A Meta-Theory of Musical Composition
Not a Theory of Musical Composition, but a Theory of Theories of Musical Composition
A meta-theory is a theory about theories.
So a meta-theory of musical composition is a theory about theories of musical composition.
The basic precepts of my meta-theory are:
To compose quality music efficiently you need to have a sufficiently complete theory of musical composition.
Traditional “Music Theory” is not a sufficiently complete theory of musical composition.
There does not exist any sufficiently complete theory of musical composition which has been written down.
People do compose music, therefore theories of musical composition must exist.
Those people know how to compose music, but they do not know how to write down an explanation of how to do it.
If you want to compose music, you have to figure out how to acquire your own theory of musical composition.
I can expand on each of these precepts in more detail.
To compose quality music efficiently you need to have a sufficiently complete theory of musical composition.
In principle it could be possible to compose quality music by trial and error.
But in practice the search space is too large. A theory of composition is something that reduces the search space sufficiently to make it practically possible to compose new good quality music.
Traditional “Music Theory” is not a sufficiently complete theory of musical composition.
There are components of traditional Music Theory that are necessary, but not sufficient, to compose good quality music. Traditional Music Theory does reduce the search space significantly, but not enough to turn the problem of composing quality music into a tractable problem.
For example, if you know melodies are constructed from scales, then you don’t need to waste time searching the space of all possible melodies unconstrained by melodic scales. (Of course it’s entirely possible that there exist possible forms of music that are not based on melodies constructed using scales, but just stating such a possibility does not do anything to help us reduce the search space.)
There does not exist any sufficiently complete theory of musical composition which has been written down.
The promise of Music Theory is that it is something you can learn from reading books or listening to lectures, which will then enable you to create quality music.
Unfortunately this is just not the case.
There is some Music Theory that indeed you do have to learn. But when you have learned the basic elements of Music Theory, you will find that you still don’t actually know how to compose new good quality music. You might conclude that this is caused by not having learnt enough Music Theory and your only option is to learn even more Music Theory.
What my meta-theory of music tells you is that this is not going to work. It is not going to work because the music theory you have to know to compose music has not yet been written down by anyone.
People do compose music, therefore theories of musical composition must exist.
Theories of musical composition must exist, because that is the only way that composers can compose music. But those theories are trapped inside the minds and brains of those composers.
Composers know how to compose music, but they do not know how to write down an explanation of how to do it.
No one has yet worked out how to write down a sufficiently complete theory of musical composition.
(Note: by “composer” I mean anyone who composes music - often we don’t use the word “composer”, and instead we talk about beat-makers, producers and song-writers. But a large part of what these people do is composing music, so for the purpose of this article, they are “composers”.)
If you want to compose music, you have to figure out how to acquire your own theory of musical composition.
This raises the important question, which is: if people cannot learn how to compose music from learning verbally presented Music Theory, then how do they learn?
The basic answer to this question is probably that you just have to do it. Like sit down, get some instruments or equipment, and start trying to compose.
But, there are almost certainly particular ways of sitting down and trying to compose music which will result in a faster process of learning how to compose music. So just “doing it” or “trying to do it” may not get good results.
As far as I know, this question of what is the best way to learn to compose music is something that has not been scientifically studied.
There are probably many reasons why it has not been studied. I suspect some of those reasons have to do with the somewhat non-scientific nature of much of Musical Academia (even though “Music Science” is a thing these days).
In particular, if those in Musical Academia are not prepared to fully confront the insufficiency of traditional Music Theory, then they probably don’t see any point in trying to study how it is that people actually learn non-verbalisable theories of music composition that go beyond what the traditional theory is capable of.
Riding a Bicycle
There are actually lots of things that people have non-verbalisable “theories” of, inside their brains.
Most of these have to do with physical skills that they have learned.
If you know how to ride a bicycle, then your brain must contain some kind of theory of bike riding.
It’s true that these days there are scientific theories of bicycle riding, based on scientific observation and experimentation.
But people were learning to ride bicycles before proper scientific theories of bicycle riding were ever discovered.
Musical composition is a bit like this, where you can learn to do it, even though the science of how to do it has not yet been discovered.
And even these days, with all the known bicycle science, you still can’t learn to ride a bicycle just by reading a book about it. You have to actually get on a bicycle and start riding.
Although there are some things that we know about the best way to learn to ride a bicycle. (For example, start with a balance bike.)