Music Theory For Dummies

Introduction

What do you think of when you hear the phrase music theory? Does the image of your elementary school music teacher eyeing you from behind the piano pop into your head? Or perhaps you have flashbacks to a later image of fellow college students in theory classes determinedly trying to notate theremin whistles? If either of these ideas is anything close to your own perception of what music theory is, hopefully this book will be a pleasant surprise.

For a lot of self-taught musicians, the idea of theory seems daunting and even a little self-defeating. After all, if you can already read guitar tabs and play some scales, why would you want to muddle what you already know with theory?

Even the most basic music theory training gives you the information you need to expand your range and abilities as a musician. A decent amount of note-reading ability enables you to play a particular type of music, whereas some basic knowledge about chord progressions can help you write your own music.

About This Book

Music Theory For Dummies, 2nd Edition, is designed to teach you everything you need to know to become fluent at knocking out a solid beat, reading musical scores, and learning to anticipate where a song should go, whether you’re reading someone else’s music or writing your own.

Each chapter is as self-contained as possible. In other words, you don’t have to read every single chapter to understand what the next one is talking about. Reading the chapters consecutively does help, though, because knowledge of music builds from simple concepts to complex ones.

We cover a lot of territory in this book, from discovering the basics of note values and time signatures to dissecting lead lines and adding harmony to a melody to studying the standard forms that much of popular and classical music follow. So if you’re new to the world of music theory, pace yourself while reading this book. Read it while you’re sitting at your piano or with your guitar or whatever instrument you’re working with next to you, and stop every couple of pages to practice the information you read. If you were taking a music class, this book would cover several years’ worth of information, so if you don’t learn everything in one or two months, you should refrain from self-flagellation.

Conventions Used in This Book

For organizational purposes, the following conventions have been used throughout this book:

check.png When we introduce you to a new musical term, we put it in italics.

check.png Keywords or key parts of lists appear in boldface.

check.png Websites are in monofont to help them stand out. Note that some web addresses may break across two lines of text. In such cases, no hyphens were inserted to indicate a break. So if you type exactly what you see — pretending that the line break doesn’t exist — you can get to your web destination.

What You’re Not to Read

The historical information and musician quotes contained in the sidebars or preceded by the Technical Stuff icon all make for interesting reading; however, if you never learn why the piano is the preferred tool of most composers or who invented the term minim, you can still understand everything else in this book. Unless you’re being tested on this information — and we promise we won’t show up at your door to administer a test — this information is included for entertainment purposes only.

Foolish Assumptions

We assume that if you’re reading this book, you love music, you want desperately to understand music and everything about it, and you’re a nut for the complicated dance of perfect timing and arrangement of tones. At the very least, we assume that you have a couple of books of sheet music lying around that have been frustrating you, or you have an old piano in the corner of your house that you’d like to mess around with.

This book is written for the following types of musicians (which, frankly, covers the gamut):

check.png The absolute beginner: We wrote this book with the intent that it would accompany the beginning musician from his very first steps into note reading and tapping out rhythms all the way into his first real attempts at composing music by using the principles of music theory. Beginning musicians should start with Part I at the beginning of the book and just keep reading until reaching the back cover. The book is organized to follow the lesson plan that college music theory classes offer.

check.png The music student who drifted away: This book can also be helpful for the musician who took instrument lessons as a child and still remembers how to read sheet music but who was never exposed to the principles of building scales, following basic improvisation, or jamming with other musicians. A lot of folks fall into this camp, and, luckily, if you do, this book is designed to gently ease you back into the joy of playing music. It shows you how to work outside the constraints of playing from a piece of music and truly begin to improvise and even write your own music.

check.png The experienced performer: This book is also intended for the seasoned musician who already knows how to play music but never got around to working out how to read sheet music beyond the basic fakebook or lead sheet. If this description sounds like you, start with Part I, because it specifically discusses the note values used in sheet music. If you’re already familiar with the concepts of eighth notes, quarter notes, and so on, Part II may be a good starting point. In that part of the book, we lay out the entire music staff and match it to both the piano keyboard and the guitar neck for easy reference.

How This Book Is Organized

Music Theory For Dummies, 2nd Edition, is organized into five parts. The first three are each based on a particular aspect of music, and the fourth, the Part of Tens, contains information about fun aspects of music theory that have little or nothing to do with actually playing or writing it. The fifth part provides three appendixes, including a guide on how to listen to the audio tracks, a rundown of chord charts, and a glossary. This organization makes it easy for you to find what you need to know quickly. This is, after all, a reference book, and nobody wants to spend all day thumbing through pages to find one simple technique. You can read about each part in the following sections.

