Why you should be mad at theory

[pauln]

meaning you would be hard pressed to find any musical tradition that uses the scale, meaning its just a 20th century invention, Scriabin I think being the first to use it to any extent - therefore it cannot be something 'fundamental' to music. Also, the 7th in the harmonic series is so out of tune relative to LD it hardly qualifies as the same scale

In the modern world, what we consider fundamental has been updated by new discovered things (fields and particles, cells and alpha amino acids, set theory and group theory) so I don't think one can just claim that something can't be fundamental just because it is relatively new and wasn't known or used in the past.
What I found was the Lydian Dominant, not the overtone series; I make no claim that they are the same scale (doesn't concern me that the overtone series is out of tune; if you have ever played with an audio frequency oscillator you will have noticed that pitch and frequency are progressively divergent - frequency extremes diverge from the ears' sense of pitch).

[m_d]

The main thing I would like to see as an education system that isn’t full of academics of a similar background talking in a similar way and a system of educational accreditation that sees value in tacit knowledge and embodied skill. But people have been championing that for generations.

More or less what people like Barry Harris and Alvin Batiste were saying. More like us should be teaching at universities. Both were hugely influential to generations of musicians.

[rpjazzguitar]

Hard to believe as the scale does not exist in any historical musical tradition, except perhaps an odd occurrence in an Indian raag, but even then its not a recognized thaat

I don't know what counts as historical tradition, but LD is the most used sound in Baiao.

[RLetson]

It isn't only the classical world where "repertoire is on a pedestal." When I started going to workshops in the 1980s, there were always students who focused on playing pieces by particular player-composers pretty much as they'd heard them on the recordings. Which players (and styles) went through the amateur-picker subculture: Leo Kottke, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Michael Hedges, and Doc Watson were particular heroes, and later, Celtic repertory (particularly O'Carolan's harp pieces) was pursued with enormous intensity. I recall one kid at a fingerstyle festival John Stropes ran in Milwaukee--he was Japanese, spoke almost no English, and only came out of his room to attend sessions and perform. He could pull off Kottke pieces note-perfect--but he didn't depart from the originals, nor did he jam with any of the other participants. Years later at CAAS (Chet Atkins Appreciation Society) conventions, I saw similar focus from pickers who idolized Chet and Merle Travis. Some of them could jam (and Tommy Emmanuel would jam with anybody), but there was a lot of not so much stealin' from Chet as flat-out reproducing him.

I completely get the urge to play great pieces with the same authority and accuracy as their originators, and pursuing the technical control that allows it. Godknows I spent enough time trying to get my fingers around "Anji" or "Deep River Blues" my own self. But eventually I recognized that what I really enjoyed was playing with others, and that required a rather different kind of workshop experience, which I found at the Augusta Heritage Swing Weeks--where workshops often mix technical topics (say, chord construction or swing rhythm right-hand technique or building a solo) with plain old playing along. In that context, repertory is the stuff we enjoy and have in common.

[Jimmy Smith]

I thought of an instance where I can bond with the mad at theory gang.

So I've been contemplating what scales to use for the flatted scale sound that organists use occasionally. I though of phrygian obviously. I also thought of mix flat 6. However one that took me a while to think of was simple natural minor. It gives that elegant flatted note sound over a major or minor chord without sounding too weird. However cst says, 'no you can't use natural minor in jazz!'

[rpjazzguitar]

Why I get mad at theory is this:

I have had a few nuggets of theory turn out to be absolute gold. By that, I mean my playing was transformed for the better in a matter of hours. So, I feel I can't ignore it and wouldn't want to.

Much more often, I've been puzzled, overwhelmed or had my time wasted by theory or purveyors of theory.

This happens in every field. Some people are pragmatic, others prefer the abstract, everything in between these poles or entirely outside of the lines is also represented. Some people are plain spoken about it, others seem incomprehensible, even when they clearly know the material, as in, they clearly solved the problem but the explanation of how they did it was gibberish.

