To hell with all these theories, if they always serve only to block the evolution of art and if their positive achievement consists in nothing more than helping those who will compose badly anyway to learn it quickly.
—Arnold Schoenberg
Music theory is used to help create music. But it’s an ugly word that encompasses endless thinking and rules, all which makes music seem inaccessible. Systems sounds better; they’re systems to help create things, tools if you will, like a hammer and nails. These theories/systems are like templates, too, showing us how to make something, rather than grasping in the dark. But what of experimentation? Experimentation is free choice, without limits, which inspires innovation and a dissatisfaction with templates. It asks us to think outside of what we know, and to search for a novel synthesis of ideas. Most importantly, it promotes action, rather than thinking. Rumination morphs into procrastination, and then we produce nothing, perhaps out of fear of judgement or failure. But we can’t discount theory as frivolous. Structure and exploration work in tandem such that theory provides the tools, and doing something at all creates the art. There’s a conflict, though, that causes discomfort: the paralysis of unlimited choices against the constriction of methods.
In Arnold Schoenberg’s book Theory of Harmony, he expresses his philosophy of the learning musician. He notes that theoretical principles and exercises provide gentle guidance to limit frustration. Limited options build confidence through a sense of progression, whereas unlimited freedom presents us with the anxiety of choice, but students can be discouraged by this constraint just as much as the frustration of the unknown. Schoenberg frames this dichotomy as a philosophy of searching. We embrace a methodology which provides the answer since we desire comfort—i.e. guaranteed rewards—but this security can inflict lethargy, rather than motivation:
…movement alone can succeed where deliberation fails. Is it not the same with the learner? What does the teacher accomplish through methodology? At most, activity. If everything goes well! But things can also go badly, and then what he accomplishes is lethargy. Yet lethargy produces nothing. Only activity, movement is productive. Then why not start moving right away! But comfort! Comfort avoids movement; it therefore does not take up the search.1</ sup>
We move forward with theories, but things can go wrong; plus, it does little to inspire innovation. A template is provided to help scaffold our attempts, but the desire to experiment is strong. And so the teacher tries to “shake up the pupil thoroughly”2 with exercises, but there’ll be a struggle between frustration and boredom.
With music, reckless experimentation can produce disappointment, but it can also generate ideas for future use. In other words, music theory is useful for showing ideas, but hands-on experimentation through listening and analysis stokes the fire. Although it’s easy to get lost without templates, we are in danger of succumbing to musical bigotry—a strict adherence to tradition, to comfort—by demanding control through popular methods.
As an example, I’ve noticed the strength of musical motifs/themes—a distinctive idea which recurs throughout an artwork to establish continuity—for building narrative structure in music, and its counterpart, films. Movies benefit from a recurring melody to highlight significant moments, such that the motif transforms to represent the changing mood of the characters or story events. As a consequence, I’ve learned that we create movement in music through conflict, which itself is a relationship between consonance and dissonance, or comfort and danger.
In the soundtrack for Final Fantasy 7 by Nobuo Uematsu, for instance, the Main Theme melody which introduces the story establishes a tone of hope and ambition. But later, when our main character, Cloud, loses control and nearly kills his friend, we hear the same melody transfigured into the nightmarish track Who…Am I?3
Similarly, in the movie Blade Runner, Vangelis uses a creeping chromatic motif to signal the crossing of a threshold. In Rachel’s Song [3:30] the music evokes a vague longing, a sense of melancholy, but the motif draws us into a liminal space that disorients us and causes discomfort, perhaps an illustration of her struggle with humanity as an android. Likewise, the track Main Titles [2:40] evokes numinous wonder as we’re introduced to a futuristic cityscape, but the motif introduces tension as Deckard is descending from the sky onto the roof of the police precinct, marking his passage into another world.
With this knowledge I have new tools: motifs, dissonance, and consonance, but strict adherence is unnecessary. Dissonance and consonance is fertile ground for other ideas. 12 tone music, for example, creates continual tension by using every note of the chromatic scale—12 keys on the piano—as the basis for a composition (imagine laying your arm flat on the keys). The result is an absence of comfort since nothing is significant; we’re stuck in musical limbo, endlessly searching for a home that never shows.
