It's a statement I've heard repeated often enough to have become a cliche. Let's face it, when it comes to music, "breaking the rules" is not a conscious decision. Musical innovators develop their own language by following what they hear, and while any writer or composer is influenced by the music that moves them they don't have to have a formal grasp of the vocabulary to absorb elements of the style and sound.
On top of that, the subjective filter that we comprehend music through is different for everyone...one man's celestial harmony is another man's noise. And with the whole of human musical history a few mouse clicks away, you can go from Gregorian chant to Sonic Youth in the blink of an eye. Any combination of sounds anyone's ever made are probably on a YouTube video. There are far more sonic and tonal possibilities open to the contemporary musician than Bach or Mozart would have dreamed of. So is it still relevant, given all this, to study four hundred year old "rules" to learn how to make music in the 21st century?
Well, yes, it is. The tonal system as we use it in most popular music today still follows the same principles of tension and release that form the basis of classical harmony. A major chord is still a major chord, and ending a song on a 5 chord is sure to leave most of the room hanging. A 12-bar blues or a three-chord country song still moves forward not just on the narrative thrust of the lyric but by setting up dissonance: the diversion from 1 to 4, and the expectation and gratifying sense of release when 5 brings us back home to 1. Fundamentally, harmony is like gravity: combinations of notes and chords exert force on each other and bring about movement as a result. So music theory is simply a way to categorize and explain how and why this works. The earth revolved around the sun before Galileo postulated it, and Newton's apple would have fallen whether he was there to observe it or not.
So the "rules" are not really rules at all, but explanations why some notes sound good together and some don't. The major triad is present in the overtones of a vibrating string: it's a sound that existed before someone gave it a name. And understanding of THIS aspect - music theory as an explanation of natural sonic phenomena - is a great tool and stimulus for creativity.
This is a large and complex topic, but understanding this simple fact makes the study of music theory both more relevant and more interesting. So to go back to our cliche: you really CAN'T break the rules, they just exist....and they're more flexible than you might think.
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1 comment:
Hmm, I like the way you look at it. Yep, the rules are there, what sounds right does exist. An understand of tonal music would only help you put words to what your ears already know, as you say.
Thanks for your positive reception to my playing the other week!
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