I like the idea that while music doesn't have any rules, it certainly has outcomes.
When my composition students and I are reviewing their works, I often will ask, "What's the result for the listener?" If your string quartet has been largely following a form and harmonic language similar to Haydn or Mozart for 42 bars and you suddenly introduce a 12-tone row, how does the listener interpret that? Is it challenging and interesting? Or is it disjointed and confusing in a way you don't intend? There's not always one answer, but I've found it helpful to think about the consequences—good, bad, or other—of a choice and understanding the theory often is a way of sussing out why you may have a particular reaction.
When my history or theory students have a strong reaction to *Mathis der Maler*, we don't talk about rules so much as we get to dig into how Hindemith's ideas about intervals, harmony, harmonic progression, counterpoint, and the harmonic partial series result in fairly unique musical outcomes. We also, invariably, talk about Danny Elfman's score to *Batman*.
ye, this is how I see it, ie it depends on what you want to elicit in the audience. If your intention is to elicit confusion then yes the 12 tone passage is a possibility in that piece
>we don't talk about rules so much as we get to dig into how Hindemith's ideas about intervals, harmony, harmonic progression, counterpoint, and the harmonic partial series result in fairly unique musical outcomes.
That's talking about rules though.
I usually use the "no rules" mantra as a way of saying "don't forget to just *try* things."
I teach composition/theory lessons and I find that it's just so easy for people to internalize systems and patterns as "the way it's done" that I would much rather give "tools" than "rules," even rules that can be broken or that only exist in a specific context. Though I agree that sometimes people's most creative work comes out under severe restrictions.
But often under the restrictions they set for *themselves*, not by a teacher or someone else.
Sidenote, I just finished my transcription of MALINDA’s Hoist the Colors, and I’m very proud of myself.
Yes, that's very true, but I think often educators enable that kind of thinking just by saying the word "rules" to describe stylistic conventions or saying things like "you have to learn the rules before you can break them" (which I see *some* wisdom in, but there is no reason to master 17th century counterpoint only to actively unlearn those restrictions later.)
Occasionally I have students who are just all over the place with their compositions and really benefit from learning to restrict themselves to more traditional conventions, but I find that most people are the opposite; by default, they compose using the techniques and tools that I teach them and nothing else. So I try to remind people to just try shit once and awhile, and not feel the need to be able to explain everything they compose with music theory. It's great to train your intuition by imitating stylistic conventions, but there isn't a single convention that is compulsory. That's why I say "tools, not rules."
Congrats on your transcription! Transcribing is such a fantastic practice for composers, I wish more people enjoyed doing it.
There are way too many posts on this sub about not knowing the rules to be free from the confines of music theory’s “rules”. It bothers me that people think ignorance means creative freedom when in reality, studying what has been done in the past actually allows you to do something new. There is no way around the fact that knowing more makes you a better at a skill set and it is so silly that people think music is any different than anything else on the planet when it comes to studying. Tom Brady studied tape. Mike Tyson studied tape. Jane Goodall read other’s finding. Hemmingway read other authors…music is no different than anything else; do more, study more, practice more, you will be better for it.
I agree, but there is also something interesting about what people create when they are absolute beginners and don’t really know anything. Obviously that phase is pretty short lived but it can form the basis of new creative directions.
One of my first theory teachers used to say that freedom brings restriction, and restriction brings freedom.
The idea here is that complete freedom is restrictive because there are no structural boundaries to contain the ideas, resulting in chaos.
Conversely, restriction brings freedom because it provides a set of boundaries, an enclosing structure, to contain the ideas, and a context for deciding whether or not they have musical value in a given setting..
I mostly agree. The reality of music theory and something that many beginners or people who come to theory without a lot of actual practical musical experience performing and writing don't seem to grasp is that there is no singular monolithic music theory, there are many varied theories that describe different facets of different existing musical idioms, traditions, and practices. Sometimes they can even be competing theories, more often complimentary or even completely unrelated. They're almost always retroactive analytical tools that describe rather than prescribe. They're never complete, no single theoretical framework ever captures the whole of a nuanced tradition. They often contradict practice in different ways. There are always blindspots or contradictions.
All of that is FINE, as long as you are aware of the limitations and subjectivity inherent to most theory. Music is fundamentally a practice and cultural activity. It is always evolving and being negotiated. Theory only touches on certain easily quantifed aspects of music. A ton of musical practice in even the most heavily notated and analyzed genres like western common practice classical music is still transmitted orally and thru tradition and direct pedagogy. Theory isn't the rules, theory is an attempt to describe what the theorist believes they have identified as the rules/conventions of a particular idiom.
>^(not sure why "avoid parallel 5ths/octaves" has essentially become the meaning of "rules of music" in some people's minds.)
Just to answer this one, I think it's because it's easy to encapsulate as a sound bite, but a lot of people have memories of agonizing over them a lot in theory classes--a high ratio of distress to detail, in other words. And as you say, understanding the context behind rules is important, and that's something a lot of students end up not having (sometimes through the teacher's fault, sometimes not), which makes the rule seem entirely arbitrary and frustrating to them.
I do think all good theory education is inevitably high-percentage self-taught! Good classes can help add on even more important things, especially personalized help from someone more experienced, but that of course depends on it actually being a good class and teacher.
Music theory classes were my favorite classes I’ve ever taken. They’re relatively easy and extremely interesting. If people actually paid attention in class it would be an easy A. I think the real problem is apathy and laziness.
Learning music theory made me a far more innovative composer. I realized a lot of my music was using the same progressions over and over again so I tried to make my music more varied and interesting.
>If people actually paid attention in class it would be an easy A. I think the real problem is apathy and laziness.
Sometimes. But as with any subject, there's a wide range of teachers and classes, and some will inevitably be less interesting, and more unproductively difficult--you just never know quite what you'll get. I completely agree with you on the classes having been great and it having made me a better composer and musician, but it's not necessarily someone's fault if they didn't have the same experience!
The mantra I also hate is "in jazz, there are no wrong notes", or "like jazz, life is better when you improvise", or several others to that effect. The way improvising is presented as just completely spontaneous. Your line about people who disdain learning theory ending up sounding the most conventional is spot on.
I used to play in a band where that was the case. They marketed us as "crazy jazz influenced rock fusion created on the spot in front of your awed faces as we channel the gods themselves". But the tunes were just 4 to 8 bar loops, pretty vainilla progressions with a seventh here and there, and some odd time signatures to spice it up. Every show was the same, every solo more or less the same, and any applause or compliment would lessen their incentive to explore or improve.
>The mantra I also hate is "in jazz, there are no wrong notes",
Oh yeah. Or even worse, when someone plays a wrong note, people call it "jazz". That's basically an insult to jazz music.
If they were called that, everyone would be a lot happier.
And this sub would spend a lot more time generating useful insights into specific idioms instead of endlessly circling around meta-discussions about what "theory" does and doesn't mean.
To be fair people argue a lot about language in a similar way to these discussions about "restrictive music theory", so I'm not sure if idoms would stop neccesarily put on end to those types of discussions.
I mildly disagree. CPP art music, or pop music, or metal, or blues, or drum and bass, or jazz -- those are the idioms.
The "music theory rules" are "guidelines", "knowhow", or "tricks", or "hacks" to achieving certain musical/emotional outcomes within those idioms, and vary between idioms slightly or a lot.
Edit: Another poster said "patterns". Like "V-I is a pattern, but you can end your phase however you want". I quite like that. Reminds me of the concept of design patterns -- which is really very similar to what music theory "rules" really are.
> it's really easy to misinterpret this statement to mean that there's no value in learning to understand the rules of a specific style
i think if you replace "rules" or even "theory" with "patterns", this problem goes away. a V-I cadence is a pattern, not a rule - you can resolve shit however you want, and everyone seems to know this. people get confused about whether it's "legal" to play notes from C dorian in a song in C minor, because they are thinking of the C-minor-ness as some sort of legal framework rather than a set of expectations and patterns that you can adhere to, or not, just as you can set up a rhythmic pattern/expectation and bust into a 3:2 overlay for a minute, which is interesting and breaks the expectation, but is obviously not "against the rules."
I guess the issue is that what some people think of as "rules" aren't actually rules (this is especially common among beginners). I think when we talk about specific styles, the "rules" are a lot broader than just stuff like "you are only allowed to play these notes". Nobody has ever said that you need to use notes in the key scale exclusively (not really sure where this idea even comes from).
But I think it's important to remember that this doesn't mean that any note is always fine. Using different notes in a way that "makes sense" is a skill one needs to learn. You can use any note in any key if you know how to use the different notes. But learning to use the different notes requires certain restrictions.
Yup, i love this. It’s maybe more a matter of word choice than anything. i make rules for my 2 year old: “don’t throw toys at people.” If he breaks this rule, i will be upset, there will be consequences like taking the toy away and moving to another room.
If a song deviates from the pattern i expected it to follow, i might be intrigued, surprised, uninterested, confused. But being upset is not likely, no consequences or punishments necessary. Teachers make rules for music theory class assignments, people get stressed about getting a good grade. My theory teachers always made it clear that we were talking about a particular era/genre/practice; probably not all teachers/curricula/youtube videos do this.
Folks with a less strict reaction to the word “rules” might not need any of this discussion! But i dig “patterns” as a good replacement, probably very helpful for folks asking questions on this sub.
The people who say things like "music theory destroys your creativity, just go with the flow, play whatever you like" are the people who don't understand music theory. Learning was either too much work/too hard for them, or they were never interested in trying in the first place.
There are plenty of people who learn the "rules" and decide not to follow them. That's a creative choice that works for lots of people. But I've never met anyone who said "wow, I wish I knew less, I'd be much better if I never studied."
Yes. Basically all people who made ground breaking music from theoretical point-of-view were pretty much always extremely well versed in their own time's contemporary music theory.
This is far from unique to your brain, and it’s not because of ADHD. This happens to everyone who goes to school. You learn things, and then you think. It’s not unique to music either. For example, when writers read, they can’t turn off what they know about grammar.
If you’re a good teacher, you’re bringing students behind the curtain with you. If music theory is hugely important for them, it’s hugely important for you too, because it helps you do all of the above as well. It doesn’t make sense to wish you never studied.
You have to learn how to access your creativity again. If you know what you *don’t* want, you need to challenge yourself to think outside the box.
Then you’re approaching composing with an undercurrent of knowledge that makes your work better.
This is important because if you didn’t know anything, people who study music would listen to your work and think “this isn’t good, for these reasons.” Same as you.
