Master Music Theory

Overview of Music Theory

• Music theory is the study of the practices and possibilities of music.

• It includes the study of music notation, scholars' views on music from antiquity to the present, and a sub-topic of musicology that "seeks to define processes and general principles in music".

• Music theory is concerned with describing how musicians and composers make music, including tuning systems and composition methods among other topics.

• Music theory encompasses the methods and concepts that composers and other musicians use in creating and performing music.

• Music theory has a deep and long history that is visible in ancient and living cultures around the world.

• Music theory is a subfield of musicology, the wider study of musical cultures and history.

• Music theory considers melody, rhythm, counterpoint, harmony, form, tonal systems, scales, tuning, intervals, consonance, dissonance, durational proportions, the acoustics of pitch systems, composition, performance, orchestration, ornamentation, improvisation, electronic sound production, etc.

• Pitch is the lowness or highness of a tone, and specific frequencies are often assigned letter names.

• Musical tuning systems, or temperaments, determine the precise size of intervals.

• Notes can be arranged in a variety of scales and modes, and different cultures often use scales that do not correspond with an equally divided twelve-tone division of the octave.

• Consonance and dissonance are subjective qualities of the sonority of intervals that vary widely in different cultures and over the ages.

• Music theory has a long history of emotional associations with specific keys, known as the doctrine of the affections, which were an important topic in music theory during the Baroque period.Overview of Music Theory

• Music theory is the study of the fundamental elements of music, including rhythm, melody, harmony, timbre, texture, form, and expression.

• Consonance and dissonance are fundamental concepts in music theory, with perfect fourths, fifths, and octaves and all major and minor thirds and sixths considered consonant.

• Rhythm is produced by the sequential arrangement of sounds and silences in time, with meter measuring music in regular pulse groupings called measures or bars.

• A melody is a group of musical sounds in agreeable succession or arrangement that typically moves toward a climax of tension then resolve to a state of rest.

• A chord is any harmonic set of three or more notes that is heard as if sounding simultaneously, with triads the most frequently encountered chords.

• Harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them.

• Timbre is the principal phenomenon that allows us to distinguish one instrument from another when both play at the same pitch and volume, and is determined by the relative balance of overtones produced by a given instrument due to its construction.

• Dynamics refer to variations of intensity or volume, with conventional indications of dynamics including abbreviations for Italian words like forte (f) for loud and piano (p) for soft.

• Articulation is the way the performer sounds notes, with staccato the shortening of duration compared to the written note value, legato performs the notes in a smoothly joined sequence with no separation.

• Texture is how the melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic materials are combined in a composition, thus determining the overall quality of the sound in a piece.

• Musical form refers to the overall structure or plan of a piece of music, and it describes the layout of a composition as divided into sections.

• Musical expression is the art of playing or singing music with emotional communication, with the elements of music that comprise expression including dynamic indications, phrasing, differing qualities of timbre and articulation, color, intensity, energy, and excitement.Overview of Music Theory

• Music theory is a field of study that deals with the understanding of the elements of music, their structure, and their relationship to each other.

• The components of musical expression are closely related to the voice's natural ability to express feelings, sentiment, and deep emotions.

• Musical notation is the written or symbolized representation of music, achieved by the use of graphic symbols, verbal instructions, and abbreviations.

• Western music notation evolved during the Middle Ages and remains an area of experimentation and innovation.

• Musical analysis is the attempt to answer the question of how music works, and the method employed differs from analyst to analyst.

• Schenkerian analysis is a method of musical analysis of tonal music based on the theories of Heinrich Schenker.

• Transformational theory is a branch of music theory developed by David Lewin in the 1980s, which models musical transformations as elements of a mathematical group.

• Music psychology is a field of research with practical relevance for many areas, including music performance, composition, education, criticism, and therapy.

• A music genre is a conventional category that identifies some pieces of music as belonging to a shared tradition or set of conventions.

• Musical technique is the ability of instrumental and vocal musicians to exert optimal control of their instruments or vocal cords to produce precise musical effects.

• Music theorists sometimes use mathematics to understand music, and although music has no axiomatic foundation in modern mathematics, mathematics is "the basis of sound."

• Music semiology (semiotics) is the study of signs as they pertain to music on a variety of levels.Music Theory: History, Semiotics, and Education

• Musical semiosis involves the idea of musical signs within a text and without.

• Topics, or various musical conventions, have been treated suggestively by writers on music semiology, such as Kofi Agawu, Heinrich Schenker, and Raymond Monelle.

• The notion of gesture is becoming important in musico-semiotic enquiry.

• Roland Barthes wrote about music in his works, but did not consider music to be a semiotic system.

• Music meanings occur mainly through the connotations of sounds and the social construction, appropriation, and amplification of certain meanings associated with these connotations.

• Philip Tagg's work provides one of the most complete and systematic analyses of the relation between musical structures and connotations in western and popular music.

• Leonard B. Meyer's Style and Music theorizes the relationship between ideologies and musical structures and the phenomena of style change, focusing on romanticism as a case study.

• Music theory in the practical sense has been a part of education at conservatories and music schools for centuries, but the status music theory currently has within academic institutions is relatively recent.

• A growing number of scholars began promoting the idea that music theory should be taught by theorists, leading to the founding of the Society for Music Theory in the United States in 1977.

• Most music theorists work as instructors, lecturers, or professors in colleges, universities, or conservatories.

• The job market for tenure-track professor positions in music theory is very competitive.

• The job tasks of a music theorist include teaching, conducting research, publishing research articles, authoring book chapters, books or textbooks, and supervising M.A. and PhD students.