Music Theory: Answering “The Why”
i was at rehearsal the other night when the question came about where should somebody start who wants to know more about music theory.
fair enough, but talk about an unintentionally loaded question. if you picked up a few books from the library they would start out with the fundamentals (notes, clefs, keys, scales, intervals, chords…), but after you learned that information what would you really have learned and what could you do with it?
i think when somebody says they want to learn music theory what they really are wanting to know is really “how does music work”. on that hand i don’t think many books do a great job (although i’d encourage others to happily prove me wrong and i’ll share that info).
along the lines of my previous theory post (making the simple more complex) is that learning ‘theory’ should be synonymous with teaching how music works; the skills needed how to create music i.e. composition (and implicitly imitation) rather than teaching students how to only analyze and dissect music.
thinking about this in practical terms this would mean making some big changes on how I would teach lower level theory fundamentals, asking students to transcribe and analyze a melody and/or chord progression that they liked (pain in the ass to grade). the big point here is to figure out how intervals and chords work in the context of a real piece of music (unlike the traditional way of teaching them divorced from the actual music making experience)
to skip ahead a bit the big point I’m continually trying to make is that:
- the best way to learn music theory is to analyze music that is ‘interesting’ (to us)
- this analysis should focus on answering the question ‘why?’
- learning music fundamentals (and music theory) should be connected to answering ‘the why?’
