The study of musical
possibilities and historical practices involving musical notation and
interpretation (essential for
understanding the rest of the course) in a musicological approach.
- Music theory can be a tool box, a rule book (that can be broken), or a guideline for composers to help them develop their own ideas of composing their pieces of all genres with chord progressions, tonal & atonal harmony, melodic structuring and many more methods.
- Many modern
contemporary composers have broken many of the common practice period composing rules; Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky & Ivan Shostakovich are notable examples.
- Jazz music theory, or known as jazz harmony uses similar approaches to Western harmony but often use harmonies that are often played within the genre with additional tension using 9th, 11th, and 13th chords with incorporated usages of modes, and dissonant chords (augmented & diminished chords) and chord progressions that aren’t conforming to traditional music theory.
- There are prominent theorists on YouTube such as Adam Neely, David Bruce, 8-Bit Music Theory, etc. that do analyses and compose pieces using methods of music theory as they explain viewers regardless of their knowledge input of theory.
