You very quickly find yourself making statements like this (taken from the second PDF in this series):
"A tuplet is any non-standard division of a note. These are usually written as a group of notes delineated with a bracket and a number showing the division being made." It's correct in grammar and sense, and about as exciting as a lawn-mower repair manual.
This is probably the best series of music theory cheatsheets I've ever seen, though... just about any other music theory resource you can find, online or off, gets bogged down immediately in sleep-inducing language. I had to poke around a bit to find the example above.
The real problem is the "building blocks" approach to music theory pedagogy; that is, making students learn all of the basic concepts before they can do anything remotely interesting or useful.
It's really, really logical. It's also a sort of mental torture, in the realm of music theory, because a lot of the building blocks are arbitrarily weird for historical reasons, and it takes too much meaningless memorization before you can do something as trivial as sight-reading a piece of music you could already pick out by ear 10x faster. What about doing basic analysis of a piece of music? So, so many building blocks required first....
I think it's possible to make learning theory enjoyable, but it'd be damned hard (and not possible in a static form).
That said, if you have the external motivation already to make the slog through the basics, these are solid references to help get the details straight in your head.
Teaching music theory can be hard, but it doesn't have to be. I know, because I do it almost every day (its my day job). To make it relatable, you have to tie it into the elements of music-- for this, I use Copland's "What to Listen for in Music". Once students can generally grasp and talk specifically about Melody, Harmony, Rhythm, and Tone Color, you can relate the music theory to it.
I have about 200 6th-8th graders that are able to perform basic figured-bass analysis on major-key chorales in about 3-4 months by progressing in an orderly fashion from notation to rhythm to major scales to the Circle of Fifths to minor scales to intervals, to chords, and finally, to cadencial analysis. Some of them pretty much view it as a game we play with written notes, but, when reinforced by practical experience in private lessons or participation in ensembles, it is remarkable how much they like it and are sad when we move on to Music History in the second half of the year.
The way this teaches it is very difficult. They make the same mistake as all music theory lessons, which is to dive right into the Circle of Fifths without ever mentioning how the Circle of Fifths is derived.
I've been thinking about writing a music theory lesson for programmers and "normal" people. I swear it is a conspiracy theory of music teachers to make music theory seem hard. Once you see the logic of how it all comes together, it is head-slapping easy. Music theory is all created from a few easy-to-remember patterns.
I already wrote a bit of music theory code in Python. Maybe this will be my Thanksgiving project.
As a bit of encouragement for you, a primer on "music theory from the ground up" is exactly what I have been looking for. I have tried to learn proper notation as well as scales and chord structures, but I seem to hit a brick wall because it all seems so arbitrary to me. I'd love to know how the system was derived.
I'm hoping one day to find an explanation of what music really is; why do certain patterns of sounds appeal to us; why do we share a sense of melody, harmony, rhythm.
Ideally, this explanation would ignore centuries of historical cruft, starting instead from the physical and physiological basics, and making full use of the infinitely malleable sound generators we all own.
Is it really the case that teaching music theory is hard? I suppose what is hard is teaching music without using actual music -- which is what these sheets attempt to do.
It's pretty easy to teach what a tuplet is, even without written notation: play all eighth notes over a regular ♩♩♩♩ (that's 4 quarter notes) rhythm, then sixteenth notes, then play triplets.
> a lot of the building blocks are arbitrarily weird for historical reasons, and it takes too much meaningless memorization before you can do something as trivial as sight-reading a piece of music you could already pick out by ear 10x faster.
I'm thinking mostly of teaching theory via textbook, website, etc. -- but even one on one with a good teacher, very few of them actually manage to make it interesting.
Just conveying the material clearly is important. Finding a way for the student to grasp the material while using it, while actually achieving something useful with it, is far more difficult.
I studied Suzuki method when I was little; I still remember playing the tune of Twinkle Twinkle to "see you later alligator", but we never touched on music theory beyond the very basics needed to read music notation (and not even much of that). We pretty much memorized everything we played AFAICR.
I do agree that it's essential to involve actual music in the instruction, but it needs to go beyond "a 5-tuplet looks like this; here's what it sounds like" -- that's still little more than a dreary list of definitions to memorize.
The trick is to engage the student in the music such that they need a name for this next concept so they can talk about it (which is what theory is for, really).
Agreed. Ironically the only tolerable music theory book I read was "music theory for dummies". Actually learned something from that before falling asleep.
Then again, mashing 3 or 4 memorised chords on an old korg trinity gets you quite far without having to know what you are doing :)
You very quickly find yourself making statements like this (taken from the second PDF in this series): "A tuplet is any non-standard division of a note. These are usually written as a group of notes delineated with a bracket and a number showing the division being made." It's correct in grammar and sense, and about as exciting as a lawn-mower repair manual.
This is probably the best series of music theory cheatsheets I've ever seen, though... just about any other music theory resource you can find, online or off, gets bogged down immediately in sleep-inducing language. I had to poke around a bit to find the example above.
The real problem is the "building blocks" approach to music theory pedagogy; that is, making students learn all of the basic concepts before they can do anything remotely interesting or useful.
It's really, really logical. It's also a sort of mental torture, in the realm of music theory, because a lot of the building blocks are arbitrarily weird for historical reasons, and it takes too much meaningless memorization before you can do something as trivial as sight-reading a piece of music you could already pick out by ear 10x faster. What about doing basic analysis of a piece of music? So, so many building blocks required first....
I think it's possible to make learning theory enjoyable, but it'd be damned hard (and not possible in a static form).
That said, if you have the external motivation already to make the slog through the basics, these are solid references to help get the details straight in your head.