What is Music Theory? - In The Box Blog

Music Theory for Musicians tobyrush.com and Normal People

Like other forms of art, music often has the capability to create emotional reactions in the listener that transcends other forms of communication. Though a single piece of music may elicit different reactions from different listeners, any lover of music will tell you that those feelings are real!

When composers write music—whether it’s a classical-era symphony or a bit of Japanese post-Shibuya-kei glitch techno—they are not following a particular set of rules. If anything, they are often trying to break them! So, while many people think music theory is about learning the rules for how to write music, that’s not quite right. Music theorists don’t create rules for writing music; they look for patterns in music that is already written.

Which leads to the most important question—one that you should be constantly asking yourself as you study music theory: Why dissect music? What’s the point of figuring out rules that composers themselves weren’t even worried about? Composers create; theorists analyze!

Why? Because somewhere in there is the reason why that piece of music moves you, the reason it makes you cry, gives you chills, reminds you of home. Maybe it’s in the notes. Maybe it’s in the silence. Maybe it’s somewhere in between. It may take a long time or even create more questions than answers. But music theorists are going to find it because music theory is figuring out what makes music work.

NOTATION: Pitch

Music Notation is the art of recording music in written form.

Modern music notation is a product of centuries of transformation… and it is neither efficient nor intuitive.

Pitch is the highness or lowness of a sound.

For example, a flute has a high pitch, while a tuba has a low pitch.

The system of musical notation we use is essentially a stylized graph of pitch versus time.

The five lines on which notes appear is called a staff.

Notation is based on the piano keyboard; lines and spaces on the staff represent the white notes on the keyboard.

The white notes on the keyboard are labeled with letters from A to G

To display notes outside the staff, we use shortened staff lines called ledger lines.

The clef determines what notes each staff line corresponds to. the four modern clefs are shown here; the note displayed on each staff corresponds to middle c.

Middle c is the c that is closest to the middle of the piano keyboard

To notate the black notes on the piano keyboard, we use accidentals, which alter the note by one or two half steps

A half step is the distance between two adjacent keys on the piano keyboard, regardless of what color the keys are.

The flat lowers the note by one half step.

The natural cancels out any previous accidental.

The sharp raises the note by one half step.

Two notes which have the same pitch (for example, f sharp and g flat) are called enharmonics.

Notation: Rhythm

While pitch is pretty clearly notated on a vertical axis, note length is indicated using a somewhat arcane system involving noteheads, stems and flags.

In this chart, each successive type of note is half as long as the note to its left. none of these notes has a standard length; a half note in one piece may be the same length as an eighth note in a different piece.

Note lengths in a piece are indicated by the tempo marking at the beginning of a piece or section.

A rest is a period of silence the length of which corresponds to a particular note.

Usually rests are placed on the staff at a particular vertical position as shown here.

The augmentation dot is a dot placed to the right of a notehead. though small, this dot wields some serious power: it adds half of the original note’s length!

Multiple dots can also be added, each one adding half of the previously added value.

Ties

Ties are curved marks which connect two notes together to create a single, extended sound.

To tie more than two notes together, draw ties between each note; do not use a single, extended tie.

TRIPLET

A triplet is any non-standard division of a note. these are usually written as a group of notes delineated with a bracket and a number showing the division being made.

NOTATION : METER

A fundamental feature of most pieces of music is a consistent rhythmic pulse.

This pulse is called the beat, and a single pulse is called a beat units.

There are two types of beat units: those containing two divisions, called simple beat units…

…and those containing three divisions, called compound beat units.

In music, beats are organized into patterns of accented and unaccented beat units. In fact, if you listen to a sequence of repeated notes, your brain will probably start to perceive the notes as groups of two, three, or four, even if no accents are present!

These groups are called measures, and they are delineated with barlines.

The organization of beat units and measures in a piece is called meter. Meter is described by two numbers placed at the beginning of the piece: the time signature.

Simple TIME SIGNATURES are easy.

The top number indicates the number of beats in a measure. The bottom number indicates the type of note which serves as the beat unit. The code for the bottom note is pretty easy: refers to a quarter note, to an eighth note, to a sixteenth note, and so on.

Compound TIME SIGNATURES are kind of lying to you.

