Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

We're going to disagreee about this. I do get where you're coming from and I actually don't care for musical notation; I can read it but I can't sight-read to play so studying notes on a staff involves a lot of painfully keyboard pecking (or occasional cheat transpositions into a DAW) followed by a bunch of more fluid experimentation with the musical elements I played so badly, and it's during this experimental phase that I may or may not learn something.

Like you I'd much rather read text about the psychology of musical perception and the why of music. I disliked the notation drills etc. when I had piano lessons as a kid, but as I never had a natural ear for chords or harmony (and thus frequently found myself wanting to improvise things but without a good understanding of how to go about it) I came back to the theoretical stuff as an adult, and ended up getting interested in other musical traditions like Arabic and Indian styles as well as the western one (though I don't want to oversell my knowledge or skills here). Different traditions use different schemes but they all have some way to codify things, because unless you stay within a single tradition or are blessed with an eidetic memory chances are you'll need to note things down at some point.

Where I'm disagreeing with you is on the terminologyl I hold that when people search for 'music theory' it's because they want to be conversant with other people on the basics, even if they just want the bare minimum of how to distinguish between major and minor, construct a few basic chords, or read/write a melody outside of a piano roll. It's unfortunate that the label 'music theory' has become associated with this basic stuff; it's as if we used 'literature' to refer to basic spelling, grammar, and vocabulary and used some other term to describe the actual study of artistic writing - but that's how it is.

Okay, okay, okay! I get it!

Now, explain to me the music theory of the D major section of the Bach Chaconne! Say the first few notes of that section after the opening open D string and the D an octave higher on the A string; or if want to avoid the open string, play the D of the open D string on the G string and the other D on the D string.

Then what is the role of the notes repeated three times, and those triplets repeated several times? These triplets are insistent? Heifetz played them this way, but not all violinists do!

Then what is the connection from the last few bars of the D major section and the first few bars of the following D minor section? Or the last of the D major is the climax of the piece, and the start of the D minor is a catharsis?

For more, at the beginning of the second to last bar of the D major section, there is a chord the first G above middle C, the next G up, and the B above that. The notes are quarter notes except the upper G is an eighth note and changes to the D just below, also an eighth note. Well, what is the role of the change from that G to that D? Some violinists emphasize that change from the G to the D a fourth below, that is, make the D easy to hear and the fall something dramatic, say, as some kind of resignation. What's going on here? What likely did Bach have in mind?

Rostropovich, with his recording with von Karajan of the Dvorak concerto, made something really special at the beginning of the second movement: He has some depiction of remembered pathos. So, how'd he (Dvorak and/or Rostropovich) do that?

From Rostropovich I hear emphasis with vibrato, volume, and tone color and careful timing, phrasing. It's passionate music. What's going on? It sounds a little like some abstraction of some speech with pathos.

Maybe easier is the Prelude of the first Bach piece for solo cello and, there, the rising chromatic passage to what is apparently the climax of that piece. So, what else is going on there just besides that rising chromatic passage?

Then there is the cello solo early in the first act of Die Walkure, maybe representing the girl? How to write a cello solo that sounds like a compassionate girl?

For some more, there is the duet, "Presentation of the Rose" in Der Rosenkavalier with Barbara Bonney and Anne Sophie von Otter as at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuS337uc-4Y

Some parts of the duet with the two voices are just marvelous, and I'm not understanding how Strauss did that. What's going on? How'd he do it?

For more, there's too much going on in Ein Heldenleben, but I'd be happy knowing a little about what Strauss did there, even how the girl, that is, the violin solo, worked, or even just how Stauss made the girl so comforting in the last section.

Are such issues what you have in mind as music theory?

How'd I get into such questions? One night on a radio I heard Beethoven's 7th symphony, and it seemed easy to like, e.g., the dance. Occasionally Dad gave me some money, and I bought some recordings, Vivaldi through Rachmaninoff. Then I was a grad student in math at Indiana University in a dorm next to the music building, and a Stern protege put his old Italian violin under my left chin, gave me a lesson, and I took a violin course, starting with how to tune the thing. I learned the music theory of perfect fifths, that is, three times the frequency of the lower open string is the same frequency as two times the frequency of the upper open string, and the beats between those two can be used to tune to perfect fifths. Not long after making it in some form through much of the Chaconne I got too busy to continue on. So, I like the music but don't fully understand just why. Music theory has an explanation?

I'm surprised nobody mentioned that terrible font... Any chance you could fix it?

Standard notation can help build a mental representation of how the music sounds. With some training, one can process the standardised fingering annotations into physical movement really fast too.

Tabs are physical movement instructions. With a lot of training, some people can process this into a limited mental representation of how the music sounds.

If you think about it, it's quite analog to the difference between vector and bitmap images.

Of course it's not. I was just responding to the thought that a theory explains an observed phenomenon, and trying to show how for at least one definition of music that the OP was indeed "music theory."

It never claims to be "a comprehensive guide to all things musical" or "a theory of all music," but it certainly qualifies as music theory.