Music theory: books please.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415170338/ref=sr_aps_books_1_1/026-9290232-8174013

are there any useful books with stuff like this?

(But it really does stick to fundamentals, whereas books like Music Theory for Dummies try to give the reader an introduction to more complex topics as well.)

The main thing I'd stress, however, is that none of these books will do you much good unless you train your ear to hear the concepts you're learning, instead of approaching them as abstract things to read about/think about. Most theory books will make this point, and it should be taken seriously!

i'm serious: this is way better than music theory for dummies, because the dummies book is like a pseudo-science description that includes much that is relevant and much that is pointlessly idiosyncratic or included only because it is easily explained. it actually resembles a junior high science book, you know, the kind that explains atoms but doesn't tell you why the positive and negative charged particles don't attract each other. the guide to writing songs will instead have tips from some geek who's listened to thousands of top 40 songs with a greedy ear and can play hundreds of them on the spot; he understands that novelty effects are usually more important than chord progressions and yet has a strong grasp of chord leading because he's written plenty of lousy songs and competently analyzed why they are worse than a prince or abba song.

of course you might want to work towards laying a solid foundation in understanding musical harmony: this will take years of work as a hobby, but eventually you will be able to listen to tchaikovsky and brahms and stravinsky and come up on your own with the real reasons why you have always liked the one them that you like. all that has already been written down and explained hundreds of times in guides to the classics but the good part is you can yourself then listen to gorecki and part and xenakis and this time actually decide for yourself something which people still argue about.

to do this you will want to look at the pop book a little and then look at a serious book on classical harmony [bach's harmony, and then how we gradually introduced chords bach wouldn't approve of], they are all the same except for those which concentrate more on bach or more on mozart/beethoven or perhaps wagner/debussy. you will need a piano and painfully learn to poorly sight read but you won't have to learn to play very well.

there is no equivalent to pop or modern music theory because complexity [and variation/development] of harmony, melody and rhythm are rarely more than the occasional hook in all kinds of modern music [even most symphonic music, amazingly] and the real complexity [i.e. that which supports a theoretical viewpoint, or requires it, or rewards it, or derives from it] is in production layering, tone/timbre/emotional attack, repetition and buildup, symbolism and charisma, and the lyric. you can't be mathematical about any of this the way you can about bach and wagner, so modern music "theory" is identical to reviewing/criticizing poetry, fashion, film, criticism, etc.

Music analysis for ‘non-musos’
Popular perception as a basis for understanding musical structure and signification
by Philip Tagg

Some '-ics' and '-ologies' of Music
Incomplete set of (mostly short) explanations of recurrent academic jargon in non-ethnocentric musicology for students following module 'Popular Music and Musicology' (MUSI 112) at the Institute of Popular Music and/or Music Department of the University of Liverpool. [ADMIN: 2 links removed from Martian's post as they now lead to NSFW-ness]

anyway this goldman guy attempts to show that most of the notes which are generally regarded as "wrong" ie dissonant/appogiatura etc. in a given key are not in fact dissonant at all. this overlays his heavier theory that all the chords in a tune are chosen so as to accentuate to a greater or lesser degree our seven-step major chord tonality itself. sort of an acceptance of "non-euclidean" music tonalities which would be suggested by other ways of combining the more exotic chords.

this seemed pretty pseudo to me. scrounging about for metaphors ("tiptoe bass") in a search for rigor, faulty logic all over the place (e.g. "students are encouraged to analyse verbal and visual messages critically but music is rarely taught as if it communicated anything at all"... well, there's not a lot of high school analysis of any kind of art apart from language arts, and the study of reading, writing and speaking is assumed to improve those things; if one studies music videos, you've got a big argument to make that more will be improved than your ability to make and understand music videos, and the author just sort of assumes that communication is all interchangeable. learning to cook also improves critical thinking, why don't we go back to teaching that?)

Some '-ics' and '-ologies' of Music
this is good.

http://www.wm.edu/music/theorybk/text/tabofcnt.htm

it's Mixolydian (just tag on "mixo" to "lydian"--that's how I always think of it, since it's a whole step up from its relative Lydian mode)

Practica Musica is set up in lessons and you don't need a keyboard to use it.

Any more suggestions? n.b. DJ Martian's links now link to incest porn, not good.

As someone with zero practical or theoretical knowledge, I found this book helpful and accessible on the basics of music theory:

A Player's Guide to Chords and Harmony

Wasn't there another much longer thread filled with stuff?

Maybe this is what I was thinking of:
practical music theory books.

Did Howard Goodall ever write a book? An adaptation of his TV series would've been pretty good for this kind of thing.

http://www.musictheory.net is quite handy.

Go ahead and tackle Arnold Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony, it's great literature, highly instructive, and you'll feel good skipping the difficult passages since his repeated message is that you need to learn these rules mainly in order to quickly forget them in real life.

Otherwise, stick with GameCheat's Total Pwnage Guide to Guitar Hero III.

I haven't read Schoenberg, so I'm not sure how it compares, but I learned from Walter Piston's Harmony, which I thought was generally quite clear and straightforward. I think it's in fairly wide use in university theory courses.

here's one of those dj martian links: http://web.archive.org/web/20030404181619/http://www.theblackbook.net/acad/tagg/articles/cardiff01.html

and here's the other:
http://web.archive.org/web/20021125143350/http://www.theblackbook.net/acad/tagg/teaching/ipms/ologies.html

is levitin's 'this is your brain on music' any good for this, or is it pretty advanced?

going to check out that 'practica musica' program, has anyone here tried it?

are there any (torrentable) tv or radio shows other than that goodall series that can explain basic music theory?

badump