[vintermann]

Saying music theory has no rules and is purely descriptive, is like saying grammar has no rules and is purely descriptive. These days grammarians have sensibly decided to be descriptive only, but there have been a hell of a lot of prescriptive grammar books over the years.

[seanhunter]

Arnold Schoenberg in Theory of Harmony said "There are no rules of music, only rules of style".

[coldtea]

Well, most popular music follows a few styles. That's not just "popular" as in "top 10". It's popular as in "top 10000".

So, if you want to write music in those styles (say, be a rock band, or a country songwriter, or a German schlager composer, or a fusion jazz player, or a funk-meister), and if you want people to enjoy it and/or buy it, you try to follow those styles too.

[seanhunter]

That's precisely the point he was making. If you want to understand music and make good music it's important to understand these stylistic conventions. If you deeply understand them you can understand the situations in which they do and don't apply and figure out ways to achieve the result you want.

Bach didn't invent the rules of the contrapuntal Baroque style any more than he invented the "rules of music theory". Which is what the actual FA is saying. However, Bach is a particularly good example of this style and so for a long time people used to study chorale harmonizations in particular and even in my music study I was taught chorale harmonization in the style of Bach. When you're taught this you are taught lots of rules (eg "avoid parallel 5ths") which help to achieve pleasing counterpoint but of course when you look in the Bach chorale canon you can find instances where he violates all of these rules.

[coldtea]

>Bach didn't invent the rules of the contrapuntal Baroque style any more than he invented the "rules of music theory". Which is what the actual FA is saying.

I know that, and I agree with the actual FA.

Just not with the comment that there are no "rules of music", which even if pedantically true (obviously, there are microtonal and different harmonic ethnical traditions, there are western niches like noisecore or musique concrete, there is contemporary classical and atonal music, and so on), it falls flat when it comes to the huge majority of music as the audience knows it, and especially western audiences (which the article is addressed at).

Heck, not just in the west but also in Europe, Latin and Central America, Japan, Korea, Chinese pop, etc. follows the same set of foundational rules (12 note scales, major and minor keys plus a dozen variations, modes, triads, and so on). Heck, even A4=440 has been pretty much standard for decades...

[vintermann]

Call it rules of style, then. There have been plenty of prescriptive rules of style, old Arnold got (in)famous for coming up with one.

The point is, maybe we should stick to being descriptive, but throughout history we certainly haven't.