https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/ link takes you to the homeworks/assignments and everything else for a self-study/auto-didact to follow along. Neat!
If you subtract the "meaningless phrase", the title of the book is just "Music Theory". Do this for every book written about music, art, mathematics and you'll just have a lot of books with identical and quite dull titles.
There is a whole paragraph in the preface about why he titled it “21st-Century Classroom”. The first sentence contains one very good reason: it’s a full year college music theory textbook with an open license.
The other reasons cited are:
“This text differs from other music theory textbooks by focusing less on four–part (SATB) voiceleading and more on relating harmony to the phrase. Also, in traditional music theory textbooks, there is little emphasis on motivic analysis and analysis of melodic units smaller than the phrase. In my opinion, this led to students having difficulty with creating melodies, since the training they are given is typically to write a “melody” in quarter notes in the soprano voice of part writing exercises. When the assignments in those texts ask students to do more than this, the majority of the students struggle to create a melody with continuity and with appropriate placement of harmonies within a phrase because the text had not prepared them to do so.”
Suffers from the same problem that all music theory texts seem unable to avoid: they require the reader to simply accept a bunch of random facts to memorize with no context.
Example: memorize the major scale as a series of whole and half steps but we won’t provide you with any context or motivation for why this is so.
Similar: in a major scale all notes are played and none are skipped or repeated. Except if your scale goes D–E–F#–G, in which case you skip F. The only way for this to be correct is apparently we consider F and F# to be the same note for purposes of scales even though this directly contradicts a previous section.
I was expecting a “21st century” music theory reference to have an emphasis on building intuition. Music theorists are apparently allergic to good pedagogy.
There is a part near the beginning where he derives the diatonic scale from first principles. (There is a sequel as well, and a book if you prefer to read it in book form)
We recently had a long discussion about this. I come from the “music theory makes a lot more sense once one understands that 2:1, 3:2, 4:3 sound really whole and good to the human ear, 5:4 has a little more tension, and 6:5 has even more tension” school of thought [1] but for other people it is a distraction from understanding basic stuff like “this is a minor scale”. See here for the long discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49541888
[1] I understand ancient scales were 3-limit instead of 5-limit scales, and that modern equal temperament has thirds which significantly deviate from 5:4 and 6:5, but once polyphony became a thing, 5-limit temperament made a lot more sense because they reduce beating.
Man that top comment is such a combination of "sneering to show off" and completely wrong that I'm shocked I'm not on reddit.
Recommending The Jazz Theory Book to someone starting from scratch, especially someone self studying, is like recommending CLRS or TAOCP to someone who asks "I'm curious about learning the basics of algorithms and data structures, any good books for self study?" And of course that happens all the time too. Chapter 1 is "here's what intervals like major 3rd and perfect fifths are", Chapter 2 is "here's the major scale and all its diatonic modes and ii-V-I progressions", Chapter 3 is "here's how you might use the Phyrigian mode to play over a Sus flat-9 chord" (pg 48).
Recommending Schoenberg and Messiaen as steps to get a sufficient surface of topics covered for "music theory" is performance art in its own regard. Bravo!
> I come from the “music theory makes a lot more sense once one understands that 2:1, 3:2, 4:3 sound really whole and good to the human ear, 5:4 has a little more tension, and 6:5 has even more tension” school of thought
Ah, well, that makes sense. I come from the "music theory is a quintessentially rigid, British-Schoolroom-coded subject that emphasizes rote memorization over actual understanding" school of thought. The musical equivalent to Americans requiring their children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance before they can even understand what the words mean.
The student seeking to build their understanding asks: why is the order of sharps FCGDAEB? Why is the mode with a sharp 4th note the Lydian mode?
Music theory responds: Because fuck you, that's why.
Sure, I knew what they meant. But if they are sloppy with their terminology on the knucklehead stuff then it doesn’t bode well for the esoteric stuff to follow.
My point was not to showcase my confusion, rather to reinforce the fact that music theory texts are just generally low quality, and music theory as a field seems to be okay with that.
I dunno. On first glance, for a "21st-Century" textbook, this seems to place a high emphasis on classical music theory, and moves very highly influential modern styles to the back burner -- notably jazz. And there is essentially no discussion of music theory in other cultures (middle eastern, african, east asian, indian), nor current analysis of pop and rock music.
I have a BA in Music Theory, I think maybe you should consider again. First off, Jazz relies on the same fundamentals and extends them, everything from Classical music is somewhat relevant in Jazz. So if it's only Jazz theory exclusive to classical, it'd be an advanced book indeed.
Second, it literally has a chapter on Popular Music and another on Jazz Theory, and "Classical" is not found in its chapter titles. So I don't think your critique is accurate.
