Advent Calendar: Day 5

By Circe -

Believe it or not, there are a few things I am not good at. If you don't believe me, ask anyone who ever got stuck with me in a high school chem lab. Music theory was one of those things for a long time. I was fine all the way through the part where it's math and physics -- frequency ratios and overtones and all that make perfect sense to me. But I lost the plot right around the part about keys and modes and and voices. I kept asking, "But WHY is it grouped like that? WHY is that the pattern we use? WHY?"

The answer turns out to be, "Because 300 years ago, a rich white guy wrote a monograph, probably in German, and we all just ran with it." The brave soul who finally said the quiet part out loud and admitted that all of this is completely arbitrary was Adam Neely, a jazz musician and YouTube personality who has provided the only explanation for any of music theory that has ever made any sense to me whatsoever.

Most of his videos are uncontroversial, at least to people who don't spend their time on the internet arguing over what key pop songs are in, but linked below is one that got widespread coverage during the BLM protests in 2020. Part of admitting that a lot of music theory is arbitrary is recognizing that the reason for that is mainly down to the distribution of power in society, and who gets to write the textbooks. Feel free to go through his channel if you want something lighter, but this one seems pretty important.

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