Seriously. What IS Music Theory?
Or why you need to be able to organize sounds for your “Mind’s Ear.”
Science and History.
A few months ago, I ran across the statement that “science is just our way of describing how we currently understand the universe.” The more that we learn, the way that science describes that universe also changes. Humans went from thinking that we lived on a flat earth that was the center of the universe to an understanding that the world was a spinning ball moving at 67,000 miles per hour around a much hotter spinning ball that in turn was hurtling around the center of our galaxy at roughly 490,000 miles per hour. Essentially, science is our way of describing the relationships and realities of the world as we currently understand it. This is the role that music theory plays in our understanding of music.
I like to use this analogy because the concept of music theory is usually thought of as this complete and total set of incontrovertible laws about how music works when in reality, it is not. From the earliest (that we know of) attempts to codify how sounds work together to how we currently understand musical relationships in the twenty-first century, this set of concepts has changed and evolved many times. We know that there are depictions of pitched instruments going back to prehistoric times. There are texts from Mesopotamia, India, and China about music going back two and three millennia about how the people in those societies thought about and performed music. We are definitely making music differently than the people who wrote those texts or painted those pictures.
My own university education about music theory starts mostly with ancient Greece. To reduce this down to a manageable if less complete description, our system of harmony has its roots in the system of modes that the ancient Greeks devised. The modes of our system of tonal harmony (or how we divide sounds up into major and minor keys) still have Greek names. However, they are not the same thing. The names Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, and Locrian now describe the seven modes of our modern major scale, which was not in existence in ancient Greece.
Over the centuries, these modes were the basis for the chants of the early Christian church and eventually tonal music from the renaissance forward. The idea of metrical or measured music rhythms also evolved over the last couple of millennia as well. While I do suggest doing some reading about music from outside of our Western European bubble, to make this writing more manageable and relevant to my students (who are mostly guitar players), I am going to stop the history lesson here and sadly ignore the music of the rest of the civilized world. You should check it out, though. There is some really great stuff out there.
Why bother at all?
For those of us who are playing contemporary music on guitar (or pretty much any other pitched instrument), music theory is a way to represent how different sounds work together in a form that we can communicate to each other or organize in our own mind. Ultimately, our brain is the primary musical instrument, and the physical instrument that you play is how we get the sound in our head out into the world. As a performer, you want to hear what you are playing in your aural imagination and then use your instrument as the conduit for that music to get out into the world.
The Mind’s Ear.
I bring this idea up now because it is important to discuss that performing music is not a mechanical exercise or a way of moving your fingers to create art but because it is an internal process. I spent much of my early musical life just learning where to put my fingers on the instrument and in what order to bang on the strings to make song-like sounds without any deeper understanding of what it was that I was actually trying to do. I was living in a fairly frustrated state regarding my lack of progress and not understanding how I could spend so much time at something and still be so mediocre.
The first part of this has nothing to do with theory and everything to do with listening to music, internalizing the sounds, and eventually using the product of that work to play the instrument. When we learn a new instrument, it becomes easy to forget that music is a sonic art form and not a physical one. The problem is that, as new musicians, we focus almost entirely on the physical component of playing an instrument. This is especially the case for guitarists due to the complexity of getting each of your hands to learn completely new motor skills in a synchronized fashion. Developing your ability to hear sounds and music in your aural imagination (or the “mind’s ear,” as I like to call it) away from the instrument is one of the most important skills that you need as a musician and one of the best tools to help you organize those sounds is your understanding of basic music theory concepts. As you are able to do this, the secondary step of engaging the physical world through your instrument becomes much easier to conquer.
What we are going to focus on in this article is the idea that we should be able to define what makes those sounds work, and we should be able to use those definitions to make music better and faster in the future. For our purposes, we are going to look at the relative distances between notes (intervals), collections of notes that work together for our system of music (scales), and the sounds they make when played at the same time (harmony). This is just a small slice of what I think music theory is all about, but it is the most useful slice for most students. It will hopefully make a case for trying to understand music in a more complete fashion.
The distances between notes.
An interval is merely a measurement of the distance between two notes. We have twelve different pitches in our chromatic Western music universe. There are other cultures and systems of music that have more notes or sometimes even fewer notes to work with, but we have twelve. Hearing the difference between two notes is an important part of teaching your brain to hear music in any meaningful way. When I was in school, they gave us a list of songs to help us hear these distances using existing memories that we’ve stored up through a lifetime of listening to the music around us. Instead of copying that list, here is a link to a similar list with audio examples: https://flypaper.soundfly.com/tips/interval-cheat-sheet-songs-to-help-you-remember-common-intervals/.
