Sol....Sol......................................................Do!

Music Theory is one of the classes that many students who pursue a degree in music regard useless or not useful. They question the real world application of doing roman numeral analyses of musical scores, knowing how to write proper voice leader, and being able to meticulously label everything in a piece of music. Of course there is so much more to theory than those concepts, but some students see these skills as worthless and that they will not use them during the job. Perhaps they want to teach elementary music and they don't really need to know the concepts for their lesson plans, or even working in the church where they might just be singing and playing chords. Personally I think that those are just made up excuses and in fact theory is always being used, whether actively or in a subconscious manner. This has been my experience since I've been learning music theory.

I do personally enjoy learning about music theory for it seems like you are archaeologists discovering relics of the ancient past. You are essentially deconstructing a piece of music into elements and smaller and smaller parts where you can explain the function behind each musical element. So if music theory is deconstruction what use is it when performing music? Well this has been my experience so far. From music theory, you learn that there are patterns and that there are such things as musical clichés. One of these is that the V chord really wants to move to the I chord since the leading tone really wants to resolve upward to tonic. Now what use is this? It's actually quite amazing. If you have ever sight read the bass of a piece of music or an excerpt you can sometimes feel the tension of a V chord wanting to resolve to I by just singing on the 5th scale degree. One of these passages is if a bass line is Sol-Sol-Do. This pattern in the bass, usually toward the end of a phrase or excerpt, is most often a cadential 6/4 chord to a V chord to a I. When sight-reading the bass of a piece for the first time this tell can really help with the sight reading. I personally am not a strong sight reader, but when I see that occur in a piece of music it assists me singing the accurate pitch and also giving me an idea of what solfegé can come next.

Of course that particular pattern does not always go to a I chord, as composers do not compose with music theory in mind since it comes after the composition. But from learning about the pattern and hearing it and recognizing the tension it assists me with my sight reading in choir. Currently we are working on Mozart's Requiem. If there is anything about Mozart that you should know it is that he loves is I V I patterns and strong dominant to tonic progressions. That is the staple of the Classical period and one of Mozart's musical idioms. From just learning the bass part in sections or sight-reading the line for the first time, I can get a light understanding of what the chordal structure is in some phrases. I am not actively doing a detailed roman numeral analysis, but I am applying what I know from theory and what I've trained my ear to hear in Aural Skills together to sight read in choir.

So with that, theory has in fact improved my ability to sight read and be able to understand the flow of the music.