
Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People - Tomte
http://tobyrush.com/theorypages/index.html
======
ewoodrich
It piqued my interest from the cached thumbnails, and I was able to find a
mirror of the complete set:

[http://academic.udayton.edu/tobyrush/theorypages/complete.pd...](http://academic.udayton.edu/tobyrush/theorypages/complete.pdf)

It's licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND, and Toby W. Rush is the author.
Great resources by the way, better and more concise than a lot of theory info
for beginners (bordering on intermediate, if you are able to get to some of
the more advanced scales, structure and basic part-writing/voice leading at
the end).

~~~
commontone
Hey, thanks for the nice hug, everyone! It's been a fun night. :)

I updated the mirror that ewoodrich referenced; what was up there before was a
slightly older version. The new one has a few more pages in it and a few typos
fixed here and there.

I've also swapped out the page on my site with a redirect to the mirror, since
my web hosting service has rebooted the server twice now. The mirror is on my
faculty web space at work, so we'll let them worry about it now! :)

No worries, though. Glad you all are finding the materials useful.

------
kev6168
Based on my own experience, I find the No. 1 obstacle in learning music theory
is the difficulty, _in the early stage of learning_, to practice the knowledge
to gain a real sense of how the stuff is used and why.

Take computer programming as an example. After 15 minutes of HTML lesson, a
newbie can already look at her creation in a browser and the html file on hard
disk, and have fun tweaking it (<html><body background="green">My home
page</body></html>, remember the days?). An hour of Java lesson can result in
several variations of "Hello World!" programs, created by the student.
Basically, people can put their hands on the knowledge and use it to produce
somewhat useful/tangible stuff.

Not so much when learning music theory. After enduring the bombardment of
names/concepts/terms/maths and other stuff for quite a while, I don't have the
slightest idea where I can practice in using them to analyze or write some
music.

I wish there is a lecture in the format of "One hundred songs for one hundred
music concepts". The songs should be stupidly simple (children's songs, simple
pops, short classical pieces, etc.). Each lesson concentrates on only _one_
concept appeared in the piece, explains what it is, how it is used, why it is
used in that way, and how its application makes nice sound, etc. Basically,
show me the _effect_ for each concept in a simple real world setting. Then
more importantly, give me exercises to write a few bars of music using this
concept, no matter how bad my writings are, as long as I am applying the new
knowledge.

~~~
dsirijus
You're wrong about categories of analogy, but I don't blame you - analogies
are a pretty slippery slopes. In particular, you're most likely conflating
these because of the implementation detail - you _write_ HTML, so _writing_
music is an analogy. Not really - _writing_ HTML is closer to _performing_
music.

You can teach almost everyone to perform "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" on
piano or "Smoke on the Water" on guitar within 15 minutes, both of which are
de facto "Hello world!" equivalents to many aspiring musicians.

EDIT: Removed attempt at drawing a HTML/music analogy which could be closer to
truth. It is really fruitless endeavour, makes no sense.

~~~
kev6168
I disagree. The rendering engine of the browser is the performer who looks at
my script(HTML/CSS/JS) and produce the final result for the visitors to the
web page. Writing HTML is not closer to performing music, but actually closer
to composing music, if you will.

Also, I think although knowing theory would help you play a song with an
instrument, it's not required, is it? More likely knowing music theory is for
understanding/appreciation of the composition/structure of the music. So no,
playing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" on an instrument is NOT equivalent to
writing "Hello world!" program. On the other hand, composing a super simple
but complete song is closer to writing a "Hello world!" (or a Fibonacci
series) program.

~~~
Retric
CSS is probably a better analogy for performing music. You generally keep the
same content, but presentation is important.

------
quadrangle
This isn't "music theory" (although almost everyone thinks it is). This is
"music jargon and notation systems". A _theory_ is something that explains an
observed phenomenon. This jargon and notation stuff doesn't explain music, it
just guides you through the jargon and notation.

I have a music degree and learned all this stuff and a lot more. This
presentation is an _excellent_ , _high-quality_ overview of this non-theory
junk.

It's extremely culturally-biased and, again, offers no real theoretical
explanation.

If you want _real_ understanding of music in a _useful_ way for real people, I
recommend Bob Snyder's book "Music and Memory: An Introduction" which was
actually written to teach creative artistic people about how music _actually_
works rather than how aristocratic European music notation works.