Part I: Getting Started with Music Theory

Without rhythm, music would be one long, unbroken, unwavering note, and dancing to it would be awfully tricky. This part introduces you to music theory beginning with rhythm, the most basic component of any type of music. Being able to keep proper rhythm can make or break a performer or performance. In this part, we discuss the various values of notes and rests used in written music as well as more advanced concepts like time signatures and beat, including syncopation.

Part II: Putting Notes Together

In this part, we cover basic note reading and some silly mnemonics to help you remember the order of the notes on the grand staff. We go over major and minor scales, key signatures and the use of the all-important Circle of Fifths, interval basics, chord building, and basic chord progressions and musical cadences. We also include tons of audio examples, performed on both piano and guitar.

Part III: Musical Expression through Form, Tempo, Dynamics, and More

In this part, we show you how to put everything you know together in order to start writing your own music. We first show you the basics of musical form, and then we discuss and dissect the structure of various types of classical forms — including fugues and sonatas — and forms used in popular genres of music like the 12-bar blues, 32-bar blues ballads, and forms in rock and pop. We also cover tempo and dynamics as well as tone.

Part IV: The Part of Tens

In this part of the book, we jazz it up a bit and focus on theory outside of playing music. We answer some of the most common questions people have about music theory. We also help you further your musical exploits by listing additional music theory and history books as well as Internet resources. We round off the part by profiling some fascinating music theorists without whom this book, or any other book like it, wouldn’t be possible.

Part V: Appendixes

You can find a lot of useful information in the appendixes of this book. Appendix A tells you how to listen to each audio track in the book. Appendix B shows you how to play all the chords from Chapter 10 on both the piano and guitar. Appendix C is a glossary of some common musical terms.

Icons Used in This Book

Icons are handy little graphic images meant to point out particular types of information. You can find the following icons in this book; they’re conveniently located along the left-hand margins.

tip.eps This icon highlights time-saving advice and information that can help you understand key concepts.

warning_bomb.eps When we discuss something that may be problematic or confusing, we use this icon.

technicalstuff.eps This icon flags information that’s, well, technical; you can go ahead and skip it if you want to.

remember.eps When we make a point or offer some information that we feel you should keep with you forever, we toss in this icon.

playthis.eps This icon points out audio tracks that relate to the topic currently being discussed in the book.

Where to Go from Here

If you’re a beginning music student or want to start again fresh, plow through Part I. If you’re already familiar with the basics of rhythm and want to simply find out how to read notes, head to Part II. If you’re a trained musician who wants to know how to improvise and begin to write music, Part III covers the basics of chord progressions, scales, and cadences. You can also check out Part IV, which discusses a variety of musical forms you can start plugging your own musical ideas into.

Relax and have fun with your quest into music theory. Listening to, playing, and writing music are some of the most enjoyable experiences you’ll ever have. Music Theory For Dummies, 2nd Edition, may have been written by teachers, but we promise, no clock-watching tyrants will show up at your door to see how fast you’re making your way through this book! We hope you enjoy reading this book as much as we did writing it. Sit back, read, and then start your own musical adventure.

Part I

Getting Started with Music Theory

In this part . . .

This part starts you down the road of understanding what music theory is and how it helps you comprehend music, whether you’re playing it, writing it, or just analyzing it. We start by explaining what different notes and rests are worth and then help you read time signatures. The part wraps up with coverage of beat patterns and of how different notes help create varied rhythms in music.

Chapter 1

What Is Music Theory, Anyway?

In This Chapter

arrow Checking out a bit of music history

arrow Getting to know the basics of music theory

arrow Finding out how theory can affect your playing

One of the most important things to remember about music theory is that music came first. Music existed for thousands of years before theory came along to explain what people were trying to accomplish when pounding on their drums. So don’t ever think that you can’t be a good musician just because you’ve never taken a theory class. In fact, if you are a good musician, you likely already know a lot of theory. You simply may not know the terminology or technicalities.

The concepts and rules that make up music theory are much like the grammatical rules that govern written language (which also came along after people had successfully discovered how to talk to one another). Just as being able to transcribe language made it possible for people far away to hear conversations and stories the way the author intended, being able to transcribe music allows musicians to read and play compositions exactly as the composer intended. Learning to read music is a lot like learning a new language, to the point where a fluent person can hear a musical conversation when reading a piece of sheet music.