Third, history and time matter. "Theory" came first in "classical" contexts, with codified rules pre-dating even Bach. Jazz was a much later invention that built upon these and other traditions. Both of the Jazz theory books I used in my BA in Music Theoryhad many elementary topics already covered in Classical contexts.
Yes, I think people have this fantasy that Jazz has anything new to offer in terms of music theory. That's false, everything used in Jazz was already part of the practice of classical music sometimes centuries ago. For example, improvisation was common in Mozart time and extended chords were common already in the 19th century. The only difference may be the terminology used in Jazz circles, but this is something that can be learned later if you want to specialize in that style.
I know a lot of people with music degrees. This is a widely acknowledged problem. It doesn't have a simple answer, especially as academic music programs are shrinking. You can't teach everything except at a survey level. You have to find faculty who can teach new topics at a college level. And students who are prepared to dive in. Music students tend to already be damn good musicians by the time they start college.
If programming is an analogy, it's said that once you've learned your first language, you can learn any other language in a jiffy. Also, a lot of higher level learning is "learning how to learn." Maybe it's better to have a standardized "first language" that students can learn in depth, and then let them move into other areas at their own discretion.
I don't have a college degree, but for me, classical music lessons were a great preparation for learning jazz, and I've picked up pop, rock, and folk music on my own. In fact, on the instrument that I play, the double bass, gaining proficiency and experience in jazz without that background is a brutal learning curve.
Anecdotally, I know a few people who spent decades working on and/or teaching middle eastern music in conservatories abroad, and they struggle greatly to find music departments in the US who will hire them. A problem I've seen firsthand is that there are a lot of senior professors who teach it hand wavy versions of it filtered through whatever books Euro orientalists wrote mid century and are threatened at the prospect of someone coming in there who has studied and practiced it for years in places where it's more of a living art form cutting into their position of expertise.
Where this ties in to your point is that part of the reason they really don't want experts is that they rarely have someone whose job it is to teach middle eastern music. They might have a guitar teacher with some experience with oud, a flute teacher who can passably play ney (usually with awful intonation), etc. For most schools, these other types of music are "add-ons" that they have their existing faculty teach.
> And there is essentially no discussion of music theory in other cultures (middle eastern, african, east asian, indian)...
To me, that above ^ looks like the biggest gap.
To be fair, the book doesn't claim to demonstrate theory of the "world music" (sic, a phrase as bad as it sounds).
My (brief and shallow) understanding is that most scholars of music in the western world just do not have enough knowledge to talk intelligently about non-western genres. Exceptions exist, of course, but they are quite rare.
[Other reason is that there is a lot of gate-keeping. I've seen that in Hindustani/Carnatic classical studies, FWIW, which is one my areas of interest]
I don't understand why this standard is always applied to westerners. When we go to other countries, are they explaining all the fundamentals of western music in addition to the theories of their own? "Yeah our students in Boston don't know anything about Carnatic rhythm, but over in Bengal they all learn counterpoint and fugue before they learn the traditional ornaments"
I was hoping to see if by "21st-Century" it meant "music theory that is applicable to the way modern music is generally written and interacted with". With details on things like microtonal music, increased focus on rhythmic theory, an increased appreciation for the role that timbre plays in the sound of music, the theoretical frameworks that underpin long standing musical traditions of other cultures and contrasting what makes each musical theory unique as a way of better understanding both western theories of music as well as the breadth of musical expression....
Nope! Just the same old, well beaten, rotting corpse of a horse in the form of a musical theory that entirely exists to prop up schenkerian analysis. The one that that racist, elitist music programs have been teaching since well before the 21st-Century. (The way you can tell is because it includes figured bass, which is totally irrelevant to any discussion that isn't about the harmonic style of 18th century european musicians.)
God forbid I want to, oh I don't know, make music that's similar to the kind that I actually listen to on a regular basis? Better understand its underpinnings and what makes it work in the ways that it does? No. Figured bass.
How can this be fairly labelled "for the 21st-Century Classroom" when even 20th-century techniques aren't adequately represented? Electronic and computer music techniques are conspicuously absent. Microtonality has a rich history as well which is not even footnoted here.
Am I the only one who thinks that the classic music notation is 3x harder to learn than the basic music theory (without the rules of notation)?
I think that you can learn music theory (to play an instrument or to compose music e.g. in a "piano roll tool" / MIDI editor) much faster if you skip the classic notation. And I think that it is even better to learn the notation AFTER you understand the music theory.
This is a bit off topic, but since you mentioned your guide:
I hope this doesn't come off as hostile, but the guide you linked contains a number of inaccuracies and oversimplifications - it's kind of naive in an endearing way, but also leaves the reader with the impression that it covers all there is to music. I guess what I'm saying is it's fine to restrict yourself in what you include in the guide, or even simplify things, but it should be clear that the topic (i.e. music) is far richer and more complex.
