It's a fun webpage about a programmer dipping their toes in the very most basic elements of music and documenting some of their current understanding.Imagine I wrote an article called "Programming for musicians" that was mostly about how to turn your computer on and install homebrew[1] and finished by showing you step by step how to cut and paste "hello world" in javascript from stack overflow. You might rightly say that while "programming-adjacent" the article didn't really address programming.

Here[2] Is the syllabus for ABRSM Grades 1-5 music theory. So this is super-basic music theory of the level that you couldn't really expect to pass high school music without knowing. I've picked associated board because this is the most generic music theory syllabus possible, and grade 5 is very basic. If you were actually studying music you'd go way way beyond this.

To a first approximation none of this is in the article. It also doesn't have any more advanced topics (functional harmony, orchestration, voice leading, transposition, key/scale relationships, advanced rhythmic concepts etc). That's why I say the article isn't really music theory.

And then for completeness, when I say that what is music theory is wildly misleading I'm talking about things like "chords are notes stacked in thirds". There's so much wrong about about this it's hard to even start, but for starters it's an if and only if when it really shouldn't be. Notes stacked in thirds are chords, but there are a whole heck of a lot of chords that aren't stacked in thirds. It's like if I said "even numbers are 4 and 6". It's like sure, but there's more to it than that.

[1] without mentioning that this was only needed if you were using a mac

[2] https://www.abrsm.org/sites/default/files/2023-09/music-theo...

> You say that the article isn't music theory but don't bother to say why.

His response sounded kind of gatekeep-y to me. Kind of like an academic with theoretical knowledge, but no practical experience.

Many great musicians never learned proper music theory. Innovation comes from outside, not from inside the establishment.

I think what he means as music theory is the next step after what this (blatantly AI-written, but passable) article talks about. This is the part that you take for granted, but it certainly is music theory in the same way that Peano's axioms are number theory even though you don't use them explicitly.