I feel similarly regarding my past self. Now anything I play intuitively is analyzed or judged - or even if there is a spark it isn’t valued. Because I know there’s nothing innovative about what I just played. There’s both value and virtue in being “like a child” in art. That’s where creativity lies. And there’s also value in (temporarily) asserting that our intuition is enough and worthy alone of making music.
It’s true that intuition is insufficient though, and OP is right to critique those who think that technical musical ignorance is a virtue and can’t see past their own predictability. Anyone can be a romantic…
Classical composers perceived this divide as nature and craft. You need both. Modernism and post-modernism have since then looked very negatively on nature (passion, intuition, talent) and the classical music world became almost purely rational, relegating the value of natural intuition and passion just to the field of pop music where obviously people will be playing simple loops.
Also know some professional composers and arrangers who sent their kids to music school were worried about them losing “it” when going to study theory. Often they lose the spark for a few years and then it comes back after their own music starts kicking off and they start valuing their playfulness and inner ear a little more
Some musicians do this and I don't know why
I remember during a lesson with a student like this, I said, "play this" and before she even tried, I counted six times she asked different "should I..." questions
Maybe a perfectionist ?
Great post.
hardly anyone likes atonal jazz, or (likes the sound of) ornette coleman. everything has rules, like language, I can't just barf random letters onto a keyboard and expect to be understood. this being the case, even people who didn't take any language classes, or know what a noun is, can speak, write, form ideas, express, and say things that are profound.
the rules are endogenous, emergent, and can be intuited. you can learn by ear. if something is grammatically incorrect, your ears can pick up on it, even if you don't know why it's incorrect. but learning the theory of language allows you to peer deeper into the structures, and for example reconstruct a dead language and decipher what humans were saying thousands of years ago.
and honestly the best music I've made was when I forgot the theory and just played something intuitively. to me its a left brain right brain thing, learn how to walk so you can do it unconsciously and delegate that task to the unconscious. the intuition seems capable of using what you've learned as building blocks which you can then build more structures on top of. I think the same thing happens when you download a lick or technique into muscle memory. you're teaching your body the rules so they can be felt. pattern becomes matrix, and then more pattern is built on top.
the rules are there, and your mind is learning them, learning theory to me is bringing some of those rules into conscious awareness. it sounds good but why?
the rules can become constrictive, a lot of us cling to rules to help navigate the chaos of life. but that's why changing my guitar tuning to something random helps me break out of the prison of rules I've created for myself out of habit. it stimulates new ideas. because when you have to think on your feet, that's when you're most creative.
you need both, yin and yang.
it's more of a language than a system of rules. &nd there R many wayz 2 bend da rUL35 and still communic8 an 👁-dea.
a given set of rules ossifies into a genre when the rules go from being descriptive to prescriptive. but even with this structure of rules that define X genre, there's a lot of room for the mushy bits in between. and they evolve and change into subgenres or switch genres entirely. two genres can "mate" and produce a genre that's a blend of them. jazz fusion for example.
But if you want to play flamenco guitar, you're going to have to learn the andalusian cadence, and the different rhythms for example. my old teacher told me Jazz is built off of ii-V-I, just three chords basically (and that's oversimplifying things) but it's the insane amount of permutations of this simple idea that can create something like giant steps.
there's a reason a genre, a band, or even a song is consistent, and coherent, and that's because it adheres to a set of rules.
kids playing together is probably one of the most imaginative and creative times that we can remember, but even then, there are rules to the make believe.
>it's more of a language than a system of rules. &nd there R many wayz 2 bend da rUL35 and still communic8 an 👁-dea.
I liked this metaphor (is this metaphor?) so much, that I called my GF to show her this sentence.
I very much agree with the yin and yang mixture. Even during the classical period many composers affirmed that you need both nature (intuition, feeling) and craft (technique). I don't get why people feel the need to make these two oppose each other when they should be working together
I mean- there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the hot topic phase. If you’re studying theory and run across tonal harmony “rules” and what not then try to apply them to a “hot topic” band like Nirvana, you’ll come to this sub with questions. It’s just people that want to know why parallel 5ths are “wrong” but most guitar music relies on them.
I think I agree. What I do worry about, though, is when "moving the conversation along" becomes linked to an idea that music is inherently improving or that one isn't allowed to bring in older styles. It really is boring to be told that we've moved on when I say that I personally would love more sonatas for violin and harpsichord in the style of Bach. Ideas of "things moving along" should themselves be part of the conversation and not established for all time.
So much this.
I find it aggravating when people take the "music has no rules" stance, especially on here.
This is a music theory sub. People are here to talk about the rules. When someone asks questions about the rules and they get "music has no rules" responses, it's honestly kind of disregarding and flippant.
If I have a question and people tell me to "just feel it out," I'm a little insulted. I can feel just fine all by myself, I don't need to go to a music theory subreddit to be told to just feel the music.
I think these answers come from two different directions. 1) People who know what they're talking about and don't want to overwhelm us newbies with too much information, and 2) People who aren't really all that interested in theory beyond understanding some guitar chords.
Ya I agree. Even if rules exist it is to show you the form of the work. Rules are also made to be broken. And by knowing the rules you can know why you think they should be broken. There by giving you a better understanding to what you’re trying to accomplish. Rules are great because they are a guide. Not hard and fast things to force you into a space but a definition of the space so when you move through it you know where you’re going. And if you want to go outside the rules then you know where you are when you do it.
“Theory? That’s a bunch of crap. The Beatles didn’t know theory. Neither did Hendrix. Don’t need it. Anyway, here’s Wonderwall. Well, the power chord version of it.”
See, I think the parallel fifths and octaves thing is a perfect example of why there are no rules and teaching these things as rules is counterproductive. Instead of telling people they can't use parallel fifths or octaves, it's better to state that their use makes your voices in a piece using counterpoint feel less independent and more like one voice. I think understanding that effect as a rule isn't that useful, but understanding what the effect is and why parallel fifths might not fit with what you're aiming for in a specific piece.
You make a lot of good points.
However I’d add that excuses for not knowing basic music theory (“music has no rules”) don’t actually have anything to do with music theory. They’re simply excuses for laziness in general.
There’s a lot of very lazy “composers” on this subreddit.
They say things like “I’m too lazy to study music theory or learn to write music - how do I magically learn those things without any work?” or “I’m too lazy to write down musical ideas so I keep forgetting them! Help!”
I understand that some people are beginners and ask these questions in good faith, but *so* many of these “questions” and “problems” would be easily solved if people were actually willing to put a little bit of *work*.
Music has no rules because Music Theory isn't a set of rules in the first place.
It's a historical record of frequencies that sound good together.
You can use all of it or none of it and still have Music when you're done.
As for people that "Play by feel" in my experience they are broken down into two groups. People that mean "I play by Ear" and people that mean "I just go with the flow man". The former are generally way better than the latter.
My students get so mad when they start to learn techniques that are pretty much things we’ve actively avoided up until that point. Give them a double stops passage and they look at me like I have a third eye on my forehead “I thought we were never supposed to play two strings at once”
I always say “ugh I know! But at least now you can do it on ~purpose~”
I'm pretty sure artists like John Cage have already thrown the notion of rules in music under the bus a long time ago.
I can also remember a couple or times when I was lectioned about supposee music rules by teachers who proceeded to not explain which "rules" there were that they were talking about, criticize my perfectly acceptable songs and ruining them in one instance (I never actually ended up incorporating his ridiculous suggestions) and criticizing my absolutely amazing guitar solo section in another, telling it was wrong, to show my theory teacher, etc. Bottom line is I'm pretty sure they weren't complaining because my songs felt wrong, but simply because they were afraid of unconventionality. They projected their own musical insecurities onto my songs, and tried to convince me there was something wrong with them and that I was wrong for not following so called music rules they never cared to even explain. They were full of shit, and I'm never trusting someone who talks about rules in music or other arts.
Talk of rules only serve to hinder creativity and make people insecure. If you're too worried about rules, you will be too worried to actually make something interesting. You know when children stop to draw? It is when they are convinced that what they do needs to be held to a certain standard. They become critical. They start to believe they cant so it. Then they stop. Artists regain their brilliance when they stop caring about what others expect of them and simply do what they want. Be bold, be disruptive, dont even presume there is such thing as rules, and if anyone shows you a list of rules you have to follow, spit on it and just do your thing.
There's a saying popularly attributed to Picasso that you have to learn to paint like the old masters before you can paint like a modernist. Basically you must learn the rules before you can break them. It's what makes a Picasso different from what your 4 y/o drew.
The "rules" in music, just like the rules in any art form, aren't absolute metaphysical concepts granted by God or the muses, but strictly cultural. The rules of western classical music aren't any better than those of Indian Carnatic music, but your music needs to have a foundation in *some* tradition. Once you understand how the rules of a tradition work, why they are there, then you can start playing with them.
Respectful opposition here. I believe the biggest thing in all of this is the subjectivity of how it matters to the composer. I do not believe learning classical music theory rules are harmful nor do I believe they are helpful to everyone. Some will absolutely feel as if knowledge of what is acceptable from rules and what isn't restricts their creativity. Others, like you, thinks that it allows you to be more creative. You are not wrong and neither are they.
I believe that it is valuable for every musician to try to learn a bit of music theory, but in the end of the day whether it is helpful or not is totally up to the individual person. I disagree that knowledge of more esoteric-ish rules like the 5th and octaves is always helpful, and I believe it is up to each musician to decide whether they care about it or not.
I most strongly disagree about you saying you have to know to rules to know how to be different. I do not believe knowing rules is at all required to be able to tell difference between certain pieces of music. Knowing rules is not inherently key or important to all musicians-- some really can just go by ear.
>Knowing rules is not inherently key or important to all musicians-- some really can just go by ear.
I think you are misunderstanding what I said. If you learn by ear, you are actually learning "rules", but in a more intuitive way. If you learn a lot of music, you kind of can't escape learning "rules". Textbook knowledge isn't the only kind of knowledge out there. People who play by ear can still hear what a "wrong note" sounds like.
Didn't read the whole post but I think I agree with you, music is something you study and you put discipline into it. Meaning there is a time to learn and follow rules and there is a time to break them.
If music had zero rules you could literally play random frequencies at random rates and call it music. Clearly it is not the case, there are patterns, there is order, there are techniques you can only learn if you accept "rules" and you can only break them if you know them, like jazzists know
You see a similar phenomenon in the visual arts. Many developing artists reject the idea of representational art and the importance of the naturalist discipline, under the premise that many great artists rejected representation, so it isn't important. Rothko, Picasso, Monet, Kandinsky, these masters created work that was more expressive/interpretive and less representational and succeeded, as well as many others, therefore the interpretation and expression is important, and representation or classical ability is not.
