Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

I know for me, the stage at which I was doing the very simple HTML examples you listed was when I was 13. Back when you're that young, just playing around with that stuff was SO FUN for some reason. As a 29 year old guy if I were just starting out I'd be much more inclined to try to skip that step and make stuff more real-world.

The equivalent in music theory would be simply playing around with the white keys on the piano (C major). Making interesting melodies (but ultimately kinda boring melodies like mary had a little lamb). To your young ears, this would be very interesting and fun. You'd play around with this for weeks and weeks and make small observations. For example, you might notice B->C has a sense of resolution to end the melody, or internalizing what C->G feels like by just playing it a lot and singing it. You might notice that E->F feels smaller and has more of a "pull" to it than A->B (in the context of C major). It's this stage that's so crucial for later understanding music theory.

Adults want to skip the simple exploration and just dive right into Beethoven. We think we can use our strong analytical sense to just book-learn music theory. What I've learned is that it's much more fruitful to make observations first and then learn what music theory calls those observations.

When you're writing HTML at 13 years old, you don't really know the high level concept of a "mark-up language" and how it might be manifested, you just know that there are parts in angle brackets that don't show up on the page but control the content. Later in high school when you learn the concept of a mark-up language you make that connection to HTML with extreme ease because all those memories of changing background="green" to background="black" flood back to you.

The content of these cheat sheets describes what a music major learns in the first semester or two of music theory classes. But there are people who get PhD's in music theory. What do you think they study for all those years? It's not this.

Saying this is music theory is like saying arithmetic is math. It's not wrong, exactly, but it's leaving out a lot. People spend the first 12 years or more of their math education learning the notation, learning formulas, at least partly because you need to know that stuff in order to do any real math (we'll leave the discussion of whether this is the optimal pedagogy for another day, shall we?). You could say, "but people googling math want to understand why 2+2=4," but if you don't know that 2+2=4, there's not much point in trying to learn why. You could also say that what people learned in high school is what most people call math, but we all know that what people learn in high school math doesn't have much to do with what real mathematicians do.

"Real music theory" uses the contents of these cheat sheets (and many, many other things) to describe pieces of music and to try to understand things like: why did this composer choose the notes and rhythms they did? What can we use to justify the subjective observation that a composer or time period had a unified music style? What are the assumptions of musical language that govern musical composition without necessarily being known to the composers? Why does this collection of notes have meaning? What is that meaning? What does the content of this music tell us about how it should be performed?

The best of my music theory classes tried to keep a clear line from what we were learning to the kinds of questions above. The worst classes we spent a lot of time doing worksheets with the musical equivalent of times tables and algebraic equations, ad nauseam.

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I'd also like to note that the things that appear under the aegis of introductory music theory are a strange hybrid of techniques, reflecting the multiple purposes of music theory for theorists, musicologists, composers, and practitioners. So you get things that don't help much with analysis, like species counterpoint (probably a useful exercise for composers, and maybe for musicologists since it is really a historical curiosity, but not really useful for anyone else) or realising figured bass (really only necessary if you're going to be performing baroque music in period style on a keyboard instrument).

You could again say similar things about high school math of course.

Also, I think although knowing theory would help you play a song with an instrument, it's not required, is it? More likely knowing music theory is for understanding/appreciation of the composition/structure of the music. So no, playing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" on an instrument is NOT equivalent to writing "Hello world!" program. On the other hand, composing a super simple but complete song is closer to writing a "Hello world!" (or a Fibonacci series) program.

I understand the desire but it's also very important to realize that these things take a LONG time to develop. You can't really expect yourself to grasp chord progressions until you have a firm understanding in scales and you can't just gloss over it and be familiar with it, you have to internalize it. You have to get scales under your fingers... you have to feel the pull of the leading tone to the tonic... you have to be able to sing them and know them inside and out or your knowledge of chord progressions will be built on a shaky foundation.

The equivalent to project euler would be to just compose your own songs. Seriously, compose then analyze. Since music is subjective there's no way to say, "you're song is correct, move on to the next song". Also, there's no real correlation between song writing and theory knowledge that I know of. You can know about theory a lot but still not be good at writing songs. Also knowing theory doesn't make you a good musician by any stretch of the imagination. Music theory is descriptive, not prescriptive (i.e. it doesn't tell you HOW to write or what you should write, but rather is just a language to describe what you've written)

You can know about programming like if you're good at math you probably have a sense of what programming is about but until you sit down and type out some code, you're likely to not be any good at programming.

> My main goal is to be able write songs of quality at least slightly above total crap.

You will write total crap. The best thing you can do is come to terms that you'll write crap probably for years and that's okay. Here's the first song I ever wrote way long ago:

http://www.noteflight.com/scores/view/4dd02b77f3dc95b0de340c...

Bleh... not exactly something I'm super proud of other than the fact that I did indeed finish it and I was honest with myself about what level of song I could write at the time that I wrote it. I'm still not a super great musician, but I've at least improved every song since that one!