It kind of reminds me of the periodic declaration someone makes on HN that textual programming sucks and we all need to switch to something else, usually visual programming in this case.
If someone takes time to deeply understand the advantages of the textual approach and then builds an alternative, I'll listen.
But at this point, anyone who is doing this and their criticism of the original approach is shallow and uninsightful, where it's basically just "it's old and it must therefore suck", is unlikely to produce a good answer.
I think that applies to the music notation case too. "Conventional" music notation isn't just a staff and a couple of types of notes. By the time you handle all the use cases that conventional notation handles, or even just a solid subset of it, your brand new notation is probably a lot less elegant than it started out as in someone's head.
love that video, it made me lol so hard the first time I saw it :D
Classical composer and software engineer here. One of my goals is to help update score notation. I use something called "harmonic coloring" which is like a reduced MIDI notation: You color a note by its functional role (harmonic value) rather than an arbitrary hue in 0-11.
What this view shares with MIDI: Long rectangles representing the applied durations.
How it is different: Occupies a minimal amount vertical space.
The color palette I'm using is intended to support people with colorblindness. The shades/hues of a color encodes the functional harmony. The root key signature (origin) is always the same color; and chords some distance r away on the circle of fifths is the shade/hue at that offset r.
There is a similar concept described in the Tantacruel video towards the end.
You can explore it here on Monic Theory.
(mobile view should be fixed within 48 hours)
As a semi-professional trombonist, C clefs are very important to me. Alto and tenor as-written, tenor as a means of transposing Bb treble, mezzo-soprano as a means of transposing F parts… they are not obsolete.
I suppose it makes historical sense, and even ingeniously designed.
But it, and the piano black keys with it, are definitely not optimal. It makes playing in C easy, and playing in anything else hard. I've picked up a new instrument since ~2 months, and 1 month in I could already play all scales by by deliberately staying away from music notation, learning the raw distances/steps that make up a scale and how to play them, rather than the 'delta from C', which is how classical training taught me to think. (Same story for chords etc)
It's all about the integers modulo 12. Classical notation obscures that (while making it easier to figure out which of the integers modulo 12 you're using, minus being able to assign them to integers in an obvious way).
I fun little exercise is to work out what would be different if we found aliens that also used 12 tone equal temperament, and also used a subset of 7 of those 12 notes to make their major scale, and also followed the same convention that we do of naming the notes of the major scale C, D, E, F, G, A, B like we do and naming the other 5 by naming a major scale note and adding modifier to tell how far away the not is from that like our # and b modifiers, and we both have the convention that when naming the notes of a transposed major scale we use each letter exactly once--except they picked a different 7 notes to be their major scale.
Our 12 tone scale with the major scale note names and notes not in the major scale marked with dots looks like this:
C.D.EF.G.A.B
Suppose the aliens have a very different idea of what makes a good sounding major scale, and their system is:
CDE.FGAB....
Suppose we transpose ours up 7 tones. We can represent this graphically by drawing out major pattern for two octaves, and below that drawing our major scale pattern with names replaced by X (X.X.XX.X.X.X) shifted over by 7, then look above to see how to name the notes (remembering we can only use each letter once):
C.D.EF.G.A.BC.D.EF.G.A.B
X.X.XX.X.X.X
Our major scale transposed up 7 is G A B C D E F#.
Let's do the same 7 tone transposition for the aliens. Their major scale pattern is XXX.XXXX..., so we get
CDE.FGAB....CDE.FGAB....
XXX.XXXX...
That's B Cbbbb Dbbbb Ebbb Fbbbb Gbbbb Abbbb.
At first that seems very different from our 7 tone transposition. We only need one sharp and they need 23 flats! But wait...mod 12 we have -23 = 1.
It turns out for all transpositions if you count sharps in your key signature as +1 and flats as -1, the key signature for a transposition by N tones will have 7N sharps or flats mod 12 in both our systems.
In general if you have a T note equal temperament scale with an M note subset major scale, transposing the major scale up N tones gives a key signature with NM mod T sharps/flats.
I'll leave it as an exercise to prove that. Hint: you can think of a transposition as a two step operation: (1) a shift that keeps the same letters and just adds sharps or flats to move the notes, and (2) a renaming that changed the name you use to name the first note of the transposed scale. Think about what each of those operations does to the number of sharps and flats needed.
I feel that quote more likely is pointed at "music appreciation" as a written work, versus understanding the theory. I know a few musicians who are happy to use terminology from theory, "I love to write songs with diminished and sustained chords".
This seems like a great resource to me, a classically trained pianist who is now playing different types of music.
Music theory for the 21st century with notation from several centuries earlier. Hmm.... sorry but tracker's table-like views are much easier. And so are most DAWs gantt-like editors. 100 times easier to comprehend than notation having the same not written in three different ways, and then some.
