Music Theory Lessons

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Music theory is the study of the structure of music and the way in which it is written down and described. It seeks to explain and understand the following:

Dynamics
Form
Harmony
Melody
Notation

Patterns
Rhythm
Structure
Texture
Timbre

These elements, which go to make up modern music theory consist of the following key topics:

Analysis
Analysis is the describing and explanation of music with only the music itself as the commencement point. It is a general term in music theory used to express and put into words the description of a piece of music. It is also used to elucidate the concepts of form and hierarchy (formal analysis) or style (informal analysis).

Consonance and dissonance
Consonance relates to harmonies which complement and augment each others' resonance (and which might simplistically be labelled 'pleasing to the ear') while dissonance gives rise to more involved acoustics known as beats (and which could be labelled as 'displeasing to the ear').

Dynamics
This usually describes the volume of the note (and usually written in Italian) - for example 'piano', 'forte', 'crescendo' and 'diminuendo' but it can also relate to the style - eg staccato, legato, andante, dolce, grandioso etc.

Ear training
The teaching of how to gauge the pitch of a note or to classify the rhythm or style of a piece of music purely by ear and without reference to printed sheet music is an essential part of any music theory course.

Four-part writing
The Common Practice Period relates to the development of music from the Baroque to the Romantic era and its study is a key part of a music theory qualification. An essential part of that is the analysis of Bach's chorales for four voices to investigate the harmonic function, rhythm and shape of each of the four parts.

Harmony
Harmony is the consideration of what are known as vertical sonorities. A vertical sonority is the relationship between simultaneously-occurring pitches. Harmony can also refer to a melody following a harmonic framework.

Mathematics
Music theory contains a substantial element of mathematics and acoustics, composing and pitch all have a large numerical component.

Melody
Melody is made up of four elements - duration, dynamics, pitch and timbre - and is defined as a sequence of notes played in succession. A melody's rhythm usually reflects the language of the lyrics being sung, the choreography of dancers or just a regular and harmonious sound. A melody can form the basis of a piece of music with the chords added subsequently to harmonise it or it can be harmonically written (ie by beginning with the chord sequence and weaving a melody line around them).

Music perception and cognition
Introduced by Jackendoff and Lerdahl in an effort to endeavour to explain the hierarchy of music, these rules group music into 'Preference Rules', 'Transformational Rules' and 'Well-Formedness Rules'. The rules relate to how listeners perceive the structure of the music.

Musical semiotics
This is the study of signs and conventions in music and labels a piece as being introversive or extroversive according to whether the musical signs are within or without a text.

Notation
Musical notation is the depiction of the pitch of individual notes along with accents, dynamics, key, rests and tempo etc. Standard notation is to write these notes on a stave (treble clef or bass clef) with the vertical 'axis' representing pitch and the horizontal 'axis' representing time (as would be correct for a graph).

Pitch
Pitch is a term used to describe how a listeners attributes a tone to a note based on its vibration with little or no reference to its volume. Pitch relates directly to the frequency of the note in Herz (Hz) with the lower the frequency number, the lower the pitch. The 'A' above middle-C has been set at 440Hz with an octave gap meaning a doubling or halving of the frequency. The mathematical difference between two pitches is called an 'interval'.

Rhythm
Rhythm is the distribution of sounds and silent intervals with respect to time and set to a meter or tempo. A piece of music is split into regular groups of sounds which are called bars or measures and the tempo dictates how many beats there are in each bar.

Scales and modes
Notes can be rearranged into scales and modes. Music theory splits an octave into 12 possible notes (the Chromatic Scale) normally labelled A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A-flat, B-flat, C-sharp, E-flat and F-sharp. The difference between each note is called a semi-tone and a scale is made up of a series of semi-tones or tones (two semi-tones).

Serial composition
Schoenberg developed a technique for ordering and repeating the 12 notes of the Chromatic Scale and this is known as the Twelve Tone Serialism. Again the mathematical influence appears since the combinations are recorded in a 12 x 12 matrix. Set

Set theory
Set theory seeks to explore atonal music by representing the pitch classes numerically and allows for the construction of a serial tone row to be investigated. This method has been made popular by Lewin.

Texture
Texture describes the whole sound of a composition with reference to the inter-relationships between parts and lines in order to label the piece with either monophony (or monody), heterophony, polyphony or homophony. Monophony is the melody alone, homophony includes the chords, polyphony relates to multiple melodies and heterophony relates to the simultaneous variation of a melody line.

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