For some other perspectives, check out
[http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/htmlRT/contents.html](http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/htmlRT/contents.html)
and
[http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/ttss.html](http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/ttss.html)
(normally I wouldn't push these on average folks, although they are _superb_
but the HN crowd should be fine with them)

~~~
zeroxfe
I'm not sure how parent became the top comment, but "music theory" is
absolutely appropriate here. This terminology is commonly accepted by
musicians, educators, and practitioners. OP's link could say "western music
theory", but that seems unnecessary given the audience.

Secondly, why would you call this junk? This is actually very useful for
people learning to play, and for those who want to understand the basics of
harmony and rhythm.

What you are talking about is typically called "music perception theory",
"music cognition", or "music psychology".

~~~
subdane
Knowing how to spell doesn't make you a writer. I think the parent is trying
to explain that there's a cultural bias and inscrutability with respect to how
music theory is taught. Does learning a notation system make one a theorist?
One can be a western musician in, say, a jazz tradition, understand theory,
have theories and play music and have never used the system of notation
explained in the otherwise awesome comic.

~~~
anigbrowl
The poster above is trying to one-up the OP. Of course a notational cheat
sheet is not the same thing as a rigorous intellectual foundation, but the
phrase 'music theory' is the most common term to describe the traditional
notation and grammar for the western music corpus _by a mile_. That's what
most people want when they search for 'music theory'. It's not a good use of
the word 'theory' but the context within which it is embedded is widely
familiar.

 _One can be a western musician in, say, a jazz tradition, understand theory,
have theories and play music and have never used the system of notation
explained in the otherwise awesome comic._

True, but it's pretty unlikely. Most people who play music pick some up theory
(in the sense of this submission) along the way if only so they can have
meaningful conversations with other musicians.

~~~
quadrangle
> That's what most people want when they search for 'music theory'.

I think most people are actually thinking, "I want to understand music more."
when they search for "music theory", and instead of learning deeper
understanding about the nature of music, they are taught about notation
traditions. Then, most people decide they do _not_ especially care about
"music theory" anymore. The folks who continue are those who like studying
notation patterns.

~~~
anigbrowl
We're going to disagreee about this. I do get where you're coming from and I
actually don't care for musical notation; I can read it but I can't sight-read
to play so studying notes on a staff involves a lot of painfully keyboard
pecking (or occasional cheat transpositions into a DAW) followed by a bunch of
more fluid experimentation with the musical elements I played so badly, and
it's during this experimental phase that I may or may not learn something.

Like you I'd much rather read text about the psychology of musical perception
and the _why_ of music. I disliked the notation drills etc. when I had piano
lessons as a kid, but as I never had a natural ear for chords or harmony (and
thus frequently found myself wanting to improvise things but without a good
understanding of how to go about it) I came back to the theoretical stuff as
an adult, and ended up getting interested in other musical traditions like
Arabic and Indian styles as well as the western one (though I don't want to
oversell my knowledge or skills here). Different traditions use different
schemes but they all have some way to codify things, because unless you stay
within a single tradition or are blessed with an eidetic memory chances are
you'll need to note things down at some point.

Where I'm disagreeing with you is on the terminologyl I hold that when people
search for 'music theory' it's because they want to be conversant with other
people on the basics, even if they just want the bare minimum of how to
distinguish between major and minor, construct a few basic chords, or
read/write a melody outside of a piano roll. It's unfortunate that the label
'music theory' has become associated with this basic stuff; it's as if we used
'literature' to refer to basic spelling, grammar, and vocabulary and used some
other term to describe the actual study of artistic writing - but that's how
it is.

~~~
rquantz
_It 's unfortunate that the label 'music theory' has become associated with
this basic stuff_

Only in the way that the label mathematics has become associated with
arithmetic. The stuff here is what you need to know in order to get started
analyzing music of the common practice period (you'd need set theory to talk
about the pitch content of most music after 1900). But when people get
doctorates in music theory, they are not stil studying the circle of fifths.
They use these concepts to describe music in order to come to some
understanding of how and why it is structured.

------
fredley
I would love to see a version of this with European (/rest of the world?)
terminology. E.g. Crotchet, quaver, minim instead of quarter note, eigth note,
half note etc.

