What’s missing from music theory class?

In a recent comment, a reader posed a good question:

I’m classically trained (I do recognize a blues progression when i hear it though) so i would like to hear more of your insights into the forms, styles and methods of pop music — your observation that “most of the creativity in pop lies in the manipulation of timbre and space”, for example, was very interesting. To me the compositional technique of most pop and esp. rock/blues seems to based on noodling on a guitar and is directly the result of the tuning of the instrument and the ease with which a beginner can learn a few chords. The fact that many popular songs have been written by teams (mostly duos) of songwriters to me seems to corroborate my noodling theory — but I am very interested to learn if there are common practices, disciplines, methods, etc that have been used and transferred over time.

I have to add that I’m a little surprised to hear that pop musicians are baffled by the relevance of “academic” music theory to their music. If you wanted to teach a pop musician about the theory of his craft, what would you teach other than what is offered in any freshman theory course? (all right, you can skip the figured bass and species counterpoint).

My response:

In classical music, melody is the crucial avenue for expression, and everything else is there to support it. In pop, rhythm, timbre, and space are the crucial avenues for expression. Melody and harmony are mostly there to signpost where you are in the beat, if they’re present at all. There are plenty of hip-hop songs with no melody and little to no harmony.

Classical music thinks about timbre in certain ways — through orchestration and expressive articulation. But fundamentally, an oboe is going to sound like an oboe. In pop, you have complete freedom over the sonic content of every instrument. You can make a synth sound like literally anything, and through studio technique you can make anything sound like anything else, in any imaginary spatial environment. With all of this timbral and spatial possibility, you need to keep other elements simple and predictable or the listener will be totally overwhelmed. This is why the most sonically adventurous music (hip-hop and EDM) is the most repetitive and formally constrained.

There are as many compositional techniques in rock and pop as there are songwriters. That said, your picture of the beginner guitarist permuting the easy-to-play chords is dated, and hasn’t been the dominant songwriting method in many decades. The recording medium itself has been the major songwriting tool since the 1980s. You come up with a beat and then record improvisation over it, either with audio or MIDI or both. Then you edit your improvisation into a shape, improvise against that, edit some more, and so on. There is no “writing” happening most of the time — the improvisation, recording and editing are all the same act, and the recording is the only meaningful form that the song ever takes. Hip-hop and EDM artists pioneered this method, but at this point it’s quite ordinary for pop songwriters to arrive in the recording studio with no material prepared at all.

Euroclassical music theory is missing a lot of key information that a pop musician needs to function in the world. The biggest hole is traditional theory’s disregard for the musical norms of the African diaspora. Black music is a much more salient influence on pop than European music. Afrocentric music does not revolve around the cadence; you can go a long time listening to pop and never hear a V-I. (If you listen to hip-hop stations, you can go a long time without hearing harmonic movement at all.) Voice leading is unimportant, and in some stylistic situations, positively wrong — parallel fourths and fifths are essential not just to rock, but to a lot of other pop styles. Tritones don’t have to resolve. In fact, it’s usually better if they don’t. The flat seventh is used in major-tonality melodies more frequently than the leading tone, even on top of V7 chords. The major/minor binary frequently doesn’t even apply; blues-based music freely mixes major and minor or eschews thirds altogether. While some pop music uses strict diatonicism and functional harmony, it’s usually the lamer, more vanilla styles, like Disney musicals. And even there, the blues pops up fairly regularly. Furthermore, Africa isn’t the only stream feeding into global pop; the modes and drones of Asia and India are major influences too.

It isn’t just the music theory that’s irrelevant to pop musicians, though. It’s an entire musical value system. Classical musicians usually can’t improvise. Pop musicians have to be able to. Classical musicians read notation. Pop musicians generally don’t, and often can’t. Classical musicians study recordings infrequently. For pop musicians, recordings are the first, last and usually only learning resource. Classical music is systematic and rule-driven; pop is made by informally trained or totally naive musicians operating by trial and error. Classical music is linear; pop is cyclical. Classical is meant to be the expression of a lone genius; pop emerges out of a giant shared memepool. The list goes on.

I learned very little in music school that was of direct value to me as a musician. (Though it has been useful as an academic.) My mission as an educator is to fill some of the yawning gaps in the standard curriculum.