It's Just a Theory

"Why she had to go I don't know, she wouldn't say."  Yesterday, the Beatles, 1965

Toward the end of my second year at the Enterprise State Junior College, I was a guest for dinner at at friend's house.   She was not my girlfriend; she was more of a friend-girl.  But I found myself having dinner with her and her parents in their home within walking distance of the college.  I was well into the second of seven years of music school when I would graduate with a master's degree in conducting. I was far enough in to be offended by her father's remark, but then and now I have trouble speaking up to defend myself.

Her father was an engineer, or a doctor, or a lawyer, or a pharmacist.  I forget what. But it was a field of study and practice that is generally respected in society. The conversation about college education had drifted into which majors are the most and least useful.  Her father had no idea about my major and said, "Take music, for example, that is the most useless degree possible, I can't believe that people go to school for that many  years to study music. How hard can it be?"  I just smiled, kept drinking my sweet tea and let it go.

This morning on the radio I heard "Yesterday". Paul McCartney wrote the song, but it is attributed to McCartney-Lennon. McCartney says that the entire melody came to him in a dream. It has been voted as the best pop song of all time by Rolling Stone and the best song of the 20th century by the BBC. The DJ commented on the key that McCartney chose for the song,  the key of F, and then about the  chord structure of the vocals and string quartet accompaniment.  He named a few of the chords by their numerical names. I understood what he was talking about. When most people cross the Golden Gate bridge, they're thinking about where they're going on not about  the bridge itself. When a structural engineer crosses it, he appreciates it on another level. They all cross the Golden Gate Bridge.

My good friend's father had no idea what he was talking about. A few years ago I read "Of all symbol systems,music is the most complex symbol system in the world".  When you consider the thousands of symbol systems in language, science and mathematics, that is quite a claim. Math alone includes the systems of arithmetic, algebra, geometry (plain and solid), trigonometry, calculus, differential equations and more. Considering all of that, I don't know that the statement is correct, but I won't argue with it either. With a multitude of other music classes, I passed six semesters of music theory. Starting with chord inversions on  the first day at ESJC, we were into the "quantum mechanics" of it on the last. But I can tell you that it was as complicated and as beautiful as the music itself.

Without trying to explain many of the particulars,  in all tonal music the melodies and harmonies you hear form chords. Looking at the composition on paper each chord spelled vertically from the bottom of the bass clef to the top of the treble clef  has a numerical name. And for the most part each "passing tone" between those chords has a name. These "non-harmonic tones" (because they don't belong in the chord) include  passing tones, neighboring tones, escape tones, suspensions and several more. Their name depends on whether that note is approaching a chord or leaving a chord and other musical factors. I associate this somehow with quarks in quantum physics. Quarks, exponentially smaller than the atom itself,  include up/down ,charm/strange and top/bottom. In an advanced theory class at Samford  University, I had an exam to name the "passing tones" the professor had circled on a page of a Bach fugue (fugue is for another lesson).  I made  the only A in the class.  Well, it was 100. But who's keeping score? Nobody but me, I'm sure.

So how useful is all this music theory to me today?  About as useful as organic chemistry is to a pharmacist day to day as she is filling an antibiotic  prescription for a urinary tract infection or medicine for the  flu. The chemistry is in the pill, but as far as the pharmacist is concerned, she just needs to fill the prescription correctly  and put a label on the container. This is not to minimize the importance of that. With the names of drugs today, "filling the prescription correctly" is a feat in itself.  It's important that we studied the minutia of our respective fields; it's not all that important that we remember any of it.

So are the symbols of music from a symbol system more complex than organic chemistry? You explain to me a first and second inversion. These inversions from the root chord, the tonic chord, involve a 5/3 chord a 6/3 chord and  a  6/4 chord. Understand that and we'll talk about  which system is most complex.  And we studied that within the first thirty minutes of that first day of theory at ESJC.

So what's my point? My point is that I don't think I was two-timing on my girlfriend. Although my friend-girl did kiss me once.  Honest, I didn't kiss her; she kissed me.  It can happen. She died about ten years ago of kidney failure. I don't remember much of anything about "passing tones" but I remember my friend. And I remember that dinner in 1973 and  what her father said.

"Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play. Now I need a place to hide away. I believe in yesterday." I write that because my junior college girlfriend reads most of this stuff.