Music Theory/Composition Thread

By MPC's request:

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Originally Posted by campbell (Post 7876365) nice list. maybe spin it into a different thread?

Below is a list of suggested resources for learning music theory:

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Originally Posted by clarinetist (Post 7876023) The standard these days is Kostka and Payne's Tonal Harmony. It covers the first 3-4 semesters of music theory pretty well. I've never seen the 7th edition but I learned from the 6th edition, which I thought was really good. 6th edition is here. I would recommend purchasing the workbook and the CD with it as well (which I can't find at the moment). The disadvantage of this is the price - it's one of those books which get updated too frequently and are meant to be a ripoff for university students. I also recommend www.musictheory.net to supplement your study. After you get through that textbook, I would recommend Hearing Form by Matthew Santa. This covers the fourth-semester material. For twentieth-century techniques, I recommend listening to atonal music and getting as many scores as you can, but if you want a text, I used a previous edition of Materials and Techniques of Post-Tonal Music by Kostka (the 6th edition of Tonal Harmony has a nice introduction as well). Once you're done with all of this, you can do whatever you want, pretty much. I would highly recommend a study on counterpoint, especially Kennan for Baroque counterpoint and Schubert for Renaissance counterpoint. I have heard good things about Piston for counterpoint, but haven't read it. The original treatise on counterpoint is Fux, but some people consider it outdated. You can also venture off into orchestral writing if you desire, for which I recommend learning from Dickreiter (a VERY, VERY well-written text), Adler, and Rimsky-Korsakov, in that order. ETA: A version of Rimsky-Korsakov's text is in an online course, BUT it doesn't cover everything in the original text. I did learn orchestration from this website when I started, but I wouldn't recommend it without any outside resources.

There is a lot that I didn't cover in here. One thing I'd like to point out is that 20th century atonalism (esp. music created via serialism) is based on arithmetic mod 12. Music theorists have been doing this for the longest time, but I don't think many have the background to understand that this makes set of all 12 distinct notes isomorphic (in the group sense) to . The isomorphism defined by , , etc., up to is what music theorists have called fixed-zero notation. Considering that I learned atonalism first by taking the 20th-century music class, it was extremely enlightening when I took Abstract Algebra I a few semesters later.



This idea of using Abstract Algebra also extends to how Schoenberg (a 20th-century composer) was manipulating tone rows and sets (see http://ift.tt/1DNlDJl and http://ift.tt/1eD81Ra for example). Tone rows and sets can just be viewed as -tuples where each component is distinct and in and . How music theorists have been manipulating sets through transposition, inversion, retrograde, and the combinations of such operations can be seen as mappings that occur among -tuples. Who knew?

Music Theory/Composition Thread