Michael Andritsopoulos

General Music Theory Michael Andritsopoulos

General Music Theory is a theoretical tool for musicians, which aims to provide the means for direct control of the expressive needs of composers and performers, regardless of their preferred music genre or their theoretical background. General Music Theory covers the rhetorical possibilities of the musical systems. At the same time, it provides a better insight to musicians for introducing more directly their expressive ideas into any musical content. The model proposed by this theory connects emotions and punctuation marks with basic musical objects and thus explains the structures of older music theories, such as traditional harmony, 20th-century, and other popular music genres, as well as sets the basis for new formations. This is possible because it is based on a new and original idea: that all the expressive means of music were already present in speech. The main argument is that speech, as a means of communication that has been formulated in a natural way, has the imaging power to express, in the best possible way, our emotions and meaning concepts. Most elements of the melodic and harmonic writing of existing music systems are covered and can be explained in-depth through their connection to the model of this book. The code of human expression, that found an outlet through speech, is now an organized musical system that comes to support and overlap the existing ones, as well as to provide new tools and immediacy, through the General Music Theory and our first-ever speech-based music theory model.