Issues on theory.
1)	The meaning of theory: Theory as word comes from Ancient Greece with the combination of the words "Theo - Ro". Theos is God and Ro is used as a component for all the words that have the meaning of sight. Theory literally means "Seeing with the mind". The mind interprets the world through abstraction and thinks by processing ideas. Of course we would have to wait till Plato defines the word "idea" inside his philosophical concept, but "Theory" itself was always a living issue for every human action or world observation. Music would not escape theory of course. The theoretical approach on music is neither stale nor coercive as bad education tends to suggest. It is a more abstract approach of music as it would be on geometry or mathematics. Two cows and two cows make four of them, right? Mathematics though define the calculation actions between numbers, producing an abstract logic that does not have to be justified by cows, dogs or any real object any more. Music theory is not far from this. When Music needs to be defined by structuring small ideas to produce bigger ones, then it resembles much the human language, therefore different approaches to music are created: System, Harmony, Morphology etc.
2)	Elements of a musical system and its theory are the simplest structures that derive from the raw "note pool" that a system uses. In modern theory, time intervals scales and chords are elements, while the scale-chord relation (or the scale-interval relation) are more complicated issues. Back in the Modal System era, the chord was not an element because a 3-4 note structure was not an autonomous entity. Intervals were of
3)	"What" and "How" differ a lot. Remember my Linux pages? HelpMe is an introduction for terminal commands, while ConsoleMe focuses on the terminal itself. In other words, helpme tells what to write in the terminal, consoleme tells how to use the terminal. If we do not know the "how" , then "what" is not going to lead us too far. If we do not know the "what", then "how" is just another rhetorical question. The "what" in music is what we call "Theory": Material, primary organization, structures, relations between structures (intervals to scales), combinations etc. "How" ,"when", "why", are questions answered by different approaches: Harmony, History, Morphology, and like the small above example "what and how about the terminal", theory itself is a primary tool for approaching music, but it is not the ultimate one by any means. In many musical activities, the "what" is merely "music reading" and great focus is on "how" or "when" music issues. But actions like composition or improvization need a greater focus in music theory, and this focus is what I will try to keep in my pages.
4)	Theory always opens roads and never closes them. Theory does not "forbid". Theory does not apply rules. Consider theory that tries to do that as bad. There are other approaches that handle laws, rules and exceptions, or historical knowledge. If theory messes with these issues, then loses power and makes the whole music learning obscure.
5)	Theory is one if the material is one. All music genres or styles that derive from the Western European Music have the same theory. Major branches like Classical Music, Jazz, Rock & Roll, Ethnic & so on, do not have different theories, as they all share the same material. They may have different harmony morphology or history but as theory, it's the same. This means also the opposite. Byzantine music cannot be approached using western scale tuning and note naming, pentagram and/or key signatures, because different material needs different theory from bottom up.
6)	Theoretical issues in these pages are related only to Western Music and all genres that derive. The fact that Pentatonics will be mentioned as scales, does not mean that you can understand or create Chinese traditional music.
7)	The innovation of today becomes the procedure of tomorrow. While analyzing the atonal piece's Original, Inverted (upside down) Retrograde (last to first) and Inverted Retrograde 12 note idea, let's not forget that this procedure was first invented back in the 14th century, in Renaissance, for the purpose of building up the central idea inside the polyphony principles that existed back then. Webern, who was doing an essay for that era, introduced this technique to Schoenberg and from then, both (and later others) organized free Atonality using this more specific procedure as a method. This is relevant to Jazz also. The so-called "lick" is described in Mark Levine's "The Jazz Theory Book" as: "An improvised phrase that has entered the everyday language of jazz, often used descriptively, as in 'a Joe Henderson lick' ". So, in all cases, the new idea, if strong, enters theory principles and provides new roads to make music. Theory is not static, and by all means, not conservative. If the theory we receive is not radical, then something is wrong either with us that hear it, or the person that tells it.