It’s going to be a while before I get to any of these “Advanced Theories”, but I wanted to at least give a contrast between the Tonal Diatonic music that I’m going to be spending the majority of the time describing and the more modern techniques of writing music that isn’t concerned with Key Centers at all. Just so you know, at the beginning of this century, there was an opera writer from Germany named Richard Wagner. He wrote music that stretched and obscured the “rules” of tonal music that I’m discussing in the “Intermediate Theory” lessons so much that the entire idea of organizing music by tonal ideas became somewhat almost pointless. His music, for many, destroyed the validity of basing music on key centers and constraining yourself to the rules of music that is based on keys. Long story short, Academic music (college type orchestral black tie kind of music) took a major detour in the early 1900′s and a lot of very interesting new types of music began to emerge. It is those types of music that I want to talk about in the Advanced Discussion.
I’m starting in no particular order, but I am going to start with my favorite things that came out of this revolution against the “Key”. The official term is Aleatoric music, but I like its original name better, Chance Music. It’s the complete opposite of traditional composition, which is entirely based on order. All of theory I’m talking about is nothing but ordering sound. Methodically and rigidly ordering sound according to something that really amounts to nothing more than maintaining “traditions”. There were some “serious” folks back in the day, who really wanted to destroy musical traditions and create something completely different. Chance music was one of the outcomes of those ideas. It’s literally the notion of ordering “non-ordered” sounds.
I plan on discussing this technique in a lot of detail later. But for now I just want you to listen to some music that relies heavily on Aleatoric techniques. I warn you in advance that it ain’t gonna have a good beat, and you ain’t gonna be able to dance to it, but listen to the difference between Tonal music and non-tonal music. We’re so used to hearing stuff like this because of movies and TV that it won’t sound as “how dare you?!” as it did back in the day, but you will immediately see that it defies sing-ability and the ideas of melody and harmony and are completely rendered unimportant. But what a disturbing and dark vibe it creates. You fans of horror and suspense will find yourselves finally at home. So this is just for listening fun and an introduction. I’ll get into all the gory details after I’m done with the basics of the Intermediate Theory section.
Threnody to The Victims of Heroshima
Get ready to hide under the covers and cower in absolute terror. This is, IMO, the grand Pooh Bah of Aleatoric music. The title pretty much sums up the subject matter. This piece is bone chilling and, to me, unbelievably beautiful. And I will talk about this piece in great detail in a future lesson.
Here’s one you might be more familiar with. This is easily my favorite Spielberg/Williams collaboration. This score is just awesome! And it really defines the creepy laid back feel of this movie. And it’s mostly written using aleatoric techniques. This is obviously a rip-off video and I apologize for that, but I couldn’t find this any other way and I really wanted to show you what kind of vibe this style creates by showing you how the actual movie opens and how it sets the feel for everything that’s going to come. You only need to watch the first 1:33 seconds to hear what I’m talking about (really the aleatoric vibe of the opening is only taken over by the sounds of the dessert winds and stays aleatoric until Mr. Williams resurrects tonality at about 4 minutes in, but even that quickly dissolves into a wonderful Aleatoric mix that defines the feel of this movie ), but you might forget and keep watching for a while because this is a really great movie!
All right, its time to take everything we’ve learned so far and use it to build our first scale (mode). Like I showed you in the Introduction to Scales and Modes lesson, the first mode is also known as the Major Scale. All the scales we are going to be talking about have a few basic things in common. The first and most important thing is that they are all made up of seven notes. The second thing that is common to them all is that they are all going to be made up of five whole steps and two half steps. This arrangement of half-steps and whole-steps creates a unique pattern and that unique pattern creates a signature that defines what the scale is. Like I mentioned in a previous lesson, the thing that creates the “signature” of each of the scales that we are going to learn is “Where the half-steps fall”. In tonal music, the half-steps are the most important notes in a key as they create harmonic motion, which we will talk about later. To make this clear, let’s begin by looking at the signature of a major scale:
The unique arrangement of steps that creates a major scale is as follows:
You must commit this pattern to memory! From here on out, I’m going to be abbreviating the terms half-steps and whole steps. So just get ready to see the abbreviations “hs” and “ws” and know that when you see them they mean:
hs = half-step
ws = whole-step
So again, the signature pattern of the major scale using our abbreviations is:
ws, ws, hs, ws, ws, ws, hs
So let’s see how to put this formula in practice by building a Major Scale starting with the note C. Here’s how it works. We begin with the note C. From there we go up a ws, which is a D. From there we go up another ws, which is an E. From there we go up a hs, which is a F. From there we go up a ws, which is a G. From there we go up a ws, which is an A. From there we go up a ws, which is a B. And finally, we go up a hs, which is a C again. So the notes of a C major scale are:
C D E F G A B C
Let’s add one more idea to the pile before I show you a video explanation of this. This is the idea of “scale degrees”. A scale degree is a number that is assigned to each note of the scale. This part really couldn’t be simpler. The first note of the scale is called the first scale degree. The second note of the scale is called the second scale degree. The third note of the scale is, you guessed it, the third scale degree and so on. I told you that each of the scales we are going to be learning are seven note scales so they will each have seven scale degrees in them. So now let’s take the C Major scale we just built and label the scale degrees above each of the notes.