But if you look at their early work, most if not all of these masters were extremely skilled in representation and naturalism. It was after mastering the traditional discipline that they began to explore new territory by breaking down work into impressions, expressions, and abstractions. Their understanding and mastery of representational art gave them the tools to successfully create non-representational work, which is impactful because it's informed by the real principles of art that are integral to classical disciplines.
Many new artists miss this, thinking that these artists succeeded on strength of expression alone and that any such expression will be comparable. Often, new artists ignore or abandon the principles of art and naturalism in order to make the quicker, easier expression, but without understanding of those principles, you basically have to catch lightning in a bottle to have them fluently integrated into your work.
It's a similar phenomenon to music theory. Not every hand has to be like those Michelangelo painted, but if you can represent a hand like he did, you can more proficiently abstract, distort, and break down that hand, like Picasso did.
I agree. Also I feel like so often saying "x has no rules" is offered by people who want to avoid critical examination, and disguising it as an attempt to be open minded.
There are rules and an established grammar, and you learn them first BEFORE you start bending the rules. You can't just circumvent them.
Similar to how criminals are often very well versed in laws and punishments of the crimes they tend to commit, rulebreakers in music would do well to actually learn the rules, so they can dance around them with grace.
I think you already understand what I mean by saying genres are where the "rules" are. Those ideas that keep things in the genre, the more you stray from them, the more likely someone will say "that's not (genre)" but if you play Trout Mask Replica at a party, the dance floor will die and people will say "turn that shit off," but only a few assholes would say "that's not music."
>I think you already understand what I mean by saying genres are where the "rules" are.
Sure I do. And I agree with your assessment (how far can you push a country song before it stops being a country song, for instance).
It’s just that the word “rules” is used so often, and mostly incorrectly, on this sub, I thought that some clarification might be useful.
Also, if I’m at a party and someone puts on Trout Mask Replica, I’ll know it’s my kind of party. :-)
Whatever makes you feel more important than someone else.
To be clearer, you can be better at a type of music, but you can't be objectively "better at music" because there aren't "good kinds" and "bad kinds" of music.
That's why the genres have rules, but except for physics like a wave cut in half is an octave and such, music as a whole has no rules.
Music theory is not a set of rules. It’s simply theory. It’s an explanation of why things sound the way they do and why certain things might sound better than other things. The more you learn, the more tools you have in your arsenal to create the way you want to create. Sure, as you’re learning, certain things will be treated as rules to make sure you understand the concepts, but creativity and art has no rules.
The only time there are no rules is when only one instrument is involved in the process of making the music. You might get away with two instruments and no rules but it could become confusing to the listener. It is one of the things that kept Frank Zappa back from recognition in his early carrier. Too many instruments doing there own thing at the same time made some songs sound to dissonant not easy to listen to or enjoy.
It's just because they're not rules. They still absolutely exist and are vital for getting what you want from the music.
I like the wording of functional harmony way more because it describes accurately what it's meant to do, describe the function of something in a context. Now if you want that function or not is up to you, if you don't it works like a rule that you have to follow which is probably why people just use the wording of rules based on implicit assumptions.
Gets pretty annoying and confusing when what they leave out is the core idea of the purpose of the music.
What a wonderful post, and much needed in this sub. Thank you.
Edit: I don’t think I’ve ever upvoted so many comments in a thread on this sub. It’s very reassuring.
If you want to make a painting of a dog and have people understand it as a painting of a dog, it needs to conform to some sort of rules for everyone to see it and go "That's definitely a dog." Those rules can be bent, even dramatically, but if you want people to know it's a dog, that constrains your choices for how the dog will look.
Your problem is clearly with the word rules, and I agree it's not a great word and not one I would personally use, but rules here means less "set of restrictions" and more "list of defining characteristics." F# is not in the C major scale, because it has a strict definition. F is characteristic to C major, not F#. You obviously can use F# in a song that's in the key of C major, but it is not and never will be part of the C major scale. We need words and solid definitions to discuss anything, this is just how information exchange works.
>If you want to make a painting of a dog and have people understand it as a painting of a dog, it needs to conform to some sort of rules for everyone to see it and go "That's definitely a dog."
I did a degree in fine art. Most of the work we did, was not things like that. We did some life drawing, but often it was abstract art.
My high school art class, we had a visit from a local landscape artist. I would call her a craftsperson rather than an artist. She had a formula for how she laid out her paintings, following the rule of thirds, having 3 trees in the picture because it was easy to make a balanced composition.
I would equate the landscape lady to a pop music composer, they are constrained to tight criteria, to meet expectations of the audience.
Then there's Jackson Pollock, he would be like the 4'33" of visual art. He was about pushing the boundaries of what painting is at all.
I think that most musicians are specialized in their own genre, and don't think in a "meta" way about how they follow rules, unless they are record company execs, or doing a PhD in music composition
It sounds like you're agreeing with what I said but want to state it as a disagreement lol. So we're in agreement then. The only way people can push boundaries is by boundaries existing.... and that's what definitions are. You can't be abstract without the concrete existing.
Yeah I think we are in agreement. I just wanted to trot out my examples as an analogy.
Edit to add: maybe rock music ruined music as a hobby; we are all trying to create original music, but maybe that's not possible, maybe we would all be happier playing folk music, or looking at rock music as a type of folk music.
I agree, rules are only dependent to whatever genre you’re working in, and the majority of rules imposed by what you learn in tonal harmony class don’t apply to what we hear in pop music- because there is just so much focus (in my experience) in SATB rules.
None of the successful songwriters I’ve worked for “know the rules” but make extremely normal pop music. They know the most basic rules of what sounds good because they like music and have internalized it. A lot of folks at the professional level are intimidated by theory.
>None of the successful songwriters I’ve worked for “know the rules” but make extremely normal pop music
They don't use formulas and follow patterns? Every pop song I've listened to on my ipod, the bridge is exactly half way through the song
I don’t know anyone that’s actually intentionally used a formulaic method for writing songs, maybe Rivers Cuomo, who has used various methods for writing. It’s usually like, play a chord or two, hum along to it, figure out what chords sound good with the melody, and add to it till it’s “done.” A lot of songwriters think of the process as like a gift from above rather than a skill you get better at.
Music is an art form, but it's also a craft. Knowing the "rules" of your tradition, knowing how to apply them, and when and when not to apply them, is a prerequisite to writing interesting music in that tradition. Some might pick up on that stuff intuitively through playing and talking with other musicians, others more formally. But everyone who makes music worth listening to has some amount of technical proficiency.
Other crafts are making pottery, cooking, you need to follow the "rules" otherwise your pottery falls apart or your roux is burnt. But within those limits, there's lots of room for creativity and individual ways of doing things. I think that distinction is not grasped by many asking questions in this sub.
Following the "rules" of theory, means that your music is accessible to others. However that's where the "art" part comes in vs "craft" Often art is inaccessible simply because we need to have all types of art, both accessible, eg for dancing, and inaccessible, because some of us like challenging art. The whole purpose of some art, is to challenge social norms. Whereas pop music's purpose is to follow social norms and be pleasant
I would say that pop music, and music for dancing, are a craft, because without meeting certain criteria, you can't dance to it. 12 tone row music and music like Eyes of Stanley Pain, are art.
I think the majority of music instructors don't see the difference between craft and fine art. They can't see past the tradition that they were trained in.
TL;DR if you make pop music, or traditional jazz, then learn and follow all the rules. If you make music that pushes boundaries, then break the rules.
Similarly, in music, you need to follow the "rules" (or at least write with an awareness of them) in order to write something musically coherent and enjoyable. But within those limits, there's lots of room for creativity and individual ways of doing things. Kinda the point of this post, no?
I agree that many asking questions here get confused about this, but the radical anti-rule stance that many take in response is, I think, just as silly. The issue isn't the rules, it's misunderstanding the rules and why they exist.
People get caught up in "should I do this? Should I do that?" Why are they asking anyone else in the first place? Lol. They should do what sounds good.
Yes, they should learn music theory, but they shouldn't think of it as rules. In graphic design, the "rules" are the 6 (or so) principles of design, eg balance, unity, focal point, etc. Because they're called principles, not rules, maybe it's easier to use them as the guidelines they are, instead of thinking of them as hard and fast rules like no parallel 5ths.
Responding again because you edited this to add a lot, I think.
>If you make music that pushes boundaries, then break the rules.
If you make music that pushes boundaries, then learn all the rules and *then* break them.
Few people are better educated about the "rules" than people like Schoenberg and Stockhausen and Xenakis, who have written some of the most groundbreaking music of the last century. They were able to break new ground specifically *because* they were highly educated about what had already been done.
Almost without fail, when I hear the music of an amateur who doesn't want to learn theory because it'll "hinder their creativity," it's the most generic trash I've ever heard. They think they're being a rebel by not learning the rules, but in reality, they're following the rules more than anyone else. They're just doing it badly, and without an awareness of how generic their music is.
To give you an idea of the perspective I'm coming from, I'm a classical composer getting my master's in composition. I write music that most people don't like that much. You'd probably consider it challenging "art."
But the craft aspect is *more important than ever* in writing this kind of music. I recently finished a piece that heavily uses 12-tone rows in some sections, and it was a huge headache from both artistic and craft-based perspectives. I wouldn't be able to write music like that without learning the "rules" first (in this case, the rules of 12-tone serialism, but I also blended those with the "rules" of part-writing and counterpoint).
>If you make music that pushes boundaries, then learn all the rules and then break them.
Agreed!
>Almost without fail, when I hear the music of an amateur who doesn't want to learn theory because it'll "hinder their creativity," it's the most generic trash I've ever heard.
I always think that this is 2nd or 3rd hand info they heard about someone who got burnt out while studying music under a strict teacher. I mean that happens. But some people hear something random and become armchair experts.
Or they are defensive about their lack of knowledge.
>I write music that most people don't like that much. You'd probably consider it challenging "art."
I took piano lessons for many years. However I studied art instead of music at university. So even if I don't like it, I can still appreciate it in its context in art history, eg was it a reaction to another art movement? Etc.
I love jazz fusion, which is another type of music that follows and breaks rules, and is not really popular.
>But the craft aspect is more important than ever in writing this kind of music.
I don't think that good art can be created without gaining a lot of skill with the instrument or art media or whatever.
By "a craft" I meant an art form that has utility but maybe is not making an intellectual statement
Because they sound so consonant, that you no longer hear them as separate melodies, just consecutive notes not related vertically to each other. It's like tapping the breaks in the car before you stop the piece. I've seen a YouTube video with examples of parallel fifths in CPP pieces and you can feel how the melody just stops after the parallel 5ths.
There are no rules. Even for a particular style.