DAWs have been around for a few years now. If you were right and they really were 100 times easier to comprehend people would you not see people using printouts of piano rolls to read from?
What you’re suggesting is actually hundreds of years old from well before the existence of computers or DAWs but still no one is using it.
It turns out that judging the relative length of lines is difficult at speed compared to reading distinct symbols.
Also that 88 note piano rolls are a very space inefficient way of representing music on a page. Even a chromatic stave would be inefficient.
That really matters for people that want to sight read with other musicians and have as much viewable as possible in a compact area.
Finally, standard notation is very rich and evolved, as you’d expect for something in active use for so long. It has extensions for lots of instruments.
When people say notation can’t show X it’s usually that they just don’t know it can.
Because people doing piano have never seen DAWs, or never tried to use them? Because computers are bad, and piano is good. What a nonsense! And I've heard this argument hundred of times, and then at the end most music is produced/recorded/mastered using DAWs.
I have friends who have actual degree in music composition from actual conservatories, so most of them, professionals, who actually compose and produce actual music for movies, for games, for whatever you want - well all of them use DAWs and all of them are on Ableton or Logic or something along the line, and exactly ZERO of this nonsensical notation that takes more effort to master than music itself.
Most of the new music that gets composed is written in gantt charts or tracker rows, believe it or not. Dig around, and you'll find out.
The English language is messy as hell, and yet, here we are using it because it's a shared set of rules and symbols that pretty much everyone who wants to join in on this conversation already knows.
Same with staff notation: If you want to communicate music to other people, learning the slightly clunky but universally-known written language is generally the way to go.
No, English language is easy as shit. You think tis difficult, because you never tried Russian, French, or Mandarin - then we discuss again. Had it not for the simplicity of English Language, it wouldn't be so omnipresent. So you are so wrong on this account.
And I really want to see you communicate wobbling bass or fast random notes. Well you can - in Studel.cc - but is impossible in this notation. Same for complex drum sections (as in dnb, yes), and I can give you fair amount of other examples where medieval notation is useless.
The choir director at my church, Michael Dodds (UNCSA), covers the early development of musical notation, "From Modes to Keys in Early Modern Music Theory" [0]. Currently on sabbatical at Cambridge. Once in a while during rehearsal he will give an impromptu lecture on music history, always interesting.
It would be really hard for me to improvise a clarinet solo based on the melody line in that kind of notation, which is something I have to do pretty frequently in my old style jazz band using fake books.
I'm sympathetic to that view; I spent all evening writing electronic music by programming it into a sequencer and spent a lot of my early career (starting in about 1999) programming using a piano roll.
But "easier for what purpose"? It'd be really tough to read at a gig off a piano-roll.
It took a long time to become comfortable with the fact that standard notation is mostly a suggestion that doesn't contain the years of context I need to get through a big band gig on double bass... but once I realized that my ability to sight read got good enough that I stopped wishing there were some other kind of notation to read.
Sorry, brov, but improvisation is not "following a notation", but exactly the contrary. And perhaps you should try to once in a lifetime use a DAW, I bet you may find yourself amazed by how easy it is to actually read these squares.
https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/ link takes you to the homeworks/assignments and everything else for a self-study/auto-didact to follow along. Neat!
SVG illustrations, too? Delicious! This is how an online textbook should be done. Bravo.
Very cool but what does this have to do with "21st-Century Classroom"? Is that just a meaningless phrase to make it sound modern, not old-fashioned?
If you subtract the "meaningless phrase", the title of the book is just "Music Theory". Do this for every book written about music, art, mathematics and you'll just have a lot of books with identical and quite dull titles.
Insightful. The title being more to distinguish than to describe.
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There is a whole paragraph in the preface about why he titled it “21st-Century Classroom”. The first sentence contains one very good reason: it’s a full year college music theory textbook with an open license.
The other reasons cited are:
“This text differs from other music theory textbooks by focusing less on four–part (SATB) voiceleading and more on relating harmony to the phrase. Also, in traditional music theory textbooks, there is little emphasis on motivic analysis and analysis of melodic units smaller than the phrase. In my opinion, this led to students having difficulty with creating melodies, since the training they are given is typically to write a “melody” in quarter notes in the soprano voice of part writing exercises. When the assignments in those texts ask students to do more than this, the majority of the students struggle to create a melody with continuity and with appropriate placement of harmonies within a phrase because the text had not prepared them to do so.”
https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/mt21c/frontmatter-5.html
I guess the 21st century classroom is the free online classroom you connect to from your portable device
It's a new presentation, an online hypertext, and uses YouTube publications of 21st Century music as example.
https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/mt21c/frontmatter-5.html
Could just be because it is the 21st century and this was written for classroom use.