The origin of tension and release, then, could be said to evolve from our natural desire for comfort in the face of danger. Schoenberg suggests that consonant sounding music arose from an inclination to sing harmonies which sounded pleasant. We started singing melodies alone, ie. one voice, and then we combined male and female voices, which were easier to sing in unison or octaves—the same note higher or lower—due to vocal range limitations. However, if there was a voice too high or low for a man or woman, then they needed a different starting note that followed the contour of the melody, which became the fifth for its consonance, i.e. comfort.
But sometimes the origins of aesthetic principles are lost, and they become imprinted as rigid rules. In classical music, for example, there’s a practice of avoiding parallel motion in 5ths or octaves—two or more voices moving the same direction. But it’s likely 5ths and octaves came to prominence through ease of singing. Other intervals were tougher to sing, plus they added dissonance, which might have sounded bad to certain composers and listeners. In truth, voice independence was seen as important to classicists, as pleasing, which made parallel motion inherently naughty since the voices in question are doing the same thing; but if parallel motion avoidance was regarded as a rule, as Schoenberg says, “it could be forgotten that octaves and fifths were not in themselves bad, but on the contrary were in themselves good; that they had merely come to be considered outmoded, primitive, relatively artless; that there was no physical nor aesthetic reason, however, why they should not on occasion still be used.”4
And so musical norms exist because they produce desirable results, which, consequently, makes them great compositional tools; at worst this inspires stagnation through repetition, and at best it spurs action and negates choice paralysis. I balance this dichotomy by using traditional concepts alongside experimentation. Tension and release through dissonance and consonance, for example, provides interesting parameters for music creation, such as 12 tone music and musical motifs. Why not tie subsequent songs together with motifs, or transition to new sections with tense chromaticism, or create entire pieces out of tension? Even an allegiance to consonance creates interesting results, like tranquility. Taken to the extreme, a song could flip-flop between drastic changes in tension—why not?
Ideally, I’m empowered to generate my own systems and logic, and to balance tradition with novelty. Adherence to tradition is a quick way to forget why such standards existed in the first place: someone thought it was a method for achieving a desired outcome, likely for aesthetic reasons, and it possibly led beginners to success sooner. Rather than perpetuating dogmas, we analyze music to gather tools and to spark our own synthesis of ideas. Schoenberg has a point: in the wrong hands methodologies block the evolution of art, such as an artist using AI to spawn predictable results. As a tool, AI is fine; experiment with it. However, the mimetic exercise of creating popular playlists out of AI for profit, that’s creative business, not art.
Theories are a language, and a tool, and we can use them freely. This creates surprises, for sure, but that’s part of the joy of creating something; it’s unpredictable. Like a gardener, I set the conditions for success, but who knows how the plants will grow? Too much control inspires boredom out of predictability; I want some plants to surprise me, to be weird.
Ultimately, other artists like Nobuo, Vangelis, and Schoenberg shake me into action. I’m inspired to try new things, and I focus on the process. I still get frustrated, and there’s still doubt in my decisions, but I realize that as a human I demand control and comfort, and thus the real battle is to let go. So that’s what I do: set the conditions for success and watch it develop, using the various tools of the trade. At the very least I stop thinking and do something because it’s better than doing nothing at all, or holding my work to some distant standard; and that’s the spirit I want to embody: confidence in all my decisions, whether they guide me down the well marked path or the unknown. Music is just sound, and the theoretical principles applied to them represent our demand for order. Create a box for these sounds to live and perhaps something interesting will happen; or perhaps nothing, but it inspires searching nonetheless, a drive for experimentation, the hero’s journey, away from comfort.
- Theory of Harmony. p. 2
- Theory of Harmony. P. 3
- Watch “The Art of Storytelling” for an in-depth look at motifs in FF7: The Intricate Musical Storytelling Of Final Fantasy 7
- Theory of Harmony. P. 67