satisfying music in the present, you need to know something about how Indian and Asian and African musics work too.
Does music theory teach you how to create music?
Sort of. Theory is a systematic way of understanding conventions. If you want to create conventional music, you just apply your theory rules, and everything comes very easily. When I work with pop and rock musicians, my theory knowledge is a timesaver for solving some kinds of problems: writing basslines and harmonies, i.e. figuring out which notes will sounds good or bad against a given chord, and which chords sound good or bad in which situation. Knowing a variety of music theories gives me a bigger toolkit. I know when to use diatonic harmony, and when to deliberately avoid using it, when to use parallel fourths and fifths, when to use unresolved tritones and clusters, and all that good stuff. This knowledge makes me an exceptionally good craftsman. However, it doesn’t make me an artist. Theory ultimately tells you nothing about what to do or not to do. It tells you what the conventional thing to do is, and that’s useful, but it’s ultimately up to you to follow convention or not. That’s where artistry comes in.
Michael Jackson and the Beatles were famously ignorant of formal theory. They did all of their learning by ear, working from actual repertoire. They most certainly understood how music worked, but their knowledge was implicit, not explicit. They might not have been able to explain to you why a certain chord sounds better after another one, but the important thing is to know that it does, not why it does. It probably took them longer to solve musical problems by brute force trial and error than it takes me, but who cares? Their music is enormously, colossally better than mine, and that of any of the authors of any of my theory texts. You might argue that Michael Jackson and the Beatles did end up learning theory implicitly, but they certainly never did it in a way that would have earned them a music degree.
How do I learn music theory?
Some people are formal learners. I’m one. I like systematic thinking and am good at it. Once I realized that I needed to learn all of the modes of all twelve major, harmonic minor and melodic minor scales in order to understand jazz, I just sat down and did it, and enjoyed doing it. However, this type of learning is not equally effective for everyone. If you find theory confusing and discouraging, don’t let it bog you down. Learn by ear, by trial and error, through your own idiosyncratic approach. It might be slower and more difficult, but there are many paths up the mountain.
Like I said above, theory is neither necessary nor sufficient for artistry. I know plenty of well-schooled musicians who lack the confidence or emotional maturity to make good art. I know plenty of perfectly naive musicians who make beautiful work. I have yet to see a decent formal explanation of the blues, which is why I’m hard at work writing one. Theory is unhelpful for understanding oddballs like Thelonious Monk, but it’s the oddballs who make the interesting art. And theory can’t tell you how to make a good-sounding recording, which in electronic music is 90% of the art form.
Do you really think blues is so hard to explain? I’ll give it a try ;).
1) The I7: Used to emphasize the change to IV, the authentic cadence.
2) The alternation between III and bIII (major vs minor): In most blues songs, the key is either major or minor, and the altered third is used as a variation.
3) The #4: The key changes to locrian, that’s how I look at it.
4) The bIII: Suppose that the key is major (I). Then it suddenly switches to the parallel minor key (i). In this key, the bIII chord is natural.
5) The #6: In minor blues, this is just a variation from natural minor to dorian.
The whole concept of blues seems – to me – to be experimenting with tonalities.
Minor vs. Major vs. Mixolydian vs. Dorian vs. Locrian (or Lydian if it’s major blues).
I don’t know what the “mystery” is all about, blues is just a mixture of modes, and the “in between” notes are just the fault of bad guitarists who couldn’t bend a note properly ;).
1) The “authentic cadence” implies that the IV chord is temporarily the I chord, but that’s not how it actually sounds in the blues.
2) In most blues songs, the underlying chords are major while the top-line melodies are minor. This is not “either major or minor,” this is both, or neither, or something else.
3) The #IV chord is diminished, not half-diminished. That would imply diminished scale, not Locrian mode, except that blues musicians use neither. You use the I blues scale on the #IVdim chord.
4) The parallel minor idea makes sense in part, but it doesn’t say anything about why you can so freely mix major and minor generally, or why the blues scale fits over any chord.
5) Minor blues is closer to conventional minor tonality, but there is still that #4^ scale degree that doesn’t come from any of the minor scales (except Locrian, but no one uses Locrian in the blues.)
The “in between” notes are most certainly not mistakes. You have to play them to make your blues sound like the blues, especially the “neutral” third between major and minor. These intervals emerge from non-Western tuning systems imported into America from Africa, like equiheptatonic. You can fake your way through the blues by combining modes in the manner you suggest, but you can’t play it for real.
I think you have a straw man conception of Western harmony.
For some reason, you seem to be convinced that western music theory is about “rules” and telling you what you cannot do. That may be true of certain pedagogic presentations of music theory, but is not really the content of music theory.
