Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People
academic.udayton.edu

You very quickly find yourself making statements like this (taken from the second PDF in this series): "A tuplet is any non-standard division of a note. These are usually written as a group of notes delineated with a bracket and a number showing the division being made." It's correct in grammar and sense, and about as exciting as a lawn-mower repair manual.

This is probably the best series of music theory cheatsheets I've ever seen, though... just about any other music theory resource you can find, online or off, gets bogged down immediately in sleep-inducing language. I had to poke around a bit to find the example above.

The real problem is the "building blocks" approach to music theory pedagogy; that is, making students learn all of the basic concepts before they can do anything remotely interesting or useful.

It's really, really logical. It's also a sort of mental torture, in the realm of music theory, because a lot of the building blocks are arbitrarily weird for historical reasons, and it takes too much meaningless memorization before you can do something as trivial as sight-reading a piece of music you could already pick out by ear 10x faster. What about doing basic analysis of a piece of music? So, so many building blocks required first....

I think it's possible to make learning theory enjoyable, but it'd be damned hard (and not possible in a static form).

That said, if you have the external motivation already to make the slog through the basics, these are solid references to help get the details straight in your head.