Re:Music theory for nerds (2016)
by danShumway on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @10:33AM
(#30361275)
Agreed, the pushback on this reminds me ironically of some of the pushback I see towards people who try to break apart math notation to make stuff like science papers more accessible.
My experience with being taught music theory lines up with your experience, and I spent a lot of time learning both piano and instrumental music leading up to college, to the point where I considered myself to be a fairly decent-ish musician. I was not taught why anything exists I was taught rules: rules that I constantly saw being broken around me, and that I was constantly told, "well, it's OK for them to break the rules once they understand them." It was not until I started to think of music-theory as a grammar based on conventions and social norms that any of it clicked for me, before that point I hated music theory. Certainly it was rare for people to try and break things down to first principles or to describe why things were the way they were.
What happens as an early musician (in my experience) is that over time you just kind of get used to the social conventions and it becomes intuitive because you've spent a lot of time on it. I learned about stuff like ratios once I started getting into intermediate jazz on the saxophone; it was not an early concept taught to me in piano lessons.
And then people look at articles like this and say, "well, that's all super-basic stuff, and it's not completely right, and she's doing a bad job of explaining..." Nonsense, she's doing fine. Even if there are a few inaccuracies, this is a good article: it's written in a way that's sympathetic to people who know nothing about music theory, it gets across the immediate points that musicians might not even realize are problems (why is a C a C, why is B# C), it is a (mostly successful) attempt to tie music theory to something that readers might already understand. It's helping bridge this gap of "repeat this rule until it becomes intuitive", and that's a good thing to do.
Even with really simple concepts, people forget how big the barrier of entry is around notation. It's extremely common for me to run into people who say they would read more scientific papers or statistical research if the math notation didn't throw them off. Music is the same, there is a common language that is very efficient and nice for people who know it, and is indecipherable for everyone else. Anything that helps lower that gap is good, and looking at this article as someone who knows the notation already my immediate reaction is that it seems pretty helpful and a lot of "intro" music courses won't explain these concepts, they'll expect you to tough it out and just memorize the rules.
My experience with being taught music theory lines up with your experience, and I spent a lot of time learning both piano and instrumental music leading up to college, to the point where I considered myself to be a fairly decent-ish musician. I was not taught why anything exists I was taught rules: rules that I constantly saw being broken around me, and that I was constantly told, "well, it's OK for them to break the rules once they understand them." It was not until I started to think of music-theory as a grammar based on conventions and social norms that any of it clicked for me, before that point I hated music theory. Certainly it was rare for people to try and break things down to first principles or to describe why things were the way they were.
What happens as an early musician (in my experience) is that over time you just kind of get used to the social conventions and it becomes intuitive because you've spent a lot of time on it. I learned about stuff like ratios once I started getting into intermediate jazz on the saxophone; it was not an early concept taught to me in piano lessons.
And then people look at articles like this and say, "well, that's all super-basic stuff, and it's not completely right, and she's doing a bad job of explaining..." Nonsense, she's doing fine. Even if there are a few inaccuracies, this is a good article: it's written in a way that's sympathetic to people who know nothing about music theory, it gets across the immediate points that musicians might not even realize are problems (why is a C a C, why is B# C), it is a (mostly successful) attempt to tie music theory to something that readers might already understand. It's helping bridge this gap of "repeat this rule until it becomes intuitive", and that's a good thing to do.
Even with really simple concepts, people forget how big the barrier of entry is around notation. It's extremely common for me to run into people who say they would read more scientific papers or statistical research if the math notation didn't throw them off. Music is the same, there is a common language that is very efficient and nice for people who know it, and is indecipherable for everyone else. Anything that helps lower that gap is good, and looking at this article as someone who knows the notation already my immediate reaction is that it seems pretty helpful and a lot of "intro" music courses won't explain these concepts, they'll expect you to tough it out and just memorize the rules.