December 1st, 2017

Mark Benis, a video game and film score composer, studied music in college and is now in graduate school for composition at NYU. He uses theory to maintain a creative flexibility in his character themes: “Say you’re writing for TV and don’t necessarily know what’s going to happen later in the series. You write a theme for a character, say they’re a very headstrong, aggressive person. If your main motive is big Taiko drums and guttural men’s choir, but they have a very tender scene later in the series, you’ve kind of written yourself into a hole. If you write a motive that can imply all sorts of harmony, you have more possibilities.”

Theory also helps him translate a director’s instructions into musical notes: “If we’re talking about a client-composer situation, it’s the composer’s job to interpret what your client says into musical language. When they say, ‘I want this to be darker,’ does that mean they want the same melody but just want you to orchestrate it for cellos and double basses? It’s interpreting their words into theory and seeing if you can accomplish the changes they want.”

I next talked to Cory Broad, who plays acoustic guitar with the band called ., or One Dot. Cory’s been playing and writing pop and rock songs for 15 years, and this September at Brown University, he decided to take a class in music theory.

When Cory composes with his band members, theory is never a big part of the composition process. It’s more about the vibe of the music, and less about harmonic complexity: “I’ll write songs [with chords] I-IV-V, playing everything on the guitar with parallel fifths and octaves, and I’m pretty chill with that. It’s not very theoretically complicated or particularly harmonically interesting. I’m more concerned about the words and the emotions and the performance.”

Cory sees theory as a tool to use when he needs it, and ignore when he doesn’t: “Whenever I pick up more theory I get concerned that I’m going to lose some kind of naiveté or something that I wanted to maintain in writing or doing music. But I don’t think that fear has been true. Having the theory is helpful sometimes, and then it’s pretty easy to just ignore when I don’t want to use it. If I need to think through something, then I’ll try to turn on some of the random theory stuff I have floating around.”

Whether you’re writing scores for films or playing and recording for yourself, music theory can be a great tool for tackling technical problems. But if you want to just zone out and groove, diving headfirst into a deep analysis might not be necessary. How do you use music theory, if at all, in your music?