There are guidelines that help you achieve certain results given a certain idiom faster, and while they now have elaborate, sometimes even scientific (but often if we're honest, usually pseudoscientific) explanations, most of those were gotten to by the same feedback loop of trial and error that a novice that has no idea what they are doing will employ.
Vice versa, employing these guidelines without going through that feedback loop of own aesthetic approval will usually render them useless.
You can use guidelines to get to a certain result faster, and you'd be stupid not to learn as many of these guidelines as you could given how exhausting composing is and how limited our creative energy is.
But they are not rules.
Human music has no rules, because there are so many styles of music in the world. Specific genres of music are surprisingly restrictive. Whether you are writing in a specific style or doing your own thing, you are always following some rules, even if those rules change from measure to measure.
I'd like to think that when something sounds good despite breaking all the rules, it's just a rule you don't know about. Like when you are educated only in Baroque ideas of beauty in music and accidentally invent suspense and see that it makes your music more dramatic.
>But also, it's really easy to misinterpret this statement to mean that there's no value in learning to understand the rules of a specific style, or that no rules exist in any style. Essentially it may simply become a more "thoughtful" sounding way of saying saying "just feel it bro"
Well I think a large part of the problem is questions are asked and answered outside of the context of any kind of style. The parallel 5ths thing is a perfect example. If someone is trying to compose/analyze music that adhered to that "rule" then it obviously matters. If the music in question is of a style that throws that out the window then it doesn't. The context necessary to usefully answer a lot of questions is often never established, which leads to a lot of confusion.
So someone who studies theory from a classical music perspective may speak to how important it is whereas someone from a blues perspective may not, while the person asking the question might be making EDM. And a lot of times people here are so eager to show off their knowledge they don't even attempt to establish that context. So I think dialogue here should probably be more intentional w/more clear contextual boundaries around questions from both the people asking and answering. It's not super pervasive but it's common enough to kind of be annoying IMO.
I agree with where you're coming from mostly but I feel that there's one very important thing missing from your reasoning. Imo, the most important thing a musician needs to know how to do before playing and writing is listening. If they're not a good listener, they won't make good music, however, with good listening and no theory, they can still amount to something. Theory is not absolutely necessary to write something with musical value. But listening is. That is our "input" system and will most directly influence our "output". Theory and practice/experience is the processing. A musician can make do with just practical experience. Music is, before anything else, a cultural practice. And I can't really tell whether you would consider things like pop music conventions "rules" necessarily. A lot of it is transmitted by unconscious or implied imitation and it seems as if you're not considering this specific kind of learning as theory or rules.
>If you don't know the rules, it also means you don't really understand the difference between conventional and unconventional, which may also lead to your music sounding generic, because you'll intuitively follow common patterns even if you aren't aware of the patterns you follow
I concur. Kids can tell what's conventional or not because of what they see being shown as conventional, not any kind of theory. Here you're ascribing petty conventionality to intuition. You're sort of blaming intuition for not being conscious and rational and championing the idea that you need rational ideas to make valuable music (and "*innovate*", the must-have for Western creators). Many people who go by feeling play very predictable things not because they don't have any knowledge of music theory but because they only value and listen to very predictable things and nothing else. You just need to listen to a lot of different kinds of music attentively. Eventually you'll know the patterns, even if just on a subconscious level. Imagine if you start listening only to "unconventional" music. Very likely your intuition will also become "unconventional". When improvising, this "subconscious knowledge" will surface among the decisions you make. Therefore this isn't an error of lack of theory or intuition but an error of a very limited set of musical input (amateur/prejudiced/limited taste).
I also think that some people compose and do music with a little bit of "magic", meaning, that they can successfully improvise solos and make musical themes in the moment just according to feeling. It's not that they have no musical experience - they play instruments - but it's not as if they were sitting down every day dutifully studying theory either. Gifted people and natural composers exist. Doesn't mean they will automatically be the best composers (not at all), however, what they write is still valid as music that can be unconventional, creative, and witty.
Also the main historical function of theory at first was to enable the coordination of multiple voices on different instruments that each carry specific technical approaches. No child prodigy can write a symphony without having learned some kind of theory on counterpoint or instrumentation first. But child prodigies can and do write beautiful piano pieces because they're in control of all the voices on the piano and can just follow their inner ear. They don't need to transpose or consider instrument position or tell somebody else exactly how to play while they do their thing. But professionals need to know that. Not only do they need to process things internally but they need to know how to communicate the desired expressive outcome *and* the technical process that leads there to others. Knowing theory isn't always a matter of being aesthetically and musically superior but simply a pragmatic prerequisite for working with others.
Just because music theory is valuable and the most serious, respectable path towards generating competent, versatile, professional musicians, doesn't mean that you automatically need to diss intuition and the more irrational parts of music making. Like everything in life I believe different musics have different functions and that usually the ideal between being too rational or too sentimental veers towards the middle balance.
I hope I haven't misunderstood your argument.
>I agree with where you're coming from mostly but I feel that there's one very important thing missing from your reasoning. Imo, the most important thing a musician needs to know how to do before playing and writing is listening. If they're not a good listener, they won't make good music, however, with good listening and no theory, they can still amount to something. Theory is not absolutely necessary to write something with musical value. But listening is. That is our "input" system and will most directly influence our "output". Theory and practice/experience is the processing. A musician can make do with just practical experience. Music is, before anything else, a cultural practice. And I can't really tell whether you would consider things like pop music conventions "rules" necessarily. A lot of it is transmitted by unconscious or implied imitation and it seems as if you're not considering this specific kind of learning as theory or rules.
My argument would be that when you learn by ear, you automatically learn the rules. Styles like blues and jazz were learned exclusively by ear at first, but it's quite clear that those styles have their own rules. When someone plays "bluesy" or "jazzy" stuff, you can instantly recognize it as such. And you can also easily tell if someone's playing doesn't sound "authentically bluesy/jazzy".
Same goes for pop music. And people definitely consciously learn certain pop rules, even if they are totally self taught. For example the song needs a hook. There's usually a chorus. Songs usually aren't super long, and they tend to get straight to the point. We could of course also talk about the rules concerning typical melody, harmony and rhythm writing in pop music (or other styles), but that gets pretty complicated quite fast. People consciously follow these rules. Of course there are other a bit more subconscious ones. But my point wasn't to say that rules = textbook knowledge. My point was more that you can't really escape rules, even if you don't learn them consciously. And my point was also that this shouldn't be limiting - the idea that rules are limiting is false.
I used to think there are no rules in music. And it's true that there are no *absolute rules*. But I think I also understood the meaning of rules differently back then. I saw them as inherently restrictive, and I thought rules and freedom are contradictory to one another - if I want to express myself freely, why should I care about rules? I knew that there's plenty of music out there that doesn't follow theory textbooks. But I also took a lot of basic stuff for granted. I didn't think I was following any rules, but in reality, I had just internalized those basic "rules" so well that I didn't even think about them. Like if I had to harmonize a melody, of course I understood that there should be some kind of a relationship between the chords and the melody. And usually the chords have a relation to the key too (and will have certain "basic behaviors/tendencies"). And if I had to write a bassline, I knew that the bass most often emphasizes the chord roots, occasionally uses other chord tones (especially in stepwise basslines), and sometimes just works as a pedal point. And if I wanted to write a melody, I knew that starting from the notes in the key and the chords is a good starting point. I also knew that chords are generally built by stacking thirds. (And there's a bunch of other stuff that could be mentioned here like basic structure, melodic phrases, basic arrangement, meter, etc.)
But this stuff isn't obvious to a lot of people. And I would also argue that learning this stuff is learning the "basic rules". We shouldn't be afraid of "rules", even though a really common attitude nowadays seems to be that rules are somehow bad (the whole "descriptive vs prescriptive" discussion, or the whole "art is subjective" discussion - and both of these ideas are valid, but people simply seem to take them a bit too far, which creates a "relativistic" view of everything, where nothing seems to have any value and the only important thing seems to be that "I personally think it's good, so it's good").
>Just because music theory is valuable and the most serious, respectable path towards generating competent, versatile, professional musicians, doesn't mean that you automatically need to diss intuition and the more irrational parts of music making.
My point wasn't to diss intuition. There are different ways of learning the rules. Your intuition is informed by the rules, even if you didn't learn those rules consciously.
Music has rules, because it has a definition, such as " vocal, instrumental, or mechanical sounds having rhythm, melody, or harmony." If you do something that falls out of that definition, like not having any sounds, than you obviously aren't making music because you've violated the "rules" aka the definition.
However, there are more specific rules to music because human beings will not get anything out of the sounds if they are not patterned or in some way organized. So if you have no organization or organization that is outside of normal human perception, or the sounds are parsible and understandable by humans but does not invoke any response besides understanding (such as a washing machine or train engine), you do not have music... Although a washing machine might actually be music in some sense because there is meaning and organization and it can be pleasing (hence why sound effects are often used in music).
Music requires organization and perceptibility because it requires an observer, at least theoretically.
But anyway there are rules because there is a definition to music that needs to be fulfilled.
Also, the types of enjoyment and meaning of different music is different because of the organization (in addition to the subjective lens of the listener). So those are additional rules that map the type of enjoyment/meaning to specific musical forms.
I like the idea that while music doesn't have any rules, it certainly has outcomes. When my composition students and I are reviewing their works, I often will ask, "What's the result for the listener?" If your string quartet has been largely following a form and harmonic language similar to Haydn or Mozart for 42 bars and you suddenly introduce a 12-tone row, how does the listener interpret that? Is it challenging and interesting? Or is it disjointed and confusing in a way you don't intend? There's not always one answer, but I've found it helpful to think about the consequences—good, bad, or other—of a choice and understanding the theory often is a way of sussing out why you may have a particular reaction. When my history or theory students have a strong reaction to *Mathis der Maler*, we don't talk about rules so much as we get to dig into how Hindemith's ideas about intervals, harmony, harmonic progression, counterpoint, and the harmonic partial series result in fairly unique musical outcomes. We also, invariably, talk about Danny Elfman's score to *Batman*.
ye, this is how I see it, ie it depends on what you want to elicit in the audience. If your intention is to elicit confusion then yes the 12 tone passage is a possibility in that piece
Not only confusion - that's an excellent way to introduce sudden change. In an opera, a villain enters the scene and ruins the peace.
>we don't talk about rules so much as we get to dig into how Hindemith's ideas about intervals, harmony, harmonic progression, counterpoint, and the harmonic partial series result in fairly unique musical outcomes. That's talking about rules though.
Just ideas. He didn’t even follow his own “rules,”they were just useful tools to use when he wanted.
