Richard Bruner’s Musical Philosophy

Capital-M Music

Part 2: Theory and Practice

This is part 2 of my essay on my personal musical philosophy. Part 1, about my philosophy of music-making, is available here. This part is a collection of things I’ve written in the past few months about music theory and music as a thing itself. The bulk of it is a new essay about why we should study music theory and some of what that has entailed for me as a film scoring major at Berklee College of Music, and some observations from my tutoring of undergraduate music theory classes as a graduate composition major at California State University, Northridge (CSUN).

Note that most of this essay was written over the summer of 2024, before the start of my Fall 2024 semester at CSUN. I’ve updated it with some additional thoughts based on my theory tutoring at CSUN, particularly as my tutoring schedule exploded in this Fall semester with a large influx of students this year, so I’ve had the opportunity to work with a lot more students than I did last school year. This has also shown me more areas where most of my students seem to stumble, as well as individual strengths and weaknesses in my various students, which has made tutoring quite interesting this semester! The essay was revised and initially posted here on November 23, 2024, near the end of the Fall 2024 semester.

I currently have placeholder text where I might add some graphics - I’m still trying to decide how much of a high-level “textbook” I want this to be. The Harmony class section gets very detailed relative to the rest of the essay about how harmony works vs. simply what the class is like, and I think some notation graphics might help show those concepts better. But I also might rewrite that to be less technical, or pull that part out separately in my Theory Guides section on my website. We’ll see what I do a little later. The rest of the classes section is less detailed and more about the classes rather than about the subject.

Next, I have an excerpt from another guide I’m working on about rhythm and musicianship. Most of that guide is about concepts and skills for applying rhythm to music (with lots of real-world examples), but the first chapter is an essay on “Foundations of Music”, where I talk a bit about what music “is” (keeping in mind that there isn’t a single definition that fits everything, and this subject has been debated for centuries if not millenia!).

I hope you find something useful in all this, and if you have any comments or feedback for me (or you’d like to sign up for musicianship, composition or music theory or production lessons or tutoring with me), please contact me here!

Why study music theory? I’ve covered some of this in my life-tips guide, particularly in my Philosophy of Music Theory section, but I thought it might be good to lay out some ideas explicitly in one place. I’ve seen comments online from people, and even heard at least one person in real life say to my face that they don’t want to listen to anyone else’s music, or study music theory at all because they want to write their own music and not be influenced by anyone else. I’ve also encountered a little resistance in my tutoring, just in the three semesters I’ve been doing it formally [so far], to why we need to study certain kinds of ideas. One of my students asked me once why he needed to study string harmonics if he wasn’t a string player.

There are a few reasons why it would be useful to study all of this information. To directly address the comments above, first: as I mentioned in Life Tips Composition Tip No. 28, if you can have a face-to-face conversation with me, or even read any of my tips, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ve already been influenced by other people’s music. It’s pretty much inescapable in society today, or on the internet (and have you ever been to a grocery store?). If you grew up on a desert island and had no connection to any other civilization at all, then maybe what you’d come up with would truly be original in that sense, but if I can talk to you or read your comments, then definitionally you do not meet that criteria. When people say they don’t want to be influenced by anyone else, I think they might actually mean one of two things. One, that they don’t want to try copying any other specific artist’s music, or even necessarily any particular style of music, but rather that they want to make their own music without reference to that. Or two, that they want to make music that sounds explicitly unlike anything that already exists. For that second point, I will point out that to do that presupposes that you have some idea of what came before, otherwise you cannot know that you aren’t re-creating something that already exists (case in point - I had a student recently who brought me a chord progression he came up with. He asked me to help him figure out what the chords actually were, and when he played them for me it turned out that he had stumbled across the beginning of the “Autumn Leaves” chord progression, effectively the Circle of Fifths chord progression, which is one of the most common and straight-forward of all the chord progressions! In fact we’ll look at it in some detail below in the “Harmony” section of this essay).

Reacting against something is still reacting to that thing. Not all music theory concepts are based on fundamental attributes of our hearing or physics - some really are historical accidents that could easily have developed another way. But some elements of our theory are in fact based on fundamental laws of physics of sound and human anatomy, and therefore you are likely to stumble onto at least a variant of those techniques if you don’t know otherwise. The Harmonic Series is one such fundamental physical reality. Also, I’d point out that writing music that goes against those elements might make your music less easy to listen to, so you might lose a lot of your audience if you go too far down that road (some twentieth century harmony explorations might have gone a little too far, and lost some of that audience for that reason - see Composition Tip No. 27).

As far as copying other artists’ music, I can refer back to Composition Tip No. 28 again for more on that, but here, I’ll just say that there’s nothing wrong with working in a tradition and pushing at the boundaries of an existing tradition. If you really want to try to stay away from existing music, you can try to make that choice (though again I point out it’s hard to escape music around us all the time and you might have to accept extreme sacrifices to do this - if you took this seriously, you wouldn’t be able to go to any movies, dance clubs, events in general, and again even the grocery store would be a problem. Avoiding any exposure to music in our society would be so difficult as to be impractical if not impossible, and I really think you’d be better off finding some way to work with being exposed to other people’s music). You don’t need to try to recreate their music precisely, though making mockups of music you are familiar with is a good way to learn certain kinds of tools like sample libraries and DAWs, or even notation software by copying existing scores into the computer. I’ll also add here that Arnold Schoenberg, inventor of 12-tone serialism, insisted that all of his students become experts at common practice tonal harmony before they try getting into systems like his (he also disliked referring to 12-tone music as a “system”, and saw it as an outgrowth of trends in late Romantic classical music).

As far as the concern my student had about why he should learn about string harmonics if he wasn't a string player, that one is almost easier to address. If you want to be a composer of some sort, whether art music or media composition, or even other forms, it’s best to learn about the instruments that you might be able to work with. In either of those types of composition, string instruments play a key role and knowing what techniques are available for them and what they sound like is crucial. String harmonics as a playing technique are not the way we ordinarily think about the instruments (as someone who is a string player myself), but they are common enough that anyone who didn’t know about them from either the player’s or composer’s side could not really be considered professional. They are also one of the easiest ways to get into the concept of the harmonic series, which appears all over the place in music once you know about it (for one thing, all pitched sounds consist of harmonic or near harmonic sine waves, as I explore in my Harmonic Series guide). Any composer who didn’t have knowledge of the harmonic series would be at a serious disadvantage in their knowledge of how sound worked in general.

This gets into more about additional reasons to study theory. As composers (and performers in a different way), we are sound artists. We paint sound on silence, and the nature of the sound we paint with can be explored in all sorts of different ways (that’s a paraphrase of a quote from at least one other person, but I can't remember who off the top of my head). You don’t have to stick to the music of the classical common practice, but this is the basis of most Western music, and having some knowledge of it is useful. As a musician, the ability to look at sheet music or listen to music and to consciously identify what you are hearing is important, regardless of what aspect of music you want to get into. As a performer, being able to understand what the composer of the piece you are playing had in mind is necessary to playing it most effectively. As a composer, being able to set up structured music in a way that can make sense is also important, whether you are writing in a pre-existing style or trying to create your own world of sound. If no one else can interpret what you’ve done, then they will not be able to play it effectively as a performer, or to appreciate it as a listener. If you are trying to produce music for other people, an ability to articulate why a passage is or isn’t working will be useful for fixing it - I’ve had people tell me that as long as they know when it sounds “good” that’s enough, but an ability to explain why it sounds good (and perhaps more importantly, why it might not) will be much more useful. All of these aspects are developed through the study of music theory and through musicianship classes (see the end of this essay for more on how music theory and musicianship intersect).

