What's Wrong with Music Theory

Standard music theory teaches two different things at once, with the same tone of voice: facts about how harmony sounds, and facts about how one particular notation system happened to evolve. The first kind is worth learning. The second kind gets taught just as seriously, despite not describing sound at all - and it's most of what makes theory feel harder than it needs to be. Here's a short tour of it.

Historical accidents

The seven-letter alphabet, the uneven black-and-white keyboard layout, sharps and flats bolted on as modifiers instead of being first-class notes - none of this was designed for the harmony we actually use. It's what survived from a much older system, built for monophonic chant centuries before chromatic harmony existed, that later theory backed into rather than starting over. A chromatic scale has twelve evenly spaced notes. Nothing about how it sounds explains why seven of them get plain letters and the other five get treated as exceptions.

Enharmonic notation

G-sharp and A-flat are the same pitch. Which name is “correct” in a given passage is a rule about how a scale's letters are supposed to avoid repeating, not a fact you can hear. Push that rule far enough and it produces double sharps and double flats - a symbol whose entire job is to keep the spelling grammatically tidy on a page, for a note that sounds exactly like some much simpler-looking key a semitone away.

Musical keys

A key signature is a fact about how a piece is written down - how many sharps or flats sit at the start of the staff - not a fact about how its harmony works. Transposing a chord progression into a different key doesn't change a single relationship inside it; it's the same shape, moved. But because each key gets its own signature and its own set of “correct” spellings, two identical progressions in different keys can look like they need entirely separate vocabulary to describe.

Pointless memorization

“Every Good Boy Does Fine.” “Whole-whole-half-whole-whole-whole-half.” The circle of fifths, recited in order until it sticks. These are all workarounds for not being able to see the pattern directly - strings of letters standing in for a shape. Once you can see the shape, the string is just extra weight to carry around.

Turf wars around spelling

A remarkable amount of theory instruction is spent litigating whether something “should” be spelled one way or another - is this a diminished 4th or a major 3rd, a G-sharp or an A-flat - as if getting the label wrong were a musical error rather than a clerical one. None of it changes what's sounding. It's an argument about convention wearing the costume of an argument about music.

See Why This App for what we keep instead, and why the wheel sidesteps all of this by drawing harmony as distance rather than as spelling.