I recall, in a technical field, someone in a discussion with a colleague saying, "Is there any way we can have this conversation without me first having to read everything you've read?".

I recall one poster on another music forum recommending playing every possible triad pair (maj, min, dim, aug) against every other possible triad pair and playing those notes against every possible bass note, in every key. How many things is that to try? First you have to unlock the key to eternal life. Then, after multiple normal lifespans, you have finally heard all the sounds, memorized the ones you like and can finally learn a song. And, when anybody took issue, the response was self-righteous and punishing. More theory was his solution to everything. And, btw, his playing sounded like it. One odd sounding juxtaposition after the next.

[Jimmy Smith]

Then use it as efficiently as you can to be musical. Rather than exhaustively to sound robotic.

[ragman1]

I don't understand this thread. Why would I be mad at theory?

[Christian Miller]

It isn't only the classical world where "repertoire is on a pedestal." When I started going to workshops in the 1980s, there were always students who focused on playing pieces by particular player-composers pretty much as they'd heard them on the recordings. Which players (and styles) went through the amateur-picker subculture: Leo Kottke, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Michael Hedges, and Doc Watson were particular heroes, and later, Celtic repertory (particularly O'Carolan's harp pieces) was pursued with enormous intensity. I recall one kid at a fingerstyle festival John Stropes ran in Milwaukee--he was Japanese, spoke almost no English, and only came out of his room to attend sessions and perform. He could pull off Kottke pieces note-perfect--but he didn't depart from the originals, nor did he jam with any of the other participants. Years later at CAAS (Chet Atkins Appreciation Society) conventions, I saw similar focus from pickers who idolized Chet and Merle Travis. Some of them could jam (and Tommy Emmanuel would jam with anybody), but there was a lot of not so much stealin' from Chet as flat-out reproducing him.

I completely get the urge to play great pieces with the same authority and accuracy as their originators, and pursuing the technical control that allows it. Godknows I spent enough time trying to get my fingers around "Anji" or "Deep River Blues" my own self. But eventually I recognized that what I really enjoyed was playing with others, and that required a rather different kind of workshop experience, which I found at the Augusta Heritage Swing Weeks--where workshops often mix technical topics (say, chord construction or swing rhythm right-hand technique or building a solo) with plain old playing along. In that context, repertory is the stuff we enjoy and have in common.

Yes, and I feel this is becoming more and more the case with rock players aiming to play shred solos note perfect and jazzers nailing transcription of Brecker or whoever perfectly but not releasing any of their own stuff. The algorithm also encourage this - if you release a video talking about or covering another player it will always do better than your own music.

Furthermore Instagram etc seems to be discouraging players from improvising because of fear of imperfection….

[Christian Miller]

I thought of an instance where I can bond with the mad at theory gan.

So I've been contemplating what scales to use for the flatted scale sound that organists use occasionally. I though of phrygian obviously. I also thought of mix flat 6. However one that took me a while to think of was simple natural minor. It gives that elegant flatted note sound over a major or minor chord without sounding too weird. However cst says, 'no you can't use natural minor in jazz!'

Stick around a while and you see more and more of this….

[reventlov]

I'm not mad at theory if it's taught well, with direct relevance to actual music. Sometimes though, I'm mad at how theory is taught - isn't that really what this thread is about, and what the speaker in the video in the OP is saying?

[Christian Miller]

Maybe. I do think Gjerdingen seems to think Roman numeral analysis and stuff is inherently a bad thing compared to the old figured bass practice etc, but I don’t actually think the other people involved in the Partimento revival actually agree, including Sanguinetti and most definitely Michael Koch (whose video BWV posted.)

The other thing is - if you sit grade 8 ABRSM music theory in the UK you’ll be asked to complete a baroque trio sonata extract from a figured bass. So what is that if not partimento? Is this not mainstream in the US for some reason? I don’t get it.

Mind you only nerds take grade 8 theory. Grade 5 is the requirement for the more advanced instrumental grades so most stop there.

