Capital-M Music

Music Theory Guides

I’ve been writing a lot about music over the past few months, and while most of it is about my philosophy of music, “Capital-M Music”, I have also written some guides to a couple of specific aspects of music theory. These guides were mostly written to go deeper into topics I’ve been exploring in the Philosophy of Music Theory section of my Life Tips guide. I thought I’d collect them here as well so that more people might find them even if they don’t get all the way down to those tips in the Life Tips guide. Note that some of these are still works in progress, so while all the information in the should be good, I have plans to expand some of them from what they are now. So far, I have five guides:

Music as Patterns - this one was written to explore one aspect of an overarching tip I have which is the only “secret” I’ve ever found to music, which is that music is built on patterns, not notes. See Life Tips General Musicianship Tip No. 1. This guide was particularly written for Life Tips Philosophy of Music Theory Tip No. 1, which relates back to that first tip and explores that idea some more. This guide uses a chord progression with a high pedal tone to show how the “meaning” of a note changes based on where it fits against a chord, and also where it fits in an overall chord progression.

Chord Voicing - This one was written to go deeper into the core harmony concept of Chord Voicing, as explored briefly in Life Tips Philosophy of Music Theory Tip No. 5. That tip is about using the same word to mean different things to different types of musicians. For people that wanted to explore this use of the term “Voicing”, I wrote up this guide to the concept. This one also includes several examples of real-world pieces that demonstrate some of the points.

How to Think About Modes - This was a guide I put together for a friend of mine in 2022 to help him with modes (a type of scale pattern). I’ve heard from many people personally and in comments online about how confusing modes are, so I thought I’d share an expanded version of this guide here for anyone who might be struggling with modal theory. I will be expanding it more in the future as well.

The Harmonic Series - Here’s a guide to an important concept in music theory, which comes in handy in many different aspects of music. This relates to the concept of timbre, and is also a playing technique (or even the basis of playing) in many different instruments. It’s also indispensable in electronic music, where it can be used directly to generate different sounds through techniques like additive synthesis. This guide currently examines the basics of dark / bright sounds and timbre, and then looks at the pitch sequence of the first 16 harmonics in some detail, followed by some basic technical demonstrations in string playing, with me playing harmonics on my viola. More may be added at a later date, particularly exploring additive synthesis. I have now added a section demonstrating the “sonic illusion” of the missing fundamental, and I may add more sonic illusions later.

Sonic Forest - Notation Trees - A guide I put together for Life Tips Philosophy of Music Theory Tip No. 3, showing how when doing score reading, you can be distracted by visually striking notation and miss the more important sonic elements of a piece. This guide features a passage from the end of Jupiter, Mvt. 4 from Holst’s The Planets suite.

Orchestration Analysis - I’m working on a presentation for my Advanced Orchestration class at CSUN at the moment, and I thought I’d share a written version of part of it here. I’ve been talking to some of the other students both as a tutor and as a friend, and I think seeing a version of orchestration analysis written out might be helpful. This guide also goes with Philosophy of Theory Tip No. 3: How to Read a Score, showing how there aren’t as many things happening in an orchestral score as there might at first seem to be. This one also uses a passage from Jupiter from The Planets by Holst (a different passage from the guide above). We just played the whole suite at CSUN as I write this in Fall of 2024, and it was fantastic! It’s been one of my favorite pieces in the repertoire for about 20 years at this point, so I’ve had a lot of fun exploring the whole suite as a violist and as a composer / theorist this semester. Have fun!