Theorycrafting: how it matters and doesn't matter

Games and music are two of the very few true universals of human culture -- although they take very different forms and have varying functions, it seems likely that all human societies feature music and games. In English we even use the same word for both activities: "play". While I wouldn't want to push the analogies too far, games have probably influenced my thinking about music more than I'm aware of. Today I realised that games-people have a name for much of what I do on this blog and I wanted to talk about it a bit.

In the parlance, theorycrafters are people who think long and deeply about how a game can be played; this thinking may or may not influence how they actually play it. For some games, the theory can be highly mathematical; for others it's more about identifying an advantageous niche in the prevailing meta, a route through the maze nobody else has spotted yet.

The term "theorycrafting" can come with a snide edge, describing the rarefied speculation of forum-dwelling know-it-alls while elsewhere those who can, do. But in complex games, the great players theorycraft too: they experiment with new possibilites, searching for new and viable ways to do things. This is part of the preparation of chess masters, who hire a team of their peers to work through lines their opponents are likely to go into, searching for a novelty.

So while theorycrafting can be a diversion from serious play, it can also be an important adjunct. And I think it's especially important for those of us who think hard about our creative practice. Not everyone does that and their work is no worse for it. Some of us are just wired this way: we seek to externalise everything in words or diagrams and we worry at things until they yield up their secrets to us even if those secrets don't amount to much. It's a tick, not a virtue, but it's important to those of us who are like that. You can say we're pretentious or we over-think everything if you like. Fine, let us cook.

Brian Ferneyhough is like that, and I really enjoyed this talk in which he appears to keep durdling about doing something with numbers and time and computers and random generators and what-have-you:

It's easy to find this a little absurd and rather adorable, but under his strange practice is a finely-honed intention. That whiteboard of parallel time signatures is his preparation for a world championship match only he really understands and in which he is the only contestant.

One reason for this post is that I wanted to make it very clear that nothing on this blog matters. But looking at Brian up there I do need to frame that a bit. Of course, "music theory" in general doesn't matter to everybody, but this blog in fact contains very little of that. Music theory is a descriptive discipline that looks at a body of music and tries to extract general principles from it. What I do here is much more like theorycrafting.

Picking up the analogy: theory can show you the standard chess openings that you can play if you want to adopt the style of one of the past masters or the great schools of the game. But at a high level, everybody knows all that and it won't win you any games. What you need for that is theorycrafting, which by contrast is always in search of novelties. As a practice it's obsessive, rigid, opinionated and usually riddled with error -- it's a messy journey towards a new way of doing things. If you don't know the things in this blog, it doesn't matter -- nor do I, nor does anyone.

By all this I don't mean to claim any kind of wild innovation in music -- actually it's really the opposite. In the end, theorycrafting is never about grand invention: it's about finding an edge here, a handhold there. When a chess player studies many moves deep into the Alapin Sicilian, an overlooked move may come under scrutiny that seems promising. Perhaps in the future that move will come up and will win the grandmaster a game. Perhaps. But they'll never invent a new game, or even a new rule, because that's not the point. They're looking to make a tiny innovation in the context of a grand history.

I think of a lot of what I do here as tactical: it's about finding things to do here and now. Things that get the first ink on the page or sounds coming out of a speaker; things that help you jump out of a groove that's worn a bit too deep. And I'm aware that the way it's presented here doesn't help with that. I've been working lately on alternative ways to present and continue reworking these ideas and I hope to be able to show that off a bit at some point. Part of that will be presenting this stuff as something other than "music theory" -- something more like "clues towards a future music that might never get made". But it might, maybe by you, so I should get on with that in case you find some little part of it useful...