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Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

tobyrush.com

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Re: Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

#81

Post by commontone »

ewoodrich wrote: post #6

It piqued my interest from the cached thumbnails, and I was able to find a mirror of the complete set: http://academic.udayton.edu/tobyrush/theorypages/complete.pd... It's licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND, and Toby W. Rush is the author. Great resources by the way, better and more concise than a lot of theory info for beginners (bordering on intermediate, if you are able to get to some of the more advanced sc…

Hey, thanks for the nice hug, everyone! It's been a fun night. :)

I updated the mirror that ewoodrich referenced; what was up there before was a slightly older version. The new one has a few more pages in it and a few typos fixed here and there.

I've also swapped out the page on my site with a redirect to the mirror, since my web hosting service has rebooted the server twice now. The mirror is on my faculty web space at work, so we'll let them worry about it now! :)

No worries, though. Glad you all are finding the materials useful.

Re: Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

#82

Post by quadrangle »

theOnliest wrote: post #36
quadrangle wrote: post #28

This isn't "music theory" (although almost everyone thinks it is). This is "music jargon and notation systems". A theory is something that explains an observed phenomenon. This jargon and notation stuff doesn't explain music, it just guides you through the jargon and notation. I have a music degree and learned all this stuff and a lot more. This presentation is an excellent , high-quality overview of this non-theory…

> A theory is something that explains an observed phenomenon. That's true, but if you take the "observed phenomenon" to be "Western, common-practice tonal music (and notation)," then this certainly helps to explain it. It's certainly what gets taught in undergraduate music theory classes (much of it in "fundamentals" courses). Graduate work in music theory involves doing exactly what you say: explaining observed phen…

"Western, common-practice tonal music (and notation)," is not anything close to a good definition of the word "music".

Re: Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

#83

Post by quadrangle »

zeroxfe wrote: post #48
quadrangle wrote: post #28

This isn't "music theory" (although almost everyone thinks it is). This is "music jargon and notation systems". A theory is something that explains an observed phenomenon. This jargon and notation stuff doesn't explain music, it just guides you through the jargon and notation. I have a music degree and learned all this stuff and a lot more. This presentation is an excellent , high-quality overview of this non-theory…

I'm not sure how parent became the top comment, but "music theory" is absolutely appropriate here. This terminology is commonly accepted by musicians, educators, and practitioners. OP's link could say "western music theory", but that seems unnecessary given the audience. Secondly, why would you call this junk? This is actually very useful for people learning to play, and for those who want to understand the basics of…

Indeed "music psychology" is a good term but is almost a truism. There is no such thing as music otherwise. Music is only psychology. Everything about patterns of dots on paper and the theories about them is valid when it aligns with psychology and invalid otherwise. A pattern in notation that isn't psychologically experienced is not music.

Teaching the notation by the hypotheses about music that the canon of "music theory" gives us is like teaching chemistry by 100 year old diagrams and names of chemicals.

To be perfectly fair, the post here does do a BETTER job with the Western-notation-scope than most other examples.

Re: Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

#84

Post by quadrangle »

anigbrowl wrote: post #60
subdane wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowing how to spell doesn't make you a writer. I think the parent is trying to explain that there's a cultural bias and inscrutability with respect to how music theory is taught. Does learning a notation system make one a theorist? One can be a western musician in, say, a jazz tradition, understand theory, have theories and play music and have never used the system of notation explained in the otherwise awesome comi…

The poster above is trying to one-up the OP. Of course a notational cheat sheet is not the same thing as a rigorous intellectual foundation, but the phrase 'music theory' is the most common term to describe the traditional notation and grammar for the western music corpus by a mile . That's what most people want when they search for 'music theory'. It's not a good use of the word 'theory' but the context within which…

> That's what most people want when they search for 'music theory'.

I think most people are actually thinking, "I want to understand music more." when they search for "music theory", and instead of learning deeper understanding about the nature of music, they are taught about notation traditions. Then, most people decide they do not especially care about "music theory" anymore. The folks who continue are those who like studying notation patterns.

