Music theory


Music theory is the study of theoretical frameworks for understanding the practices and possibilities of music. The Oxford Companion to Music describes three interrelated uses of the term "music theory": The first refers to the "rudiments" needed to understand music notation such as key signatures, time signatures, and rhythmic notation; the second is a study of scholars' views on music from antiquity to the present; the third is a sub-topic of musicology that "seeks to define processes and general principles in music". The musicological approach to theory differs from musical analysis "in that it takes as its starting-point not the individual work or performance but the fundamental materials from which it is built."
Music theory is frequently concerned with describing how musicians and composers make music, including tuning systems and composition methods among other topics. Because of the ever-expanding conception of what constitutes music, a more inclusive definition could be the consideration of any sonic phenomena, including silence. This is not an absolute guideline, however; for example, the study of "music" in the Quadrivium liberal arts university curriculum, that was common in medieval Europe, was an abstract system of proportions that was carefully studied at a distance from actual musical practice. But this medieval discipline became the basis for tuning systems in later centuries and is generally included in modern scholarship on the history of music theory.
Music theory as a practical discipline encompasses the methods and concepts that composers and other musicians use in creating and performing music. The development, preservation, and transmission of music theory in this sense may be found in oral and written music-making traditions, musical instruments, and other artifacts. For example, ancient instruments from prehistoric sites around the world reveal details about the music they produced and potentially something of the musical theory that might have been used by their makers. In ancient and living cultures around the world, the deep and long roots of music theory are visible in instruments, oral traditions, and current music-making. Many cultures have also considered music theory in more formal ways such as written treatises and music notation. Practical and scholarly traditions overlap, as many practical treatises about music place themselves within a tradition of other treatises, which are cited regularly just as scholarly writing cites earlier research.
In modern academia, music theory is a subfield of musicology, the wider study of musical cultures and history. Guido Adler, however, in one of the texts that founded musicology in the late 19th century, wrote that "the science of music originated at the same time as the art of sounds", where "the science of music" obviously meant "music theory". Adler added that music only could exist when one began measuring pitches and comparing them to each other. He concluded that "all people for which one can speak of an art of sounds also have a science of sounds". One must deduce that music theory exists in all musical cultures of the world.
Music theory is often concerned with abstract musical aspects such as tuning and tonal systems, scales, consonance and dissonance, and rhythmic relationships. There is also a body of theory concerning practical aspects, such as the creation or the performance of music, orchestration, ornamentation, improvisation, and electronic sound production. A person who researches or teaches music theory is a music theorist. University study, typically to the MA or PhD level, is required to teach as a tenure-track music theorist in a US or Canadian university. Methods of analysis include mathematics, graphic analysis, and especially analysis enabled by western music notation. Comparative, descriptive, statistical, and other methods are also used. Music theory textbooks, especially in the United States of America, often include elements of musical acoustics, considerations of musical notation, and techniques of tonal composition, among other topics.

History

Antiquity

Mesopotamia

Several surviving Sumerian and Akkadian clay tablets include musical information of a theoretical nature, mainly lists of intervals and tunings. The scholar Sam Mirelman reports that the earliest of these texts dates from before 1500 BCE, a millennium earlier than surviving evidence from any other culture of comparable musical thought. Further, "All the Mesopotamian texts are united by the use of a terminology for music that, according to the approximate dating of the texts, was in use for over 1,000 years."

China

Much of Chinese music history and theory remains unclear.
Chinese theory starts from numbers, the main musical numbers being twelve, five and eight. Twelve refers to the number of pitches on which the scales can be constructed, Five refers to the Pentatonic Scale, And Eight refers to the eight categories of Chinese Music Instruments; classified by the material they are made from:. The Lüshi chunqiu from about 238 BCE recalls the legend of Ling Lun. On order of the Yellow Emperor, Ling Lun collected twelve bamboo lengths with thick and even nodes. Blowing on one of these like a pipe, he found its sound agreeable and named it huangzhong, the "Yellow Bell". He then heard phoenixes singing. The male and female phoenix each sang six tones. Ling Lun cut his bamboo pipes to match the pitches of the phoenixes, producing twelve pitch pipes in two sets: six from the male phoenix and six from the female: these were called the lülü or later the shierlü.
Apart from technical and structural aspects, ancient Chinese music theory also discusses topics such as the nature and functions of music. The Yueji, for example, manifests Confucian moral theories of understanding music in its social context. Studied and implemented by Confucian scholar-officials , these theories helped form a musical Confucianism that overshadowed but did not erase rival approaches. These include the assertion of Mozi that music wasted human and material resources, and Laozi's claim that the greatest music had no sounds. Even the music of the qin zither, a genre closely affiliated with Confucian scholar-officials, includes many works with Daoist references, such as Tianfeng huanpei.

