This thread is inspired by Luka's comment on this post. ("it’s like magic. impenetrable magic") Music theory is AWESOME and really useful, but it's also one of those topics that can be incredibly difficult to study independently, because so many of the concepts and techniques are a) highly academic and b) unlike any other field of study. This thread is here for all your music theory questions & confusion (& if you just want to talk about a theory thing you think is cool, please do that also.) Want an explanation of that one song in The Sound of Music? Confused over clefs? Intrigued by Gregorian chant notation? I'll do my best to answer any and all music theory questions you can throw at me. (There are also certainly others here who can answer questions that are beyond me.) NB I'm going on choir tour tomorrow morning, so this was possibly not the best time to start a thread. Ehhh NB2: All of my experience and study has been Western classical tradition (plus a bit of Jazz and trad.)
@EulersBidentity Oh my god this is amazing! I've done music theory when I wanted to become a professional classical guitarist. I'm good at the theoretical part, but the listening part god help me. I'm rubbish at writing down music by ear. ;_; I can answer too! It's a little rusty in my head, but I love chattering about music, and classical is my specialty too. That said, @EulersBidentity what's your favourite period? Right now I've been on a hard Baroque binge, and I absolutely LOVE the pompuousness of Lully! Monteverdi is eeeh for me, as he's a bit too dry for my taste, but I love him for bringing opera. Also, ask me about opera singers! I have a few funny stories to tell about them, as well as the rampant alcoholism in my music academy.
I'm super auditory! I only realised recently, in one of those "ah, my life experience is not universal" moments. I learn things most easily by ear, and I tend to remember what people say by remembering their intonation, rather than their actual words. ...don't make me choose No okay, I think...I think it's gotta be Baroque for me as well. In a kind of loose sense of the word, where "Baroque" sometimes means "yeah, this is straight-up Renaissance". Tonight is a very Renaissance night for me. Lully is a babe, also Gabrieli. I know what you mean about Monteverdi, but at the same time...*brings up Pur Ti Miro on youtube, cries*
Okay... I'm little hard on the Green Hill, I admit! I also love Elizabethan music, and that's kind of straddling the line between Baroque and Renaissance - I love Dowland a lot. I used to play him on my guitar, but I was too wussy to actually play on him a lute (that also meant cutting my nails!). There's a LOT of really, really nice early Baroque lute music! Gotta thank Louis XIV for popularising the guitar though. :)
Okay, then: Where would you guys advise starting, specifically for someone who is good at word bits of theory but has NO ear, like at all.
my first question is, well, what do you want to do? what would your goal be? to train your ear? (sorry if this sounds super dumb. I just don't wanna start spouting stuff and then you're like "um, no Kay, that's not what I want at all stop talking")
@Starcrossedsky Hmm... I've always had a lot of trouble with the listening part of theory, so what I did was a TON of simple exercises to train my ears to hear simple things like intervals and how cadences sound like. The moment you start hearing the difference between a minor third and a major third is already a big step to listening and writing music down by ear. As for how you would practice that there are a few ways - on the net there's http://www.musictheory.net/ which offers a lot of simple listening exercises with multiple choice questions to train your ears. The problem is that you get rather attached to piano sounds, and it's a little harder to switch to other instruments. I used to take solfege, so I'd sing the scale and figure it out that way. Of course if you don't have the ear yet that's going to be hard, so the best you can do probably is assign intervals to recognisable musical pieces: For instance, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik starts with a fourth. The moment you have that ditty stuck in your head, you can recognise it. The Fifth Symphony of Beethoven goes down by a major third, and so on... It's a really rough and dirty way of going on about it, but it's worked for me. If you play your own instrument, then you can also train by yourself - I play guitar, so I always play the interval, listen, try to sing it, and so on. Bonus if you have favourite pieces - my favourite guitar composer, Mauro Giuliani, typically opens with a pompuous perfect fifth, so that's how I remember. I also assign feelings to intervals to help my mind - a minor third is sad, a minor second is creepy, a perfect fourth is grand, a perfect fifth sounds like hunting music, etc, etc.
Can anybody infodump at me about different traditions of musical notation or give me some links to read? I am really curious about what written music looked like before the standard notation we use now developed. Are there independent traditions of written music that look nothing like the modern standard? Can we still read them? (Not a theory question, but do you have a favorite Mahler symphony?)
