1. politics is the harmonization of individual interests. You don’t want to get killed, I don’t want to get killed; let’s start a state.

This idea can be traced at least as far back as St. Augustine:

But the things which this city desires cannot justly be said to be evil, for it is itself, in its own kind, better than all other human good. For it desires earthly peace for the sake of enjoying earthly goods, and it makes war in order to attain to this peace; since, if it has conquered, and there remains no one to resist it, it enjoys a peace which it had not while there were opposing parties who contested for the enjoyment of those things which were too small to satisfy both.

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Same here, pretty much. The only people who my mind returns when I ask it to list “people talking about the Enlightenment a lot” are:

* Michael Vassar
* Reactionaries, and there it should be noted that most of what I know about them comes via this blog

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It seems that you deny any distinction between “atonal” and “tonal” music, since the former is quantitatively more complex than the latter but not qualitatively different. Perhaps I should have said: “tonal vs. atonal music” is a bad paradigm.

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The links that others have provided should give you an idea, but I’ll make an attempt at a high-level summary. I have two basic complaints:

(1) The purpose of a musical theory is to provide a method of storing and manipulating music in one’s mind. The method for this implied by traditional theory is so inefficient as to be unworkable. (Which is why no one takes traditional theory literally; instead they rely on tacit knowledge — often referred to as “talent” — and tell you that some musical phenomena are outside the scope of music theory!)

(2) Traditional music theory not only obscures but outright denies the continuity between pre-1900 music and post-1900 music. It assumes (and thus promotes) what I call the “discontinuity thesis” — the idea that post-1900 Western art music is so different from the Western art music of previous eras as to effectively constitute a distinct musical tradition (i.e. not in fact “Western art music” at all). I view this idea as very harmful, not least because it is false.

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“Chord progressions” are the bad paradigm; they shouldn’t be confused with tonality. Tonality is central in Westergaard’s theory (indeed he would say that it is what his theory is a theory of! — hence the title of his book, An Introduction to Tonal Theory), and indeed in my current one (which by this point has gotten radical enough to be considered distinct from Westergaard’s, though the relationship is still fairly easily traceable).

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Hmm….I certainly have profound sympathies with that person, although unlike them I have continued to exist well beyond 2009, even into 2013.

I’m curious about the folk music theory that you mention, would you mind elaborating on that?

It’s a mess of incoherent and mutually contradictory beliefs such as:

(1) Music is not made of parts and is created by magical wizards. Wizards discover their powers instantly upon their first random attempts at creation.

(2) Non-wizards can (sometimes) learn to perform music, but not to compose it. However, non-wizards are just as good as wizards at listening, modulo unimportant details.

(3) Music is made out of atoms that have a well-defined property called “pleasing to humans”. To compose music, it suffices to concatenate a string of such atoms.

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