For example, the “rules” about not using parallel 4ths is not about whether you should use them or not. It is from the perspective that, in traditional voice leading, the goal is to keep the voices distinct. The ‘problem’ with parallel 4ths is that the independence of the voices is lost. So, if you just have a lick and want to fatten it, using parallel 4ths is just fine–since you are not trying to maintain the independence of two voices, there is no reason not to use that approach.
To see western music theory as meaningful, you need to understand what aesthetic problems it is trying to solve, and to see that these aesthetic problems are still present in contemporary music. Some of these aethetics are not very important to use today, and that theory and advice is irrelevant. But some concepts, like tension and resolution, are still very much part of the contemporary music vocabulary.
If you think the Blues has nothing to do with the Western theory, you should consider that the blues form itself is virtually a distillation is the most potent and common types of cadential movements in western harmony. The fact that we even describe the blues form in terms of I-IV-V, etc. shows that the basic concepts introduced by Western theory regarding chords and their relationships are coherent as a partial description of the harmonic materials are of blues.
Sure, the ‘blue’ note and mixed major/minor features of blues are distinct from traditional western music. But western music theory provides two notions for considering the relationship of modes: parallel minor/major and relative minor/major. The ‘blue’ note can be considered as a mixture of the parallel major/minor modes. In fact, you could use this example as an insight that the tonality of blues (what the root is) is independent of the mode (major/minor). This is just as true for classical music as for Blues, but this point is not driven home in classical the same way as in blues, since blues takes this tension and multiplicity of modes as a starting point. The fact is, that the pre-existing theory has a vocabulary and set of tools for understanding these relationships. Does the theory answer every question–of course not. But it seems ridiculous to dismiss it, when its pre-existing language and concepts provide a way to describe it very clearly. I would score that a point for music theory, that it has quite a bit to say about musics that it was not meant to describe.
Tonality was really the main driver of the development of western music theory: how do you establish a key, how do you modulate from one key to another, etc. Since blues and pop music rarely modulates (and when it does, it is usually just a phrase modulation stepping up chromatically), there is not much need for the more complicated aspects of western music theory. So, I agree with you that the other factors in what makes a song or track good, such as groove or texture, are relatively more important in pop music than in classical.
Regardless, the tendencies that are the foundation of these more complicated theories are things that apply to any use of chords. Sure, your tonic I7 in blues might be a mixolydian rather than major scale, but it is still the case this chord leads to the IV, the subdominant. And the voice leading is the same: the 7th scale degree in the I7 chord moves down a half step to become the 3rd degree of the IV chord (in the key of C, the Bb of the C7 chord moves down to the A of the F7 chord), just like in any Mozart sonata. If you don’t believe me, I suggest you listen closely to, for example, Coltrane’s album Coltrane Plays the Blues. In virtually every chorus of Coltrane’s solos on every song, he highlights this note in that last half of measure 4, as a way to express the change from I7 to IV.
Likewise, your tonic I7 chord still has a dominant, which is the V7 chord, and it functions identically as a dominant whether the genre is classical, blues, jazz or pop. You can go down the list of every chord used in blues or jazz, and they function in the same way as they would in classical music. Just because you don’t resolve a chord, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t contain tension. In fact, if you are trying to express tension, you probably want to consider the varying degrees of tension in different and related chords to start building up a vocabulary of sounds.
Tastes change according to what counts as being consonant & dissonant: an unresolved dominant 7th chord may sound fine to use today, when it would have sounded dissonant to someone in the 1800s. We live in a society that is more complicated and our music needs to model things that are more complicated. But there are two things that have not changed: the relative sense of dissonance, and the way dissonances are resolved.
Even today, a dominant 7th chord sounds more consonant than, for example, a 7b9 chord, a 7b5 chord or an augmented 7th chord. They dominant 7th chord, while not sounding absolutely dissonant to us today, when it yeilds to a IV chord does offer a sense of ‘naturalness’ and partial resolution, which shows that it is not fully devoid of tension, even though we understand and feel this tension as being stable.
This is just one example of how western music theory allows you to understand the relationships between chords, which are common in pop music. This framework can help you grapple with the relationship between melodies and chords, and how to affect phrasing. Theory can offer suggestions for how to change up sounds while maintaining the same overall progression, through use of substitution chords. In short, music theory is more relevant for these types if inquiries than anything else you can name.
Let’s agree that having more theory about these other aspects of music like rhythm, groove and texture would be valuable. But that in no way diminishes the value of tonal music theory, since that language is still part of the way we hear things, and the vast majority of music is constructed according to these patterns. It is not because people are ‘following rules’ that makes this the case. It is that music is a language that has its own grammar and logic, and people speaking this language coherently will inevitably follow these patterns. You can choose to learn about these, or not. But let’s not assert that ignorance is preferable to knowledge.