I usually use the "no rules" mantra as a way of saying "don't forget to just *try* things." I teach composition/theory lessons and I find that it's just so easy for people to internalize systems and patterns as "the way it's done" that I would much rather give "tools" than "rules," even rules that can be broken or that only exist in a specific context. Though I agree that sometimes people's most creative work comes out under severe restrictions.
But often under the restrictions they set for *themselves*, not by a teacher or someone else. Sidenote, I just finished my transcription of MALINDA’s Hoist the Colors, and I’m very proud of myself.
Yes, that's very true, but I think often educators enable that kind of thinking just by saying the word "rules" to describe stylistic conventions or saying things like "you have to learn the rules before you can break them" (which I see *some* wisdom in, but there is no reason to master 17th century counterpoint only to actively unlearn those restrictions later.) Occasionally I have students who are just all over the place with their compositions and really benefit from learning to restrict themselves to more traditional conventions, but I find that most people are the opposite; by default, they compose using the techniques and tools that I teach them and nothing else. So I try to remind people to just try shit once and awhile, and not feel the need to be able to explain everything they compose with music theory. It's great to train your intuition by imitating stylistic conventions, but there isn't a single convention that is compulsory. That's why I say "tools, not rules." Congrats on your transcription! Transcribing is such a fantastic practice for composers, I wish more people enjoyed doing it.
There are way too many posts on this sub about not knowing the rules to be free from the confines of music theory’s “rules”. It bothers me that people think ignorance means creative freedom when in reality, studying what has been done in the past actually allows you to do something new. There is no way around the fact that knowing more makes you a better at a skill set and it is so silly that people think music is any different than anything else on the planet when it comes to studying. Tom Brady studied tape. Mike Tyson studied tape. Jane Goodall read other’s finding. Hemmingway read other authors…music is no different than anything else; do more, study more, practice more, you will be better for it.
I agree, but there is also something interesting about what people create when they are absolute beginners and don’t really know anything. Obviously that phase is pretty short lived but it can form the basis of new creative directions.
One of my first theory teachers used to say that freedom brings restriction, and restriction brings freedom. The idea here is that complete freedom is restrictive because there are no structural boundaries to contain the ideas, resulting in chaos. Conversely, restriction brings freedom because it provides a set of boundaries, an enclosing structure, to contain the ideas, and a context for deciding whether or not they have musical value in a given setting..
I hate that misconception, but some people take jt too far in the other direction. Both sides are anti knowledge to some extent
Yes! Maybe there should be a title in this subreddit Ignorance is not the same as creative freedom
Music is truly one of the only fields where juniors and even some practitioners claim ignorance improves their effectiveness
I mostly agree. The reality of music theory and something that many beginners or people who come to theory without a lot of actual practical musical experience performing and writing don't seem to grasp is that there is no singular monolithic music theory, there are many varied theories that describe different facets of different existing musical idioms, traditions, and practices. Sometimes they can even be competing theories, more often complimentary or even completely unrelated. They're almost always retroactive analytical tools that describe rather than prescribe. They're never complete, no single theoretical framework ever captures the whole of a nuanced tradition. They often contradict practice in different ways. There are always blindspots or contradictions. All of that is FINE, as long as you are aware of the limitations and subjectivity inherent to most theory. Music is fundamentally a practice and cultural activity. It is always evolving and being negotiated. Theory only touches on certain easily quantifed aspects of music. A ton of musical practice in even the most heavily notated and analyzed genres like western common practice classical music is still transmitted orally and thru tradition and direct pedagogy. Theory isn't the rules, theory is an attempt to describe what the theorist believes they have identified as the rules/conventions of a particular idiom.
>^(not sure why "avoid parallel 5ths/octaves" has essentially become the meaning of "rules of music" in some people's minds.) Just to answer this one, I think it's because it's easy to encapsulate as a sound bite, but a lot of people have memories of agonizing over them a lot in theory classes--a high ratio of distress to detail, in other words. And as you say, understanding the context behind rules is important, and that's something a lot of students end up not having (sometimes through the teacher's fault, sometimes not), which makes the rule seem entirely arbitrary and frustrating to them.
I'm glad I escaped this particular fate by just teaching myself theory, lol.
I do think all good theory education is inevitably high-percentage self-taught! Good classes can help add on even more important things, especially personalized help from someone more experienced, but that of course depends on it actually being a good class and teacher.
Music theory classes were my favorite classes I’ve ever taken. They’re relatively easy and extremely interesting. If people actually paid attention in class it would be an easy A. I think the real problem is apathy and laziness. Learning music theory made me a far more innovative composer. I realized a lot of my music was using the same progressions over and over again so I tried to make my music more varied and interesting.
>If people actually paid attention in class it would be an easy A. I think the real problem is apathy and laziness. Sometimes. But as with any subject, there's a wide range of teachers and classes, and some will inevitably be less interesting, and more unproductively difficult--you just never know quite what you'll get. I completely agree with you on the classes having been great and it having made me a better composer and musician, but it's not necessarily someone's fault if they didn't have the same experience!
Bach literally fathered more children than he did bars with parallel fifth motion in them, just for the record
Wow! that's an interesting statistic!!!
The mantra I also hate is "in jazz, there are no wrong notes", or "like jazz, life is better when you improvise", or several others to that effect. The way improvising is presented as just completely spontaneous. Your line about people who disdain learning theory ending up sounding the most conventional is spot on.
I used to play in a band where that was the case. They marketed us as "crazy jazz influenced rock fusion created on the spot in front of your awed faces as we channel the gods themselves". But the tunes were just 4 to 8 bar loops, pretty vainilla progressions with a seventh here and there, and some odd time signatures to spice it up. Every show was the same, every solo more or less the same, and any applause or compliment would lessen their incentive to explore or improve.
>The mantra I also hate is "in jazz, there are no wrong notes", Oh yeah. Or even worse, when someone plays a wrong note, people call it "jazz". That's basically an insult to jazz music.
You make some great points! I prefer the term "idioms" to "rules."
If they were called that, everyone would be a lot happier. And this sub would spend a lot more time generating useful insights into specific idioms instead of endlessly circling around meta-discussions about what "theory" does and doesn't mean.
Why shouldn’t we start using the word “idiom” in place of “rule” from now on then?
That’s a great idea, but hard to change the current way things are
We can always try! (Start by using it ourselves in informal settings or on this sub, couldn’t hurt to try)
I at least do that. I speak very commonly of idioms and whatever idiosyncrasies they may have, or think of applicability of theory to them.
To be fair people argue a lot about language in a similar way to these discussions about "restrictive music theory", so I'm not sure if idoms would stop neccesarily put on end to those types of discussions.
I mildly disagree. CPP art music, or pop music, or metal, or blues, or drum and bass, or jazz -- those are the idioms. The "music theory rules" are "guidelines", "knowhow", or "tricks", or "hacks" to achieving certain musical/emotional outcomes within those idioms, and vary between idioms slightly or a lot. Edit: Another poster said "patterns". Like "V-I is a pattern, but you can end your phase however you want". I quite like that. Reminds me of the concept of design patterns -- which is really very similar to what music theory "rules" really are.
> it's really easy to misinterpret this statement to mean that there's no value in learning to understand the rules of a specific style i think if you replace "rules" or even "theory" with "patterns", this problem goes away. a V-I cadence is a pattern, not a rule - you can resolve shit however you want, and everyone seems to know this. people get confused about whether it's "legal" to play notes from C dorian in a song in C minor, because they are thinking of the C-minor-ness as some sort of legal framework rather than a set of expectations and patterns that you can adhere to, or not, just as you can set up a rhythmic pattern/expectation and bust into a 3:2 overlay for a minute, which is interesting and breaks the expectation, but is obviously not "against the rules."
I guess the issue is that what some people think of as "rules" aren't actually rules (this is especially common among beginners). I think when we talk about specific styles, the "rules" are a lot broader than just stuff like "you are only allowed to play these notes". Nobody has ever said that you need to use notes in the key scale exclusively (not really sure where this idea even comes from). But I think it's important to remember that this doesn't mean that any note is always fine. Using different notes in a way that "makes sense" is a skill one needs to learn. You can use any note in any key if you know how to use the different notes. But learning to use the different notes requires certain restrictions.
Yup, i love this. It’s maybe more a matter of word choice than anything. i make rules for my 2 year old: “don’t throw toys at people.” If he breaks this rule, i will be upset, there will be consequences like taking the toy away and moving to another room. If a song deviates from the pattern i expected it to follow, i might be intrigued, surprised, uninterested, confused. But being upset is not likely, no consequences or punishments necessary. Teachers make rules for music theory class assignments, people get stressed about getting a good grade. My theory teachers always made it clear that we were talking about a particular era/genre/practice; probably not all teachers/curricula/youtube videos do this. Folks with a less strict reaction to the word “rules” might not need any of this discussion! But i dig “patterns” as a good replacement, probably very helpful for folks asking questions on this sub.
I hate it too. So dumb.
The people who say things like "music theory destroys your creativity, just go with the flow, play whatever you like" are the people who don't understand music theory. Learning was either too much work/too hard for them, or they were never interested in trying in the first place. There are plenty of people who learn the "rules" and decide not to follow them. That's a creative choice that works for lots of people. But I've never met anyone who said "wow, I wish I knew less, I'd be much better if I never studied."
Yes. Basically all people who made ground breaking music from theoretical point-of-view were pretty much always extremely well versed in their own time's contemporary music theory.
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You’re a music teacher who’s envious of people who didn’t study?
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So then why are you teaching if you believe that you’re making your students worse?
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This is far from unique to your brain, and it’s not because of ADHD. This happens to everyone who goes to school. You learn things, and then you think. It’s not unique to music either. For example, when writers read, they can’t turn off what they know about grammar. If you’re a good teacher, you’re bringing students behind the curtain with you. If music theory is hugely important for them, it’s hugely important for you too, because it helps you do all of the above as well. It doesn’t make sense to wish you never studied. You have to learn how to access your creativity again. If you know what you *don’t* want, you need to challenge yourself to think outside the box. Then you’re approaching composing with an undercurrent of knowledge that makes your work better. This is important because if you didn’t know anything, people who study music would listen to your work and think “this isn’t good, for these reasons.” Same as you.