Suffers from the same problem that all music theory texts seem unable to avoid: they require the reader to simply accept a bunch of random facts to memorize with no context.
Example: memorize the major scale as a series of whole and half steps but we won’t provide you with any context or motivation for why this is so.
Similar: in a major scale all notes are played and none are skipped or repeated. Except if your scale goes D–E–F#–G, in which case you skip F. The only way for this to be correct is apparently we consider F and F# to be the same note for purposes of scales even though this directly contradicts a previous section.
I was expecting a “21st century” music theory reference to have an emphasis on building intuition. Music theorists are apparently allergic to good pedagogy.
> Example: memorize the major scale as a series of whole and half steps but we won’t provide you with any context or motivation for why this is so.
I recommend "What Makes Music Sound Good?" by Prof. Dmitri Tymoczko: https://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/files/pdfs/MUS105hando...
There is a part near the beginning where he derives the diatonic scale from first principles. (There is a sequel as well, and a book if you prefer to read it in book form)
We recently had a long discussion about this. I come from the “music theory makes a lot more sense once one understands that 2:1, 3:2, 4:3 sound really whole and good to the human ear, 5:4 has a little more tension, and 6:5 has even more tension” school of thought [1] but for other people it is a distraction from understanding basic stuff like “this is a minor scale”. See here for the long discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49541888
[1] I understand ancient scales were 3-limit instead of 5-limit scales, and that modern equal temperament has thirds which significantly deviate from 5:4 and 6:5, but once polyphony became a thing, 5-limit temperament made a lot more sense because they reduce beating.
Man that top comment is such a combination of "sneering to show off" and completely wrong that I'm shocked I'm not on reddit.
Recommending The Jazz Theory Book to someone starting from scratch, especially someone self studying, is like recommending CLRS or TAOCP to someone who asks "I'm curious about learning the basics of algorithms and data structures, any good books for self study?" And of course that happens all the time too. Chapter 1 is "here's what intervals like major 3rd and perfect fifths are", Chapter 2 is "here's the major scale and all its diatonic modes and ii-V-I progressions", Chapter 3 is "here's how you might use the Phyrigian mode to play over a Sus flat-9 chord" (pg 48).
Recommending Schoenberg and Messiaen as steps to get a sufficient surface of topics covered for "music theory" is performance art in its own regard. Bravo!
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> I come from the “music theory makes a lot more sense once one understands that 2:1, 3:2, 4:3 sound really whole and good to the human ear, 5:4 has a little more tension, and 6:5 has even more tension” school of thought
Ah, well, that makes sense. I come from the "music theory is a quintessentially rigid, British-Schoolroom-coded subject that emphasizes rote memorization over actual understanding" school of thought. The musical equivalent to Americans requiring their children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance before they can even understand what the words mean.
The student seeking to build their understanding asks: why is the order of sharps FCGDAEB? Why is the mode with a sharp 4th note the Lydian mode?
Music theory responds: Because fuck you, that's why.
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You might enjoy this unfinished project of mine: https://fakestory.acjay.com/
It's the culmination of years spent chasing an explanation of where all this stuff came from.
Highly informed by Tymoczko, who was mentioned in a sibling reply, and a bunch of other thinkers on the topic.
I will check it out, thank you.
Yes, I was hoping for something different, but as best I can tell this is a slight rehash on more of the same.
Ableton's teachings are far more interesting in my opinion, even if extremely more limited.
A better way to think about it is that all letters in the musical alphabet are represented in a musical scale. Some are sharp or flat
D major: D E F♯ G A B C♯
D minor: D E F G A B♭ C
Db major: D♭ E♭ F G♭ A♭ B♭ C
Db minor: D♭ E♭ F♭ G♭ A♭ B♭♭ C♭
Sure, I knew what they meant. But if they are sloppy with their terminology on the knucklehead stuff then it doesn’t bode well for the esoteric stuff to follow.
My point was not to showcase my confusion, rather to reinforce the fact that music theory texts are just generally low quality, and music theory as a field seems to be okay with that.
I dunno. On first glance, for a "21st-Century" textbook, this seems to place a high emphasis on classical music theory, and moves very highly influential modern styles to the back burner -- notably jazz. And there is essentially no discussion of music theory in other cultures (middle eastern, african, east asian, indian), nor current analysis of pop and rock music.
I have a BA in Music Theory, I think maybe you should consider again. First off, Jazz relies on the same fundamentals and extends them, everything from Classical music is somewhat relevant in Jazz. So if it's only Jazz theory exclusive to classical, it'd be an advanced book indeed.
Second, it literally has a chapter on Popular Music and another on Jazz Theory, and "Classical" is not found in its chapter titles. So I don't think your critique is accurate.