If you are trying to hear or remember a melody, it gets easier to recognize the distances between notes relative to a familiar sound until the interval sound itself becomes recognizable.
A side trip for Triads.
Another practical reason to understand these interval distances and their names for the student to understand how harmony is constructed. Triads are three notes that, when played together, make a specific harmony. When I teach this material to a guitar student, I can tell them that a major triad is made up of the first, third, and fifth notes of a major scale to help them understand the idea quickly. The numbers that I just used are the distances from the root or first note in the scale, as well as which note in the order of the scale (or scale degree) those pitches are. It can be a little confusing at first, but it is not really that difficult once you get started working with this information.
It is easy from that point to tell the student that you can lower the third note a half-step (one key on the piano or one fret on the guitar) to make the triad minor. You can lower the third and fifth notes to make the triad diminished and raise the fifth to make the triad augmented. These names refer to the character of the sound each group of notes makes when played together. This is a shortcut to understanding basic chords but obviously not the only way to construct them.
If we add other notes on top of the triad like sevenths, ninths, elevenths, and thirteenths, we can construct even more sophisticated sounds. If you understand the basic concept, it becomes easier to adapt a musical idea to new contexts as you experience more music and/or need to play it on your instrument.
Scales.
I just dropped the idea of scales in the last paragraph without really telling you what they are. At the most basic level, a scale is yet another way to organize sounds (notes or pitches) in a way that gets you a specific result sonically. Most of the scales that we use in western popular music consist of seven pitches that are all specific distances from one another and, when played together, create tonality. Major, minor, dominant, diminished, and many other tonalities can be implied when you play a set group of notes together melodically (music played one note at a time) or harmonically (when you play notes together, typically in a triad-based harmony as we discussed previously). There are also pentatonic scales with five notes as well as other scales with six or even eight tones. Those are for another time, but I mention them to illustrate the fact that our seven-note diatonic scales are not the only scalar game in town.
Learning scales relative to the chord progression of a song gives you a better understanding of what notes are most likely going to make up the melody of a song. It will also give you options for improvising a solo or writing your own melody. Keep in mind that this is not a “chicken or the egg” type of scenario. I can infer the harmony of a song from knowing the melody or figure out the melody of a new song even faster if I know what the chord progression is.
When you play the notes at the same time, we get “Harmony.”
As far as harmony goes, I have touched on the concept a little bit already. The simplest description comes from Google:
I like how they say “pleasing effect.” Any group of notes played together make some manner of harmony depending on how you want the listener to feel, pleasing or otherwise. Like everything else that we have discussed, if you can define the distances and relationships that the sounds have when played together, you can hear them faster and use them more effectively in the future.
Scales and harmony do have a direct relationship. If you continue to build upon the idea of triad construction that we discussed while talking intervals, you can build triads off of every note in a major or minor scale using only notes within that scale. This gives you a set of major, minor and diminished triads that define the harmony of the key and allow us to recognize chord progressions or patterns of harmony within a piece of music. If I know that a section of a song is made up of the first, fifth, sixth, and fourth chords in a key, I can easily memorize the progression to perform it or transpose it into another key to make it easier to sing or play on my instrument. Once I can hear that chord progression more easily in my aural imagination, I can recognize it in other songs and learn them more quickly.
Sometimes, this understanding helps us do something different.
When I am writing new music or working on my improvisational chops, my understanding of these relationships can help me develop a new idea more quickly or sometimes tell me what to avoid because I am looking for something new to play. There is a school of thought among some people that learning theory and traditional musical concepts will steal your creativity.
Complete and utter nonsense.
You do need to remember that these are not musical laws, and you can use them to understand how music works in a traditional sense or reject those ideas and forge your own way. Still, these are just ways to describe how we organize sound to better control our own music. And this makes music theory sort of like the idea of scientific thought that we started talking about at the top of this page. Our theory “rules” are just tools to help us understand our sonic world, and those tools can change as we learn more about that world and how we plan to navigate it. Or we can come up with new uses for our tools depending on whatever musical situation that we find ourselves in.
I don’t expect anyone to gain a functional understanding of all (or any) of these concepts from reading this article. You really only gain that understanding by learning music and trying to apply these concepts to that music. What I am hoping you get from this article is the understanding that music theory is just one of the tools that you can use to become a more successful musician.
If you are interested in seeing how I explain these “musical tools” in a way that makes sense for guitarists, check out my CAGED Fretboard Theory lesson series on YouTube.
