Music theory

[Dave2002]

I found this site - https://www3.northern.edu/wieland/theory/tt.htm

Looks useful for anyone who wants to know more music theory, or refresh previous knowledge or be reminded that C sharp Major has 7 sharps.

There is also this for the last point - http://musictheoryfundamentals.com/M...Signatures.php - and similar ones.

[Richard Barrett]

This is the best one I've come across

https://www.teoria.com/

[MrGongGong]

Or this

https://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Symphony

[BBMmk2]

Oh know, please not?!?!?

[Dave2002]

This is the best one I've come across

https://www.teoria.com/

Perhaps some of that site is good, but the site I mentioned does manage to get some material onto just one or two pages - which could easilly be printed off.

There's probably scope for both.

[Pabmusic]

...Looks useful for anyone who wants to know more music theory, or refresh previous knowledge or be reminded that C sharp Major has 7 sharps...

Seven? Well that explains a lot...

[MrGongGong]

Perhaps some of that site is good, but the site I mentioned does manage to get some material onto just one or two pages - which could easilly be printed off.

There's probably scope for both.

This

https://www3.northern.edu/wieland/theory/scales/penta.htm

Is WRONG IMV

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Seven? Well that explains a lot...

I once gave a know-all saxophonist a part in B sharp major: 12 sharps, including 5 double sharps. The rest of the group played in C major.

[Pabmusic]

I once gave a know-all saxophonist a part in B sharp major: 12 sharps, including 5 double sharps. The rest of the group played in C major.

And how'd he fare?

[Dave2002]

Seven? Well that explains a lot...

Maybe you prefer D flat - with 5 flats - enharmonic equivalent. At least it got some of us thinking - maybe I fell into a heffalump trap.

I get freaked when I see music with lots of sharps and flats, and then while playing seeing them over ridden and then immediately reasserted. There is added confusion if the accidentals apply to notes in different registers in the same bar. Some of the instrumental parts I’ve seen recently have had that kind of problem in several places.

Is this happening because of conversion from midi representations?

Re the accidentals/naturals, sometimes listening to the results can be a decider, but not always. Perhaps this is a particular problem with older music - where the time signatures and bars are often somewhat “flexible”. I have been surprised at how hard it is to read or even try to perform from centuries old manuscripts. Until recently I only ever played from modern or urtext editions, where someone else had made decisions, cleared up the text and set the notes etc. in modern typefaces.

Some music is hard enough to play even without having to decipher the scores, possibly in real time.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

And how'd he fare?

Not well. In the end, I took pity on him and gave him the C major version.

[Richard Barrett]

Perhaps some of that site is good

- no, all of it is.

[Dave2002]

Not well. In the end, I took pity on him and gave him the C major version.

So did he actually play it in A sharp?

https://tamingthesaxophone.com/saxophone-transposition

[Serial_Apologist]

About a year ago I asked a question on the forum about chord inversions, and ferney very kindly gave me the explanation I needed. What theoretical musical knowledge I came by had stopped before that point, up to which it had been down to "native intuition". Given that there is no such thing, music we sang in the school choir which had been composed before approximately 1600, and used the old church modes as opposed to the major/minor diatonic system, always felt in some way "wrong" - the composers were using flattened intervals in "wrong places"!

A friend of the same age as me (73) who composes and whose musical involvements embrace "straight" composition as well as jazz, told me of experiencing exactly the same problem. His view was that "formal" education in jazz had found, for him, easier explanations for harmonic phenomena by reference to scale-based chords, rather than enharmonic shifts, passing notes, leading tones, suspensions, apoggiaturas, interrupted cadences, etc. He also mentioned how jazz improvisers rely on chord symbols - the leader, or front line musician, may call out "C sharp 7", possibly in the middle of a passage, and the piano player can immediately respond from having pictured the chord in question, as he would have in the type of short score jazz composers often hand to band members: "C sharp 7" can immediately evoke the sound of the chord, irrespective of its context, and I imagine this must evoke a more spontaneous, open-minded response reaction than seeing the chord conventionally notated in sequence.

I always wish I had learned this chord symbol method of identifying chords as it seems (from limited personal experience of being thrown in at the deep end!) to liberate harmonic procedures from the contextualised thinking approach conditioned by traditional academic methods that only came under full-frontal challenge with the advent of atonality, though I would imagine that there are still many (including even contributers to this forum) who still hear and conceive of music according to some kind of graded meaningfulness when it comes to analysing chords: in other words that anything lying outside the dictated terms of reference are seen (or even heard!) either as extensions of or deviations from "correct thinking".

(I'm leaving out of all this the thorny question as to whether or not certain intervallic combinations simultanously sounded resonate with some humanly inbuilt need for "resolution" at the level of sound, independent of rhythmic movements that have arisen evolutionarily in conjunction!)

Having, as will have become apparent from the above, been raised in the latter tradition - to the limited extent I was - this has the possibly questionable benefit of enabling me to "hear" music in "alternative guises" - take, for example, the opening of Vaughan Williams's Symphony No 5, the sustained C "drone" at the very beginning can either be "heard" as in chromatically unresolved relationship to the chordal processes in D major unfolding above it - a field of unrelieved tension until the resolution that occurs some minutes further on - or as music conveying a state of blissful detachment. Then compare this with instances of modal intervallic succession in Schoenberg or Mahler, say the whole-tone scale-based exposition subject in the former's Chamber Symphony No 1, to cite similar instances put to very different ends, where the "wrong" intervals are assumed in conventional terms to be requiring resolution. Of course, it was liberation from the latter assumption that would (hopefully!) open the door to previously unexpressed areas of emotion, form and timbral possibilities, that, together with the other view I've tried to put across above, seem, in my case at least, to have offered a truly rewarding and broad-ranging appreciation of music - starting, in a way, with 20th century composers (since they were the first to really grab my love and attention), and then reflecting back into how I seem to find it possible to listen to preceding musical eras.

[ardcarp]

About music theory in general. Most areas of academic work for kids have been dumbed down. AB theory exams certainly haven't, and a good thing too. Anyone who wants to be an orchestral player must have a good grasp of key sigs, time sigs and much else besides. Having conducted all sorts of orchestras and choirs, it has always struck me that most (all?) amateur orchestral players are well-grounded in theory and as a consequence make a pretty good fist of sight-reading. If one compares them with choral singers of the same level (i.e. reasonable amateurs) they are streets ahead. It seems that only when working with the higher echelons of singers does one find an equivalent level. This is probably a gross oversimplification, but the old Ass Board requirement to pass Grade 5 Theory before taking higher grade practical exams makes a lot of sense. I know there's a lot more to music-making than this Gradgrind stuff, but it has its place.