10/4/25: Laying a Foundation for Talking About Music

            One of my major goals of this blog is to discuss and communicate ideas about music through discussing pieces. For example, I’ve recently been thinking a lot about rhythm in Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez’s For the First Time in Forever from Disney’s Frozen. I also would love to blab a bit about relationships between the descending bass lines found in Beethoven and Elton John. Discussing these musical concepts clearly and concisely helps me meet my goal of communicating about music and helping non-musicians understand more about music than they thought they could. However, discussing music requires familiarity with a pre-established vocabulary and traditions of analysis that must first be discussed, just so we can all get on the same page.

In my long list of favorite quotes from a music theory textbook, the following from Vincent Persichetti’s Twentieth-Century Harmony holds the number one position:

            “Any tone can succeed any other tone, any tone can sound simultaneously with any other tone or tones, and any group of tones can be followed by any other group of tones, just as any degree of tension or nuance can occur in any medium under any kind of stress or duration. Successful projection will depend upon the contextual and formal conditions that prevail, and upon the skill and soul of the composer.”

            Persichetti basically says here that in music, as in any other art form, anything goes. The only “rules” that apply (such that rules exist) are extant in the work of art itself and are the direct result of the artist’s own skill and soul. However, when the issue of “analysis” or technical vocabulary for music comes up, musicians oft do themselves a disservice by getting lost in the weeds of the “rules,” when, if Persichetti is to be believed, these rules don’t actually exist. I think that this penchant for getting into the weeds too quickly, getting too far into the “I want you to know this” information instead of focusing on “you need to know this” information, is highly detrimental to making learning about music accessible to a wider audience. This is where this next series of blog posts comes in.

            My next few posts will be devoted to discussing the “need to know” of musical analysis, at least as far as I define the “need to know” (and you are on my blog, so you play by my rules). So, then, what is “need to know?” I’ll take my lead here from Aaron Copland. In his 1939 text What to Listen for In Music, Copland identified four main elements of music: rhythm, melody, harmony, and tone color (orchestration). I will devote the next four posts to discussing these elements and sharing what I think is “need to know” information about them to understand the musical analyses and discussions I’ll be posting soon.

When I was taking piano lessons in college, my piano professor advised me not to spend too much time on just practicing technique. She told me to do a few simple exercises every day, then dive into repertoire. As I found difficulties in my repertoire, I was encouraged to develop exercises from the difficulties themselves. Of course, that philosophy implied that I knew enough about piano playing in general to be able to do this. My approach to teaching how to talk about music adopts this philosophy. These next few posts will lay the foundation of basic music analysis and terminology, enough information to make us just a little dangerous. After that, I’ll just start diving into talking pieces. Each piece will present its own set of rules. Of course, as more pieces are discussed, commonalities will be discovered. But I think diving into the world of individual pieces will eventually lead us naturally to many of the ideas that most people think are “need to know” such as common chord progressions, voice leading, twelve-tone concepts, and aspects of neo-Riemannian theory. We may even dip a toe into negative harmony if I feel like talking about Jacob Collier and the generation of minor chords. However, instead of writing dryly about these concepts or reading about them in a large textbook, we’ll discover these ideas together, in context, and by staying focused on what is ultimately important: the music itself.