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this set of guides, a standard music theory course in a college environment consists of at least one semester each of harmony, counterpoint, form and instrumentation / orchestration (usually in two different semesters for those two). Let’s take them in turn and look at how we use these different categories of classes, and then I’ll explore some of my own personal history with learning music theory.

The order in which you take these classes may differ from school to school, and even from year to year within a school depending on how often they offer these classes. Harmony is often taken as the first theory class, and to some people music theory and harmony are almost synonymous. This is not how this material was taught or developed historically, but these days you will often start with a harmony class as one of your first music theory classes (and there are usually at least two and sometimes 4 semesters of Harmony). Harmony is the exploration of simultaneous sounding pitches. It looks most prominently initially at the vertical dimension of music, which is to say what is happening now. We can take intervals (two notes sounding together and how they relate to each other), and join them together in different ways to get “chords”, which usually supposes at least three different pitches sounding together (also called a triad). If you only have two pitches sounding together, you have a “dyad”, and those two notes can usually be thought of as two pitches from multiple different possible chords. 

In a standard college harmony course, we usually teach tonal harmony, which is the basis for much of western music both in classical (art) music and in popular (non-classical) music. In tonal harmony, pitches of our 12-note chromatic scale are organized into hierarchical groupings of seven pitches (diatonic scales), where notes relate to each other and want to move in particular ways relative to other notes. We have a primary note, called the tonic (or the 1 or I note). This will be the basis for any given scale, and will give its name to the scale we are using at any given moment, or the “key” the piece is in. This is also known as the “tonal center”, and the music feels most stable when it is sitting on this note. We then build scales by taking specific patterns of half-steps and whole-steps from our chromatic scale, determined by the “mode” we are using.

Modes tell us which of the other pitches from our 12-note chromatic scale we will use in this particular diatonic scale. In classical tonal harmony, we can have one of two standard modes, major or minor, and minor has three different versions depending on how it is being used at any given point in time - natural minor is the minor scale that shares all the notes in common with another major scale (these are referred to as relative major and minor scales). This scale is actually thought of as outside tonal harmony in some ways we’ll get to momentarily. In most tonal contexts you will either be using harmonic minor or melodic minor, which will raise certain notes from the natural minor scale by a half-step to allow other effects that you wouldn’t get with natural minor. A major scale will take a sequence of half-steps and whole steps as follows: from note one, we go up by W-W-H-W-W-W-H, and that last half-step gets us back to the same tonic an octave higher.

[Graphic of C major scale, and A minor scale (three types)]

We can take any given diatonic scale, and build chords on it by stacking intervals of a third on top of each note (twice for a triad). Because the distance from one note to the next in a diatonic scale is a major or minor second (a whole or half step), you can see this as taking every other note from our scale, which will be a major or minor third. 

[Graphic - color notes of a scale for C major chord, then show C major chord stacked]

If we start on each note in turn of our major scale and then take every other note and add two additional notes to each one, we get the diatonic triads. If we then number each of the notes in the scale using roman numerals from 1 to 7 (I to vii), we can then start talking about our chords in this manner.

[Graphic showing diatonic chords in C major]

The next thing to look at really quick is different kinds of triads. All of our triads will fall into one of three categories (there are actually four possible categories, but diatonic chords will never use one of them). We can have major triads, minor triads, and diminished triads. If we take our stacks of thirds and see a major third from the bottom note to the middle note (and a minor third on top, which will also have a perfect fifth from the bottom to top note), then we have a major triad:

[Graphic C major triad, showing intervals]

 If we see a minor third on the bottom (and a major third on top and a perfect fifth between the bottom and top notes) then we have a minor triad, and if we see a minor third on the bottom and a diminished 5th for the outer notes, then we have a diminished triad (this one has two minor thirds between adjacent notes). 

[Graphic showing minor and diminished triads with intervals outlined]

The final possibility is two major thirds, which would have an augmented fifth between the outer notes, and this would be an augmented triad, but we don’t ever have that in diatonic harmony. Here it is anyway, for the sake of completeness:

[Graphic showing Augmented triad, intervals outlined]

So now we can return to our roman numerals and note that if we capitalize the roman numerals that means we have a major triad, and if we use lower case, that means a minor triad (and if it’s lower case and there’s a circle next to it, that means diminished - capital letters with a plus would indicate augmented). Note that the upper-case vs. lower case really refers to the major or minor third relative to the root.

We can go back and look at our diatonic chords and we’ll find that in major key diatonic harmony, we have the following chords: I, ii, iii, IV, V, vi, vii°. The beauty of music theory is that this will always be true regardless of what note you start on - in any (major) key, this is the sequence of chords that you have to work with. It abstracts away the note names, and we can now compare pieces in different specific keys in ways that make sense. If you can learn to think in patterns like this, rather than dwelling on note names themselves, music will be much faster and easier to grasp. I showed the C major triads above, but here are the triads in D major, showing the same chord qualities. You can check them yourself to verify that they are indeed the same types of chords if you’d like.

[Graphic of diatonic triads in D major, with roman numerals]

The next thing we do in a harmony context is to start constructing chord progressions, which are sequences of chords that make musical sense. This brings the horizontal dimension into music, time. The first part of this is to realize that we can break the seven diatonic chords down into three smaller categories - I learned them as tonic, subdominant, and dominant, but at CSUN they use “predominant” instead of “subdominant”. All else being equal, tonic chords move to subdominant chords (or sometimes straight to dominant chords), subdominant chords move to dominant chords, and dominant chords move to tonic chords. Tonic chords are the most stable (to a degree). I, iii and vi are tonic chords, ii and IV are subdominant, and V and vii° are dominant chords (also true for minor harmony with the appropriate chord qualities - but the numbers match). iii is the odd one - it would be hard to leave a piece sitting on the iii chord, but it doesn’t have a strong tendency to want to move somewhere else all the time. To the degree that it does want to move somewhere, it usually moves either to vi or to IV, another tonic chord or a subdominant chord, and those are the traits of a tonic chord. Ultimately the I chord is really the only fully stable chord.

The next element in chord progression is to learn about the most important “root motion” in tonal harmony. This means the (melodic) interval between the “root” of adjacent chords. The root is the name for the bottom note in our “stacks of thirds” we built on each scale degree. You can have chord inversions where you stack those pitches in different ways, but if you leave them in the stacks of thirds configuration, we call that root position and the bottom note is the root of the chord (regardless of where it appears in an inversion). See my Chord Voicings guide for more on that. If we have two chords side by side in our progression, we look at the interval made by the two roots, and that’s the root motion. Root motion down by a fifth is the most significant root motion in tonal harmony, and is often considered one of the defining elements of “tonal” harmony as compared to other kinds of harmony. Note that since fifths and fourths are “inverted” intervals, you might see the root move either down a fifth or up a fourth, and this would still be considered root motion down a fifth for tonal harmony purposes.

One more thing you will notice here is that a V chord is a dominant chord, and the I chord is a tonic chord, so V - I is a dominant to tonic progression, as is vii° to I. Further, if you build backwards from there, the chord that’s a fifth above V is ii (just keep going around octaves to calculate this - 5, 6, 7, 1, 2). ii is a subdominant chord, and ii - V - I is the canonical ending chord progression in a lot of tonal music (IV - V - I is another common progression, or IV - vii° - I, etc). You can keep stacking fifth root motions and you’ll get the famous “circle of fifths” chord progression, I - IV - vii° - iii - vi - ii - V - I. This is somewhat long-winded, so we often shorten it to vi - ii - V - I, which you might recognize from lots of jazz and pop music (it usually starts on I, so it would be I - vi - ii - V - I, or they might leave off the resolution, so I - vi - ii - V). This is the opening of one of the most famous jazz progressions of all time, “Rhythm Changes”, based on George and Ira Gershwin’s song “I got Rhythm”. I mentioned above the “Autumn Leaves” chord progression, which is in minor key and uses the full set. It starts on iv, and then goes iv - bVII - bIII - bVI - ii-7(b5) - V7 - i (using some jazz chord analysis I learned at Berklee, though leaving off most of the seventh chord qualities - see below).

