Originally published at Performer Magazine.
I am a guitarist – one of a notoriously stubborn class
of musicians known for kicking and screaming all the way to the treble
clef. Cadences? Transposition? Chord inversion? Forget about it. I have a fakebook. I can read chord charts and a little
tablature…after all, even The Beatles couldn’t read staff music, so why should
I?
The truth is, that voice is just shouting over the other one
that says music theory is important and that any practical person would
recognize how essential basic literacy is to earning my credibility as a
musician. It’s not the content of
music theory that puts off so many people, but the style of presentation
– and no knowledge deserves to be locked up in stuffy, uninteresting
textbooks, inaccessible to the very sense of fun that makes music worth
learning in the first place.
Thankfully, the solution has arrived: Edly’s
Music Theory For Practical People, now in its revised and expanded third
edition. Author Ed Roseman has
written an introduction to the occult universe of diatonic triads, modal
discovery, whole-tone scales, and open voicings so bouncy and colloquial it’s
hard not to smile while reading it.
Rife with Peter Reynold’s cartoon characters and a double helping of
adorably geeky “Can you believe this guy?” professor-humor, Edly’s Music Theory is about as engaging
as any introduction to an arcane and elaborate system like Western Music can
be. Lessons (although they’re not
called lessons) are well-summarized at the end of each section; focused and brief
workbook exercises keep the blade sharp; and all of the information is embedded
in application (e.g., he introduces tritone substitution by discussing its
importance in jazz improv).
For those of us afraid to tackle the intellectual
intricacies of this material, Roseman peppers the text with inspirational
reminders such as, “If it is any consolation, know that you will be alive and
well and playing for years to come – whether or not you take it upon yourself
to learn transposition, any of the concepts in this book, unicycle riding,
juggling, or gardening.” He’s not
in the game to cram information into the heads of unwilling captives
– time and time again, he reminds us of the fascinating relevance and the
minor cosmic importance of learning to read music, understanding the innards of
seven flat nine chords, or writing slash-chord voicings. In so doing, he takes the teeth out of
a topic that for many people is too intimidating to approach.