So if I was to ask you what is the fourth scale degree of a C Major scale, you should be able to tell me that it is an F. If you look at the chart above you will see that the 4th scale degree is, in fact, an F. So now that we are getting the idea of how this all works down, let’s take a look at a Rule that will help you in building your scales.
RULE: To build a scale pick a starting note and then build the signature pattern that defines the scale you want to build starting from that note. When doing this you will go through seven DIFFERENT notes names before you end up back at your starting note an octave higher or lower, depending on the direction you are building your scale. For example, if we want to build a C major scale, we start with the note C. We will then go up through DIFFERENT note name before arriving again at C. When I say different note names I literally mean that we won’t repeat any letter names on the way up or down. So C will go to some sort of a D, which will go to some sort of an E, which will go to some sort of an F, which will go to some sort of an G, which will go to some sort of an A, which will go to some sort of a B, before finally returning to a C. What sort of notes you might ask? That is determined by the signature pattern of the scale your building. In the case of the major scale, our pattern is:
ws, ws, hs, ws, ws, ws, hs
So a C goes up a WS to a D natural, which goes up a WS to an E natural, which goes up a HS to an F natural, which goes up a WS to a G natural, which goes up a WS to an A natural, which goes up a WS to a B natural, which then goes up a HS back to a C. But what if we are building a A major scale?
Well in that case a A goes up a WS to a B, which then goes up a WS to a C#. Not a C natural! Remember I said that you are going through seven different note names, so you know that you have to go from a B to some kind of a C. In this case, because the scale signature is requiring you to go up a WS, you have to go to a C#. So let’s continue on up the scale. Our next note has to be some kind of a D. Our signature pattern dictates that we now have to go a HS to get to the next of the major scale, so a HS above a C# is a D natural. We are now on the fourth note of the scale and we now have to go up a WS. A WS above a D is an E. Now we have to go up another WS, which is an F#! A WS above an F# is a G#. And finally a HW above that is an A, which leads us back to our starting note.
Let’s take a look at a video that will make this clear.
The video can be found here:
See how easy this is? As long as you know the signature pattern of each of the scales, you can use that pattern, and your knowledge of half-steps and whole-steps, to build that scale starting from any note. Before we move on, there is one more thing that I want you to be able to do with a major scale and that is to SING it. Yes, with your voice. My voice is terrible also, so that is no excuse. You simply must be able to play a note on your instrument and to then sing that note and, without using your instrument as a reference, to then sing a major scale up from that note. This isn’t as hard as it might seem at first, but in order to do this correctly I have to introduce you to something called solfeggio.
In a previous lesson called The Sound of Music, I introduced you to the idea of solfeggio, which is a system of applying sung syllables to scale degrees. And I’m sure that you did what I asked you to do and immediately dropped what you were doing and learned the song on that page. Right?? Well if you didn’t, now is the time to go back to it, because that song was teaching you the Major Scale. Every note in that song is from the Major Scale and the main melody of it was designed to drill the sound of the Major scale into your head. It was also introducing you to Solfeggio, through the lyrics of the song. So now let’s take a look at our chart again and add a column that shows you what the solfeggio syllables are for each scale degree of the major scale.
Now that you understand what the point of it all is, go back and watch this video again.
I want you to learn to be able to sing the song using the solfeggi syllables. And then go back to your instrument, play any note, and then using that note as the starting point, sing your major scale up from that note and then back down. Use your ear to guide you!! That’s what this is all about. You have to be able to hear what I’m telling you about. So grab your instrument and hit a random note. Then sing that note. Then using it as a starting point, sing this song!!! If you really do this, you’ll be thanking me one day when you can hear a major scale in your head and can accurately sing the seven different notes of that scale in any order without ever touching an instrument.
It was developed so that we can speak meaningfully with each other about the “Sound of Music”. As with any language, before you can communicate in complete sentences, you have to start by learning individual words. And before you can begin to learn words, you have to know the basic alphabet.
The language of music theory is no different and before we can talk to each other about chords and scales, which are the words of music, we have to learn the alphabet that we will use to make up those words.
The most basic answer is probably something to the effect of, “Music theory is the study of how music works”. It deals with major and minor scales and how chords are built on top of those scales. It speaks about progression and things like consonance and dissonance, intervals and modulations.
I like to think of music theory as a language. Music theory developed over the years as a way of “speaking” to each other meaningfully about the organization of the “Sound of Music”. In this theory discussion, I’m going to be speaking specifically about what is known as Western Tonal Music, or diatonic music. This is the basis for most of the music that you listen to and is what you would learn if you were attend a University to study music. Tonal music is all based around key centers. The language that describes tonal music tells stories of relationships and how motion is created by moving in and around key centers. These are the stories that I’m going to be talking about. And I’m going to be telling these stories using the language of Western music theory.