@WithAnH Oh Mahler, Mahler... Spoiler: Mahler! I don't know him well enough unfortunately to actually have a favourite symphony. My favourite Romantic composers are good old Beethoven (I like the man for so many reasons - his music, his grouchiness, his eventual deafness that reminds me a lot of my mother's struggles...), Liszt, Peer Gynt, Mussorgsky, and Dvorak. I really like the movement to collect folk music and create music inspired on that - probably the only positive thing nationalism generated: a true love for folk arts and a drive to preserve them. Musical notation! Oof! Here's a small info teaser I know at least: the earliest versions we have of recognisable western musical notation is with the Gregorian Chants. Music in a lot of cultures is mainly an oral tradition - people learn the music by ear and by heart, and create their own variations on it. For example, in Ghana (I hope I'm right) they have a very rich tradition of musical storytelling that dates back centuries and musicians are close to royalty - they act essentially as archivists and historians, singing the culture's history and making sure it's passed on from generation to generation. Western culture operated similarly, and the oldest versions of musical notation that we have are texts where musicians jotted down ornamentations and visual representations of melody lines to help them remember: See? You can tell from the text where the melody goes up smoothly, where it descends in steps (the little dots), etc. From there it's a very small step to go to a more precise notation. Why exactly that happened I don't quite remember, as it was still very important for the musicians to learn it by heart. I have a feeling it has to do with the growing prominence of melodic instruments in music - the predecessors of the violin, the organ, and the flute. But I hope somebody else can fill me out here on that! A more precise notation would aim to show the intervals between the notes. Well, how would you do that in a visual way? You can already put two dots together and guess the higher dot is a higher note than the lower dot, but how high? How about adding some lines? See, now you can tell the intervals, but the rhythm is still left to the musician. It's also a very sparse notation where the vocalist is still very much allowed liberty in the ornamentation (but there are rules for ornamentation that I can't remember!) and the rhythm. BTW, ornamentation is where the singer allows themselves some liberties by adding some quick extra notes to the melody line - they're very short, and can be rather ornate. It's a way to engage with the melody, and of course show off the singer's talents a little. ;) You see it's four lines, and that grew to five lines and kind of stayed there. What's interesting is that the slow evolution of Western sheet music came hand in hand with a growing prominence of instruments vs. voices. For a long time in the Middle Ages the musica sacra was done with the voice and was sacred and pure, and the musica secularum (????? I'm flaking enormously here) was done with instruments like the bagpipe, the fife, the lute... and was vulgar and common. But the church started to change its tune in the high medieval era, allowing popular melodies to be sung! The instruments started slowly invading the musica sacra, and there are some dour texts by abbots and bishops about churches 'profaning' sacred words with 'lewd' melodies (one of my favourite composers of the era used a popular french drinking song as the basis for one of his church pieces) Also the organ was coming into the picture. (couldn't have bagpipes, now!) With non-vocal instruments and ensembles you can improvise together, but it would also help knowing the rhythm! Wikipedia blames Notre Dame for that, and for some reason I could've sworn it was the spaniards under the reign of Alphonse X but my memory isn't so good. Anyways, check it. Musical notes with staffs! You can already tell which ones are faster (the ones with the staffs) and which notes should be sustained (free standing notes). From there it gets pretty easy to add a system of lines: See how similar they already are? When it came to rhythmic notation at the beginning of a piece, I think that also had to do with the advent of the popularity of dance music in the late middle ages. The 'C', which stands for a 4/4 rhythm, isn't actually an initial, but a half circle - where the full circle (being 'perfect' and good) stands for a triple metre rhythm, which is a 'holy' rhythm (trinity!! 3/4, 9/8), and the half circle is 'imperfect' and therefore a more vulgar 'dual' rhythm (2/4, 4/4, 6/8). And that's as far as my memory goes. I can't remember when sharps and flats came about, but again I suspect that has to do with transposing music for different instruments. I do know that the use of 'piano' and 'forte' comes from the Baroque era, when emotion in music was considered to be important to indicate to the musician what mood the piece was supposed to have. Others! Have at it!
