Abdication of the Voice

Hail and welcome. Over the month of December I put a great deal of time into working on a new music project, Cyrus Dark and the Symbols of Reverence, which I’ve mentioned a few times on the show and on my Patreon feed. During breaks between tracking parts and mixing songs, I surfed various musician subreddits (ostensibly as a way of keeping my brain in a musical mindset during a break; more likely it was just an excusable means of procrastination). I became fascinated in particular by certain patterns I was noticing in the questions posted on the music theory subreddit, patterns which matched up with sentiments expressed by many of my music students. I’ve been studying music and music theory for decades and worked primarily as a professional musician up until the pandemic, so this is an area in which I consider myself to be an expert, and I spent some time answering questions on the subreddit by way of correcting various misunderstandings about what music theory is and how it works. As I thought about it, I began to develop a theory about the nature of those misunderstandings, and that theory is the subject of today’s episode.

Transcript (with citations and references) available at asatanistreadsthebible.com