The top number indicates the number of divisions in a measure. to get the number of beats, divide it by three.

The bottom number indicates the type of note which serves as the division. to get the beat unit, use the note that is equal to three of these notes. in a compound meter, the beat unit is always a dotted note!

By looking at the top number of the time signature, you can tell two things about the meter: whether it’s simple or compound, and how many beats are in a measure.

BEAMING

Notes should be beamed in groups that illustrate the meter. for simple rhythms, this is pretty easy to do; simply group any notes that can be beamed (eighth notes and smaller) into groups that are equal to the beat unit of the current meter.

For complex rhythms, however, things can get complicated… when a rhythm includes things like syncopations or other off-beat figures, illustrating the meter may involve dividing notes across beat units with ties. fortunately, there is a step-by-step system for correctly beaming these complicated rhythms!

For example, let’s take this rhythm, which is written without beaming.

STEP 1: Find the smallest note value used, and fill a complete measure with this type of note, beamed in groups that are equal to a beat unit in the current meter.

STEP 2: Add ties between individual notes to recreate the original rhythm. make sure that each tied group corresponds to a note in the rhythm you started with!

In the bottom original Rhythm

Step 3: find every group of two or more notes that are both tied together and beamed together, and replace them with a single note of equivalent value.

A correctly beamed rhythm may include ties, but it will very clearly show the beats in the measure… which, in turn, makes it easier for the performer to read!

THE MAJOR SCALE

One of the reasons that a particular piece of music sounds the way it does has to do with the group of notes the composer decided to use.

Take this melody, for example… let’s first remove all the duplicate notes, regardless of which octave they’re in.

Next, let’s put the notes in alphabetical order, starting on the note that the melody sounded like it was centering on.

Effettivamente, esistono molti tipi diversi di scale, ognuna con un diverso schema di toni interi e semitoni.

Like the board on which a painter holds the bits of paint being used in the painting being created. in music, this “palette” is called a scale. though we usually write scales from low to high, the order is actually unimportant; it’s the notes contained in the scale that help make a piece sound the way it does.

There are actually many different types of scales, each with a different pattern of whole steps and half steps.

A half step is the distance between two adjacent keys on the piano keyboard, regardless of color.

A whole step is the equivalent of two half steps.

This particular arrangement, where half steps occur between steps three and four and between steps seven and eight (or between seven and one, since eight and one are the same note), is called the major scale.

Knowing this formula, you can create a major scale on any note!

But remember… with great power comes great responsibility!

KEY SIGNATURES

If you start writing major scales and pay attention to the accidentals that occur, you are going to start noticing a pattern…

For example look at the flat keys, starting with the key that has one flat, all the way through the key with seven flats: the flats accrue in a specific order. same with the sharp keys!

So if you look for a key that has only A D flat, you won’t find it: if a key has a D flat, it must also have A B flat, an E flat and an A flat!

Since writing an entire piece in c sharp major would have been a sure-fire way to get carpal tunnel syndrome with all the sharps involved, composers pretty quickly came up with a way to simplify things: key signatures. a key signature is a group of accidentals placed at the beginning of every line of music, just to the right of the clef, that instructs the performer to apply those accidentals to every corresponding note in the piece unless specified otherwise.

oh, and another thing: the accidentals have to be placed in the correct order, and they need to follow a particular pattern of placement that varies slightly depending on the clef being used! if you deviate from this, you, as a composer, will be mocked!

The Circle of Fifths

Theorists find it convenient to organize all the possible key signatures into a chart that shows their relationship to one another.

This chart, called the circle of fifths, displays each key as a spoke on the circle, beginning with C major at the top and adding accidentals, one at a time, to the key signatures around the perimeter.

We’ll return to this chart as we continue learning about how composers use keys.

As you move clockwise around the circle, you add sharps to the key signature. as you move counterclockwise around, you add flats to the key signature.

To determine the key signature for a key, look to see which “spoke” of the circle it’s on to determine how many flats or sharps it has, and add accidentals to the key signature appropriately.

For example, e flat major has three flats.

The keys down here line up enharmonically… for example, the key of d flat major will sound just like the key of c sharp major.