India

The Samaveda and Yajurveda are among the earliest testimonies of Indian music, but properly speaking, they contain no theory. The Natya Shastra, written between 200 BCE to 200 CE, discusses intervals, scales, consonances and dissonances, classes of melodic structure, melodic types, instruments, etc.

Greece

Early preserved Greek writings on music theory include two types of works:
  • technical manuals describing the Greek musical system including notation, scales, consonance and dissonance, rhythm, and types of musical compositions;
  • treatises on the way in which music reveals universal patterns of order leading to the highest levels of knowledge and understanding.
Several names of theorists are known before these works, including Pythagoras, Philolaus, and others.
Works of the first type include
More philosophical treatises of the second type include

  • Post-classical or Medieval Period

China

The pipa instrument carried with it a theory of musical modes that subsequently led to the Sui and Tang theory of 84 musical modes.

Arabic countries / Persian countries

Medieval Arabic music theorists include:
  • Abū Yūsuf Ya'qūb al-Kindi, who uses the first twelve letters of the alphabet to describe the twelve frets on five strings of the oud, producing a chromatic scale of 25 degrees.
  • al-Munajjim, author of Risāla fī al-mūsīqī which describes a Pythagorean tuning of the oud and a system of eight modes perhaps inspired by Ishaq al-Mawsili.
  • Abū n-Nașr Muḥammad al-Fārābi, author of Kitab al-Musiqa al-Kabir.
  • 'Ali ibn al-Husayn ul-Isfahānī, known as Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani, author of Kitāb al-Aghānī.
  • Abū 'Alī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd-Allāh ibn Sīnā, known as Avicenna, whose contribution to music theory consists mainly in Chapter 12 of the section on mathematics of his Kitab Al-Shifa.
  • al-Ḥasan ibn Aḥmad ibn 'Ali al-Kātib, author of Kamāl adab al Ghinā', copied in 1225.
  • Safi al-Din al-Urmawi, author of the Kitabu al-Adwār and ar-Risālah aš-Šarafiyyah.
  • Mubārak Šāh, commentator of Safi al-Din's Kitāb al-Adwār.
  • Anon. LXI, Anonymous commentary on Safi al-Din's Kitāb al-Adwār.
  • Shams al-dῑn al-Saydᾱwῑ Al-Dhahabῑ, music theorist. Author of Urjῡza fi'l-mῡsῑqᾱ.

    Europe

The Latin treatise De institutione musica by the Roman philosopher Boethius was a touchstone for other writings on music in medieval Europe. Boethius represented Classical authority on music during the Middle Ages, as the Greek writings on which he based his work were not read or translated by later Europeans until the 15th century. This treatise carefully maintains distance from the actual practice of music, focusing mostly on the mathematical proportions involved in tuning systems and on the moral character of particular modes. Several centuries later, treatises began to appear which dealt with the actual composition of pieces of music in the plainchant tradition. At the end of the ninth century, Hucbald worked towards more precise pitch notation for the neumes used to record plainchant.
Guido d'Arezzo wrote a letter to Michael of Pomposa in 1028, entitled Epistola de ignoto cantu, in which he introduced the practice of using syllables to describe notes and intervals. This was the source of the hexachordal solmization that was to be used until the end of the Middle Ages. Guido also wrote about emotional qualities of the modes, the phrase structure of plainchant, the temporal meaning of the neumes, etc.; his chapters on polyphony "come closer to describing and illustrating real music than any previous account" in the Western tradition.
During the thirteenth century, a new rhythm system called mensural notation grew out of an earlier, more limited method of notating rhythms in terms of fixed repetitive patterns, the so-called rhythmic modes, which were developed in France around 1200. An early form of mensural notation was first described and codified in the treatise Ars cantus mensurabilis by Franco of Cologne. Mensural notation used different note shapes to specify different durations, allowing scribes to capture rhythms which varied instead of repeating the same fixed pattern; it is a proportional notation, in the sense that each note value is equal to two or three times the shorter value, or half or a third of the longer value. This same notation, transformed through various extensions and improvements during the Renaissance, forms the basis for rhythmic notation in European classical music today.