------
mdisraeli
I recall once seeing a link on HN for music theory for physicists and
engineers, but I didn't bookmark the URI at the time - anyone recall this, and
how to find it?

~~~
xaver
this perhaps?
[http://arxiv.org/html/1202.4212v1](http://arxiv.org/html/1202.4212v1)

------
rquantz
To those of you claiming either that "this is not a theory of music" or "yes,
this is exactly what people mean when they say music theory," you are both
right and both wrong.

The content of these cheat sheets describes what a music major learns in the
first semester or two of music theory classes. But there are people who get
PhD's in music theory. What do you think they study for all those years? It's
not this.

Saying this is music theory is like saying arithmetic is math. It's not wrong,
exactly, but it's leaving out a lot. People spend the first 12 years or more
of their math education learning the notation, learning formulas, at least
partly because you need to know that stuff in order to do any real math (we'll
leave the discussion of whether this is the optimal pedagogy for another day,
shall we?). You could say, "but people googling math want to understand _why_
2+2=4," but if you don't know that 2+2=4, there's not much point in trying to
learn why. You could also say that what people learned in high school is what
most people call math, but we all know that what people learn in high school
math doesn't have much to do with what real mathematicians do.

"Real music theory" uses the contents of these cheat sheets (and many, many
other things) to describe pieces of music and to try to understand things
like: why did this composer choose the notes and rhythms they did? What can we
use to justify the subjective observation that a composer or time period had a
unified music style? What are the assumptions of musical language that govern
musical composition without necessarily being known to the composers? Why does
this collection of notes have meaning? What is that meaning? What does the
content of this music tell us about how it should be performed?

The best of my music theory classes tried to keep a clear line from what we
were learning to the kinds of questions above. The worst classes we spent a
lot of time doing worksheets with the musical equivalent of times tables and
algebraic equations, ad nauseam.

\---

I'd also like to note that the things that appear under the aegis of
introductory music theory are a strange hybrid of techniques, reflecting the
multiple purposes of music theory for theorists, musicologists, composers, and
practitioners. So you get things that don't help much with analysis, like
species counterpoint (probably a useful exercise for composers, and maybe for
musicologists since it is really a historical curiosity, but not really useful
for anyone else) or realising figured bass (really only necessary if you're
going to be performing baroque music in period style on a keyboard
instrument).

You could again say similar things about high school math of course.

~~~
quadrangle
I appreciate your attempt at balance, but I still fundamentally disagree. Math
is universal. The arithmetic and other math basics we learn in grade school is
both (A) not very culturally-biased and (B) often not taught well.

There is _so_ much cultural baggage and assumption in the notation-focused
"music theory" that is _not_ present in mathematics. When we talk about
numbers of things in math, there's no doubt we're describing something
objective about reality external to culture. There indeed exists two apples or
four apples. The concept of "four notes" is rarely objectively valid because
almost everything in music is subjective.

"Music theory" basics are much more analogous to the elementary-school
versions of linguistic grammar. And most elementary teachers' understanding of
grammar is actually full of claims that are wrong, even though there's
something to the gist of it. When we go to "English" class, we expect to learn
about English and don't think our lessons apply to all languages. We should
similarly not teach one particular language of music and call the lessons
"music" without qualification. We should further recognize that grade-school
definitions of nouns and verbs do not all hold up under scrutiny.