A friend of mine teaches improvisation at junior Royal college and the kids there all know figured bass purely as something annoying and irrelevant they have to do for exams. It’s apparently never occurred to them or their teachers that figured bass might be used for improvisation or composition. So clearly the theory itself is not the problem….

[stratology]

I thought of an instance where I can bond with the mad at theory gang.

The 'mad at theory' thread title may not have been the best choice of how to frame it.

Maybe 'what's wrong with music education?' is a better choice?


And I think a lot of issues are down to lack of clarity of addressing a subject, or asking the 'right' question.


Meaning:

- confusing 'music theory' with one single aspect of what music is about: pitch, and pitch relationships - while ignoring all other aspects, like anything related to time and rhythm, expressiveness, timbre, tone, sound in general, intention of the artist, mindset of the listener, and so many more...

- trying to use single specific aspects of music, like harmonic complexity and movement, to claim that there is some objective quality or value to the music. I think this is one of the main underlying issues of how music theory is taught and perceived.

- the motivation for that. The Adam Neely video, correctly, mentions supremacy, but I think it can be viewed even more broadly: if you really love a specific piece of music, it is fundamentally human and perfectly understandable that you want to find a definable, objective reason why the music you like is superior. Even more so if you take human insecurities and fears into account. Things we don't get can be scary, and admitting that we like something that has no objective 'high' value whatsoever takes getting used to.

- wrongly assuming that a specific set of observations - like how harmony in 18th century European music works - is applicable to other types of music of other times and geographical locations. And, once again, that it can be used to establish a 'value hierarchy' between different styles.

- lack of clear intention of how theory is taught. As in, do I want to teach music history, or do I want to teach how to compose. These are fundamentally different.

- the inherent dilemma that the best artists, who really know (intellectually or intuitively) how to create music, are often not able (or willing) to teach their knowledge. And that educators often are terrible as artists, and lack a fundamental understanding of how artists operate.
Again, it's only human to stick with things that are easy to identify and communicate - like pitch relationships/harmony - and teach what you know. And one does not have to be an artist to be a good music history teacher.



Music education is inherently very difficult, because there are so many intangibles, so much of music perception is subjective.


Clarity of what we look at makes the content more valuable: taking a college history class that looks at pitch relationships of a specific type of music of a specific time period and geographical area has value.
Just don't expect it to be a class about composition, musical execution, a hypothetical 'general theory of music', an attempt to establish 'value' or 'quality' of music, etc. - that wasn't the intent in the first place.
Criticism does come in when it's not clearly defined and communicated by the educators what the intent of the class is.

[reventlov]

I do think Gjerdingen seems to think Roman numeral analysis and stuff is inherently a bad thing compared to the old figured bass practice etc, but I don’t actually think the other people involved in the Partimento revival actually agree, including Sanguinetti and most definitely Michael Koch (whose video BWV posted.)

Having studied both systems, I'm very definitely in the camp of those "other people"
I studied figured bass decades ago, and since passing the exams that I needed that knowledge to pass, I've never given it a second's thought. It was part of the requirement for the written part of an exam in classical guitar teaching that I needed to pass for job seeking purposes, although it bore zero discernable relationship to the practicalities of playing the classical guitar. In jazz playing, which is mainly where my interest lay even then, it is irrelevant. Some knowledge of Roman numeral analysis, on the other hand, is an invaluable tool for jazz, and pretty much any other kind of music also.

[RLetson]

Another of my "I am not a jazz musician" posts:

It's a bit uncanny how many of the comments here and in related threads remind me of tensions and discussions in my old actual field of English/literary studies. What is worth studying? What tools and bodies of knowledge does a literary scholar need? And how does the usual lit curriculum connect to, say, a creative writing regimen? Or any writing regimen, for that matter? (I taught general writing courses, and my wife--who is also a writer--taught creative writing for as long as she could take reading student stories.)