Again, all of these apply to any starting key. To give a couple of concrete examples, in C major, we have Dm, G, C for ii - V - I, or Am, Dm, G, C for vi - ii - V - I (in this kind of notation, a single letter means major chord, a lower case ‘m’ after a letter means minor chord, and ‘dim’ after a letter means diminished and ‘aug’ after a letter means augmented):

[Graphic of ii V I in C maj, and vi ii V I in C maj]

In Bb major, we have ii - V - I as Cm, F, Bb, and vi - ii - V - I would be Gm, Cm, F, Bb:

[Graphic of ii V I and vi ii V I in Bb maj]

A couple more concepts here - we can keep stacking thirds from our triad, and get seventh chords with one more third. In classical tonal harmony, we mostly do that with the V chord, making V7, or the “Dominant Seventh” chord. This is a major triad with a minor seventh from the bottom, sometimes called the “major-minor seventh chord” when not being used to descend by a fifth as a V7 chord, though I just learned that configuration as dominant seventh regardless of how it’s used.

[Graphic of a V7 chord in C maj, with intervals outlined]

 We can also stack another third on our vii° chord, and get a “half-diminished seventh” chord, where we have a diminished triad and minor seventh from the root. In minor key harmony, we’d get the “fully diminished seventh” or just “diminished seventh” chord, which is a diminished triad with a diminished seventh interval from the root. The ii chord is diminished in minor key as well, and ii° is a half-diminished seventh chord when you add the seventh. In jazz harmony, they call that chord the “minor 7 (flat 5)”, or “-7(b5)”, as I mentioned above in the Autumn Leaves progression. One last quick note here - you can see several systems for writing chord symbols. The version I had a Berklee used a minus sign to mean “minor”, so ii-7(b5) is “two minor seven flat five”.

[Graphic of half diminished and fully diminished chords on B, intervals outlined]

Also note that the fully diminished 7th chord is a stack of three minor 3rds and is fully symmetric, such that if you added one more minor 3rd you'd be back at the first note again (for other chord types, you have to go up two octaves to get to the first note again). This, along with the fact that there are two tri-tones gives the diminished 7th chord some very interesting possibilities.

In jazz and pop harmony, they use four note seventh chords as the basis for the harmony (as opposed to triads as the basis in classical tonal harmony), so we add the major seventh (a major triad with a major seventh interval - built on the I chord and IV chord in major key harmony), and the minor seventh (a minor triad with a minor seventh interval, build on the ii, iii, and vi chords). They then add additional notes beyond that - stacking more thirds for the ninth, eleventh (ocassionally), and thirteenth. That’s beyond the scope of what I’ll say here as this isn’t supposed to be a theory textbook.

In most college classes they focus on classical harmony if you aren’t in a formal jazz program, so Tonal Harmony 1 would cover most of what I mentioned above (without the jazz elements). The other thing they usually get into in a Harmony 1 class is “voice-leading”, which is how to take the raw notes of a chord and have them move between chords smoothly. This is based on counterpoint (and actually both voice-leading and harmony itself come out of counterpoint historically). They will have you analyze and then practice making “four-part chorales”, as if you are writing for singers like J.S. Bach actually was when he arranged his ~300 chorales, which will most likely be the thing you spend the most time analyzing in this part of the class. There are a variety of rules that you follow to make this work, which you can learn from an actual harmony textbook or class if you want. But the basic principle is to keep each of the four parts moving mostly by step or by small leap (half-steps or whole-steps, or maybe thirds if necessary on occasion), and to avoid having two voices that are either a fifth or octave apart move to the same interval on the next chord (parallel fifths and octaves). This causes the parts to lose independence from each other and sound like the same voice. The final project for a harmony 1 class is usually something along the lines of taking a given melody, working out the diatonic chords for the melody using good chord progression techniques, and then writing a four-part chorale with those chords on that melody. By this time, they’d also get into non-chord tones, which are notes in a voice that don’t match the pitches of the chord you are supposed to be using at that point. They would have you incorporate some of those in your chorale, which will keep the voices independent and make them more interesting to play or sing, and to listen to. (And when I say “they would”, I mean they are doing that in the classes I’m tutoring at CSUN right now, and we did this project more or less the same way when I was taking Tonal Harmony 1 at Berklee 15 years ago).

I won’t cover other harmony classes in nearly this much detail, but in Harmony 2 they will start to introduce “chromatic” notes, or notes from the five pitches that we didn’t pick for our diatonic scale we’ve been using. This comes about in three new types of chords, and one major new technique. The three new chord types are Secondary Dominants, Neapolitan (Sixths), and Augmented Sixth Chords (not to be confused with augmented triads). 

A secondary dominant is a chromatically altered chord that makes either a major triad or dominant seventh chord a fifth above some pitch that isn’t the tonic (and then resolves to that chord). So we can target the dominant chord itself - V/V (“Five of Five”). We already know that ii is the chord a fifth above V, so if we raise the middle note by a half-step, we can turn our minor chord into a major chord, and now our “ii” chord becomes “V/V” instead. It then resolves down to V/I (written just as V), which then resolves to I. We can add the minor seventh on those chords as well, and get V7/V. We can make them for other chords as well so before ii we had vi, which can become V/ii by making (minor) vi into a major chord (or V7/ii). iii comes before vi so that can be V(7) of vi, etc. And if we start on V7/vi, and then “resolve” down to vi but make that major, we can resolve to V(7) / ii, etc. and if we do this for all the chords we can get an “extended dominant” sequence, V7/vi - V7/ii - V7/V - V(7/I) - I, and we now know enough to analyze Rhythm Changes fully.

[Graphic of Extended Dominant sequence in C major]

We already looked at I - vi - ii - V (- I) earlier. Rhythm changes does that twice, then adds another favorite progression of I - V7/IV (which is I with a minor seventh added to it), IV, iv (borrowing minor iv from minor key harmony, called mode mixture), and then a turnaround progression of some kind (maybe just V for two bars, or something more interesting than that - there are lots of variations). Then we repeat all of that again, but this time end with V - I. Then we go into an extended dominant sequence, starting on what would be iii but is now V7/vi. We do the sequence we outlined above, and then when we get back to I again we do one more round of the first part (ending V-I to end the piece). In total:

I - vi - ii - V | I - vi - ii - V | I - V7/IV - IV - iv | V (etc) | [repeat] I - vi - ii - V | I - vi - ii - V | I - V7/IV - IV - iv | V7 - - I | [Bridge] V7/vi - - V7/ii - - | V7/ V - - V7(/I) - - | [Back to top] I - vi - ii - V | I - vi - ii - V | I - V7/IV - IV - iv | V7 - - I ||

[Make into graphic]

One final point to make about extended dominant sequences - when you are doing this kind of chain, you’ll find that the smoothest voice leading occurs when you swap the third and seventh of the chord each time. The root moves down a fifth (or up a fourth), and the third of the previous chord becomes the seventh of the new chord a half step lower and the third of the first chord likewise becomes the seventh of the new chord a half step lower. Using this trick you can descend down the entire range of the piano if you want, though it gets old after doing it a few times!

