MUSIC THEORY AS A PART OF MUSICAL KNOWLEDGE
First, very simply, musical knowledge is knowledge acquired in the field of music. How is it different from scientific knowledge, for example? Are its methods and its targets different? Generally, musical knowledge is assimilated to music theory, which can be defined as the study of the various possibilities and practices offered by music, considering essential musical elements like scales, intervals, timbre, consonance and dissonance, harmony, counterpoint, chords or pitch. Music theory has been, for two centuries, an academic discipline.
Music theory learning or making is, literally, an act of contemplation. In fact, theoria, in Greek, means viewing or speculation as well as theory. The first traces of music theory are contained in Sumerian tablets written in 1500 BCE. In Ancient Greece, the first known music theorist was Pythagoras, who lived during the 6th century BCE. Pythagoras invented the elementary musical scale still used in the West. Three centuries later, Chinese and Indian music theorists wrote other musical scales and elements. In the Middle Ages, sheet music were manuscripts and the first European philosopher to write a musical treatise was Boethius. That work is an abstract one, but during the 9th century, Hucbald, Benedictine monk, composed pieces of music in the tradition of plainchant and wrote a music theory based on practice. Later, Arabic music theorists include Avicenna: better known as a scientist of the 10th century, he talked about music theory in his ‘Book of Healing’, an encyclopedia written to cure the ignorance of the human soul.
The rest of music theory history is better known: the Renaissance for instance saw the emergence of numerous theorists, from Johan Cochlaeus, humanist, to Claudio Monteverdi via Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, another humanist, or Giosefo Zarlino. During the 17th century, scientists like Johannes Kepler, Marin Mersenne and René Descartes were amongst music theorists besides composers like Henry Purcell. The 18th century saw the birth of Jean-Philippe Rameau, Carl-Philipp Emanuel Bach and Leopold Mozart, who was Wolfgang Amadeus’ father, besides Georg Michael Telemann or Luigi Cherubini. During the 19th century, Anton Bruckner, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov distinguished themselves as composers and theorists. Let us also mention Paul Hindemith and Karlheinz Stockhausen from the 20th century.
Music theory is a generic expression which comprises three main areas: musical notation (made up of rhythmic notation, time and key signatures), writings about music (like treatises, from antiquity to the present day) and musicology (which tries to find the general principles in music, generation after generation). These general principles are more than lists of techniques used by composers to produce musical effects and their description. They can for instance take listeners’ perception into account. The new music theory behind the YMusic search engine, a software application that helps listeners to find more music they really like, applies these principles. In medieval Europe, most of the time, music theory was an abstract description of proportions that were studied far removed from musical practice itself; but YMusic and the related theory is reviving the association between reasoned statements and practical know-how that was already a basis for music theorists of antiquity.