In my old world, "theory" would be the various branches of rhetoric, linguistics, and semantics, which may or may not be approached via or connected to various specific kinds/periods of exemplars. My impression of the the history of the teaching of rhetoric (which is vastly older than linguistics) is that it was both abstract/taxonomic ("here are the figures of speech") and practical/imitative ("imitate this speech by Cicero"). The practical goal was to enable performance (effective, persuasive speeches and arguments), but the analytical tools also enabled extension and innovation of generative rule-sets. And because rhetorical and linguistic devices are general-language tools, they also work on literary-art objects. It's not only turtles all the way down--it's also analysis and imitation and recombinant inventiveness.

When I watch myself write, I see myself deploying specific bits of rhetorical-linguistic-semantic training and imitative snippets from a lifetime of reading and listening--a bit of Shakespeare here, a steal from Randy Newman there, a retooled punchline from Brother Dave Gardner or an Ole and Lena joke whenever I feel frisky. I think I hear something like that when I listen to Zoot Sims.

But then, my education was a lot looser than what I see of formal musical training, and my practice is on the anarchic side, so what do I know.

[rpjazzguitar]

Another of my "I am not a jazz musician" posts:

It's a bit uncanny how many of the comments here and in related threads remind me of tensions and discussions in my old actual field of English/literary studies. What is worth studying? What tools and bodies of knowledge does a literary scholar need? And how does the usual lit curriculum connect to, say, a creative writing regimen? Or any writing regimen, for that matter? (I taught general writing courses, and my wife--who is also a writer--taught creative writing for as long as she could take reading student stories.)

In my old world, "theory" would be the various branches of rhetoric, linguistics, and semantics, which may or may not be approached via or connected to various specific kinds/periods of exemplars. My impression of the the history of the teaching of rhetoric (which is vastly older than linguistics) is that it was both abstract/taxonomic ("here are the figures of speech") and practical/imitative ("imitate this speech by Cicero"). The practical goal was to enable performance (effective, persuasive speeches and arguments), but the analytical tools also enabled extension and innovation of generative rule-sets. And because rhetorical and linguistic devices are general-language tools, they also work on literary-art objects. It's not only turtles all the way down--it's also analysis and imitation and recombinant inventiveness.

When I watch myself write, I see myself deploying specific bits of rhetorical-linguistic-semantic training and imitative snippets from a lifetime of reading and listening--a bit of Shakespeare here, a steal from Randy Newman there, a retooled punchline from Brother Dave Gardner or an Ole and Lena joke whenever I feel frisky. I think I hear something like that when I listen to Zoot Sims.

But then, my education was a lot looser than what I see of formal musical training, and my practice is on the anarchic side, so what do I know.

At the end of a near 40 year career in non-music field, I understood that I could not hold my own in a conversation with theorists, even when I was the only one in the conversation who knew how to solve an actual problem in the field.

I do think it is the same across different human endeavors. It's about how people relate to accomplishment and each other. Some far more pragmatic, others far more theoretical -- with neither approach necessarily prevailing over the others in quality of results.

What is maddening, is that sometimes the theorists have something valuable to offer, forcing me to put up with the rest in search of the golden nugget.

[stratology]

...and obviously, when we talk about education in writing and literature: all the tools of writing and communication apply to the English language, and are borderline irrelevant for Chinese literature, or Arabic literature, where some cultural aspects are fundamentally different, where basics like the Alphabet and reading direction are different, etc.



I found taking a college course on Classical Arabic music highly informative. Before the course, I was not even aware that there is such a thing as Classical Arabic music. As a musician, I still have no idea who the Arabic or Chinese equivalents of Shakespeare are.


Also interesting to find commonalities in fundamentally different cultures: the approach of Arabic musicians of learning new scale based material is to figure out where the notes are, and start improvising right away. No scale-up-and-down-noodling. Which is exactly how John Scofield described his approach to learning new scale based material.

[Jimmy Smith]

Music education is inherently very difficult, because there are so many intangibles, so much of music perception is subjective.

My opinion is the difficulty is beginners don't know what they don't know. For me, after friggin 20 years of music study, I know what theory I should use and study to improve my music. I can also hear well to either pick up what devices are being used in music or to check that my music sounded good or not with theory ideas I'm trying. Beginners don't have that worldview, they just pick up stuff from themselves or others that may or may not be correct.

