Music theory names both practice tools and academic science
Music theory maps frameworks for how music works—from the rudiments needed to read a score, to scholars' ideas across history, to the search for general principles. Its oldest written traces are Mesopotamian clay tablets listing intervals and tunings from before 1500 BCE.
The Oxford Companion to Music identifies three linked meanings: notation basics such as key and time signatures, the history of scholarly ideas about music since antiquity, and a branch of musicology that hunts for general principles. That last kind differs from analysis by starting with the raw materials of music rather than a single work. Some now define music broadly enough to include any sound, silence among them, though medieval universities taught music in the Quadrivium as abstract proportion, far from actual playing, and that study later underpinned tuning systems.
Theory also lives in practice. Prehistoric instruments hint at the ideas of their makers, and oral traditions carry theory as surely as treatises do. Guido Adler, a founder of musicology in the late nineteenth century, argued that measuring and comparing pitches began together with music itself, implying that every musical culture has a theory. Today the field covers tuning, scales, consonance and rhythm alongside orchestration, ornament, improvisation and electronic sound, and a tenure-track theorist in North America usually needs an MA or PhD.
Scholar Sam Mirelman dates the earliest Sumerian and Akkadian music texts to before 1500 BCE, a thousand years ahead of comparable thought elsewhere, using terms that stayed current for over a millennium. Chinese theory is built on the numbers twelve, five and eight: twelve pitches, a five-note scale and eight instrument classes sorted by material, from metal and stone to gourd and wood. A text from about 238 BCE tells of twelve pitch pipes cut to match six notes each from a male and a female phoenix.
The Confucian Record of Music framed music morally, while Laozi claimed the greatest music is soundless. In India the Vedas give early testimony but no theory; the Natya Shastra, dated between 200 BCE and 200 CE, analyses intervals, scales, consonance and melodic types.
Source: Music theory
