| >Oh boy. Music theory, as such, has no "rules," That's a little pedantic. Well music theory in the abstract and academic or niche sense have "no rules", music theory as practiced, has rules, even in pop and rock. (Otherwise it wouldn't be a "theory" - just descriptions of disjoint practices). Keys and scales are already "rules". How a triad chord is formed is another rule. Major/minor/modes. Diatonic chords are a rule. Modulations the huge majority of the time follow certain rules. And so on. Rules might be violated for effect or there might be different spins on them (e.g. blues scales and progressions vs classical music), but there's a foundation of rules that do exist. It seems like we focus on some exceptions, to be seen as "broad minded" and miss the forest for the trees, the forest being that the majority of music consumed, charting, etc, does follow some rules, and they do come from traditional music theory (with some spins, like different progressions or scales being more common after the blues, some things being more or less common, etc.). And yes, there are ethnic music traditions with different rules, but as long as we're talking about Europe/North America, the dominant popular music of Central and Latin America, and the majority of the pop/ballad/etc. business globally, there's a foundational ruleset. Practically, 95% percent of the western population still only (or predominantly) listens to the same kind of music, based on "common practice" harmony - just with the blues and such spices on them on top. At the furthest from they, they might listen to something like atonal hip hop (though even hip hop tunes had long used samples from earlier pop/rock/jazz/funk tunes) or conventional scales and harmony, usually simplified for the genre. |
There are, of course, stylistic norms, and a lot of those norms are shared across lots of kinds of Western music. The thing I'm pushing back against is a misconception I see a lot that people who teach music theory are arbiters of quality in music, and that music that doesn't "follow Bach's rules" is somehow less good than music that does. (That misconception is probably well deserved, because that is how music theory was presented for a long time. I think that has changed, though, and that you'd be hard-pressed to find someone in the field that holds that position these days.)