Plenty of people in the world can’t read or write, but they can still communicate their thoughts and feelings verbally just fine. In the same way, plenty of intuitive, self-taught musicians have never learned to read or write music and find the whole idea of learning music theory tedious and unnecessary. However, just like the educational leaps that can come with learning to read and write, music theory can help musicians master new techniques, perform unfamiliar styles of music, and develop the confidence they need to try new things.

Unearthing the Birth of Music and Theory

From what historians can tell, by the time the ancient world was beginning to establish itself — approximately 7000 B.C. — musical instruments had already achieved a complexity in design that would be carried all the way into the present. For example, some of the bone flutes found from this time period are still playable, and short performances have been recorded on them for modern listeners to hear.

Similarly, pictographs and funerary ornaments have shown that by 3500 B.C., Egyptians were using harps as well as double-reed clarinets, lyres, and their own version of the flute. By 1500 B.C., the Hittites of northern Syria had modified the traditional Egyptian lute/harp design and invented the first two-stringed guitar, with a long, fretted neck, tuning pegs at the top of the neck, and a hollow soundboard to amplify the sound of the strings being plucked.

A lot of unanswered questions remain about ancient music, such as why so many different cultures came up with so many of the same tonal qualities in their music completely independent of one another. Many theorists have concluded that certain patterns of notes just sound right to listeners, and certain other patterns don’t. Music theory, then, very simply, could be defined as a search for how and why music sounds right or wrong. In other words, the purpose of music theory is to explain why something sounded the way it did and how that sound can be made again.

Many people consider ancient Greece to be the actual birthplace of music theory, because the ancient Greeks started entire schools of philosophy and science built around dissecting every aspect of music that was known then. Even Pythagoras (the triangle guy) got into the act by creating the 12-pitch octave scale similar to the one that musicians and composers still use today (see Chapter 7). He did this via the first Circle of Fifths (see Chapter 8), a device still religiously used by musicians from all walks of life.

Another famous Greek scientist and philosopher, Aristotle, is responsible for many books about music theory. He began a rudimentary form of music notation that remained in use in Greece and subsequent cultures for nearly a thousand years after his death.

In fact, so much music theory groundwork was laid in ancient Greece that substantial changes didn’t seem necessary until the European Renaissance nearly 2,000 years later. Neighbors and conquerors of Greece were all more than happy to incorporate Greek math, science, philosophy, art, literature, and music into their own cultures.

Putting the Spotlight on Music Theory Fundamentals

While it would be nice to be one of those people who can sit at any instrument and play beautiful music without any training whatsoever, most folks need some sort of structured instruction, whether from a teacher or from reading a book. In the following sections, we go over the basic information you need to start learning how to read music, play scales, understand key signatures, and build chords.

Understanding the foundation: Notes, rests, and beats

Learning how to read music is essential to a musician, especially one who wants to share his music with other musicians or discover what other musicians are playing. By studying the basic elements, such as time values of each type of written note, musical rests, time signatures, and rhythm, you put yourself on the path to mastering music. All these elements come together to establish a foundation that allows you to read, play, and study music.

Manipulating and combining notes

Reading musical notes on both the treble and bass clef staves as well as finding notes on the piano and guitar — the two most common instruments on which people teach themselves to play — are crucial to making and studying music.

When you can read notes on the staves, you can determine a musical piece’s key signature, which is a group of symbols that tells you what key that song is written in. You can use the Circle of Fifths to help train yourself to read key signatures on sight by counting the sharps or flats in a time signature. You can read more about key signatures and the Circle of Fifths in Chapter 8.

After you’ve become familiar with key signatures, you’re ready to move on to intervals, chords, and chord progressions, which create the complexity of musical sound — from pleasing and soothing to tense and in need of resolution. As we discuss in Chapter 9, you build scales and chords using one of two types of intervals: melodic and harmonic. Chapters 10 and 11 show you everything you need to know about building chords and chord progression.

Linking the keyboard to music notation

Prior to the Renaissance period, few truly innovative changes occurred in music technology. Stringed instruments, woodwinds, horns, and percussion instruments had been around for thousands of years, and although they had experienced many improvements in design and playing technique, they were essentially the same instruments used by the people of ancient cultures. It wasn’t until the 1300s that a brand new musical interface appeared: the keyboard.

With the invention of the keyboard came the beginning of modern musical notation — written music. The keyboard-notation link was fostered because of the ease of composing for full orchestras on the keyboard. Also, most newly commissioned work was created for