Theory cannot speak to what “sounds good” on an absolute scale. However, the notions of tension and resolution are well-defined enough that there is a great deal we can say about them. If you ask a roomful of people to tell you when some music completes a phrase, or when something that is tense resolves, everyone will more or less give you the same answer (assuming that the music has coherent phrasing or resolution).
This is because there are patterns to music that have become part of our language. If we didn’t have this underpinning of language, we would not have coherent art that speaks to the vast majority of people. Many of these essential patterns can be described by theory in a very clear way. Actual music may blend and counterpose patterns, which complicates things. But the utility of theory is that it gives us a way to inquire about how these work, and how to manipulate them to make something beautiful.
Looking forward to your theory of the Blues!
You and I both understand that music theory is a flexible and evolving set of descriptive tools. What I’m attacking is the version of music theory that is taught in every school I’ve ever attended or taught in. If the only experience of music theory you have is the one you get in school, then that’s what music theory is. To get my degree, I had to master the rules of 18th century voice leading, and to this day I have no idea why anyone other than music historians needs to do that. It’s a rule set that’s only “traditional” for Europeans. There are other traditions we could be learning and teaching.
Tension and resolution are indeed important to contemporary music vocabulary, but cadential harmony is not the best tool to understand it. Half the music out there has no cadences at all, and does its tension and resolution with changes in rhythmic density and timbre.
The usefulness of tonal harmony in understanding the blues is way overblown by classical music theorists trying to assert their relevance. The blues might use I, IV and V, but it uses them quite differently than Mozart does. The 12-bar form is only one blues structure; there’s a whole body of blues that uses no chord progressions at all. The I7-IV7 movement sounds like a cadence, but it isn’t one; it’s just a chord that follows another chord. Jazz musicians have mixed tonal music back into the blues, so you get that more classical-style voice leading, but actual blues players barely even use thirds in their chords. There’s no requirement that I follows V; you more commonly follow V with IV. And blues relies heavily on bIII and bVII, whose functions are really hard to explain in tonal theory terms. The blues scale is nonsensical from a classical perspective–you don’t get the all-important #4^ from parallel minor. The blue notes don’t even fall on the piano keys. I’ve been teaching blues for many years, and tonal theory is totally inadequate to the task, it contradicts practice so often as to be more confusing than illuminating.
In blues-based music (e.g. nearly all American pop), functional harmony is not that important. Harmony itself is optional in hip-hop and electronica. This music defines the tonic by metrical placement and repetition, not with functional chords. Schenker has it backwards: in current pop, rhythmic structure is everything, and chords are mostly there just to signpost where you are in the groove. The song “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk doesn’t have a key center at all; the metrical scheme defeats the chord functions. Rock songs change key all the time, sometimes once a measure, just by brutal parallelism.
The chords used in blues or jazz most certainly do not function in the same way they would in classical music. I invite you to check out Coltrane’s “Cousin Mary”, built around a “cadence” of #IV7-IV7-I7. Mozart would not have recognized that progression. Listen to a Monk tune like “Bye-Ya” or “Pannonica” or “Little Rootie Tootie,” the chords are nonsensical on paper but still sound perfectly logical.
The question of how people experience musical tension and resolution is an empirical one that is only now beginning to get some real research behind it. My colleague Mary Farbood is doing a major study to see how people experience tension and resolution due to changes in pitch direction, harmonic progression, metrical placement, timbre, loudness and other parameters. It remains to be seen whether the classical concepts turn out to be human universals or arbitrary cultural conventions. My experience suggests the latter, especially given how much of our music treats harmony and melody as being optional. We need a common practice music theory that can make sense of actual current common practice.
I see music theory as a collection of facts and definitions rather than a collection of rules. I find it extremely useful for understanding and memorizing things I figure out by ear, communicating with other musicians, and for creative inspiration (try flattening that fifth, or move the chord up chromatically, etc) But then again, I never studied music theory in a formal academic setting
understanding the unk in the funk is what helps to know blues.before blues mixed with western chords and 1-4-5 it was modal,field holler etc. and for me it`s always been language and dialects. thank you Howlin Wolf and Muddy Waters and all…I dig it all,but the modal stuff grabs me !
Music theory, like any theory, exists to help answer questions. Some, as you mention, are, what notes sound good with this chord.
But really, that is just a specific way of asking, what is the basis of what sounds good?
Music theory, like any theory, also helps organize disparate-seeming data by providing simple conceptual models that approximate reality enough to be useful.
As such, I find it strange that you hate on traditional western music theory. Since it has quite a bit useful to say about all musics except those that developed wholly outside the western tradition. Blues and pop are not counterposed to western tradition, they are a continuation of it, together with others. The insights offered by tonality and voice leading are not abandoned just because others are added.