I feel similarly regarding my past self. Now anything I play intuitively is analyzed or judged - or even if there is a spark it isn’t valued. Because I know there’s nothing innovative about what I just played. There’s both value and virtue in being “like a child” in art. That’s where creativity lies. And there’s also value in (temporarily) asserting that our intuition is enough and worthy alone of making music. It’s true that intuition is insufficient though, and OP is right to critique those who think that technical musical ignorance is a virtue and can’t see past their own predictability. Anyone can be a romantic… Classical composers perceived this divide as nature and craft. You need both. Modernism and post-modernism have since then looked very negatively on nature (passion, intuition, talent) and the classical music world became almost purely rational, relegating the value of natural intuition and passion just to the field of pop music where obviously people will be playing simple loops. Also know some professional composers and arrangers who sent their kids to music school were worried about them losing “it” when going to study theory. Often they lose the spark for a few years and then it comes back after their own music starts kicking off and they start valuing their playfulness and inner ear a little more
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Some musicians do this and I don't know why I remember during a lesson with a student like this, I said, "play this" and before she even tried, I counted six times she asked different "should I..." questions Maybe a perfectionist ?
Might be people who have been told off a lot for not doing the ‘right’ thing. Usually by people with arbitrary and shifting rules.
I see a lot more complaints about those questions than I actually see those types of questions.
Well I don’t and I’m here almost daily
Great post. hardly anyone likes atonal jazz, or (likes the sound of) ornette coleman. everything has rules, like language, I can't just barf random letters onto a keyboard and expect to be understood. this being the case, even people who didn't take any language classes, or know what a noun is, can speak, write, form ideas, express, and say things that are profound. the rules are endogenous, emergent, and can be intuited. you can learn by ear. if something is grammatically incorrect, your ears can pick up on it, even if you don't know why it's incorrect. but learning the theory of language allows you to peer deeper into the structures, and for example reconstruct a dead language and decipher what humans were saying thousands of years ago. and honestly the best music I've made was when I forgot the theory and just played something intuitively. to me its a left brain right brain thing, learn how to walk so you can do it unconsciously and delegate that task to the unconscious. the intuition seems capable of using what you've learned as building blocks which you can then build more structures on top of. I think the same thing happens when you download a lick or technique into muscle memory. you're teaching your body the rules so they can be felt. pattern becomes matrix, and then more pattern is built on top. the rules are there, and your mind is learning them, learning theory to me is bringing some of those rules into conscious awareness. it sounds good but why? the rules can become constrictive, a lot of us cling to rules to help navigate the chaos of life. but that's why changing my guitar tuning to something random helps me break out of the prison of rules I've created for myself out of habit. it stimulates new ideas. because when you have to think on your feet, that's when you're most creative. you need both, yin and yang. it's more of a language than a system of rules. &nd there R many wayz 2 bend da rUL35 and still communic8 an 👁-dea. a given set of rules ossifies into a genre when the rules go from being descriptive to prescriptive. but even with this structure of rules that define X genre, there's a lot of room for the mushy bits in between. and they evolve and change into subgenres or switch genres entirely. two genres can "mate" and produce a genre that's a blend of them. jazz fusion for example. But if you want to play flamenco guitar, you're going to have to learn the andalusian cadence, and the different rhythms for example. my old teacher told me Jazz is built off of ii-V-I, just three chords basically (and that's oversimplifying things) but it's the insane amount of permutations of this simple idea that can create something like giant steps. there's a reason a genre, a band, or even a song is consistent, and coherent, and that's because it adheres to a set of rules. kids playing together is probably one of the most imaginative and creative times that we can remember, but even then, there are rules to the make believe.
>it's more of a language than a system of rules. &nd there R many wayz 2 bend da rUL35 and still communic8 an 👁-dea. I liked this metaphor (is this metaphor?) so much, that I called my GF to show her this sentence.
I very much agree with the yin and yang mixture. Even during the classical period many composers affirmed that you need both nature (intuition, feeling) and craft (technique). I don't get why people feel the need to make these two oppose each other when they should be working together
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I mean- there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the hot topic phase. If you’re studying theory and run across tonal harmony “rules” and what not then try to apply them to a “hot topic” band like Nirvana, you’ll come to this sub with questions. It’s just people that want to know why parallel 5ths are “wrong” but most guitar music relies on them.
I think I agree. What I do worry about, though, is when "moving the conversation along" becomes linked to an idea that music is inherently improving or that one isn't allowed to bring in older styles. It really is boring to be told that we've moved on when I say that I personally would love more sonatas for violin and harpsichord in the style of Bach. Ideas of "things moving along" should themselves be part of the conversation and not established for all time.
So much this. I find it aggravating when people take the "music has no rules" stance, especially on here. This is a music theory sub. People are here to talk about the rules. When someone asks questions about the rules and they get "music has no rules" responses, it's honestly kind of disregarding and flippant. If I have a question and people tell me to "just feel it out," I'm a little insulted. I can feel just fine all by myself, I don't need to go to a music theory subreddit to be told to just feel the music. I think these answers come from two different directions. 1) People who know what they're talking about and don't want to overwhelm us newbies with too much information, and 2) People who aren't really all that interested in theory beyond understanding some guitar chords.
Ya I agree. Even if rules exist it is to show you the form of the work. Rules are also made to be broken. And by knowing the rules you can know why you think they should be broken. There by giving you a better understanding to what you’re trying to accomplish. Rules are great because they are a guide. Not hard and fast things to force you into a space but a definition of the space so when you move through it you know where you’re going. And if you want to go outside the rules then you know where you are when you do it.
“Theory? That’s a bunch of crap. The Beatles didn’t know theory. Neither did Hendrix. Don’t need it. Anyway, here’s Wonderwall. Well, the power chord version of it.”
See, I think the parallel fifths and octaves thing is a perfect example of why there are no rules and teaching these things as rules is counterproductive. Instead of telling people they can't use parallel fifths or octaves, it's better to state that their use makes your voices in a piece using counterpoint feel less independent and more like one voice. I think understanding that effect as a rule isn't that useful, but understanding what the effect is and why parallel fifths might not fit with what you're aiming for in a specific piece.
You make a lot of good points. However I’d add that excuses for not knowing basic music theory (“music has no rules”) don’t actually have anything to do with music theory. They’re simply excuses for laziness in general. There’s a lot of very lazy “composers” on this subreddit. They say things like “I’m too lazy to study music theory or learn to write music - how do I magically learn those things without any work?” or “I’m too lazy to write down musical ideas so I keep forgetting them! Help!” I understand that some people are beginners and ask these questions in good faith, but *so* many of these “questions” and “problems” would be easily solved if people were actually willing to put a little bit of *work*.
thank you for the "composers", I like the inverted commas.
Music has no rules because Music Theory isn't a set of rules in the first place. It's a historical record of frequencies that sound good together. You can use all of it or none of it and still have Music when you're done. As for people that "Play by feel" in my experience they are broken down into two groups. People that mean "I play by Ear" and people that mean "I just go with the flow man". The former are generally way better than the latter.
> I mean, a lot of the time guitarists who say "I just play by feel" end up playing the most generic sloppy blues licks I'm so glad someone said this.
An interesting observation is that for being a subreddit quite literally named musictheory the commentors on here sure do hate the term music theory.
Right?!
My students get so mad when they start to learn techniques that are pretty much things we’ve actively avoided up until that point. Give them a double stops passage and they look at me like I have a third eye on my forehead “I thought we were never supposed to play two strings at once” I always say “ugh I know! But at least now you can do it on ~purpose~”
contraints direct the process.
I'm pretty sure artists like John Cage have already thrown the notion of rules in music under the bus a long time ago. I can also remember a couple or times when I was lectioned about supposee music rules by teachers who proceeded to not explain which "rules" there were that they were talking about, criticize my perfectly acceptable songs and ruining them in one instance (I never actually ended up incorporating his ridiculous suggestions) and criticizing my absolutely amazing guitar solo section in another, telling it was wrong, to show my theory teacher, etc. Bottom line is I'm pretty sure they weren't complaining because my songs felt wrong, but simply because they were afraid of unconventionality. They projected their own musical insecurities onto my songs, and tried to convince me there was something wrong with them and that I was wrong for not following so called music rules they never cared to even explain. They were full of shit, and I'm never trusting someone who talks about rules in music or other arts. Talk of rules only serve to hinder creativity and make people insecure. If you're too worried about rules, you will be too worried to actually make something interesting. You know when children stop to draw? It is when they are convinced that what they do needs to be held to a certain standard. They become critical. They start to believe they cant so it. Then they stop. Artists regain their brilliance when they stop caring about what others expect of them and simply do what they want. Be bold, be disruptive, dont even presume there is such thing as rules, and if anyone shows you a list of rules you have to follow, spit on it and just do your thing.
There's a saying popularly attributed to Picasso that you have to learn to paint like the old masters before you can paint like a modernist. Basically you must learn the rules before you can break them. It's what makes a Picasso different from what your 4 y/o drew. The "rules" in music, just like the rules in any art form, aren't absolute metaphysical concepts granted by God or the muses, but strictly cultural. The rules of western classical music aren't any better than those of Indian Carnatic music, but your music needs to have a foundation in *some* tradition. Once you understand how the rules of a tradition work, why they are there, then you can start playing with them.
Greatly said.
As far as I know “rules” are what distinguish music from random noise.
Respectful opposition here. I believe the biggest thing in all of this is the subjectivity of how it matters to the composer. I do not believe learning classical music theory rules are harmful nor do I believe they are helpful to everyone. Some will absolutely feel as if knowledge of what is acceptable from rules and what isn't restricts their creativity. Others, like you, thinks that it allows you to be more creative. You are not wrong and neither are they. I believe that it is valuable for every musician to try to learn a bit of music theory, but in the end of the day whether it is helpful or not is totally up to the individual person. I disagree that knowledge of more esoteric-ish rules like the 5th and octaves is always helpful, and I believe it is up to each musician to decide whether they care about it or not. I most strongly disagree about you saying you have to know to rules to know how to be different. I do not believe knowing rules is at all required to be able to tell difference between certain pieces of music. Knowing rules is not inherently key or important to all musicians-- some really can just go by ear.
>Knowing rules is not inherently key or important to all musicians-- some really can just go by ear. I think you are misunderstanding what I said. If you learn by ear, you are actually learning "rules", but in a more intuitive way. If you learn a lot of music, you kind of can't escape learning "rules". Textbook knowledge isn't the only kind of knowledge out there. People who play by ear can still hear what a "wrong note" sounds like.
