Before you learn how to craft it, the experience of listening to music is nearly entirely emotional. Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” feels fist-pumpingly badass. Pavement’s “Stop Breathin” feels ineffably sad. Ginuwine’s “Pony” feels pants-tighteningly horny. 

When I was little, my parents told me I would cry to The Beatles’ “Yesterday” and Kermit the Frog’s “Bein’ Green.” Don’t get me wrong, I was a pussy baby, but, man, those songs seem calculated to bring on the waterworks. 

The more you learn about music, the more you discover that there’s plenty of calculation at play, for the electric mush in our heads seems either culturally or biologically wired to respond to certain sounds. 

Say you play a C. If the next note you play is an E, it’ll sound happy. If it’s an Eb, it’ll sound sad. The interval between the notes determines how your brain responds to them. 

Granted, most musicians never actually dig into the science of why sounds make us feel a certain way, just like most computer programmers never actually develop their own programming languages. You don’t need to know how something works to use it, but it helps to have a guide. 

Enter music theory. 

The study of music theory goes back to antiquity and encompasses huge subjects like what constitutes music, musicological principles, and, even, in Plato’s case, the morality of music itself. 

Rock musicians typically only engage in theory on a rudimentary level, as in literally the  rudiments themselves: notation, key and time signature, you know, scales. While an anti-egghead contingent of rock musicians shy away from learning even the basics, almost every musician I know who plays with other people has either an academic or intuitive understanding of the basic elements of music.

Quite frankly, the fastest way to teach a band a new song – as in a song that exists only in your head – is to use theory as a shorthand to grease the learning process along. Rock musicians typically don’t chop it up about theory in the way of, say, Johannes Brahms; they use it as a shorthand. (Some will admit to having a favorite mode, however. Phrygian.)

The anti-theory crowd typically argues that learning theory hampers, rather than inspires, their creativity. This is asinine. This is like saying that going on a road trip is easier without a map. You don’t need to follow the map, but it’s always there in case you get lost. Personally, once I took the plunge and dedicated myself to learning the rudiments, I finished writing a whole clutch of material that I had stalled out on when I was writing by “feel” alone. 

But I’m not saying that learning the fundamentals of playing music doesn’t change your relationship to listening to it. Because…it does kinda remove some of the magic. You’re, after all, now the magician, not just part of their audience. 

Think of a filmmaker. To most viewers, a movie is an immersive story. Visuals and sound combine to create an emotional or visceral experience. To someone who makes movies for a living, a movie is still that, but they also infer all the work that went on literally behind the scenes to make the story possible. They recognize the editing, the visual effects, the mistakes, where the budget ran out. They see the scaffolding of the art. 

It’s the same way with music. Once you become familiar with the scaffolding, suddenly “Yesterday,” for instance, isn’t such a mystery. In addition to Paul McCartney’s lyrics about longing for a past that used to be better than today, the music structurally evokes complicated emotions that are neither happy nor entirely sad. 

“Yesterday”’s verse progression has two minor chords, which is at least one more minor chord than most verses. It opens with the tonic chord (an F) before immediately switching to its relative minor (Dm), implying wistfulness. And then the verses’ rising melody is immediately counteracted by a descending chromatic line within the progression (aided by a secondary dominant, an A7) which pulls the song back down. 

So much of music is just elevator up or elevator down. McCartney does both one after the other.  

And then there’s the arrangement, with McCartney’s spare acoustic guitar and solo voice aided by a string quartet playing subtly enough to keep from overwhelming the song. The strings could’ve turned the song into a schmaltzy hash by overplaying, but they perfectly imply a mood without insisting on it. 

Arguably the musical scaffolding is so strong that it surpasses the lyrics. Shortly before his death, John Lennon said, “Although the lyrics don’t resolve into any sense, they’re good lines…but if you read the whole song, it doesn’t say anything.” 

Not that that means anything. “Yesterday”‘s royalties make it the fourth most profitable song of all time, behind perennials like “White Christmas” and “Happy Birthday.” And it made a pussy baby like me cry. Not anymore though. The magic is gone; I’m a jaded music theory nerd.

“Bein’ Green” still gets me leaking like a broken faucet, though.