In fact, the music of Monk is a terrific example. Using a lead sheet of melody and chord symbols, you can condense the complexity of Monk into something a performer can read on a gig. There is nothing other-worldly about the elemental musical content of Monk’s music. In fact, I would argue it is only because of music theory that anyone can learn to mimic the style of Monk–it sounds so ‘other’ at first, but after analysis, you see how it relates to and extends sounds you are already familiar with. Perhaps we can never describe the rhythmic swing and swagger of Monk, but tonally he’s pretty traditional.
Also, Michael Jackson knew how to use a Dominant half cadence, you should check out a tune called Billie Jean some time. While he may or may not have conceptualized it as such, if you want to learn how to create that type of tension and release (I’m talking about the pre-chorus into the chorus) western music theory provides a way to analyze that example such that you can apply it in myriad ways.
I would agree with you that the way music theory is taught is problematic, and that, like any theory, is fundamentally incomplete.
But don’t throw out the theoretical baby with the pedagogical bathwater. Tonal harmony holds water.
Theory doesn’t actually tell you why anything sounds good. It just tells you that a given thing does sound good (or should sound good.) We’re only in the very early stages of being able to use science to explain the question of why.
It is simply not true that traditional Western theory applies to everything within Western tradition. The blues developed entirely in the Western world, and it violates tonal theory rules constantly. Blues is directly counterposed to tonal theory in its treatment of tritones, in its lack of distinction between major and minor, in the way it treats the blues scale as consonant rather than dissonant, in its total lack of concern with voice leading, in its reliance on microtones, and in the fact that you can make perfectly fine blues music without having any harmonic movement at all. There is plenty of pop that descends from the Euroclassical tradition, but the really meaningful and culturally important stuff comes from the blues.
A performer might be able to read a Monk lead sheet on a gig, but that will completely fail to get at the point of Monk’s music. You need to study the recordings to understand his sense of time and attack. Also, the lead sheets are rarely explicit about the exceedingly peculiar chord voicings Monk used in his writing, much less in his improvisation. There are some good and faithful transcriptions out there, most notably the Hal Leonard Monk books, but they make no attempt to explain Monk’s music, and they are very clear about the necessity of aural learning to complete the picture. Monk is not tonally “traditional” unless the tradition you’re talking about is the blues, for all the reasons outlined above.
The chord changes in “Billie Jean” are the least salient and meaningful part of it. That song is about groove and production. The best way to understand that is to listen to cover versions. Chris Cornell does a version of the tune that follows the melody and harmony, but changes the groove and instrumentation. He misses the point of the song so extremely that I don’t think we should even consider his cover to meaningfully be the same piece of music. Analyzing “Billie Jean” harmonically is like analyzing “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” in terms of groove. It’s present in a minimal way, but it’s hardly the point.
Tonal harmony holds water within Euroclassical tradition and the portion of contemporary popular music that descends from it. But it misses so much of fundamental importance. I would love to have every kid learn a music theory that encompasses all of the practices that are truly common in Western culture, including the blues, Afro-Cuban rhythmic concepts, Indian and Middle Eastern modes and drones, and so on. Kids should be presented with voice leading as one valid tool, and rigid parallelism as another. They should learn that groove and timbre are expressive dimensions on a par with melody and harmony, and that melody and harmony are perfectly optional. Traditional Western tonal theory would make a terrific music history elective. It is certainly not something we should treat as the basic foundation of all musical understanding.
Abandonment of formal music study in the US is epidemic. I’ve seen studies putting it between eighty and ninety-five percent of kids, and those are just the kids who had it available to them in the first place. I’m part of that majority. I thought growing up that I wasn’t interested in music. It turns out that I’m just not that interested in the music of Western Europe from two hundred years ago. I had to learn about music in an ad hoc way on my own. When I finally did do Western tonal theory in graduate school, I found the experience infuriating. I was motivated enough to persevere. Most people aren’t. The problem here is not just teaching. It’s the institutional value system we have around music, which is widely at odds with the value system of the broader culture. Until we align the two better, music class will continue to be an effective musician repellant.
I’ve always described theory as the “grammar of music.” Sure, you can write a novel without knowing grammar, but a solid knowledge of grammar makes it easier to write well and saves you a lot of editing time in the long run. To extend the metaphor using your comparisons above, I might compare jazz theory vs. traditional Western theory as I might compare, say, German grammar with French grammar: completely different rules apply, although a noun is still a noun, a tonic triad is still a I/i chord, etc.
I’m a theory geek, so I love knowing the nuts and bolts, and it makes me a better arranger, sight-reader, transposer, improviser, &c. I’m more hireable because theory helps me be quicker and more versatile at what I do. That’s how I try to sell music theory to my students, and most seem to agree that it’s useful to a point, but not the end all/be all. I totally agree with your assessment above. I love the Monk reference towards the end!