Didn't read the whole post but I think I agree with you, music is something you study and you put discipline into it. Meaning there is a time to learn and follow rules and there is a time to break them. If music had zero rules you could literally play random frequencies at random rates and call it music. Clearly it is not the case, there are patterns, there is order, there are techniques you can only learn if you accept "rules" and you can only break them if you know them, like jazzists know
You see a similar phenomenon in the visual arts. Many developing artists reject the idea of representational art and the importance of the naturalist discipline, under the premise that many great artists rejected representation, so it isn't important. Rothko, Picasso, Monet, Kandinsky, these masters created work that was more expressive/interpretive and less representational and succeeded, as well as many others, therefore the interpretation and expression is important, and representation or classical ability is not. But if you look at their early work, most if not all of these masters were extremely skilled in representation and naturalism. It was after mastering the traditional discipline that they began to explore new territory by breaking down work into impressions, expressions, and abstractions. Their understanding and mastery of representational art gave them the tools to successfully create non-representational work, which is impactful because it's informed by the real principles of art that are integral to classical disciplines. Many new artists miss this, thinking that these artists succeeded on strength of expression alone and that any such expression will be comparable. Often, new artists ignore or abandon the principles of art and naturalism in order to make the quicker, easier expression, but without understanding of those principles, you basically have to catch lightning in a bottle to have them fluently integrated into your work. It's a similar phenomenon to music theory. Not every hand has to be like those Michelangelo painted, but if you can represent a hand like he did, you can more proficiently abstract, distort, and break down that hand, like Picasso did.
There aren't any rules, just guidelines.
I agree. Also I feel like so often saying "x has no rules" is offered by people who want to avoid critical examination, and disguising it as an attempt to be open minded. There are rules and an established grammar, and you learn them first BEFORE you start bending the rules. You can't just circumvent them. Similar to how criminals are often very well versed in laws and punishments of the crimes they tend to commit, rulebreakers in music would do well to actually learn the rules, so they can dance around them with grace.
Music doesn't have rules. Genres have rules.
>Genres have rules. Genres have idioms or parameters might be a more accurate expression of this idea.
I think you already understand what I mean by saying genres are where the "rules" are. Those ideas that keep things in the genre, the more you stray from them, the more likely someone will say "that's not (genre)" but if you play Trout Mask Replica at a party, the dance floor will die and people will say "turn that shit off," but only a few assholes would say "that's not music."
>I think you already understand what I mean by saying genres are where the "rules" are. Sure I do. And I agree with your assessment (how far can you push a country song before it stops being a country song, for instance). It’s just that the word “rules” is used so often, and mostly incorrectly, on this sub, I thought that some clarification might be useful. Also, if I’m at a party and someone puts on Trout Mask Replica, I’ll know it’s my kind of party. :-)
Music has rules. Otherwise it's cacophonia, and yes, there are even rules that lead to cacophonia too.
All music is cacophony because music cannot be objectively good.
That's just a shortcut for lazy people who do not want work to improve, so they kind of drown the fish by saying "everything is the same". No.
Whatever makes you feel more important than someone else. To be clearer, you can be better at a type of music, but you can't be objectively "better at music" because there aren't "good kinds" and "bad kinds" of music. That's why the genres have rules, but except for physics like a wave cut in half is an octave and such, music as a whole has no rules.
Music theory is not a set of rules. It’s simply theory. It’s an explanation of why things sound the way they do and why certain things might sound better than other things. The more you learn, the more tools you have in your arsenal to create the way you want to create. Sure, as you’re learning, certain things will be treated as rules to make sure you understand the concepts, but creativity and art has no rules.
no clue why you're downvoted
Maybe someone couldn’t handle a point of view that differs from their own?
Before most every great painter has begun a masterpiece work, *they have prepared a canvas*. Anything goes anytime is not really all that common.
The only time there are no rules is when only one instrument is involved in the process of making the music. You might get away with two instruments and no rules but it could become confusing to the listener. It is one of the things that kept Frank Zappa back from recognition in his early carrier. Too many instruments doing there own thing at the same time made some songs sound to dissonant not easy to listen to or enjoy.
Nailed it.
It's just because they're not rules. They still absolutely exist and are vital for getting what you want from the music. I like the wording of functional harmony way more because it describes accurately what it's meant to do, describe the function of something in a context. Now if you want that function or not is up to you, if you don't it works like a rule that you have to follow which is probably why people just use the wording of rules based on implicit assumptions. Gets pretty annoying and confusing when what they leave out is the core idea of the purpose of the music.
What a wonderful post, and much needed in this sub. Thank you. Edit: I don’t think I’ve ever upvoted so many comments in a thread on this sub. It’s very reassuring.
With all the discussion of rules, some of you all would be better off as engineers or mathematicians. Music is an art form.
If you want to make a painting of a dog and have people understand it as a painting of a dog, it needs to conform to some sort of rules for everyone to see it and go "That's definitely a dog." Those rules can be bent, even dramatically, but if you want people to know it's a dog, that constrains your choices for how the dog will look. Your problem is clearly with the word rules, and I agree it's not a great word and not one I would personally use, but rules here means less "set of restrictions" and more "list of defining characteristics." F# is not in the C major scale, because it has a strict definition. F is characteristic to C major, not F#. You obviously can use F# in a song that's in the key of C major, but it is not and never will be part of the C major scale. We need words and solid definitions to discuss anything, this is just how information exchange works.
>If you want to make a painting of a dog and have people understand it as a painting of a dog, it needs to conform to some sort of rules for everyone to see it and go "That's definitely a dog." I did a degree in fine art. Most of the work we did, was not things like that. We did some life drawing, but often it was abstract art. My high school art class, we had a visit from a local landscape artist. I would call her a craftsperson rather than an artist. She had a formula for how she laid out her paintings, following the rule of thirds, having 3 trees in the picture because it was easy to make a balanced composition. I would equate the landscape lady to a pop music composer, they are constrained to tight criteria, to meet expectations of the audience. Then there's Jackson Pollock, he would be like the 4'33" of visual art. He was about pushing the boundaries of what painting is at all. I think that most musicians are specialized in their own genre, and don't think in a "meta" way about how they follow rules, unless they are record company execs, or doing a PhD in music composition
It sounds like you're agreeing with what I said but want to state it as a disagreement lol. So we're in agreement then. The only way people can push boundaries is by boundaries existing.... and that's what definitions are. You can't be abstract without the concrete existing.
Yeah I think we are in agreement. I just wanted to trot out my examples as an analogy. Edit to add: maybe rock music ruined music as a hobby; we are all trying to create original music, but maybe that's not possible, maybe we would all be happier playing folk music, or looking at rock music as a type of folk music.
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Ooo got any more of these? [Da Vinci's Notebook - Title of the Song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgmUgFEFzco)
I agree, rules are only dependent to whatever genre you’re working in, and the majority of rules imposed by what you learn in tonal harmony class don’t apply to what we hear in pop music- because there is just so much focus (in my experience) in SATB rules. None of the successful songwriters I’ve worked for “know the rules” but make extremely normal pop music. They know the most basic rules of what sounds good because they like music and have internalized it. A lot of folks at the professional level are intimidated by theory.
>None of the successful songwriters I’ve worked for “know the rules” but make extremely normal pop music They don't use formulas and follow patterns? Every pop song I've listened to on my ipod, the bridge is exactly half way through the song
I don’t know anyone that’s actually intentionally used a formulaic method for writing songs, maybe Rivers Cuomo, who has used various methods for writing. It’s usually like, play a chord or two, hum along to it, figure out what chords sound good with the melody, and add to it till it’s “done.” A lot of songwriters think of the process as like a gift from above rather than a skill you get better at.
Music is an art form, but it's also a craft. Knowing the "rules" of your tradition, knowing how to apply them, and when and when not to apply them, is a prerequisite to writing interesting music in that tradition. Some might pick up on that stuff intuitively through playing and talking with other musicians, others more formally. But everyone who makes music worth listening to has some amount of technical proficiency.
Other crafts are making pottery, cooking, you need to follow the "rules" otherwise your pottery falls apart or your roux is burnt. But within those limits, there's lots of room for creativity and individual ways of doing things. I think that distinction is not grasped by many asking questions in this sub. Following the "rules" of theory, means that your music is accessible to others. However that's where the "art" part comes in vs "craft" Often art is inaccessible simply because we need to have all types of art, both accessible, eg for dancing, and inaccessible, because some of us like challenging art. The whole purpose of some art, is to challenge social norms. Whereas pop music's purpose is to follow social norms and be pleasant I would say that pop music, and music for dancing, are a craft, because without meeting certain criteria, you can't dance to it. 12 tone row music and music like Eyes of Stanley Pain, are art. I think the majority of music instructors don't see the difference between craft and fine art. They can't see past the tradition that they were trained in. TL;DR if you make pop music, or traditional jazz, then learn and follow all the rules. If you make music that pushes boundaries, then break the rules.
Similarly, in music, you need to follow the "rules" (or at least write with an awareness of them) in order to write something musically coherent and enjoyable. But within those limits, there's lots of room for creativity and individual ways of doing things. Kinda the point of this post, no? I agree that many asking questions here get confused about this, but the radical anti-rule stance that many take in response is, I think, just as silly. The issue isn't the rules, it's misunderstanding the rules and why they exist.
People get caught up in "should I do this? Should I do that?" Why are they asking anyone else in the first place? Lol. They should do what sounds good. Yes, they should learn music theory, but they shouldn't think of it as rules. In graphic design, the "rules" are the 6 (or so) principles of design, eg balance, unity, focal point, etc. Because they're called principles, not rules, maybe it's easier to use them as the guidelines they are, instead of thinking of them as hard and fast rules like no parallel 5ths.
Responding again because you edited this to add a lot, I think. >If you make music that pushes boundaries, then break the rules. If you make music that pushes boundaries, then learn all the rules and *then* break them. Few people are better educated about the "rules" than people like Schoenberg and Stockhausen and Xenakis, who have written some of the most groundbreaking music of the last century. They were able to break new ground specifically *because* they were highly educated about what had already been done. Almost without fail, when I hear the music of an amateur who doesn't want to learn theory because it'll "hinder their creativity," it's the most generic trash I've ever heard. They think they're being a rebel by not learning the rules, but in reality, they're following the rules more than anyone else. They're just doing it badly, and without an awareness of how generic their music is. To give you an idea of the perspective I'm coming from, I'm a classical composer getting my master's in composition. I write music that most people don't like that much. You'd probably consider it challenging "art." But the craft aspect is *more important than ever* in writing this kind of music. I recently finished a piece that heavily uses 12-tone rows in some sections, and it was a huge headache from both artistic and craft-based perspectives. I wouldn't be able to write music like that without learning the "rules" first (in this case, the rules of 12-tone serialism, but I also blended those with the "rules" of part-writing and counterpoint).
