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| Tibetan musical
score from the 19th century. |
Theory
Music theory is the study of the practices and
possibilities of music. The Oxford Companion to Music
describes three interrelated uses of the term "music
theory". The first is the "rudiments", that are needed
to understand music notation (key signatures, time
signatures, and rhythmic notation); the second is
learning scholars' views on music from antiquity to the
present; the third a sub-topic of musicology that "seeks
to define processes and general principles in music".
The musicological approach to theory differs from music
analysis "in that it takes as its starting-point not the
individual work or performance but the fundamental
materials from which it is built." |
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History
Prehistory
Preserved prehistoric instruments, artifacts, and later
depictions of performance in artworks can give clues to
the structure of pitch systems in prehistoric cultures.
See for instance Paleolithic flutes, Gǔdí, and Anasazi
flute.
Mesopotamia
Several surviving Sumerian and Akkadian clay tablets
include musical information of a theoretical nature,
mainly lists of intervals and tunings. The scholar Sam
Mirelman reports that the earliest of these texts dates
from before 1500 BCE, a millennium earlier than
surviving evidence from any other culture of comparable
musical thought. Further, "All the Mesopotamian texts
[about music] are united by the use of a terminology for
music that, according to the approximate dating of the
texts, was in use for over 1,000 years."
China
Much of Chinese music history and theory remains
unclear.
The earliest texts about Chinese music theory are
inscribed on the stone and bronze bells excavated in
1978 from the tomb of Marquis Yi (died 433 BCE) of the
Zeng state. They include more than 2800 words describing
theories and practices of music pitches of the time. The
bells produce two intertwined pentatonic scales three
tones apart with additional pitches completing the
chromatic scale.
Chinese theory starts from numbers, the main musical
numbers being twelve, five and eight. Twelve refers to
the number of pitches on which the scales can be
constructed. The Lüshi chunqiu from about 239 BCE
recalls the legend of Ling Lun. On order of the Yellow
Emperor, Ling Lun collected twelve bamboo lengths with
thick and even nodes. Blowing on one of these like a
pipe, he found its sound agreeable and named it
huangzhong, the "Yellow Bell." He then heard phoenixes
singing. The male and female phoenix each sang six
tones. Ling Lun cut his bamboo pipes to match the
pitches of the phoenixes, producing twelve pitch pipes
in two sets: six from the male phoenix and six from the
female: these were called the lülü or later the shierlü. |
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Fundamentals of music
Music is composed of aural phenomena; "music theory"
considers how those phenomena apply in music. Music
theory considers melody, rhythm, counterpoint, harmony,
form, tonal systems, scales, tuning, intervals,
consonance, dissonance, durational proportions, the
acoustics of pitch systems, composition, performance,
orchestration, ornamentation, improvisation, electronic
sound production, etc. |
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Music theory as academic
discipline
The scholarly study of music theory in the twentieth
century has a number of different subfields, each of
which takes a different perspective on what are the
primary phenomenon of interest and the most useful
methods for investigation. |
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|
 Kiddle: Music theory
Wikipedia: Music theory |
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