When "music theory" of the sort here is taught _well_ , it is about as valid
and useful as grade-school pedantic, prescriptivist, grammar — the sort that
treats minority dialects as "bad grammar". Insisting on music theory being
this notation-jargon from classical Europe is like saying that African-
American dialects have poor grammar, when actually there are careful and
consistent implicit rules in those dialects that sometimes carry useful
meaning that standard American English doesn't even have a way to achieve.

~~~
rquantz
I actually don't think we completely disagree here.

First, I definitely didn't intend the parallels with math to extend any
further than the problems of perception with regard to how they are taught
versus how they are practiced by scholars. Music theory is an art-related
discipline and very much culturally inflected.

And this makes sense. Most music theory (in the West at least?) does focus on
Western classical music, in large part because Western music has a literate
tradition (see Taruskin) that most other musical traditions lack, which allows
us to treat the compositions themselves as texts/objects more easily than
other musics.

Even within Western music, we tend to use style- (read culture-) specific
analytical tools. It doesn't make sense to use harmonic analysis for
Stravinsky, and it doesn't make sense to look for twelve-tone rows in Mozart.
In general we use a combination of language that composers used and thought
with (so for Mozart, think keys and counterpoint) and techniques that arose
from observing the style after the fact (in this case, for instance, sonata
form, or Schenkerian analysis).

All of these techniques are culturally biased because, as you've pointed out
several times, music is psychological, and therefore rooted in culture.
Meanwhile, it makes sense to analyze, for instance, Indian classical music
using rhythmic modes.

So, coming around to your analogy with elementary school grammar education, I
think you're right that there is a prescriptivist parallel here -- learning
that parallel fifths are not allowed, or that the second theme in a sonata
always modulates to the dominant, or even that there always is a second theme
in sonata, all of these do not accurately describe all music, or even all
Western music of the common practice period. They are artifacts of the
particular techniques being used. The original description of the sonata came
into being around the same time as prescriptivist grammar (and has had a great
deal of improvement since then -- read Rosen if you haven't already). Species
counterpoint and Bach-style chorale harmonizing came about to describe
specific styles, and to be used as exercises for composition students in the
18th-19th Centuries. The fact that those two things in particular (which I
think are the most grievous examples of what you're talking about) are still
included in music theory education is possibly counterproductive, especially
since they are treated as sets of rules, rather than as historical examples of
the composition pedagogy that the Western classical composers themselves were
subjected to. Teaching Fux as anything other than "this is how Mozart and
Beethoven learned to write counterpoint" is silly.

So that's the prescriptivist parts. However, where we disagree is that I think
there's still a lot here that's useful for _descriptive_ purposes. It's
difficult to talk about classical music within its cultural-intellectual
context, which I think is necessary, without these tools. You can argue that
any interval can be dissonant with the right timbre, but if those timbres are
rarely used in the repertoire you're describing, it's not much use is it? The
18th and 19th Century composers thought about dissonance a certain way, and if
you're analyzing their work as art objects (cultural objects) rather than
physical objects, you have to at least take that into account.

~~~
kazagistar
The problem I have with trying to casually learn music theory is that I cannot
separate what is "real" and what is "syntax". For example, I can trivially see
that "beaming" is entirely syntactic, but the difference between 3/4 time and
6/8 time is far more confusing.

Music notation just seems really really suboptimal for actually understanding
music (music software uses totally different notations/interfaces for a
reason), and all music theory seems obsessed with it.

~~~
rquantz
In fact, beaming makes the difference between 3/4 and 6/8 clear. But even if
it didn't, you can't divorce the cultural object from it's notation. Once
you're trained, traditional music notation is pretty optimal for reading music
for performance, and you have to remember that that is the purpose of music
notation. All alternative notation systems I've seen fail this simple test:
once I've learned this, would I be able to play music I've never seen before
reasonably well the first time? I've never seen anything that works as well as
traditional music notation for that.

Meanwhile, music theorists are "obsessed" with notation only insofar as the
music they study is written using that notation. You seem to have skipped my
previous comments -- music theory, even at this basic level, has little to do
with notation. You read it as notation obsessed only because you're not
thoroughly enough steeped in the notation. Reading and writing music notation
is as natural to a musician as writing in English is to you. It would be
strange and counterproductive to insist on using nontraditional notation when
every musician who plays the repertoire you're studying already reads the
standard notation, and all the repertoire you're studying is written in it.

------
nottombrown
Nobody has mentioned hooktheory.com yet. If you're interested in why some
music sounds good, check it out.

~~~
praxeologist
I'll second this even though I only checked out the site once a bit back. I'm
still quite the newb at this stuff but it got a great response on the EDM
production subreddit.

------
mnemonik
Down for me. Here's a wayback machine cached version:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20140226025639/http://tobyrush.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140226025639/http://tobyrush.com/theorypages/index.html)

------
klodolph
It appears that the site is somewhat image-heavy, hence the downtime. There
are ~50 pages of content, each presented as an image link to a PDF.