Neapolitan Chords are chromatically altered chords in minor key harmony, lowering the second scale degree by a half-step, building a major triad and (usually) flipping it to first inversion (hence the ‘sixth’ - the roman numeral designation of first inversion - N6). The Neapolitan chord as used in classical tonal harmony is a subdominant chord, usually moving directly to V7 using a specific voice leading pattern, though sometimes it passes through another chord first. I explore the N6 chord a little more fully in Philosophy of Music Theory Tip No. 4.

[Graphic demonstrating basic version of N6 chord]

The Augmented 6th chord is actually a set of three possible chords, which are all related and are also minor key subdominant chords that move to V (or V7) most of the time. These are actually built off of voice leading patterns rather than stacks of thirds. The most basic Aug6 chord is the Italian 6th, and you create this chord by starting with an octave of the V note, and moving chromatically up one half step from the lower note and chromatically down a half-step from the top note - if we’re in C minor, then we target G as the V note, and we start with Ab (up from bottom G), and F# (down from top G). A to F is an interval of a sixth, and Ab to F# is specifically an augmented 6th interval, hence the name of the chord. Then we add in as the third note the tonic (C), which is a major third above our Ab. This three note chord is the Italian 6th. It resolves to V by reversing the top and bottom notes back to the Gs we had originally (down from Ab to G, up from F# to G), and then the C resolves by half-step down to B-natural.

[Graphic of It+6 resolving to V, C minor]

The other two Aug6 chords take the same starting point, in this case Ab, C, F#, but then add one additional note for a four note chord. The German 6th adds a note a minor third above our middle note, so Eb in this case. If you hear this chord by itself, it sounds a lot like a dominant seventh chord (F# is enharmonically the same pitch as Gb, so then we’d have Ab, C, Eb, Gb, which is an Ab7 chord). But we don’t have that, we have Ab, C, Eb, F#, and the way this chord resolves is different than the way an actual Ab7 chord resolves. Here we actually resolve to a i6/4 chord, then to a V (or V7) chord. Ab and F# still resolve out to G and G, but now C stays C, Eb stays Eb, giving us a second inversion C minor chord, then C goes to B-nat, Eb goes to D, (and the top G can go to F if you want a V7 chord).

[Graphic of Ger+6 resolving to i6/4 to V]

The French 6th is the last one, and it adds to the Italian 6th a note a whole step above the middle note, so D above our C in this case. It sounds the most unusual of the three, and resolves straight to V normally - the Italian part resolves the same way as the Italian 6th, and D is already in the G chord, so you usually go straight to V.

[Graphic of Fr+6 resolving to V]

The other technique they talk about at length in a Harmony 2 class is modulation. This is changing keys in a piece, so there’s a new note name for our scale (note that changing the mode without changing the name of the note is just mode mixture, not modulation). There are several ways to do this, which are beyond the scope of this essay, but the most common versions are pivot chord modulation, common tone modulation, and direct modulation. Here’s a guide to some modulation techniques.

Harmony 2 will also address some other chord types that are less common in tonal harmony, including the ways to use augmented triads as passing chords in chromatic tonal harmony.

This may be all you have for harmony classes (CSUN only does two semesters of Harmony class, for example). If you have others, Harmony 3 is likely where you will cover church modes in more detail (see my Modes guide for a lot more on that subject). That’s what I remember most from my Harmony 3 class at Berklee, but at Berklee, Harmony 1-4 focused on jazz and pop harmony, not classical harmony (we had that separately), so I don’t know for sure what they cover in Harmony 3 in a classical program (I think they at least cover modes in that context too). Harmony 4 would be twentieth-century harmony in a classical program. At Berklee it covered uses of pop and jazz harmony outside of tonal harmony.

[A couple of little tips from my time tutoring Harmony (Harmony 1 in particular) - be careful how you use the words in this class. Two things that kept tripping up my tutoring students at CSUN in my current semester (Fall 2024) - say the note names correctly. The third of a C minor chord is E-flat, not “E” (I think students are looking at the note and forgetting the key signature, and not really being fully comfortable with the keys themselves yet are forgetting that Eb is the note in C minor. But they pretty consistently would say just the letter name and ignore the flat or sharp, and I’d show them that E is not the same pitch as Eb!). I have found that some of the students will actually play an E-natural on the piano by accident, so it isn’t necessarily just a terminology issue - they are actually forgetting that it is an Eb.

The other term that keeps tripping up my students is the distinction between the chordal seventh and the leading tone (scale degree seven). The chordal seventh is the “stack of thirds” note that is above the fifth of the chord (or the note that is a seventh above the root of the chord), whereas the leading tone is the seventh scale degree that leads to the tonic, or the first scale degree. In minor key harmony, we raise the leading tone by a half-step to make the V chord major and not minor. This is raising the seventh scale degree, which is the third of the V chord. The chordal seventh in the V7 chord is the fourth scale degree. This also means that we resolve the leading tone up a half-step (the third of the V chord goes to the root of the i chord), and we resolve the chordal seventh down a whole-step (the fourth scale degree goes to the third scale degree - in major harmony it’s down a half-step).

The use of the word “seventh” gets even trickier when we get to half- and fully-diminished 7th chords, because the vii chord is diminished, and so now we can talk about “vii°7”, which I’ve been careful to pronounce as the “seven diminished-seventh” chord. Talking about vii° versus simply any “°7” chord gets a little confusing (seven diminished is a triad, while a diminished seventh chord doesn’t have to be on the vii scale degree).

If you can keep all these terms straight in your head and be precise when talking about them, that will go a long way towards keeping you from getting tripped up in your class. These were a couple of terminology issues I noticed over and over in my tutoring students, and I did a lot of tutoring this semester!]

I mentioned above that voice leading and even harmony itself grows out of counterpoint historically. In a counterpoint class, you will cover using more than one melody line at a time in substantial detail. The first version of counterpoint you will usually have is called Species counterpoint, and looks at ways to create a second line that has a certain number of notes against another existing melody. 1 to 1 would be one counterline note for each existing note, and requires avoiding dissonances. 2 to 1 would have two notes in the counterline for each note in the existing melody, and can introduce dissonance because you can resolve it within the same melody note. 3 to 1 and 4 to 1 can have more interesting lines, and then you get to mixed, where you can use the different “species” as you see fit at any given point in time, and now you can write actual counterlines like you’d find in real music. Many of the same rules you learn for voice leading in harmony class apply in counterpoint, along with some additional rules. The next version of counterpoint you often look at is Two part or Three part canon and invention, and then there may also be a component looking at fugues and passacaglias and other variation forms. At CSUN, they have one semester of counterpoint and they try to squeeze all that in, while at Berklee I had three semesters of counterpoint, one for each of those areas (Species, Two part canon and invention, and Fugue etc or “Advanced Counterpoint”). I wrote a bit more about “applied counterpoint” in Philosophy of Music Theory Tip No. 2.

Form is another primary music theory class, and we had that for one semester at Berklee. CSUN seems to have two for the undergraduates (though on closer inspection it appears they are only actually offering one right now), and another version of that class is also the only theory class required at CSUN for all the graduate students. As a composition major I will also take an orchestration class, but there’s no harmony or counterpoint at the graduate level at CSUN (I just tutored the undergraduates in those classes!). Berklee called the form class “Techniques of Tonal Writing”, while CSUN uses the name “Music Analysis” for their classes. 