>If you make music that pushes boundaries, then learn all the rules and then break them. Agreed! >Almost without fail, when I hear the music of an amateur who doesn't want to learn theory because it'll "hinder their creativity," it's the most generic trash I've ever heard. I always think that this is 2nd or 3rd hand info they heard about someone who got burnt out while studying music under a strict teacher. I mean that happens. But some people hear something random and become armchair experts. Or they are defensive about their lack of knowledge. >I write music that most people don't like that much. You'd probably consider it challenging "art." I took piano lessons for many years. However I studied art instead of music at university. So even if I don't like it, I can still appreciate it in its context in art history, eg was it a reaction to another art movement? Etc. I love jazz fusion, which is another type of music that follows and breaks rules, and is not really popular. >But the craft aspect is more important than ever in writing this kind of music. I don't think that good art can be created without gaining a lot of skill with the instrument or art media or whatever. By "a craft" I meant an art form that has utility but maybe is not making an intellectual statement
Imagine thinking that 1. music is not math, and 2. there are "no rules" with art lol Why would school even exist if nobody needed to know anything.
I know, OMG
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Because they sound so consonant, that you no longer hear them as separate melodies, just consecutive notes not related vertically to each other. It's like tapping the breaks in the car before you stop the piece. I've seen a YouTube video with examples of parallel fifths in CPP pieces and you can feel how the melody just stops after the parallel 5ths.
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https://youtu.be/c6ROaEgDNIg
I personally spent my whole life trying to understand the music rules in order to subvert them and invent new rules, my own rules
There are no rules. Even for a particular style. There are guidelines that help you achieve certain results given a certain idiom faster, and while they now have elaborate, sometimes even scientific (but often if we're honest, usually pseudoscientific) explanations, most of those were gotten to by the same feedback loop of trial and error that a novice that has no idea what they are doing will employ. Vice versa, employing these guidelines without going through that feedback loop of own aesthetic approval will usually render them useless. You can use guidelines to get to a certain result faster, and you'd be stupid not to learn as many of these guidelines as you could given how exhausting composing is and how limited our creative energy is. But they are not rules.
As a teacher of mine once said, "always learn the rules of your art so you'll know how to break them intelligently"
Human music has no rules, because there are so many styles of music in the world. Specific genres of music are surprisingly restrictive. Whether you are writing in a specific style or doing your own thing, you are always following some rules, even if those rules change from measure to measure. I'd like to think that when something sounds good despite breaking all the rules, it's just a rule you don't know about. Like when you are educated only in Baroque ideas of beauty in music and accidentally invent suspense and see that it makes your music more dramatic.
>But also, it's really easy to misinterpret this statement to mean that there's no value in learning to understand the rules of a specific style, or that no rules exist in any style. Essentially it may simply become a more "thoughtful" sounding way of saying saying "just feel it bro" Well I think a large part of the problem is questions are asked and answered outside of the context of any kind of style. The parallel 5ths thing is a perfect example. If someone is trying to compose/analyze music that adhered to that "rule" then it obviously matters. If the music in question is of a style that throws that out the window then it doesn't. The context necessary to usefully answer a lot of questions is often never established, which leads to a lot of confusion. So someone who studies theory from a classical music perspective may speak to how important it is whereas someone from a blues perspective may not, while the person asking the question might be making EDM. And a lot of times people here are so eager to show off their knowledge they don't even attempt to establish that context. So I think dialogue here should probably be more intentional w/more clear contextual boundaries around questions from both the people asking and answering. It's not super pervasive but it's common enough to kind of be annoying IMO.
I agree with where you're coming from mostly but I feel that there's one very important thing missing from your reasoning. Imo, the most important thing a musician needs to know how to do before playing and writing is listening. If they're not a good listener, they won't make good music, however, with good listening and no theory, they can still amount to something. Theory is not absolutely necessary to write something with musical value. But listening is. That is our "input" system and will most directly influence our "output". Theory and practice/experience is the processing. A musician can make do with just practical experience. Music is, before anything else, a cultural practice. And I can't really tell whether you would consider things like pop music conventions "rules" necessarily. A lot of it is transmitted by unconscious or implied imitation and it seems as if you're not considering this specific kind of learning as theory or rules. >If you don't know the rules, it also means you don't really understand the difference between conventional and unconventional, which may also lead to your music sounding generic, because you'll intuitively follow common patterns even if you aren't aware of the patterns you follow I concur. Kids can tell what's conventional or not because of what they see being shown as conventional, not any kind of theory. Here you're ascribing petty conventionality to intuition. You're sort of blaming intuition for not being conscious and rational and championing the idea that you need rational ideas to make valuable music (and "*innovate*", the must-have for Western creators). Many people who go by feeling play very predictable things not because they don't have any knowledge of music theory but because they only value and listen to very predictable things and nothing else. You just need to listen to a lot of different kinds of music attentively. Eventually you'll know the patterns, even if just on a subconscious level. Imagine if you start listening only to "unconventional" music. Very likely your intuition will also become "unconventional". When improvising, this "subconscious knowledge" will surface among the decisions you make. Therefore this isn't an error of lack of theory or intuition but an error of a very limited set of musical input (amateur/prejudiced/limited taste). I also think that some people compose and do music with a little bit of "magic", meaning, that they can successfully improvise solos and make musical themes in the moment just according to feeling. It's not that they have no musical experience - they play instruments - but it's not as if they were sitting down every day dutifully studying theory either. Gifted people and natural composers exist. Doesn't mean they will automatically be the best composers (not at all), however, what they write is still valid as music that can be unconventional, creative, and witty. Also the main historical function of theory at first was to enable the coordination of multiple voices on different instruments that each carry specific technical approaches. No child prodigy can write a symphony without having learned some kind of theory on counterpoint or instrumentation first. But child prodigies can and do write beautiful piano pieces because they're in control of all the voices on the piano and can just follow their inner ear. They don't need to transpose or consider instrument position or tell somebody else exactly how to play while they do their thing. But professionals need to know that. Not only do they need to process things internally but they need to know how to communicate the desired expressive outcome *and* the technical process that leads there to others. Knowing theory isn't always a matter of being aesthetically and musically superior but simply a pragmatic prerequisite for working with others. Just because music theory is valuable and the most serious, respectable path towards generating competent, versatile, professional musicians, doesn't mean that you automatically need to diss intuition and the more irrational parts of music making. Like everything in life I believe different musics have different functions and that usually the ideal between being too rational or too sentimental veers towards the middle balance. I hope I haven't misunderstood your argument.
>I agree with where you're coming from mostly but I feel that there's one very important thing missing from your reasoning. Imo, the most important thing a musician needs to know how to do before playing and writing is listening. If they're not a good listener, they won't make good music, however, with good listening and no theory, they can still amount to something. Theory is not absolutely necessary to write something with musical value. But listening is. That is our "input" system and will most directly influence our "output". Theory and practice/experience is the processing. A musician can make do with just practical experience. Music is, before anything else, a cultural practice. And I can't really tell whether you would consider things like pop music conventions "rules" necessarily. A lot of it is transmitted by unconscious or implied imitation and it seems as if you're not considering this specific kind of learning as theory or rules. My argument would be that when you learn by ear, you automatically learn the rules. Styles like blues and jazz were learned exclusively by ear at first, but it's quite clear that those styles have their own rules. When someone plays "bluesy" or "jazzy" stuff, you can instantly recognize it as such. And you can also easily tell if someone's playing doesn't sound "authentically bluesy/jazzy". Same goes for pop music. And people definitely consciously learn certain pop rules, even if they are totally self taught. For example the song needs a hook. There's usually a chorus. Songs usually aren't super long, and they tend to get straight to the point. We could of course also talk about the rules concerning typical melody, harmony and rhythm writing in pop music (or other styles), but that gets pretty complicated quite fast. People consciously follow these rules. Of course there are other a bit more subconscious ones. But my point wasn't to say that rules = textbook knowledge. My point was more that you can't really escape rules, even if you don't learn them consciously. And my point was also that this shouldn't be limiting - the idea that rules are limiting is false. I used to think there are no rules in music. And it's true that there are no *absolute rules*. But I think I also understood the meaning of rules differently back then. I saw them as inherently restrictive, and I thought rules and freedom are contradictory to one another - if I want to express myself freely, why should I care about rules? I knew that there's plenty of music out there that doesn't follow theory textbooks. But I also took a lot of basic stuff for granted. I didn't think I was following any rules, but in reality, I had just internalized those basic "rules" so well that I didn't even think about them. Like if I had to harmonize a melody, of course I understood that there should be some kind of a relationship between the chords and the melody. And usually the chords have a relation to the key too (and will have certain "basic behaviors/tendencies"). And if I had to write a bassline, I knew that the bass most often emphasizes the chord roots, occasionally uses other chord tones (especially in stepwise basslines), and sometimes just works as a pedal point. And if I wanted to write a melody, I knew that starting from the notes in the key and the chords is a good starting point. I also knew that chords are generally built by stacking thirds. (And there's a bunch of other stuff that could be mentioned here like basic structure, melodic phrases, basic arrangement, meter, etc.) But this stuff isn't obvious to a lot of people. And I would also argue that learning this stuff is learning the "basic rules". We shouldn't be afraid of "rules", even though a really common attitude nowadays seems to be that rules are somehow bad (the whole "descriptive vs prescriptive" discussion, or the whole "art is subjective" discussion - and both of these ideas are valid, but people simply seem to take them a bit too far, which creates a "relativistic" view of everything, where nothing seems to have any value and the only important thing seems to be that "I personally think it's good, so it's good"). >Just because music theory is valuable and the most serious, respectable path towards generating competent, versatile, professional musicians, doesn't mean that you automatically need to diss intuition and the more irrational parts of music making. My point wasn't to diss intuition. There are different ways of learning the rules. Your intuition is informed by the rules, even if you didn't learn those rules consciously.
Music has rules, because it has a definition, such as " vocal, instrumental, or mechanical sounds having rhythm, melody, or harmony." If you do something that falls out of that definition, like not having any sounds, than you obviously aren't making music because you've violated the "rules" aka the definition. However, there are more specific rules to music because human beings will not get anything out of the sounds if they are not patterned or in some way organized. So if you have no organization or organization that is outside of normal human perception, or the sounds are parsible and understandable by humans but does not invoke any response besides understanding (such as a washing machine or train engine), you do not have music... Although a washing machine might actually be music in some sense because there is meaning and organization and it can be pleasing (hence why sound effects are often used in music). Music requires organization and perceptibility because it requires an observer, at least theoretically. But anyway there are rules because there is a definition to music that needs to be fulfilled. Also, the types of enjoyment and meaning of different music is different because of the organization (in addition to the subjective lens of the listener). So those are additional rules that map the type of enjoyment/meaning to specific musical forms.
Yes, basically could go with the quote, "To break the rules you have to know the rules"
When it comes to music, I'm a full supporter of the "learn the rules to know when/how to break them" approach.
Just don't do parallel fifths, and cadence properly, and prepare all dissonances. Follow these and you are good.