A very beginner-composer look at the relationship between music theory and music composition

So, we've been making a lot of music in PICO-8, and it's kind of been illuminating when it comes to our understanding of music theory.

What is music theory? The point of music theory is explaining the experience of listening to music.

...no, that's half true. The point of music theory should be and often is that - but can be and sometimes (often?) is snobbish condescension. People do wield the tools of music theory to argue that another person's taste in music is Wrong™, an exercise that is (a) cruel, (b) philosophically indefensible, (c) a waste of time, and (d) an entirely valid reason for hating music theory. This essay is about the music theory that explains the experience of listening to music, though.

Anyway. The point of music theory is explaining the experience of listening to music, and doing that is ... I guess three skills? Listening to music, understanding what in the music creates the effects one is feeling, and articulating how it does that. And now that we actually say that ... wow, this is embarrassing.

We studied the vocabulary of music theory in college. How to articulate what music is doing. We started at that end, and we never really connected that back to the feeling of listening to music - we just learned rules. (Mostly part writing - a specific set of rules describing how musicians a few hundred years ago in the vaguely north-western part of Eurasia would create a sense of harmony as consonances formed out of the independent motion of multiple melodic lines. Part writing is extremely valid and a lot of fun, by the way.) So when we first started writing PICO-8 music, we ... okay, first we transcribed a section of an out-of-copyright piece to learn the UI, but next we tried to apply the chord progression rules we'd learned - this language for articulating a specific style for making each chord lead into the next - directly to the production of music with no idea how that would sound.

And it didn't sound how we wanted. Being able to articulate the rules that we'd been taught got us nowhere as far as making feelings that we wanted.

This was largely prompted by having watched a video about the Beatles and whether they knew music theory, a story which ties into our own experience tracking music in PICO-8. What the Beatles lacked, for the most part, was just and only an academic language for articulating what they were doing - they knew what feelings they were hearing, and they understood a great deal about how they could create those feelings with their music, but they couldn't on their own put that into standardized language.

And we ... understand a little bit about how to create feelings with our music. And a lot less than we expected about how to articulate the feelings we like that we create. The theory is helping a lot - knowing what notes are in standard tertian-harmony chords and what notes are in the scales of the modes of major and minor mean we can make a lot of good guesses as to what notes would fit with what notes are already there - but we're guessing and checking a lot. We're hearing something that we like and rolling with it. And we're putting a lot less weight on finding chord progression than shaping lines and finding chord progressions within them.

And sometimes we can articulate how an effect was achieved and often we can't.

...I think we might try to make something with an extremely standard chord progression just for fun. But we have to do it like we did that part writing piece we linked earlier: demanding that it sound right while we search the space of options within the rules, and editing-editing-editing until it does.