I strongly agree with the article's premise! I also agree with this guidepost for how we should be moving music theory past its highly entrenched and institutional attitudes:
> We should be asking: what is it that musicians are doing that sounds good? What patterns can we detect in the broad mass of music being made and enjoyed out there in the world?
I would personally add one more leading question: Can we explain music in other ways than by its harmony and chords?
A harmonic approach to analysis works fantastic for old European music, and pretty damn well for jazz too. For rock, it starts to oddly leave out important aspects of the music like rhythm, timbre, the way effects like distortion inform the harmony, vocal delivery, etc. And in the modern era, with all the advances and innovations made in the last 30 years in the now dominant genres of hip hop, pop, and electronic music, harmonic analysis is very poorly equipped to make sense of things in any meaningful way.
One music theorist who is attempting more competent analysis of contemporary music is https://www.youtube.com/c/12tonevideos. I'd love to see more of this.
> We should be asking: what is it that musicians are doing that sounds good? What patterns can we detect in the broad mass of music being made and enjoyed out there in the world?
I would personally add one more leading question: Can we explain music in other ways than by its harmony and chords?
A harmonic approach to analysis works fantastic for old European music, and pretty damn well for jazz too. For rock, it starts to oddly leave out important aspects of the music like rhythm, timbre, the way effects like distortion inform the harmony, vocal delivery, etc. And in the modern era, with all the advances and innovations made in the last 30 years in the now dominant genres of hip hop, pop, and electronic music, harmonic analysis is very poorly equipped to make sense of things in any meaningful way.
One music theorist who is attempting more competent analysis of contemporary music is https://www.youtube.com/c/12tonevideos. I'd love to see more of this.