Third, history and time matter. "Theory" came first in "classical" contexts, with codified rules pre-dating even Bach. Jazz was a much later invention that built upon these and other traditions. Both of the Jazz theory books I used in my BA in Music Theoryhad many elementary topics already covered in Classical contexts.
Yes, I think people have this fantasy that Jazz has anything new to offer in terms of music theory. That's false, everything used in Jazz was already part of the practice of classical music sometimes centuries ago. For example, improvisation was common in Mozart time and extended chords were common already in the 19th century. The only difference may be the terminology used in Jazz circles, but this is something that can be learned later if you want to specialize in that style.
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I know a lot of people with music degrees. This is a widely acknowledged problem. It doesn't have a simple answer, especially as academic music programs are shrinking. You can't teach everything except at a survey level. You have to find faculty who can teach new topics at a college level. And students who are prepared to dive in. Music students tend to already be damn good musicians by the time they start college.
If programming is an analogy, it's said that once you've learned your first language, you can learn any other language in a jiffy. Also, a lot of higher level learning is "learning how to learn." Maybe it's better to have a standardized "first language" that students can learn in depth, and then let them move into other areas at their own discretion.
I don't have a college degree, but for me, classical music lessons were a great preparation for learning jazz, and I've picked up pop, rock, and folk music on my own. In fact, on the instrument that I play, the double bass, gaining proficiency and experience in jazz without that background is a brutal learning curve.
Anecdotally, I know a few people who spent decades working on and/or teaching middle eastern music in conservatories abroad, and they struggle greatly to find music departments in the US who will hire them. A problem I've seen firsthand is that there are a lot of senior professors who teach it hand wavy versions of it filtered through whatever books Euro orientalists wrote mid century and are threatened at the prospect of someone coming in there who has studied and practiced it for years in places where it's more of a living art form cutting into their position of expertise.
Where this ties in to your point is that part of the reason they really don't want experts is that they rarely have someone whose job it is to teach middle eastern music. They might have a guitar teacher with some experience with oud, a flute teacher who can passably play ney (usually with awful intonation), etc. For most schools, these other types of music are "add-ons" that they have their existing faculty teach.
> And there is essentially no discussion of music theory in other cultures (middle eastern, african, east asian, indian)...
To me, that above ^ looks like the biggest gap.
To be fair, the book doesn't claim to demonstrate theory of the "world music" (sic, a phrase as bad as it sounds).
My (brief and shallow) understanding is that most scholars of music in the western world just do not have enough knowledge to talk intelligently about non-western genres. Exceptions exist, of course, but they are quite rare.
[Other reason is that there is a lot of gate-keeping. I've seen that in Hindustani/Carnatic classical studies, FWIW, which is one my areas of interest]
I don't understand why this standard is always applied to westerners. When we go to other countries, are they explaining all the fundamentals of western music in addition to the theories of their own? "Yeah our students in Boston don't know anything about Carnatic rhythm, but over in Bengal they all learn counterpoint and fugue before they learn the traditional ornaments"
"Oh no, math degree... Where is 2+2=4?"
I was hoping to see if by "21st-Century" it meant "music theory that is applicable to the way modern music is generally written and interacted with". With details on things like microtonal music, increased focus on rhythmic theory, an increased appreciation for the role that timbre plays in the sound of music, the theoretical frameworks that underpin long standing musical traditions of other cultures and contrasting what makes each musical theory unique as a way of better understanding both western theories of music as well as the breadth of musical expression....
Nope! Just the same old, well beaten, rotting corpse of a horse in the form of a musical theory that entirely exists to prop up schenkerian analysis. The one that that racist, elitist music programs have been teaching since well before the 21st-Century. (The way you can tell is because it includes figured bass, which is totally irrelevant to any discussion that isn't about the harmonic style of 18th century european musicians.)
God forbid I want to, oh I don't know, make music that's similar to the kind that I actually listen to on a regular basis? Better understand its underpinnings and what makes it work in the ways that it does? No. Figured bass.
> The one that that racist, elitist music programs have been teaching since well before the 21st-Century.
Are you this guy? https://youtu.be/u2NKodxRO4A?si=xdOd7I1f_rnFN85C&t=255
Book: Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom
by Robert Hutchinson
Happy to see serialism covered! thanks
How can this be fairly labelled "for the 21st-Century Classroom" when even 20th-century techniques aren't adequately represented? Electronic and computer music techniques are conspicuously absent. Microtonality has a rich history as well which is not even footnoted here.
Indeed. Like so many books of this type, better title would be "Our Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom".
> On the piano there are 88 notes.
88 keys (usually) and unlimited notes.
I suppose a 1 key piano can have unlimited notes, at least until the key wears out.
I hated Battlestar Galactica for this.