Form looks at the way that music unfolds in time, and breaks up into sections at various points. We start at a low level looking at musical cells (little groups of 2-4 notes (usually) that are the smallest meaningful bit of music - a single note doesn’t mean anything by itself, see some of my Philosophy of Music Theory tips, particularly PoT tip no. 1, for more on that). Then you build up to motives, which are the smallest recognizable unit in music, usually about 2 bars (“2 downbeats” as our music analysis professor Dr. Liviu Marinescu at CSUN said in our graduate analysis class). This is the base unit that gets developed in much instrumental music. Then we get to phrases, which combine motives and end in cadences, covered in harmony 1 class. The standard cadences are authentic (V - I), plagal (IV - I), deceptive (V - anything not I, usually to vi), and half (anything - V). Authentic can also be perfect or imperfect (PAC or IAC) - see this page for a more thorough guide with examples. Note that cadences occur at the end of a phrase, so moving to a V chord in the middle of a phrase isn’t a half cadence, for example. The music needs to feel like it’s coming to rest momentarily at that point. I’ve seen people refer to cadences as musical punctuation, so a half cadence or imperfect authentic cadence is like a comma, for example, while a perfect authentic cadence is like a period. From multiple phrases, we get periods (not to be confused with what I just said about a PAC!), from periods we get sections, and from sections we build the complete piece of music, which may be a standalone piece or may be a movement of a larger work.

In an undergraduate class you will cover this material briefly, but they will move on to covering the “standard forms”, which will include Binary Form (AB), Ternary Form (ABA), and then some more complicated forms up to Rondo (ABACA or ABACABA), and Sonata Allegro will usually be the final form in such a class (at least it was in my undergrad class at Berklee). This is the most common form for first movements of instrumental sonatas (piano sonatas or violin sonatas, for example, and from the Classical period forward - Baroque sonatas were different). It’s also used in symphonies, string quartets, and other similar genres used in the Classical period. Concertos used a modified form that was related but different because of the play between the soloist and the orchestra. Rondo form is often used in the last movement of pieces like the above, but like any generalization about music, you’ll find exceptions if you look for them.

As a general set of principles, form is about how a composer decides to organize the sections of music in a piece in time so that music makes sense to the listener. In a properly thought through piece, you usually can’t take a section from the middle and put it at the beginning of the piece and have the piece make sense. It’s like the word order in an English sentence, if I change the order of the words the sentence either breaks down and stops making sense, or at least the meaning is likely to change. Phenomenon an this example that of is. (“This is an example of that phenomenon” 🙂). Alan Belkin notes in the introduction to his music theory guides that: 

”The most important question in musical analysis is not “what?”, but “when?”, or, more precisely, “why this, now?”. Analysis which does not answer this latter question is seriously handicapped, because music is a temporal art. If the composer takes his job seriously, things arrive at a given moment for a reason; musical events cannot be scrambled in time and maintain their significance, any more than you can scramble the words in a sentence or the sentences in an essay with no effect on the meaning.” [emphasis in the original]

In my formal analysis class at Berklee, we looked at examples of existing pieces in class and then tried writing pieces using similar forms. This is a critical point, which I will address more fully below, but you can only learn so much by studying existing music and analyzing it without trying it yourself. There’s a big difference between taking an existing piece and pulling it apart to see how it works, and staring at a blank page (or a blank screen / new file) and putting your own notes on it. You will have to make decisions when you are writing a piece yourself that were made by another person in the piece you are analyzing, and you can gloss over certain aspects of the music when looking at one component vs. another for analysis purposes that you will have to deal with when you write the piece (or in some cases if you ignore them then they will either detract from the piece you write or at least make the piece less effective than it could have been). Alan Belkin has a full textbook about this that I’ve found to be the single most useful book about composing as separate from learning theory of any book I’ve ever read (most books about composition are actually about music theory, which is a critical part of the knowledge required to be a composer, but not the only thing you need when composing). His book is called Music Composition: Craft and Art.

[A couple of points I’ll make about formal analysis based on my tutoring of the subject at CSUN - in this class, we frequently do full low-level formal analysis of entire pieces of music (at least entire movements of music). I think this is a useful exercise to go through a few times, but as I’ve thought more about this I realize that in my own musical studies today, I basically never do a full phrase-by-phrase formal analysis of a whole piece anymore. I usually work from the top of the formal hierarchy down rather than the low-level bottom up. I start with the overall form (sonata, rondo, ternary, through-composed, etc), and work out where the main section breaks are. Then I work down to the sub-sections in each main section, then drill down to phrase analysis or detailed harmonic analysis only in the parts that strike me as really interesting. 

Also, once you’ve internalized the “classroom” model of different forms like sonata form, a more interesting analysis of any existing piece is how it differs from the overall model, as most of the pieces will change something. Mozart K545 Mvt I features the recapitulation starting in the subdominant key rather than the tonic key, for example (F major rather C major like it “should”). I’ll leave it to the student to work out why that might be the case in this particular piece, though one possible hint might be that Mozart wrote it “for beginners” according to his own notes. I’ll also point out that most of the rest of that movement more or less follows the standard classroom sonata form, and someone else pointed out that this is the only sonata where Mozart does this subdominant trick. (If you want to see my full analysis of this piece, including the explanation I found most convincing for this “wrong key” phenomenon, I wrote a more-or-less formal academic analysis of this piece while studying it with one of my tutoring students at CSUN.)

Finally, be sure you know what level of the hierarchy you are operating at at any given point in your analysis. People keep getting tripped up by mixing up concepts from different levels. In sonata form analysis, the “transition section” is on the level of the sub-sections of the exposition (theme/group 1, transition, theme/group 2, closing theme, etc), but I had a student who kept on trying to put it at the same level as “periods” one level above “phrases”. The transition section can have multiple periods in it, and will almost certainly have multiple phrases in it.*

One other point I’ve made with a couple of students that I’ve worked with on formal analysis is that this class is either one of the frustrating or fun classes for undergraduate theory, because this is a class where you might be able to begin debating the correct answer. Formal analysis ultimately depends in part on how you hear a particular piece, and that might not match how someone else hears it. Sometimes there are wrong answers, but there are also times when there is at least more than one right answer. You do have to be able to defend your answer, but if you can back it up, you might hear a passage in a different way than someone else. Ironically given the point I made just above this one, there might be more than one right answer for where the transition section is in Mozart K. 545, and I actually hear that one either as a direct modulation or with a one bar transition. There is another place you could mark the transition (in the entire scale passage after bar 4), but then you have to argue that theme A is only 4 bars long and never returns in the rest of the piece, and instead Mozart only develops the transition section, which is not a typical procedure for sonata form. Given that you have to pick between unusual choices in this sonata, I hear the scale passage as part of Theme A with a very short (or practically non-existent) transition section. Other people may hear it differently and that might be fine. For students who want the teacher to tell them the “correct” answer, this may be unsatisfying, but I think once you reach a certain level this is where the fun begins 🙂.]