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tobyrus...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tobyrush.com/theorypages/index.html)

~~~
javajosh
This successfully gives you links that fail. I was hopeful that Google caches
the PDFs, so that the links might not fail (with a bit of finagling) but
apparently the cached PDFs are modified to be unreadable. :(

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tobyrus...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tobyrush.com/theorypages/pdf/0102pitchnotation.pdf)

------
zura
I'm surprised nobody mentioned that terrible font... Any chance you could fix
it?

------
chpp
Hacker News hug of death? I am new to guitar and was excited to see what this
was.

~~~
philbarr
You might want to just learn tablature for the time being, unless you're
thinking of doing classical guitar.

Not to say _don 't_ read them of course; you can read what you like, just that
tab is what you'll be using I would have thought.

~~~
markvdb
Guitar professional here.

It's good to keep the limitations of tabs in mind. The're really useful, but
they don't represent music nearly half as much as conventional music notation.
They represent finger movements instead.

~~~
kansface
The funny thing is that standard notation is quite poor for the guitar because
it has no notion of finger movements- all sorts of annotations are dumped into
scores - numbers for fingers, circled numbers for strings, roman numerals for
frets, empty noteheads for natural harmonics, and who knows what for
artificial harmonics and friends.

I don't think its possible to reproduce a piece from only tabs (without having
heard it) while standard notation makes sight reading unnecessarily hard.

~~~
squeaky-clean
I feel like I'm repeating myself too much in this thread, haha, but only
because it seems like no one is acknowledging that you can combine both forms
very easily and produce very clear results. You just replace the staff
notation with tabs, but keep everything else.

I took a quick screenshot to show an example[1]. I think here you can tell
very easily what fingerings to play, what the note duration is, and when you
should sustain notes over others. The difference between slurs, slides and
whammy bar bends (The V symbol you see next to notes like in meas 3), muting
notes is an x, yadda, yadda. I'll stop going on about tabs now.

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/yog4v5n.png](http://i.imgur.com/yog4v5n.png)

------
Stratoscope
> The augmentation dot is a dot placed to the right of a notehead. Though
> small, this dot wields some _serious power_ : it changes the length of the
> note by _150%_. In other words, it makes the note half again as long.

Oops.

Very nifty and fun though.

Woof!

------
thewarrior
I would like to recommend :

Music Theory For Computer Musicians.

------
tobr
I appreciate the style of presentation, but why do we still pretend this is
"music" theory? Most of this is completely useless for anyone who is
interested in understanding music that wasn't written by people in powdered
wigs.

For some actually useful music theory, I can recommend the goldmine that is
Ethan Hein's blog: [http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/category/music/music-
theory/](http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/category/music/music-theory/)

~~~
lucasgw
Listen to techno, house and tribal, and you hear Koyaanisqatsi, 18 Musicians,
and the work of Glass, Reich, and Riley.

Listen to Glass, Reich, and Riley - and you hear the deconstruction of
symphonic structure.

Listen to Beethoven's symphonies and you hear the struggle of form from
Mozart's classical era construction to what would become Beethoven's pure
romanticism.

Listen to the interplay of an Alberti Bass and melody in Mozart's Piano
Sonatas, and you hear the beauty in the evolution of counterpoint as written
by Bach, Scarlatti, and their band of powdered wigs.

Listen to Bach and Scarlatti, and you hear the echoes of Gregorian Chant and
the Diabolus in Musica (and why Black Sabbath sounds like Black Sabbath.)

Those who forget the past are doomed to be Miley Cyrus.

~~~
Energy1
Suppose I am listening to Les Claypool's bass work. What olden stuff am I
hearing?

~~~
lucasgw
Listen to Les, and hear the technique and round sound of Jaco Pastorius. (or
at least I do.)

Listen to Portrait of Tracy (or any great harmonic jazz) and you hear the same
open chord structures of Impressionist works like Debussy's Preludes or
Ravel's Valse Nobles.

Listen to the impressionists and you go many places...

Ravel and Debussy's piano music is barely one step removed from jazz. Makes
sense, because the early jazz greats lived and played around the same time.
There's a famous picture of Ravel at a birthday party when he was in his 50s,
with George Gershwin standing beside him. The early 1900s was an amazing time
in music... classical was mixing with early jazz was mixing with vaudeville
was mixing with the first stirrings of delta blues was mixing with gospel was
mixing with african folks songs...

(I can do this all night... ;)