Re: Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

#86

Post by quadrangle »

pierrec wrote: post #37
quadrangle wrote: post #28

This isn't "music theory" (although almost everyone thinks it is). This is "music jargon and notation systems". A theory is something that explains an observed phenomenon. This jargon and notation stuff doesn't explain music, it just guides you through the jargon and notation. I have a music degree and learned all this stuff and a lot more. This presentation is an excellent , high-quality overview of this non-theory…

This is music theory, or at the very least, the bulk of the document is about the theory of harmony. The first few pages may give the impression of solely exposing jargon, but as you progress through the pages, the author moves on to the theory of harmony , or what has been referred to as such for the last century and a half (at least). I'm not saying the expression is semantically perfectly sound, but it's been in u…

Actually, this theory of harmony is largely wrong. Harmony is actually explained in my original post's link: http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/ttss.html

Just like other fields, people actually do advance in our understanding and figure out what was wrong in the old theories. The music world has just done a very poor job of disseminating the updated understanding. That's probably because academic music institutions are too often about cultural preservation rather than about furthering our understanding.

Re: Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

#87

Post by [deleted] »

coldtea wrote: post #66
duairc wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want real understanding of music in a useful way for real people, I recommend Bob Snyder's book "Music and Memory: An Introduction" which was actually written to teach creative artistic people about how music actually works rather than how aristocratic European music notation works. Thank you! I've long been suspicious of so-called music theory for exactly the reasons you outline. I always wanted to learn mo…

> Thank you! I've long been suspicious of so-called music theory for exactly the reasons you outline. I always wanted to learn more about music and why it "works" as you say, so I assumed what I wanted to learn was music theory, but then when I tried to learn it it didn't seem to explain any of the things I was looking for. I'll have to check out that book. The reasons he mentions are bogus -- simply his bias against…

[deleted]

Re: Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

#88

Post by quadrangle »

coldtea wrote: post #66
duairc wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want real understanding of music in a useful way for real people, I recommend Bob Snyder's book "Music and Memory: An Introduction" which was actually written to teach creative artistic people about how music actually works rather than how aristocratic European music notation works. Thank you! I've long been suspicious of so-called music theory for exactly the reasons you outline. I always wanted to learn mo…

> Thank you! I've long been suspicious of so-called music theory for exactly the reasons you outline. I always wanted to learn more about music and why it "works" as you say, so I assumed what I wanted to learn was music theory, but then when I tried to learn it it didn't seem to explain any of the things I was looking for. I'll have to check out that book. The reasons he mentions are bogus -- simply his bias against…

I did mention I have a music degree, right? I teach music lessons for a living. So if you were implying that I'm a scientist who doesn't get the value of this notation-system stuff and am just being pedantic about the word "theory", you're totally wrong.

The reason I complain about the term is exactly because of the post above yours: people actually do think they are going to learn explanations about the nature music and they don't get that.

Re: Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

#89

Post by frik »

tiglionabbit wrote: post #24
tobr wrote: post #9

I appreciate the style of presentation, but why do we still pretend this is "music" theory? Most of this is completely useless for anyone who is interested in understanding music that wasn't written by people in powdered wigs. For some actually useful music theory, I can recommend the goldmine that is Ethan Hein's blog: http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/category/music/music-theory/

The guide I usually see people point to is RavenSpiral's https://www.scribd.com/doc/5220863/Ravenspiral-Guide-to-Musi...

Thanks.

I found the PDF using Google: https://www.google.com/#q=Ravenspiral+Guide+to+Music+Theory+... (Scripd.com is annoying, like a PDF download scam)

Re: Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

#90

Post by kev6168 »

Based on my own experience, I find the No. 1 obstacle in learning music theory is the difficulty, _in the early stage of learning_, to practice the knowledge to gain a real sense of how the stuff is used and why.

Take computer programming as an example. After 15 minutes of HTML lesson, a newbie can already look at her creation in a browser and the html file on hard disk, and have fun tweaking it (My home page, remember the days?). An hour of Java lesson can result in several variations of "Hello World!" programs, created by the student. Basically, people can put their hands on the knowledge and use it to produce somewhat useful/tangible stuff.

Not so much when learning music theory. After enduring the bombardment of names/concepts/terms/maths and other stuff for quite a while, I don't have the slightest idea where I can practice in using them to analyze or write some music.

I wish there is a lecture in the format of "One hundred songs for one hundred music concepts". The songs should be stupidly simple (children's songs, simple pops, short classical pieces, etc.). Each lesson concentrates on only _one_ concept appeared in the piece, explains what it is, how it is used, why it is used in that way, and how its application makes nice sound, etc. Basically, show me the _effect_ for each concept in a simple real world setting. Then more importantly, give me exercises to write a few bars of music using this concept, no matter how bad my writings are, as long as I am applying the new knowledge.

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