Something that occurs to me every few months - music existed before music theory.
That suggests that concepts like keys, chords and meters were devised to describe preexisting phenomena. The idea of someone playing a C# chord because it sounded like what they wanted to play, and not because the marks on the paper said to, is almost beyond my imagination.
This leads me to other things. There's a passage from a book by Wynton Marsalis where he's describing a musician directing a group of musicians that 'we're going to be playing something in B flat'. At the time, it was almost meaningless to me. Now I realize that the musicians were expected to know what music in that key would sound like - the notes in the melody, the chords that harmonize with the melody, the progressions from chord to chord. If one of them had been playing in a different key, it would have been immediately apparent.
When I think about all that, it seems astonishing that anyone actually learns to play an instrument. That music was created at all is beyond astonishing.
My husband assures me that all of this is intuitive for most musicians, in the same way that most people listening to music can sense the beat. I wonder what the universe looks like to those people.
Submitted December 24, 2020 at 08:22PM by Genshed https://www.reddit.com/r/Learnmusic/comments/kjoxyb/thoughts_about_theory/?utm_source=ifttt
Javier Rodriguez
Thursday, December 24, 2020