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This is a draft / beta of The Fake Story of Music. Expect revisions and a big overhaul by end of 2025!
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If, like me, you love music and you need to know the why’s behind everything, maybe you have wondered:
I have a story for you.
Welcome to The Fake Story of Music, a series exploring why our music is the way it is. Our system of music terminology, notation, and theory is convoluted, and from my earliest days playing with keyboards and learning to read sheet music, I have wondered, “where did all this stuff come from?” Did it have to be this way? This project is my attempt to put everything I have learned about this topic into something digestible.
What you will read is not at all how the development of music actually happened, which was way more complex and nonlinear. It may even unknowable, as history is incomplete record of snapshots of people’s thinking. But on some level, I don’t think this makes my story wrong. My goal is to help make some sense of why we converged on the system we have, not tell a historically accurate story. As they say, “the map is not the territory”. This is a map.
I hope that this map gives you a hub for further exploring music theory, a topic which can be unbelievably disorienting, arcane, and even prone to quackery.
The part of this that’s “fake” is the linearity of it. But the underlying concepts are all based on widely agreed upon knowledge of the math and physics behind sound and the studies of how we perceive it. This is just one way of making sense of music.
I believe that our system emerged due to the objective realities of acoustics and perception of sound, combined with the pull towards systems that balance creative potential with manageable complexity—for composers, listeners, and instrument designers. These factors acted as an “invisible hand”, guiding the evolution of our musical system. The result is a beautiful and adaptable system, which is just about exactly as complex as it needs to be.
The goal of this series is to build a mental model for our musical system linearly, untangling the web of definitions we’re typically asked to take as a given. For this reason, I try not to name each concept by its familiar name until I think we’ve fully justified it. That might be annoying if you already know what something is supposed to be called, but please bear with me, because we will eventually get to the actual terminology.
There’s so much more that could be written about every topic I’ll touch on, but I have tried introduce a new concept only when I think it adds substantially to the understandability of the story. In the footnotes and Further Reading, I try to leave enough breadcrumbs for further exploration. This hopefully keeps us on track through a narrative that is already very complicated.
Music is a lot of things and it’s different around the world. What I’m talking about here is mainstream Western-style music, with its 12-tone pitch system and major / minor tonality.
Please don’t read too much into the word “Western” here. It is just a placeholder. Our music didn’t fully originate in the West and it’s certainly not owned by the West. And by “mainstream”, I mean the conventions of the music popular today from the Baroque era through contemporary genres.
I know enough about music history to know there has never been a time when composers limited themselves to the major / minor paradigm. But it seems to me that the vast majority of music that is listened to by Western audiences does, and this holds across a huge range of genres. This series seeks to explain, or justify, that convergence.
The key distinguishing feature of Western music is its focus on harmony, which is the effect produced by tones of different pitches happening at the same time and the progression between different configurations of pitches. Typically, there’s at least one identifiable melody coexisting with the harmonic progression.
Rhythm is extremely important to every sort of music, but it’s not my expertise, so I’m going to ignore it completely to focus on tonality: the interlinked melodic and harmonic aspects of mainstream Western music.