The other set of music theory classes that you will take in a standard college theory course are instrumentation and orchestration (usually one semester each). They are related to each other, and in fact I frequently find instrumentation mislabeled both in books and in classes as “orchestration”. CSUN’s classes are called Orchestration and Advanced Orchestration. Having tutored the “Orchestration” course in the Spring 2024 semester, they were mostly working on what I’d call Instrumentation, and the final project was similar to what I did in my Berklee class called “Instrumentation and Score Preparation”. This class looks at the different instruments in the orchestra and gives some basic guidance for how they work and how to use them in orchestral music. You’ll learn the ranges of the instruments, dynamic abilities (things like brass and percussion get louder than strings and woodwinds, flutes sound softer in their low range than their high range while oboes and bassoons sound louder in their low range than their high range, etc). You’ll learn about string bowing techniques, how double-stops work, what the open strings are for each instrument, vibrato, harmonics, etc. Hopefully you’ll listen to the instruments both individually and in context of actual pieces (if you don’t, or you don’t do this enough, make sure you do it on your own as you’ll need to know what these things sound like and not just what they can do in principle). Usually they end with a final project where you take a piano piece and “orchestrate” it, assigning the lines to different instruments and creating a playable piece of music (ideally). Both Berklee and CSUN did a similar project for the final project for this class. I should also note that while this class aims at orchestral instruments and music, most of the information is generic to the instruments and would apply in any other context using these instruments as well (various chamber ensembles, etc), even if the examples chosen to illustrate them will tend most often to come from orchestral repertoire. Ranges and playing techniques, etc. apply across the board.

Orchestration class itself is then about combining the instruments in different ways to create actual pieces of music - learning about doubling instrumental lines (having more than one part play the same line in either unison or in octaves), talking about texture in music and how to create different “planes of tone” as Alan Belkin calls them. These are used to give more interest to the music, so we have the melody or featured line, and then we can have sustained harmonies to give the chords, and moving parts in the inner lines to keep the music feeling fresh and not static. I’m currently (as I write this) taking the “Advanced Orchestration” course at CSUN, which is a joint undergraduate / graduate class and follows on the Orchestration I course I tutored last spring. We’ve been looking at several pieces by a variety of composers from Beethoven and Brahms (Symphony No. 7 and 4, respectively) to several 20th century composers, including among others Ravel, Richard Strauss, Dutilleux, and Berio, and exploring both some historical context for them and how they are treating orchestral color in the pieces. The second half of the semester has been student presentations on a variety of topics related to orchestration - I did a presentation on how to study scores more effectively using Jupiter from Holst’s The Planets as a case study (I wrote up part of it for my site here); others have looked at the influence of asian music on French impressionistic music (mostly Debussy), how the trombone works, and what the role of the orchestrator as a job in Hollywood film music is like, among other topics. We’ve also tried a couple of short projects orchestrating piano pieces in the styles of some of the composers we’ve looked at.

From what I’ve seen in general (not just at CSUN), I’m not always a huge fan of the way instrumentation / orchestration is taught. I get the sense from several of the classes I’ve been aware of, and having played quite a few student pieces over the years now, that they often don’t really teach the students how to write for instruments in the way that the players would like to see the music. I’m a string player for my primary instruments (violin and viola in orchestra), and I frequently see things in student pieces written in a way that makes pedagogical sense but doesn’t help me as the player, or reflects a lack of knowledge on the part of the students of how certain things actually work; as well as my fair share of notation or music that is simply wrong or unplayable as written, or just uses the instruments poorly (especially for viola - we can do more than long sustained notes!). I often see excess words on the page, particularly in the way of bowing techniques like spiccato, tremolo, and ricochet. Spiccato is an artifact of the nature of the music, and cannot just be turned off or on at will by the player. I can choose most of the time not to play spiccato, but I can’t play spiccato if the music isn’t written that way first (it requires a certain speed for the notes - 8th notes at around q=90 is about as slow as we could do true spiccato). Any slower than that and I can pick up the bow between notes but it’s not spiccato, which is a steady, controlled bouncing of the bow to play notes, not just a short note (a “brush stroke” is not the same thing as actual spiccato, though they are related). Tremolo is sometimes written in words, but usually you just write 3 slashes through the stem of the note and we know that’s tremolo (four slashes if it’s very slow).

The pedagogical reason for writing these things in words is so the professor knows you are aware of them as a student composer, but as a player I don’t need to see the words most of the time. You should try to indicate as much as possible with correct symbols, as that’s faster to take in and read than having to read and process words on the page.

All that being said, my other issue with the way that these classes are taught is that they make a big deal out of things that really aren’t that big of a deal. I can play a lot of music that we’d complain about in principle, and even that your orchestration professor might mark as wrong. Perfect fifth double stops for strings are a good example of this - technically they are harder to get in tune than most others (and they need to be as perfectly in tune as possible or they sound noticeably out of tune in a way that you can often get away with for thirds or sixths for example - that’s what it means to be a “perfect” interval vs. major or minor intervals). But they aren’t impossible, and I actually use them all the time myself, particularly in fiddle or groove music - less so in my classically-based music. And for orchestra, most of the time the section will divide chords anyway (often even when you mark “non-div” we’ll divide anyway). So people are less likely to play fifth double stops in a piece for orchestra to begin with. There are other things that orchestration professors also make a big deal about perhaps somewhat unnecessarily. In a perfect world you might avoid certain things, but sometimes musical reasons for the piece as a whole override those considerations. It doesn’t hurt to be aware of those potential issues, and to have a reason in mind if you go against them, but you can often get away with more than your professors would accept. There really are some things that are actually impossible, though, and of course I should mention that you’ll need to follow your professor’s instructions to get a good grade on your project. But there is some sense in which it might be more helpful for the students if the professors treated the projects like real-world projects, otherwise students might learn bad habits in the name of good pedagogy!

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So that’s a (detailed) overview of what you might expect to find in a standard college music theory course. Obviously there’s a lot more detail in several semesters of classes than in a few pages of words. But one thing that you’ll get from your classes that you won’t get from reading my words (or reading full textbooks on your own) is a chance to practice these skills and integrate your knowledge with real projects, as well as drilling the material through analyzing lots of existing pieces. In several of my classes, the primary textbook was actually a set of existing pieces - J. S. Bach’s Two-part Inventions, or his set “The Well-Tempered Clavier” for the second and third Counterpoint classes, for example. The professor will also be able to give you direct feedback on your work, which is also extremely helpful. And while I’m at it, a shameless plug here for tutors as well - if your institution offers free tutoring, please take advantage of it if you need it. I’ve been tutoring all of these classes the past three semesters at CSUN and I really do want to help the students succeed as well as possible. The institution selects tutors who know the material well, and who want to work with students - we’re there as tutors to help you do as well as you can, as well as to learn to better teach the material ourselves. I’ve learned a lot from my students both about the material and about teaching, as they’ve hopefully learned from me, and you really do get better at things when you try teaching them yourself!

I mentioned above some of the classes I took at Berklee for my music theory classes, but here I’d like to focus on my story for a second and talk in one place about what all I did. As you’ll see, our program was intense! Note that I was also lucky enough to have music theory classes in high school, and I actually started my theory training from piano lessons as a kid back in my grade school days, so I’ve been doing this for a while. But at the college level:

I had 4 semesters of jazz / pop harmony at Berklee, and also separately two semesters of “Tonal Harmony” (classical harmony), one semester of twentieth century harmony, three semesters of counterpoint (species, two part canon and invention, and fugue), one form class (“Techniques of Tonal Writing”), and one semester each of instrumentation (and score preparation) and orchestration (actually two of that, one for “Dramatic Orchestration for Film”, and one “Scoring for Full Orchestra”, or classical orchestration as an elective). I also took one semester of private (classical) composition lessons as an elective. My other theory elective was Reharmonization Techniques, or how to make (mostly jazz/pop) chord progressions more interesting than your standard ii-V-I or IV-V-I. I took that as an extra class just to get enough credits for full-time status my last semester since I tested out of several early classes at the beginning, but it was pretty interesting too!