Also there's a whole rivalry between tablature and written music in the string world. Beginning classical guitarists usually scoff at tablature, considering it sheet music for babies, but older classical guitarists understand that it has a rich tradition in western music - Lute music is mainly written in tablature. What is tablature? It's a stylised representation of the neck of the lute/guitar, and shows the positions of the fingers, like this: Spoiler: Lachrimae See the lines? Those are the strings. The letters are the notes and show which strings are played, and on which fret. Modern tablature mimics the classical notation more with notes: The upper part is in conventional notation, the lower part is tablature. Instead of letters it uses numbers, but they still indicate which fret the fingers are supposed to be placed on.
I went to bed and the thread took off! Awesome. This is always my rec for everyone, but if you have the means to join a choir, choral experience is invaluable for improving your ear. @Fish butt has given a really good brief history. I'm sure there's an academic somewhere in the bowels of the Bodleian Library who can read any and all early music notation. In terms of non-academia, the four-stave square notation (says "Offert. 2. I" at the beginning) is still widely used in (mostly Anglo-/Catholic) church music. It's generally called "plainsong", and the individual notes are called "neumes" ("nyooms"). An example of plainsong that I sang at work on Sunday. One other thing about plainsong notation - the intervals between notes which are next to each other are not all equal. The intervals between parallel notes on the stave will be small (a "semitone") or larger (a "tone") depending on where the notes themselves are placed in relation to the clef (which on Fish butt's Offertory example is the thing at the very beginning that looks like three notes on top of each other, and on my Alleluia example is the thing at the beginning that looks like a C). The clef can be placed anywhere on the stave, which makes this notation very efficient (and confusing). If your chant has a lot of high notes, for example, you can write the clef low on the stave and still have room to scribble down the whole chant without having to add any extra lines above the reach of the stave. (I hope that makes sense.) According to Wikipedia, this guy gave us the four-line stave. Nice work, guy.
@EulersBidentity I have neither the means nor the inclination, as virtually all adult choirs are religious and, No. #I'm generally nice about other people's religions #But just #No #I will not sing praises to a god I don't believe in #and a religion which tends to fuck over most of the people in my social groups #that's on the other side of my line in the sand
Huh. The majority of adult amateur choirs I know are secular, but I guess it's a location thing. Fair enough if you're not interested, though.
What's it called when the treble is holding a note or playing a harmony line while the lower notes do interesting things under them? Example from about 0:39-0:42 in if I didn't explain it very well.
@littlepinkbeast ! Sorry I disappeared! I can't think of a specific name for that scenario, although I might call it "walking bass" if I wanted to describe it to someone. (You mean the bit with the upper lines going playing the little harmonising fanfare, and the tuba below going "pom pom pom pom" in a scale?) Walking bass is a pretty good term to describe a bassline that keeps moving around in small steps following the chord structure. It's used a lot in jazz. I can't find a perfect example but this'll do.
What are some good resources on music theory that are neither very basic nor very esoteric? I've been in choirs on and off since age six, and I can sight read almost any vocal music you put in front of me, but I've had no theory instruction at all. This basically means that I have a good grasp on a lot of the concepts, but the actual terminology that lets me talk about it or understand higher concepts is missing.
ABRSM Music Theory exam revision resources! 1 2 ABRSM (Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music) "grades" are the most common music exams in the UK. There are practical (instrument) exams and theory exams, labelled Grade 1-8. Grade 1 is the easiest, grade 8 the most advanced. (There are a separate course of exams, called "diplomas" [diplomae?], for post-Grade 8.) In the UK, you are required to pass Grade 5 Music Theory if you want to take Grades 6+ practical exams. Grade 5 is a really good level of theory to work towards, although some of it is quite difficult! Link #2 up there^ will take you to some example theory papers; I would recommend looking at Grade 1 or 2 and seeing if you can pick out any obvious weak points in your knowledge of terminology. From what you've written, I reckon you might have trouble with (4)(d) in the Grade 1 practice paper and (4) and (5) in Grade 2 - basically, the questions which use terminology that you might not have come across. Fortunately you know the concepts, so I reckon it won't take you long to learn the vocab! ETA: From what you've written, I would expect you (with work!) to be able to get up to Grade 3 standard in an afternoon, Grade 4 in a week, and Grade 5 in a month. If you find G1 and G2 particularly easy or difficult, then adjust for that. It's also worth noting that pass boundaries for exams in the UK are lower than in the US (...I've just assumed that's where you are. Maybe it's not). For ABRSM, 66% = pass, 80% = merit, 90% = distinction. Most people only pass, especially at G5. ETA2: another useful resource
