Music Theory: Double Flats — Right vs Correct

Transcription of the video above

If you’re someone who’s frustrated with music theory, this is where things can start to feel a little wonky. Here we’ve got ourselves a real music dilemma, because this is an A, and this isn’t. It’s a question of context, and it’s one of the breaking points where on the one hand, music theory is used to describe things in meaningful ways, or just make things more complicated than they really need to be.

To understand why this isn’t necessarily an A, we need to start with a scale. Let’s imagine we were alphabetizing your spice rack. I know, who does that? If you were alphabetizing these notes, you’d want one of every type. You wouldn’t want to have two A sections in your spice drawer. A chord is built on a scale, and it uses every other note.

It doesn’t matter if you’re thinking about music theory, when you’re harmonizing, it’s all about feeling the spaces in between those notes. In this case, those spaces are thirds. And the dilemma becomes this. Are we talking about the note names, or are we talking about the distances?

If I’m harmonizing a C, a third above that is an E, and if I’m harmonizing an E, or an E flat, a third above that is a G, or a G flat. And if I’m harmonizing a G, or a G flat, a third above that is a B, or a B flat, or a B double flat, but it’s not an A, because A and G are neighbors. In that context, I’m less concerned with the note name than I am with its relationship to the note that came before it.

But here’s where the music theory snobs get it wrong. The entire freaking point of this exercise we call music theory, it’s to get better, to get better at sharing the information that describes our shared experience. So if I’m on one side of the stage playing a C diminished, and you’re on the other side of the stage playing a C half diminished, and I yell across the stage, hey, jackass, that’s a B double flat!

Look, there’s a big difference between being right and being correct. I think one of the coolest things about music and music theory is that two things can be true at the same time.