Am I the only one who thinks that the classic music notation is 3x harder to learn than the basic music theory (without the rules of notation)?
I think that you can learn music theory (to play an instrument or to compose music e.g. in a "piano roll tool" / MIDI editor) much faster if you skip the classic notation. And I think that it is even better to learn the notation AFTER you understand the music theory.
I even made my own guide to music :D https://www.jampea.com/learn
This is a bit off topic, but since you mentioned your guide: I hope this doesn't come off as hostile, but the guide you linked contains a number of inaccuracies and oversimplifications - it's kind of naive in an endearing way, but also leaves the reader with the impression that it covers all there is to music. I guess what I'm saying is it's fine to restrict yourself in what you include in the guide, or even simplify things, but it should be clear that the topic (i.e. music) is far richer and more complex.
To give an example, this it of course not true:
> Only a limited set of frequencies is used in music. All these frequencies (that exist in music) can be played by a piano.
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https://youtu.be/Eq3bUFgEcb4 explains why music notation is the way it is. There are very good reasons for it.
The parts that are really weird (like the C clef) have mostly been obsoleted, unless you play the viola I guess.
It kind of reminds me of the periodic declaration someone makes on HN that textual programming sucks and we all need to switch to something else, usually visual programming in this case.
If someone takes time to deeply understand the advantages of the textual approach and then builds an alternative, I'll listen.
But at this point, anyone who is doing this and their criticism of the original approach is shallow and uninsightful, where it's basically just "it's old and it must therefore suck", is unlikely to produce a good answer.
I think that applies to the music notation case too. "Conventional" music notation isn't just a staff and a couple of types of notes. By the time you handle all the use cases that conventional notation handles, or even just a solid subset of it, your brand new notation is probably a lot less elegant than it started out as in someone's head.
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love that video, it made me lol so hard the first time I saw it :D
Classical composer and software engineer here. One of my goals is to help update score notation. I use something called "harmonic coloring" which is like a reduced MIDI notation: You color a note by its functional role (harmonic value) rather than an arbitrary hue in 0-11.
What this view shares with MIDI: Long rectangles representing the applied durations. How it is different: Occupies a minimal amount vertical space.
The color palette I'm using is intended to support people with colorblindness. The shades/hues of a color encodes the functional harmony. The root key signature (origin) is always the same color; and chords some distance r away on the circle of fifths is the shade/hue at that offset r.
There is a similar concept described in the Tantacruel video towards the end.
You can explore it here on Monic Theory. (mobile view should be fixed within 48 hours)
https://monictheory.com/project-templates
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As a semi-professional trombonist, C clefs are very important to me. Alto and tenor as-written, tenor as a means of transposing Bb treble, mezzo-soprano as a means of transposing F parts… they are not obsolete.
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I suppose it makes historical sense, and even ingeniously designed.
But it, and the piano black keys with it, are definitely not optimal. It makes playing in C easy, and playing in anything else hard. I've picked up a new instrument since ~2 months, and 1 month in I could already play all scales by by deliberately staying away from music notation, learning the raw distances/steps that make up a scale and how to play them, rather than the 'delta from C', which is how classical training taught me to think. (Same story for chords etc)
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It's all about the integers modulo 12. Classical notation obscures that (while making it easier to figure out which of the integers modulo 12 you're using, minus being able to assign them to integers in an obvious way).
I fun little exercise is to work out what would be different if we found aliens that also used 12 tone equal temperament, and also used a subset of 7 of those 12 notes to make their major scale, and also followed the same convention that we do of naming the notes of the major scale C, D, E, F, G, A, B like we do and naming the other 5 by naming a major scale note and adding modifier to tell how far away the not is from that like our # and b modifiers, and we both have the convention that when naming the notes of a transposed major scale we use each letter exactly once--except they picked a different 7 notes to be their major scale.
Our 12 tone scale with the major scale note names and notes not in the major scale marked with dots looks like this:
Suppose the aliens have a very different idea of what makes a good sounding major scale, and their system is:
Suppose we transpose ours up 7 tones. We can represent this graphically by drawing out major pattern for two octaves, and below that drawing our major scale pattern with names replaced by X (X.X.XX.X.X.X) shifted over by 7, then look above to see how to name the notes (remembering we can only use each letter once):
Our major scale transposed up 7 is G A B C D E F#.
Let's do the same 7 tone transposition for the aliens. Their major scale pattern is XXX.XXXX..., so we get
That's B Cbbbb Dbbbb Ebbb Fbbbb Gbbbb Abbbb.
At first that seems very different from our 7 tone transposition. We only need one sharp and they need 23 flats! But wait...mod 12 we have -23 = 1.
It turns out for all transpositions if you count sharps in your key signature as +1 and flats as -1, the key signature for a transposition by N tones will have 7N sharps or flats mod 12 in both our systems.