As a film scoring major, I also took technical film music classes in computer applications (using DAWs and sample libraries), Analysis of Film Scores, music editing (which included training in how to use Pro Tools), and two semesters of writing projects to picture on top of my capstone class in composing a score for a short film and TV main title, and conducting my own recording sessions for all three of those classes. Electives in film scoring included a class in synthesis techniques (“Contemporary Techniques in Film Scoring”), and Mixing Techniques for Film, which was supposed to be based off the intro class for the recording engineers major (MP&E, Music Production and Engineering). That one was a new course my last semester at Berklee, and it was one of the more interesting classes even if it wound up being quite different from that. We didn’t get studio time like we should have for that class, so it turned into philosophical discussions and life stories in careers in Hollywood (the professor had been an audio-post engineer in LA for several years before going back to teach at Berklee, including films like Braveheart). And these were just the more theory oriented classes I had at Berklee!**

As you can tell from the above list, we had a lot of theory classes at Berklee. As a film scoring major, which is adjacent to composition, I had more theory classes than most students did, but everyone had to take many of those classes. One of my friends from Chicago who went to Berklee before me warned me about how intense theory classes were at Berklee. I was fine with that, as that’s what I wanted to go for, but some of the performance major students were turned off by that. Some of them had visions of landing major record deals the third week of classes when someone heard them practicing in the practice rooms, and didn’t want to do any theory classes.

In my life post-Berklee, I’ve been applying my theory training as a composer and as a performer. I’ve been doing at least light analyses of pieces I’ve played in orchestra over the years, usually trying when possible to look at the scores in advance when I find out what we’re playing and noting both anything interesting orchestrationally (and formally, harmonically, etc), and anything I need to note for how my part fits in with the others (mostly viola these days) - do we have any solo sections, are we doubled by any other players in crucial sections, what role do we have in the texture at any point in time, etc? I will write notes in my part as I do that if anything jumps out to me. I also apply my theory knowledge for both improvisation and sometimes composing / arranging when I play fiddle or whistles with the Scottish Fiddlers of Los Angeles. They have me write duet parts for the group, or add chords to the melody for the rhythm players, etc in addition to writing my own tunes and simply playing the pre-existing sets.

At CSUN, I’ve spent a lot more time tutoring undergraduate music theory classes than doing graduate level theory training, as there aren’t that many theory classes in my graduate program. I have checked out graduate-level books and articles at the CSUN library but the classes themselves have not been as intense. As mentioned above, we all have to take a graduate Seminar in Music Analysis, and the composition majors in particular have to take Advanced Orchestration, but otherwise my classes are on other topics, not music theory (music history, graduate research techniques, conducting, etc). I obviously use it as I’m composing my pieces for my degree, but even then we don’t necessarily talk about theory as much in my lessons. We get more into the kind of compositional practice that Alan Belkin covers in his composition book I referenced above in the Form class section. It has as much to do with pacing and timing as it does with any other kind of theory training. I suppose if my theory training were a weak point in my background, they would go over more of that with me, but no one has ever accused me of lacking craft-knowledge! (Even when I was a five- or six-year-old violin student, my teacher said “his theory is way ahead of his technique”!) I work on other aspects of my musical development 🙂.

There was an ongoing debate over how much theory was enough and how much might be too much when I was at Berklee. In the mixing class, we had a discussion about this. The professor said that he had had a conversation with an audio-post manager in Boston recently who had mentioned that he could pick interns from either Berklee students, or from schools like the Musicians Institute. He said he usually picked the MI students because they were more likely to have the raw software skills he needed for them to be assistants in the studio (knowing more about how to use Pro Tools, etc). But he said he would rather have been able to pick the Berklee students, because we had the fundamental training and knowledge to have a real future in the industry. The MI students’ knowledge was better for what he needed today, but it was fragile. When you are taught mostly where all the options are in Pro Tools right now, you can be messed up if they move things or relabel things in the future. We were trained in fundamental skills that wouldn’t go obsolete when the next version of the software came out. To be fair, I’m sure they had theory classes too, but I can pretty much guarantee they weren’t at the intensity of Berklee’s program. It’s a difference in philosophy of what will best serve music students.

Both approaches have benefits and drawbacks, but if they are being honest with you, any college music professor should tell you that it isn’t possible to become a professional musician purely from getting a degree or diploma from a music school. 120 credit hours, or four years for a bachelor’s degree (or even 128 credit hours, which is the number I actually graduated with) is not enough time to learn close to everything you need to have a shot at being successful. Our professors at Berklee told us that they could teach us some techniques and give us some assignments to practice them, but that in order for us to become professionals we’d need to take those ideas and apply them on our own outside of our class work a lot (hence my Life Tips General Tips No. 8). In orchestration class, for instance, you learn about the sounds of combinations of instruments and look at (and listen to!) a few examples from the repertoire, but to actually learn orchestration you’ll need to look at and listen to a lot more examples than you can cover in a semester class, and you will need to try writing your own pieces and find ways to get them read or even performed. You can study all you want, but until you try it yourself you won’t really learn it thoroughly. 

In a slightly different context, I got some comments from fiddle teacher Tom Morley for a research project I did at CSUN in the Spring 2024 semester about teaching improvisation, and one thing he said was:

“I think every musician, regardless of what field they want to go into and perform in, should learn the basics of improvisation at least. Every musician has to take theory classes of course. But studying about how chords are built and how chord progressions are used without trying it all yourself on your own instrument makes learning music theory a sterile exercise at best.”

Whether applying chords and harmonic theory to your instrument for improvisation, or applying orchestration concepts to pieces you are composing, trying your hand at using the skills you learn in class and on your own is crucial. There's a reason why Part 1 of my Capital-M Music paper is called “Living Music, Doing Music”! 

I’ve been out of Berklee for twelve years now, and finished my first year of graduate school (and been involved in both professional and community music for the whole time between those), and I’m still learning every single day about all of this. Hopefully I understand it more thoroughly than the students I’m tutoring (that’s why I’m the tutor!), but as I’ve said several times now throughout these guides, you never finish this. You never win at music, it’s a process and a journey, and you have to be along for the journey at least as much as you are for the reward. There’s a quote usually attributed to cellist Pablo Casals, and it’s something like “Why do you keep practicing [at age 90]?” His answer: “Because I think I’m making progress”.

There are lots of types of learning involved in music. There’s the theory I’ve discussed here, there’s instrumental practicing like Casals was talking about, there’s the combination of those in improvisation as Morley identified above, and there are other things to practice in music as well. Gaining some insight into music history so that you do know what comes before, raw ear training and “eye training” (sight reading!) and other skills you’ll develop on the musicianship side of things, potentially learning these things in more than one genre or for more than one instrument (especially if you want to follow my “Capital-M Music” philosophy - see Philosophy of Theory Tips Nos. 6-7 for more on theory across genres). On the general music side of things, music theory, musicianship, and applied music (private lessons for your instrument, and your ensemble(s)), will all work together to help you achieve my number 1 tip in music (General Musicianship Tip No. 1); which is to learn to see (theory), hear (musicianship/ear training), and play/sing (applied music) the patterns in music over the notes themselves. 

My other big tip which I’ve said elsewhere is to listen to everything. Music as a thing is aural, it’s sound. You will get much better at music across the board if you listen to as much music as possible (not just your primary genres, but everything you can get your hands on). Focus especially on the genres you want to play / work in, and spend hundreds of hours listening to anything you can find from reputable people in those genres - that will help you more than just reading or even watching videos about the music. Try it yourself while doing this - you shouldn’t try to put in hundreds of hours of listening before you play a note, but over the years listen as much as you can in addition to playing and reading (both sheet music and about the music).

