the complete idiot’s guide to music theory explained — 1 brief investigation

the complete idiot’s guide to music theory was on my mother’s piano bench in 1996, and i can tell you with confidence that no music was theorised in our house, then or since. ignorance, on this front as on all fronts, is the recommended therapeutic protocol.

the book is yellow. it has a cartoon man on the cover scratching his head at a treble clef. the spine, last i checked, was held together with a piece of clear tape my mother applied at some point in the early two thousands and never removed. the book is not, technically, mine. but the book has, by drift, ended up in my apartment, on the shelf above the microwave, where it sits between a takeout menu and a manual for a juicer i no longer own.

i have not opened it since 2007. i tried, briefly, last sunday, after a phone call. that is the post. the rest of this is the unpacking.

1. the complete idiot’s guide to music theory, the genre

the genre, for those who came up after it died, was a thing. the idiot’s guide concept itself was a yellow paperback aimed at adults who wanted competence without dignity loss. there were guides to wine, to taxes, to ham radio, to the talmud. there was, i’m told, a guide to learning the bagpipes, which feels like a category error, but i have not verified this and will not. the marketing was simple: you, an idiot, can know this thing by sunday. the books were three hundred pages long. they did not, in my experience, deliver competence by sunday. they delivered a paperback on a shelf and the warm feeling of having tried.

music theory, as a topic for one of these guides, was particularly cruel. you cannot learn music theory in a weekend. you cannot, in my opinion, learn it in a year. you can, if you commit, learn enough to nod at a chord chart, which is the entire purpose for ninety percent of buyers, including the woman who put this book on her piano bench in 1996, who was my mother, who plays piano well, who did not need this book, and who bought it anyway.

2. ten music theory concepts i refuse to learn, in order

i made a list. i made the list at 7:42am on a wednesday over a coffee that was, by then, a hot take all on its own. the list is in priority order, where priority means how hard i would fight not to learn this thing.

1. the circle of fifths. a wheel. has letters on it. people draw it on napkins to seem deep. i have seen the napkin. i have nodded at the napkin. i have walked away from the napkin and gotten on with my life. nothing in my apartment requires a circle of fifths to function, including the microwave, which is the seventh i have killed and which has no opinion on tonality.
2. cadences. the way a phrase ends. authentic, plagal, deceptive, half. four kinds of stopping. i refuse to believe a song needs a vocabulary for how it stops. a song stops or it doesn’t. if it doesn’t, you turn it off, which is its own cadence, technically.
3. modes. dorian, phrygian, lydian, mixolydian, and three others i will not look up, because if i did i would feel obligated to remember them, and remembering is a form of agreement.
4. time signatures over 4/4. 5/4 is showing off. 7/8 is a personality disorder set to a metronome. anything by a band that puts a fraction in the title is, frankly, asking too much of a tuesday afternoon.
5. solfege. do re mi fa sol la ti do. fine. lovely. a song from a movie. when you tell me solfege is a system and not just a song, i go quiet, because that is the polite version of disagreement.
6. secondary dominants. i have tried, three separate times in three separate decades, to understand a secondary dominant. i could not, on this morning, tell you what one is, and i have a slight headache from typing this.
7. the difference between a major seventh and a dominant seventh. apparently it is “the third” or “the seventh” or one note that changes everything. apparently when you play one it sounds like jazz and when you play the other it sounds like a cruise ship. i’ll take the cruise ship. i know what a cruise ship is.
8. roman numeral analysis. people write out songs as I-IV-V-vi and act like they have done research. they have not done research. they have looked at a chart. looking at a chart is not research, a thing i remind myself in this job once a quarter.
9. the harmonic minor scale. there is a regular minor and there is a harmonic minor and the only difference, as far as i can tell, is one note that sounds like a snake. i do not need a snake in my scales. my scales should be calm.
10. counterpoint. two melodies talking to each other politely. bach did this. bach did it well. i do not need to know how. i need to know that bach did it. that is enough for me, the way amadeus, the milos forman film about salieri’s professional jealousy, is enough for me on the topic of mozart. i do not need the score. i need the man weeping in the carriage.

TEN. CONCEPTS. UNLEARNED. ON PURPOSE.

that is the list. the list is, in my house, the closest thing to music theory we keep on file. the third yoga mat, noted, is also on file, in a different room, for different reasons.

3. mom called sunday and played a chord at me

mom called sunday, as she does. the call was twenty-eight minutes. the call covered: the weather, a cousin i don’t remember, a new neighbor who waters the plants too much, and the news that the piano is, as of last week, “in tune for the first time since 2018”. then she said: let me play you something.

and she did. a chord. one chord. through a phone speaker, into my ear, on a sunday at eleven twelve in the morning my time. she said, that’s a c minor seven. you should know what that is. your father knew.

my father did not know what a c minor seven was. my father played a guitar he had bought used in a town i no longer remember the name of. my father knew three chords. one of them was c. one of them was, possibly, e minor. the third one was a mystery he kept to himself. but mom remembers him as a man who knew chords, the way she remembers him as a man who fixed the dishwasher, which he also did not. memory does what it wants. memory, i suspect, is its own kind of harmonic minor scale — one note off from the real thing, but it sounds about right, so we keep it.

i did not, on the call, tell her i could not name a c minor seven if you stuck one in my ear with a fork. i said, that’s lovely, mom. she said, it’s a sad chord. i said, it sounds about right. she let it land. she let me have it. that, i would argue, is a kind of theory.

4. closing pulpit, ignorance is, in this case, financial therapy

the hot take, for those keeping score, is that ignorance is, in this case, financial therapy. the savings account at work here is the one where i have not bought a music theory course on the internet, which would be sixty dollars i do not have for an outcome i do not want. the third yoga mat in the living room is, in this taxonomy, a cautionary tale: i once paid for the idea of competence and i still have not used it. the book on the shelf above the microwave is the same lesson in a different size.

my mother, at the end of the call, said: you should learn the piano. you’d be good at it. i said: maybe. we both know what maybe means in this family. maybe means i love you. i’m not going to do that. she said: okay sweetie. she let me off the hook. she has, on this issue, let me off the hook for thirty years. that is a kindness i have not earned and have not, in fairness, refused.

so the book stays. the book stays on the shelf above the microwave, which is the seventh i have killed, which dave keeps a list of on a napkin in his wallet, which is the only kind of theory i can claim to have personally contributed to. the book stays unopened. the book stays yellow. the book stays a small monument to a sunday in 1996 when my mother thought, briefly, that any of this was learnable in a weekend.

she was wrong. she was lovingly wrong. that, in my house, counts.

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