[BWV]

In the modern world, what we consider fundamental has been updated by new discovered things (fields and particles, cells and alpha amino acids, set theory and group theory) so I don't think one can just claim that something can't be fundamental just because it is relatively new and wasn't known or used in the past.
What I found was the Lydian Dominant, not the overtone series; I make no claim that they are the same scale (doesn't concern me that the overtone series is out of tune; if you have ever played with an audio frequency oscillator you will have noticed that pitch and frequency are progressively divergent - frequency extremes diverge from the ears' sense of pitch).

music is not science, it’s an art or language. What is fundamental would be commonalities across traditional musical cultures. The difference is all the phenomena described by the modern, more fundamental science like QM or whatever, existed before the models were created to describe them. No one made music with the LD scale before the 20th century, it’s just a marginal contribution that was created by modern musicians looking for new sounds as the felt the CP language had been exhausted

by that standard, PC set theory is way more fundamental than LD as it subsumes all possible scales and intervallic patterns

[BWV]

The skeleton of function works great for Jazz, as it’s sufficient information for players to choose the whatever voicings, extensions or subs they prefer.


It’s insufficient info for CP classical music, as the structure is contrapuntal. The Roman numerals and function don’t matter so much practically (and function can often be debatable with multiple ‘correct’ answers). Figured bass has really helped me with classical guitar music (particularly as my muscle memory is not what it once was). I use sort of a lazy hybrid system writing out things like dim 7 chords where the figured bass
gets complicated

[Christian Miller]

The skeleton of function works great for Jazz, as it’s sufficient information for players to choose the whatever voicings, extensions or subs they prefer.


It’s insufficient info for CP classical music, as the structure is contrapuntal. The Roman numerals and function don’t matter so much practically (and function can often be debatable with multiple ‘correct’ answers). Figured bass has really helped me with classical guitar music (particularly as my muscle memory is not what it once was). I use sort of a lazy hybrid system writing out things like dim 7 chords where the figured bass
gets complicated

well I can look at a two part invention and say … well it’s I V I a couple of times in Am, round the cycle in C where it does the same, round the houses into Dm etc

and that tells you nothing about what makes Bach cool. It does allow me to steal bits of Bach and play them on All the Things You Are though haha.

[Christian Miller]

The 'mad at theory' thread title may not have been the best choice of how to frame it.

Maybe 'what's wrong with music education?' is a better choice?

How dare you!

Well actually given the amount of intelligent engagement my stupid thread title seems to have generated, I’m going to stand by it.

[dasein]

I think there's a few misconceptions worth clearing up.

- Gjerdingen does not dislike music theory. He's a music theory professor, for goodness sake, I don't think he's advocating putting himself out of a job.

- What he doesn't like is the way music theory has traditionally been taught for composers and classical musicians in universities and conservatories.

- The last bit is important, because many, many great musicians with lots of theoretical knowledge do not know that stuff unless they specifically studied it. For shorthand, I will call it "traditional harmony" to differentiate it. How do you know if you studied traditional harmony? When someone says a 6 chord, do you think of a triad in first inversion (as opposed to a major triad with a major 6th above it?) Do you know the difference between a French and German augmented sixth? Do you have reoccurring nightmares about parallel fifths? Then you studied traditional harmony.

- This is very different from the theory that's usually used to train jazz, rock, pop, country, etc players. It's usually taught concurrently with species counterpoint. At Berklee College of Music, "Traditional Harmony" is a completely separate required course from its "Harmony" courses. The latter being geared to jazz and other popular music, and is usually what people think of when they think of Berklee theory (chord scales and the like).