As with any language, before we can communicate with each other in complete sentences, we have to start by learning individual words. And before we can begin to learn words, we have to know the basic alphabet. So our first stop is going to be introducing the alphabet that music theory is based on. But before we get there, let’s take a fun little diversion that will sort of lay the foundation for the ideas we’ll be talking about. So I really want to begin this discussion on music theory by taking a look at “The Sound of Music”.
All music, no matter the style of genre, is made up of notes. The basic building block of all Western Tonal Music (which is what I’m going to be teaching) is the “note”. Notes make up all the melody’s you’ve ever heard and when they are stacked on top of each other and played at the same time they make up all of the chords and chord progressions that you have ever heard. They are literally the alphabet that the language of music theory is built upon.
Each note has a letter name assigned to it. And it is those letter names that we have to memorize before we can go any further. The good news is that there are only twelve notes that you have to be familiar with. The better news is that, if you can read this page, you already know the names of seven of those twelve notes.
Here is a little video that will introduce you to the notes and show you how they are named and ordered:
So get to know the names of your notes and be able to find them on your particular instrument. From here on out, it will be assumed that you are thoroughly familiar with them.
The distance between two successive notes in a scale is called a scale step. This is a very simple idea that going to be critical when we start building scales in the next section. For now you only need to know two things:
Half-Step = a distance of one note (1 step)
Whole-Step = the distance of two notes (2 steps)
Let’s take a look at a short video that should make this crystal clear:
Sometimes you will here the terms “Tone” and Semi-Tone” when people are discussing music theory. Those are just different words for Half-Steps and Whole-Steps. Just remember:
In Western Tonal music, which is what we’re discussing in the basic and intermediate theory lessons, there are 7 different primary scales or modes that we will be dealing with. If you’ve been exploring music theory for any length of time, you’ve undoubtedly run into many different types of scales. You’ve probably heard of the pentatonic scale, which is a five note scale. You might have even heard of some of the more exotic scales, for example the whole tone scale, which is a specific kind of scale that is made up six notes. We’ll be looking at those variant scales and other like them a bit later, but for now we’re going to start with what are known as the Diatonic scales.
Diatonic scales are seven note scales that are made up of a particular arrangement of half-steps and whole-steps. Specifically each of these scales is made up of five whole-steps and two half-steps. The thing that defines each of these scales is “where the half-steps fall”. In tonal music, the half-steps of a scale are what gives them their particular flavor. They are the two most critical notes in any scale because they provide the sense of tension and release that provides the harmonic motion of a scale. We are going to discuss harmonic motion in great detail later when we begin to stack the various notes of the scales into chords, but for now, we simply need to become aware of the names of the seven modes (Scales) that we will be spending much of our time on in this intermediate section of the music theory course.
Here are the seven primary modes (scales) of western tonal music.
There are two things that you need to simply memorize at this point in time. The first is obviously the Names of each of these modes (scales). But just as important is to know the numerical order of these modes. What I mean by this is simply that you need to know that Ionian is the 1st mode. Dorian is the 2nd mode and so on. This is going to be important when I break down how each of these modes are created. And for the guitar lessons, it is the “Key” to understanding how to utilize the Five Boxes in fingering these different scales on the guitar. We’re finally done with all the introductory material and are ready to really move into talking about music theory.
Do (e) – a deer, a female deer
Ra (y) – a drop of golden sun
Me – a name, I call myself
Fa (r) – a long, long way to run
So (l) – a needle pulling thread
La – a note to follow so
Ti – I drink with jam and bread…that will bring us back to:
Do(e)
This little song from a Disney movie, will help get you started in learning music theory by introducing you to a few important areas that we are going to talk about. One is the major scale, which is your first major hurdle to overcome in learning both music theory and guitar playing. The other is something called solfeggio, which is a way of labeling the degree of scales with syllables. The importance of this for all of the things we are going to discuss here can not be over estimated! So, to begin your journey into solving the mystery of music theory, you have to complete one simple task. Learn one simple song. Memorize it. Sing it!!
I realize that this may seem like a joke, but I’m not kidding. If you bear with me and watch this closely, I promise you, you will have learned some very important concepts that you need to know to get started in learning music theory. I know it may hurt, but you have to at least make it through the entire thing and later, when you get what all this nonsense is about, you’ll be amazed at how brilliant a song this really is. The thing I really want you to clue in on here is the “pitch” of the words that make up this song. So watch and sing and learn. This WILL make sense later!
So for now, rememeber:
Do (e) – a deer, a female deer
Ra (y) – a drop of golden sun
Me – a name, I call myself
Fa (r) – a long, long way to run
So (l) – a needle pulling thread
La – a note to follow so
Ti – I drink with jam and bread…that will bring us back to:
Do(e)