In general if you have a T note equal temperament scale with an M note subset major scale, transposing the major scale up N tones gives a key signature with NM mod T sharps/flats.
I'll leave it as an exercise to prove that. Hint: you can think of a transposition as a two step operation: (1) a shift that keeps the same letters and just adds sharps or flats to move the notes, and (2) a renaming that changed the name you use to name the first note of the transposed scale. Think about what each of those operations does to the number of sharps and flats needed.
> It's all about the integers modulo 12.
Only in 12TET.
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didn't find a single audio file; only links to unaffiliated YouTube videos which want me to watch ads first.
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
I feel that quote more likely is pointed at "music appreciation" as a written work, versus understanding the theory. I know a few musicians who are happy to use terminology from theory, "I love to write songs with diminished and sustained chords".
This seems like a great resource to me, a classically trained pianist who is now playing different types of music.
There are several music samples in there...
Example: https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/mt21c/DiatonicChordsInMaj...
skill issue.
Music theory for the 21st century with notation from several centuries earlier. Hmm.... sorry but tracker's table-like views are much easier. And so are most DAWs gantt-like editors. 100 times easier to comprehend than notation having the same not written in three different ways, and then some.
DAWs have been around for a few years now. If you were right and they really were 100 times easier to comprehend people would you not see people using printouts of piano rolls to read from?
What you’re suggesting is actually hundreds of years old from well before the existence of computers or DAWs but still no one is using it.
It turns out that judging the relative length of lines is difficult at speed compared to reading distinct symbols.
Also that 88 note piano rolls are a very space inefficient way of representing music on a page. Even a chromatic stave would be inefficient.
That really matters for people that want to sight read with other musicians and have as much viewable as possible in a compact area.
Finally, standard notation is very rich and evolved, as you’d expect for something in active use for so long. It has extensions for lots of instruments.
When people say notation can’t show X it’s usually that they just don’t know it can.
The only downside is that you have to learn it.
Because people doing piano have never seen DAWs, or never tried to use them? Because computers are bad, and piano is good. What a nonsense! And I've heard this argument hundred of times, and then at the end most music is produced/recorded/mastered using DAWs.
I have friends who have actual degree in music composition from actual conservatories, so most of them, professionals, who actually compose and produce actual music for movies, for games, for whatever you want - well all of them use DAWs and all of them are on Ableton or Logic or something along the line, and exactly ZERO of this nonsensical notation that takes more effort to master than music itself.
Most of the new music that gets composed is written in gantt charts or tracker rows, believe it or not. Dig around, and you'll find out.
The English language is messy as hell, and yet, here we are using it because it's a shared set of rules and symbols that pretty much everyone who wants to join in on this conversation already knows.
Same with staff notation: If you want to communicate music to other people, learning the slightly clunky but universally-known written language is generally the way to go.
No, English language is easy as shit. You think tis difficult, because you never tried Russian, French, or Mandarin - then we discuss again. Had it not for the simplicity of English Language, it wouldn't be so omnipresent. So you are so wrong on this account.
And I really want to see you communicate wobbling bass or fast random notes. Well you can - in Studel.cc - but is impossible in this notation. Same for complex drum sections (as in dnb, yes), and I can give you fair amount of other examples where medieval notation is useless.
The choir director at my church, Michael Dodds (UNCSA), covers the early development of musical notation, "From Modes to Keys in Early Modern Music Theory" [0]. Currently on sabbatical at Cambridge. Once in a while during rehearsal he will give an impromptu lecture on music history, always interesting.
[0] https://a.co/d/0bLcrlyE
> learning the slightly clunky but universally-known written language is generally the way to go
A certain Amazon Web Services comes to mind…
It would be really hard for me to improvise a clarinet solo based on the melody line in that kind of notation, which is something I have to do pretty frequently in my old style jazz band using fake books.
I'm sympathetic to that view; I spent all evening writing electronic music by programming it into a sequencer and spent a lot of my early career (starting in about 1999) programming using a piano roll.
But "easier for what purpose"? It'd be really tough to read at a gig off a piano-roll.
It took a long time to become comfortable with the fact that standard notation is mostly a suggestion that doesn't contain the years of context I need to get through a big band gig on double bass... but once I realized that my ability to sight read got good enough that I stopped wishing there were some other kind of notation to read.
Sorry, brov, but improvisation is not "following a notation", but exactly the contrary. And perhaps you should try to once in a lifetime use a DAW, I bet you may find yourself amazed by how easy it is to actually read these squares.
I’m sympathetic to this viewpoint, but most music students in the classroom will be playing instruments or singing rather than working in DAWs.
The instruments, music, and notation all evolved together in a shared tradition that make them well-suited for one another.