Understanding All I Know About That: What did you discover about expectation and fulfillment from the experiments of the last session? Put it into one sentence, and let’s compare our discoveries.

And so we begin to create our catechism (our series of questions whose answers we memorize) with the first question and answer:

What is music theory? Music theory is the theory of what makes music “work.”

Theory. What is music theory? First, let us understand that it is not “music fact.” It is theory, and different people will have different answers, and those answers will change from culture to culture, music to music, and time to time. But my one-sentence answer is Music theory is the theory of what makes music “work.” We can glean the principle from Prov. 25:2. “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings.” If we are to be kings and rulers on this planet, we explore and understand how things work. And God stays as God, far above us, when he makes the math and the patterns far more complex than we can grasp. So for every level that we come to understand, God goes farther, and we are again humbled by His vastness.

What drives Western music? Diatonic Scale Degree Tendencies (SDTs). Scale degrees 1, 5 and 3 are stable. Scale degrees 7 and 4 are both half a step away from stable notes of 8 and 3 (never underestimate the power of the half step!), and scale degrees 2 and 6 both rather gently want to resolve downward to 1 and 5. Put it all together and we have a sense of unstable notes that want to resolve to stable pitches. Ultimately (it’s far more complex than that, of course), that is what drives music to a final resolution at the end of it.