The Packbats' Weblog

So, last month we wrote a blog post about the limits of the music theory we learned as a tool for actual music invention, inspired in a significant part by David Bennett Piano's video "How much music theory did The Beatles know?".

The topic has been bouncing around in our head a bit more, though. And I think I want to pull on a different tangent to David Bennett's video (which, to be clear, was really interesting and well-researched): who gets to lay claim to the Beatles as one of their own? Who owns the Beatles?

Or rather: if people describe the music of the Beatles as a matter of academic music theory, where does that leave people for whom that academic world is an enemy?

...writing this now, I want to connect this to Adam Neely's recent video on "The Girl from Ipanema": a song which was made less than it was because musicians from outside the culture and community that created it - musicians at a college in the US listening to a bossa nova album by Brazilian composers - used their authority as academics to define it in their framework and discard a great deal of what was outside their framework. Academia has that power. And people outside academia know it.

I don't think that the hostility to music theory analysis of popular music is as simple as "music theory studies boring music for stuffed shirts, it can't study truly emotional and meaningful music I love". Or I don't know if it is. I can see more reasons than hostility to analysis as a thing to be hostile to analysis as an act.