Western Music Theory

I was lucky enough to be shown a Penderecki score and played polymorphia by a tutor. It was just really exciting. I didn’t know you are allowed to do that. I didn’t know you could be that free and you can just think of 48 musicians as being able to do anything. – Jonny Greenwood

Faced with the need to communicate, humans developed languages, i.e., vowel and consonant sounds and the astonishing capability to recognize them. It seems that, consequently, our ears developed into highly sophisticated analyzers of frequency, loudness, harmony, and dissonance because, with languages, came the need to acknowledge slight differences in air pressure. Differentiation is a necessary condition to build an entity and its environment, i.e., what we can differentiate from the entity. It reduces complexity to a point at which reality emerges—without complexity reduction, i.e. pattern recognition, reality would be an unstructured muddy sea of noise. Differentiation makes us but also disconnects us, a contrast we always struggle with and for which we employed music to overcome it, at least for a moment.

Our hearing capabilities enable us to enjoy the art of music. They enable us to recognize patterns of compression and rarefaction of molecules; a physical process that can be mathematically represented by the relation of numbers. Music arises if there are multiple such relationships. At its core, music is about the relation of numbers, about intervals and ratios, about numbers in relation to other numbers in time and space. Listening to music reveals the human condition: being in the world in time. We listen not only in the present, but also remembering patterns in the past, and anticipating the future.

Music theory is the science of relations of numbers produced by cultural, social, and emotional interpreting creatures that lived during different centuries at different places. In the future, we might add machines and algorithms to that list. Music theory is the study of theoretical aspects as well as practices and possibilities of music and its notation in a cultural and historical context. In its essence, it studies the cognition and perception of human beings; our (biased) aesthetic experiences.

Music theory developed historically a long time ago and has matured since then. Consequently, there are numerous terms, often for the same thing, which makes it hard to start diving into it—at least for me. But to communicate ideas and concepts, an elaborate terminology is a valuable bridge in the same way mathematical notations allow us to convey ideas quickly and unambiguously. One must learn music theory terminology to understand the literature and communicate musical ideas effectively.

However, this does not mean that we have to adapt techniques or rules that emerged from the study of music. It is easy to see that constraints can be helpful in exploring the space of possibilities, but innovation often relies on breaking out of the ordinary. There is no hard limit, nothing is forbidden. Everything is permitted. Being a little shizo is sometimes necessary to overcome the limits of our imagination. A good example is the dissolution and evolution of musical rules in the Western music tradition. This tradition guides classical as well as popular music, but we sometimes need to remember that these rules constrain us to only one specific set of our vast space of possibilities. Importantly, these rules for generating well-received music changed over the centuries. They tend to open up from a narrow perspective, starting from Pythagoreanism (600 BC) to the Gregorian mode (early middle ages until 1600), the major-minor-tonality (1700-1900), Schoenberg’s atonality and serialism (1900-1940) and Penderecki’s (1933-2020) experimental compositions that are radical explorations of timbre.

In summary, music theory provides us with terminology to effectively convey and absorb musical ideas and concepts. It provides knowledge about the relation of numbers and how these relations may affect the listener. But it can also be limiting if taken too literally. For example, it emerged alongside the musician and its analog instrument. Therefore, until recently, its literature does not provide us with musical aspects that can not be realized by musicians that are constrained by their physical as well as mental ability to play an instrument—a piano with 48 keys per octave is just not practical. Consequently, music theory is a valuable subject to grasp, but it should never be taken as definitive truth.