Music also develops a lot of skills and abilities that transfer to other parts of life as well, especially if you start young, though starting music at any age is better than never starting it at all!

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*(From end of Form class section)

Some pieces that do have very short transition sections - Mozart Sonata in C Major K.545 Mvt. 1, Beethoven Symphony No. 5 in C Minor Mvt. 1, Schubert Symphony No. 8 in B Minor (the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony) Mvt. 1

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** (from “My Story” section)

My other classes at Berklee consisted of a set of applied music and musicianship classes (though I never heard either of those phrases) - private violin lessons for 4 semesters, ensemble for all 8 (a “small band” jazz/rock ensemble for my first semester, then the Berklee Contemporary Symphony Orchestra after that for seven semesters). Outside my graded ensembles, I also played fiddle and tin whistles with the Berklee Contemporary Fiddle Club, viola for one semester with the Opera Imaginarium (club), and violin / viola on over sixty other student film scoring recording sessions. 

Musicianship included one semester of Ear Training (I tested into Ear Training 4, so I would have had 4 semesters if I did them all there). It also included two string department classes, String Sight-Reading Lab, reading both classical and popular music examples and rhythms - our “textbook” was a book of funk rhythms for violin(!); and String Improvisation, trying small ensemble free improv and developing cross rhythm and ensemble communication skills in particular. We also had two semesters of Basic Keyboard Techniques, required for anyone who wasn’t a piano/keyboard principal. Every music school I know requires students to take at least two and sometimes four semesters of keyboard skills (CSUN requires four semesters of “Keyboard Musicianship”).

Then to round out the general music classes, I took two semesters of Music History (a two semester survey course in western classical music history from Medieval music to some early-to-mid 20th century composers and concepts), and two semesters of conducting technique. 

Along with all of those classes, I also had a set of “Liberal Arts” courses, which CSUN calls “General Education”, so your standard College English (Structure and Style, and Literature), two “world history” classes (one wound up being a kind of musicology class, and one was called “contemplative and mystical traditions” - basically meditation technique and history, and some mystical religious history, which wound up being really interesting even if I didn’t know what I was getting into when I signed up for it!). I also had a two semester survey course on Art History, which finally showed me how to appreciate art museums 🙂. There was a social science requirement, so I took Intro to Psychology. On the physical science side, I chose to minor in Acoustics and Electronics, so that dictated my science classes - Principles of Acoustics, Principles of Audio Electronics, General Physics, and Introduction to Psychoacoustics (how our hearing works).

In total, we were aiming for around 15-16 credits per semester, and since music classes often get shortchanged by accreditation boards, that resulted in about 6-8 classes per semester every semester I was there. Credit assignments per class are often set by hours per week of classroom time, so our liberal arts classes were generally 3 credits, but my half-hour private lesson each week was only 0.5 credits. That didn’t necessarily reflect the outside of class time required though! And ensemble also got short-changed even by classroom time standards - the orchestra rehearsed twice a week for 2.5 hours each (plus outside practice time), but it only counted for 2 credits.

1. What is Music?: Let’s start with a foundational aspect of music. There are quite a few “definitions” of music, and all of them get at important ideas and usually leave something out. But my favorite basic definition is “Music is sound organized in time”. I think this is sufficiently broad to incorporate most of what most people would call music, while also getting at the most important aspects: sound, organization, and time. The sounds of a city are not really musical because they aren’t organized, they are fairly random. To really be music and not just ambient noise, some entity (usually a human artist of some sort so far) has to decide how to group sounds, and then have that unfold in time.

2. Music as a Time-Based Artform: This gets at another point raised by my composition / music analysis professor at CSUN, Dr. Liviu Marinescu, which is that music is a time-based art form. He points out in our graduate analysis class that events in music exist in time, and therefore reading a score is not really a musical act, because you can look ahead and look back, but the music itself exists only now (see also Life Tips General Musicianship Tip No. 2). You have to remember what happened before, and you don’t know what will happen next until it happens. Of course, you can listen to a piece over and over again, and then you know what happens next before it happens, and composers can set up foreshadowing you only notice on your second listening just like authors of short stories or novels can. This is also covered in an interesting paper I read in Musicology / Research Techniques my first semester at CSUN: “Three Ways to Read a Detective Story - or a Brahms Intermezzo” by Edward T. Cone. Alan Belkin covers this topic as well in several of his essays and his textbook.

3. Music as Language?: People often make an analogy in music comparing it to spoken or written language. There are some parallels, which we spent some time exploring in our Graduate Music Analysis class at CSUN. Dr. Marinescu pointed out that music exists not in the notes so much as in the connections between the notes - the intervals and chord progressions, for example. He compared this to grammar and syntax in language. What you spend most of your time learning in undergraduate music theory classes is “vocabulary” - scale degrees, what minor and major triads are, etc. You do take a class in form in a standard music theory course in an undergraduate music program, but you usually only get one semester of that vs. two - four semesters of harmony and some of the other classes. The form class focuses primarily on the standard classical forms up to sonata form. This graduate class did a deeper dive into the basic building blocks of motivic cells (not to be confused with rhythm cells that we’ll get to later in this guide, though there is some overlap there), motives, phrases and then larger sections. We looked at relationships in rhythm and in pitch based analysis.

   But Dr. Marinescu warns that there is one key difference between spoken or written language and music - music doesn’t “mean” anything. In liguistics, the term is “semantics”. We have vocabulary, grammar, and syntax in music, but we don’t have semantics. He demonstrated how difficult it would be to write a piece to tell someone “I’ll meet you at the street corner at 2:00 PM”. Note that we’re talking specifically about instrumental music here - it’s easy to communicate that concept in vocal music that has lyrics, but that’s literally language, not music. The music minus the lyrics doesn’t mean anything specific like that.

   Grey Larsen has a couple of chapters in his book “The Essential Guide to Irish Flute and Tin Whistle” about the “Language Analogy”. He notes many of the same things that Dr. Marinescu did, for example, “Words refer to directly to things in the external world. Music refers to nothing outside itself. We often associate things of the outside world with instrumental music, for example by connecting a tune with its title. We may become inspired by the outside world to create music. But these external connections are not directly communicated by the music itself.” (Larsen, 43).

4. Music Communicates Emotion: So if music doesn’t mean anything directly, then what does instrumental music communicate? It certainly seems to communicate something. I think it communicates emotion. When we are young, our teachers often help us make up stories to go with the songs we learn so that we can play them in a certain way. Our brains work on a more concrete level at that age, and abstraction is more difficult to grasp. But at this point in my musical practice, I don’t really make stories with characters and events so much anymore. I do have some extra-musical idea I’m generally trying to communicate in my playing and writing, and it’s raw emotion. I don’t care so much whether someone else pictures a man riding a horse and going on a quest, but I do hope that they experience a similar feeling to what I had in mind. I want music to sound happy, or sad, or super dark and murky, or angry, or like the most exciting day of your life (whatever that means to you). I tend to respond better when my conductors put things in those terms more than when they try to tell me a story that the music evokes, though if it is known that the composer had a “program” in mind when they wrote a piece, then knowing that is very useful.

   The least helpful way a conductor can talk to me today is generally in technical instrumental terms. That is helpful and even necessary when you are still in the primary learning stage on your instrument (school orchestra through middle school and even parts of high school perhaps), but once you have the basic mechanics down, the conductors or music directors should stop telling you about vibrato and bowings and such (that’s the section leader or concertmaster’s job if anyone else needs to tell you something technical). They should instead tell you about the spirit of the music (or maybe its history or program notes, etc.). At least that’s what I find most useful today.