Music Theory

Music as Theatre

Historically speaking, music was an accompaniment for theatrical plays. A typical song has a Theme and develops Exposition / Conflict / Resolution through time. Its not a coincidence that the sonata and the dramatic structure share the same form. In a typical play you have scenes, transitions, sets in the background and characters in the foreground. While the play progresses and characters clash you get music alongside each of these elements. Every song has a title that guides the listener to what the song is about. Typical Scenes include intro, bridge, buildup, section, breakdown and climax. What is the intro about ? What is the bridge about ? What is the verse about ? What is the chorus about ? What are the sections about ? The essential question driving any story is how to be ? In a drama this question is answered with doubts, emotion, circularity, warnings from the chorus, exposition, rises, falls, reprisals, conclusions, contradictions, denouncements, confrontations, mistakes, reversals, recognition, revelation resolution, statements and breakdowns.

Here another way of thinking about it. A song is about answering a question posed the title / intro perhaps. The question which the artist poses to the audience. Verses are the answers. Rhythm dictates the demarcates the flow of time and seasons.

Modern music has evolved to be standalone but it retains elements of theatrical story telling. You can divide a song into verses and sections. In the documentation, we will use the terms from plays. Within each musical scene you typically have,

  • Background: You use layers of rhythm and groove to set the mood.

  • Foreground: Lead (Soliloquy), Counterpoint (Character Conflict), Call Response(Dialogues), Motif, Ornaments (Exposition)

In screenplays you also have a setup / payoff dynamic.

Setup

  • Obstacles

  • Challenges

  • Forces

  • Context

In Electronic Music, the foreground is mainly developed using Layers(polyrhythms) and Tweaking. Tweaking and Layers effectively function for the purposes of Exposition and Conflict. Chorus, Fade, Drop are used for transitions typically in electronic music. Tweaking is also called knob-twisting by hardware users. To compare the foreground in others,

Classical Music: Counterpoint and Harmony
Rock: Call Response

Now EDM - Dub, Techno and Jungle - are distinct musical genres. What could they possibly share ?

  1. All three uphold the primacy of Rhythm for start.

  2. All three are instrumental.

  3. Voices are used sparingly as samples.

  4. All three have a tradition of live acts.

  5. Dub Plates are common for these genres.

  6. Melody is nothing but a repeating stab (motif)

If you want to add a solo to EDM, you typically add a live instrument.

Dub Music is made by messing with the Recording Engineer’s Mixing desk. A prime example of tweaking.

Techno is made by messing with Hardware or Hardware + Software. Tweaking + Layering.

Jungle is used as a catch all for Breakbeat, Hardcore as well. Jungle Music is made by messing with Hardware + Software combo. Complex Layering is used here.

You can treat a musical scale as no different than a drumset. The pentatanic scale approximately maps to a drumset and you can use techniques from melodic drumming with multiple samples. This is typically how drummers approach guitars.

Essentially a DJ is like a conductor. Loops are like individual instrumentalists.

  1. Cueing -> Mute / Solo

  2. Dynamics -> Volume

  3. Ornamentation -> Cutoff

  4. Tempo, Beat Counting -> Beat Matching

Counting

Counting, Metre: This makes collaboration and arrangement easy

Music is arrangement

Following poetry,
decide on
the tempo,
the beat,
the metre.

Then,
timbral threads,
some texture,
counterpoint the harmony,
ornament the solo motif,
throwup under the bridge,
and repeat it with the hook,
not forgetting,
that silence is the count of the heart.

I like to approach music from the perspective of poetry and drama. Composing for movies and having concepts for albums is something I find deeply appealing.

Terms from Poetry

  • syllable : enunciable unit of a word. Often represented in dictionaries with -‘s. Example = ex-am-ple, id-e-a, wo-rd

  • accent : style of enunciating.

  • iamb : any two syllables, usually a single word but not always, whose accent is on the second syllable. Example = upon, arise

  • trochee : any two syllables, usually a single word but not always, whose accent is on the first syllable. Example = virtue, further

  • spondee : any two syllables, sometimes a single word but not always, with strong accent on the first and second syllable. Example = In “The long day wanes, the slow moon climbs”, the words “day wanes” form a spondee.

  • pyrrhic : any two syllables, often across words, with each syllable unstressed/unaccented.

  • anapest : any three syllables, usually a single word but not always, whose accent is on the third syllable. Example = intervene

  • dactyl : any three syllables, usually a single word but not always, word whose accent is on the first syllable. Example = tenderly

  • foot : 1 or more words which have [2-3] syllables

  • dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter : n foot, where is 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6

  • iamb-ic, troch-aic, spond-aic, pyrrh-aic, anapest-ic, dactyl-ic: when the line is made of iambs or trochee or …

If (iambic pentameter)

x = unstress / = stress iamb = x /

x  /   x   /    x    /    x    /   x /
If you can keep your head when all a-bout you
x   /   x    /      x   /    x    /  x  /   
Are los-in-g theirs and blam-in-g it on you;
x  /   x   /     x    /    x    /   x   /
If you can trust your-self when all men doubt you,
x   /    x  /   x    /   x     /     x    /
But make al-low-ance for their doubt-in-g too:
x  /   x   /    x   /   x  /     x  /
If you can wait and not be tired by wait-in-g,
x   /  x    /    x /     x     /    x  /
Or, be-in-g lied a-bout, don't deal in lies,
x  /  x    /   x  /     x    /   x  /  
Or be-in-g hat-ed don't give way to hat-in-g,
x   /   x     /    x   /     x   /    x   /
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
...
    -Rudyard Kipling[2]

The hypenation, as seen on

x / x / x / x / x / But make al-low-ance for their doubt-in-g too:

Using a dictionary we can add hypenations that can help the reader analyse a poem.

[1] http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/users/m/morillo/public/prosody1.htm [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scansion [3] https://code.google.com/p/hyphenator/ [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accent_(poetry)