- The goal of traditional harmony and counterpoint classes is to sound like mid to late 18th century music: Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, and early Beethoven. It's best exemplified with textbooks like Walter Piston, Kostka, and Aldwell/Schachter (the last one has a more Schenkerian bent). Once you start getting to Romantic music, the theoretical mechanisms you learn start breaking down, and most teachers simply shrug and say "well, Chopin just liked breaking the rules." This generally holds until you get to Schoenberg, and can start analyzing things with 12 tone rows. So you can analyze Bach chorales and Webern pieces, and not much in between -- ironically, the most popular pieces in the repertoire are completely mysterious theory-wise (but that's another rant).

- For harmony, it pretty much starts with four part SATB pieces. You are given a list of things you can do, and a much, much longer list of things you cannot do. Then you practice voice leading -- sometimes freely, sometimes by having figured basses at the bottom and trying to realize them. For counterpoint, you're given a cantus firmus and gradually introduce new complexities with each additional "species." Analysis is mostly done intervalically (thirds and sixths are good, seconds and sevenths bad unless they're suspensions, fourths and fifths handle with care, etc).

- I cannot emphasize how incredibly un-musical the whole thing is. Most students write on paper, never play it on a keyboard. Does it sound good? Does it sound like the music you envisioned? I don't know, but it doesn't have any parallel fifths and I got an A on it. If you think that jazz schools pump out too many musicians without essential practical skills, wait until you see composition departments.

- The irony is that we're trying to emulate 18th century music, but we know that 18th century musicians did not think this way. This is not even a case like Barry Harris, a next generation practitioner who tried to systematize how his predecessors thought post facto. We have tons of primary sources from composers and educators at the time. For heaven's sake, we have a book CPE Bach wrote himself. We know, for example, that they did NOT think of triad inversions as being the same thing in different orders, but totally different structures in and of themselves with their own rules.

- Remember the scene in "Amadeus" where Salieri looks through Mozart's scores, and has a break down because he must have "written it from his head"? When you study 18th century music, you quickly realize that most composers had to have been doing something very close to that. They just wrote insane amounts of music, in addition to their teaching, conducting, and ensemble/choir director duties. How did they write so damn quickly? It seems amazing. But then again, many classical musicians are amazed that four accomplished jazz musicians who have never played together can be handed a leadsheet with no notation except for chord symbols, and immediately play together and improvise without any rehearsal.

- This is not a case of "theory vs. no theory." This is about praxis (the ability to synthesize theory and practice together) vs. purely abstract theory. Jazz musicians should be very sympathetic to the former. We cannot just analyze a Charlie Parker solo or "Stella by Starlight" or whatever on paper -- we need to theoretically understand it in a way that helps us to play it. This is what the Partimento Crew have been emphasizing over the last 10-20 years. Do you understand harmony in a way that helps you compose and play it on the keyboard? It's a very exciting field, and many people who have taken traditional harmony courses but felt that something was seriously *missing* in terms of how to apply it have found it to be a breath of fresh air.

[James W]

The goal of traditional harmony and counterpoint classes is to sound like mid to late 18th century music: Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, and early Beethoven. It's best exemplified with textbooks like Walter Piston, Kostka, and Aldwell/Schachter (the last one has a more Schenkerian bent). Once you start getting to Romantic music, the theoretical mechanisms you learn start breaking down, and most teachers simply shrug and say "well, Chopin just liked breaking the rules." This generally holds until you get to Schoenberg, and can start analyzing things with 12 tone rows. So you can analyze Bach chorales and Webern pieces, and not much in between -- ironically, the most popular pieces in the repertoire are completely mysterious theory-wise (but that's another rant).

In my experience I don't think trad harmony & counterpoint texts are classes are that specific in terms of the period of music they teach you to emulate. I would be interested in your other rant because as far as I know from the harmony and counterpoint texts I have, they definitely go into 19th century music. Wagner is definitely analysable. And there are theories specific for 19th century music e.g. Riemann. In fact I have an interesting book on that repertoire called Audacious Euphony About the Book (oup.com) which analyses music by the likes of Schubert and Liszt, among others.

[sgcim]

“Generillisimo, we have not found that Morton Feldman fella. Will this do???”

My composition teacher in college told me that he thought Webern's music sounded like a bunch of little farts!