Introducing: Music Theory with Stephen Chen
The one secret about music theory that academics don’t want you to know: You don’t need it.
You don’t need to understand a single thing about what people call “music theory” in order to interact with music on an emotionally and intellectually full level. You may feel like you want to understand how music works, but the very notion is absurd. Music doesn’t work, it just is; our emotions & intellects are the ones working, spurred into action by patterns of molecular vibrations on the eardrums.
Music does not elicit response from the parts of the brain devoted to semantic knowledge, and yet we seek to find meaning within music by dissecting and discussing it. We reduce more complex waveforms (“chords”) into an array of simpler ones (“pitches”), invent time signatures to describe their patterns of recurrence, and we draw up theoretical scaffoldings to explain why they occur in the order that they do. But is that really the intellectual or emotional experience of listening?
One only needs to strike to the bars of a marimba to realize that a “note” is so, so much more than just a single pitch. Or if you hear the downbeat of a song in the “wrong” place, you may discover an entirely new piece of music within the same, familiar sounds. And if you’ve ever discovered a bouncy, cheery song’s lyrics to be unexpectedly sad, turning the whole song tragic, you may be on your way to realizing that nothing we think to be inherent about music has any real weight. It’s all the context in which we listen — emotional, historical, or physical — that shapes how it makes us feel.
To be clear, I love music theory. I love being able to describe a given passage of music in multiple ways, uncovering clever tricks by composers, appreciating where they set up and subvert expectations, and all around having a frame of reference that helps me understand what I’m listening to. But I highly doubt that music theory holds the power to solve the mystery of why music makes us feel the way it does.
To be more specific, I do not believe that music can be emotionally prescriptive, rather, it is merely triggering. For this reason, I chafe when I see major chords being taught as “happy” and minor “sad,” or when somebody calls a chord progression “triumphant” and a rhythm “exciting.” I’ve cried to major-key progressions and fallen asleep to 180bpm dance music. It’s all relative. The very fact that some people love, and others hate, a given piece of music is proof enough that musical composition alone does not have a consistent effect on a listener’s experience.
And yet, the composition of the music we listen to in the aggregate does have a consistent effect on our cognitive & intellectual experience of music. Like many who are reading this, the experience of having listened to Western music for my entire life has had an indelible effect on how I interpret what I hear. The music I’ve been exposed to has consistently featured 12 distinct pitches, organized for the most part into intervals & chords that change with statistical regularity. In other words, I’ve been unconsciously trained to hear Western music through the life-long repetition of hearing its examples.
It’s in this way that I think of “music theory” less as a way to describe what’s happening in a given piece of music, but instead, a way to predict what’s most likely to happen based on statistical patterns. Pairing these predictions with an analysis of what really happens, we’re then free to individually determine how we feel when those expectations are either fulfilled or denied.
This also offers us a chance to use the same language to describe very different types of music. Although baroque music and punk music use the same building blocks, i.e. the 12 pitches of Western music, those pitches are used in very different combinations and patterns. I would never want to say (and, sadly, you’ll hear this in almost every theory course) that a particular chord “wants to move” to another. A chord is a complex pattern of air molecules vibrating. It doesn’t have desires, you do. Instead, the most accurate you could ever get with such a statement is that, within a given style, one chord is statistically most likely to move to another particular one. Not sexy, but way more true.
Over the next few months, I’ll be writing articles that explain different Western music theory concepts using a popular song for reference. I want to create a new way of understanding theory that fully acknowledges the inherent arbitration in every assumption we make about music, while still being useful to understanding the musical world we’ve built for ourselves. I will never tell you that something ought to make you feel a certain way, or that a musical device has a particular effect. That’s up to you to determine. But I will delve headlong into describing how real pieces of music line up with — and contrast with — the abstract patterns (and ingrained “rules”) of music we’ve come to passively understand through years of listening.
Yes, you’ll hear terms like “four chord,” “secondary dominant,” and “diatonic,” but I hope to explain that these are not special concepts waiting to be learned, but merely descriptions of things you’ve already known your whole life. And paradoxically, you’ll find that the more you learn about music theory, the more tautological it all seems; and at some point of understanding, we’ll reach a musical nirvana where we shed all artificial constructs of musical analysis and interact directly with sound itself.
To be continued…
— Stephen Rodes Chen
Stephen Rodes Chen is a saxophonist, composer, and songwriter in various experimental-pop groups including San Fermin, Ghost Funk Orchestra, and Behaviorist.