DIATONIC INTERVALS

An interval is the distance in pitch between two notes.The most basic way which we identify different intervals is by counting the steps between the two notes.Specifically, we count scale degrees, but the easiest way to do it is to count lines and spaces on the staff.

When counting, begin with the bottom note as one and count until you reach the top note.

when counting the lines and spaces, we can safely ignore any accidentals. this interval is also a seventh… we’ll discuss how it’s different very soon!

two notes on the same line or space is called a unison. The distance from a note to the next closest note with the same letter name is called an octave.

When we are talking about intervals we sometimes discuss harmonic intervals and melodic intervals.

HARMONIC INTERVAL MELODIC INTERVAL

A harmonic interval is simply two notes played simultaneously; a melodic interval is one note played after the other.

And when you swap the two notes (move the lower note up by an octave so it becomes the higher note), that is called inverting the interval.

It’s helpful to remember that seconds always invert to sevenths, thirds to sixths, and so forth… the fact that each of these pairs add up to nine is known to theorists as “the rule of nines.”

PERFECT INTERVALS

The distance of an interval is one part of its name, but there’s more: every interval has another quality to it, which we’ll call inflection.

Inflection is a bit harder to understand, partly because it depends on the type of interval. so let’s start by looking at unisons, fourths, fifths and octaves.

UNISONS FOURTHS AND FIFTHS UNISON OCTAVES

Are the easiest to label: if the two notes are the same (for example, b flat and b flat), then the inflection is perfect: such an interval is called a perfect unison or a perfect octave.

FOURTHS AND FIFTHS

Require a little more explaining. if you look at all the fourths and fifths you can create using only the white notes on the piano keyboard (in other words, using only notes without accidentals):

Each one is perfect except for those which use F and B!

Well, if you were to count the half-steps that make up each interval, you’d notice that all the other ones are equal in size, but the b to f intervals are not: f to b is a half-step larger than a perfect fourth, and b to f is a half-step smaller than a perfect fifth.

An interval that is a half-step larger than perfect is called an augmented interval.

An interval that is a half-step smaller than perfect is called a diminished interval.

THE MINOR SCALE

There are actually two things that define a key: the key signature is the most obvious one, but another important part of a key is the tonic… the note around which the key centers.

This key is defined by a key signature of no sharps and flats, but also by the fact that it centers around C.

But what if we change the tonic? what if we use the same notes for the key signature, but change the note that the key is centered around?

If we center the key around the sixth scale degree of the major scale, we get a new scale: the minor scale.

THE NATURAL MINOR SCALE

the thing is, common practice period composers weren’t all that crazy about this scale, because it lacks something the major scale has: a half-step from seven to one. The whole step here didn’t have the tension they liked going into the tonic!

So here’s what they did: they raised the leading-tone by a half-step with an accidental. This gave them the tension they were looking for!

THE HARMONIC MINOR SCALE

this scale is great for building chords, so we refer to it as the harmonic minor scale. however, composers didn’t use it for writing melodies, because it had a problem: an augmented second between the sixth and seventh scale degrees.

So, for melodies, they made another change: they added another accidental to raise the sixth scale degree by a half-step.

MELODIC MINOR SCALE

Now, remember… the reason we raised the leading tone in the first place was to create tension from the seventh scale degree to tonic. but in a melody, if the seventh scale degree is followed by the sixth scale degree, we don’t need that tension, so we don’t need to raise the leading-tone at all. the way we illustrate this is by differentiating between ascending melodic minor and descending melodic minor; for descending melodic minor, we don’t raise anything!

Relative and Parallel Keys

When two keys that have the same key signature but different tonic notes, we say they’re related.

Parallel keys, on the other hand, are keys that have the same tonic note, but different key signatures.

It’s convenient to add minor keys to the circle of fifths; they’re usually placed on the inside of the circle in lower case. because relative keys share the same key signature, they also share the same position on the circle of fifths! parallel keys have different key signatures, but seeing them on the circle of fifths illustrates their consistent key relationship: minor keys always appear three degrees counterclockwise from their parallel major key. So to find the key signature for a minor key, start with the major key signature with the same tonic and either add three flats, subtract three sharps, or some combination of both!

Dynamics and Articulations