Ahh, let me get my chin-stroke on here..

I think Stravinsky actually was PIVOTAL in establishing the possibilities of the dance forms that our music tends to adhere to. If you check out the Rite of Spring, or any piece from his mid-early period, you should notice that the rhythms are generally repetitive and the part-writing is block-like in nature. In other words, 4-to-the-floor kicks and instrumental loops. This is a large generalization, but one should be able to hear the similarities given a couple listenings.

One really interesting thing to consider though is Ravel's "Bolero." This is WITHOUT QUESTION, the first western piece of Electronic/Dance music with regard to form. This piece is a 15-20 minute constant repetition of the same parts with gradually building intensity as more and more parts are layered on.

I'm not saying that Juan Atkins and Derrick Mary, et cetera, were listening to Ravel and Stravinsky in the early 80s, but... I certainly believe that these two composers laid some serious groundwork for general approaches to rhythm and structure that would eventually give way to our beloved music (with a few other important influences thrown in of course).

That said, Schoenberg's electronic music would be way fucking cool though. Autechre perhaps?

I definitely see your point, but disagree in this context. If you see post-tonal thought as a response to tonal thought, then you're right. I don't. I see it as a whole new system. So did Schoenberg. If we were talking about training new musicians or composers with regard to traditional instruments, I think tonal theory is certainly necessary. Furthermore, if we were talking about musicians interested in trance (or insert melodic-based genre here), tonal theory would also be useful. But techno, IDM, minimal? Not so much.

I would say (very generally) that our musical vocabulary with regard to these genres actually utilizes sound manipulation technique (a la musique concrete and stockhausen/tape origins) more than pitch technique anyway. But with regard to pitches, I have never heard a I-IV-V progression in a techno track. That pretty much cancels everything I learned in diatonic theory (with all the nice inherent subtleties therein). Nor have I heard much harmonic modulation (the majority of what I learned in Chromatic Theory).

In fact, I am not sure if I've EVER heard a chord progression per-se in a techno track. Certainly not one worth analytical examination. Sure a track I finished the other day had a nice rhodes solo in the middle, and I was certainly playing chords in the left hand. This is actually an interesting example, because on the one hand, it's the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of chord progressions in techno, yet on the other, I was not playing chords with any tonal grounding. I would say they were all loosely based on the octatonic pitch collection. The moment I began to learn post-tonal theory, is the moment I NEVER looked back at tonal thought. It has now been practically defunct (in my opinion) for about 100 years. (yeah, i know bands still use it..)

Furthermore, I think we do electronic music a great disjustice by trying to apply old theoretical conventions to its practice. I believe that NEW forms with NEW instruments should engender their own NEW theoretical aesthetic. That's pretty much what happened in Germany in the 60s with Stockhausen. Take a look at the score of Kontakte. It looks pretty fucking close to the arrangement windows of modern sequencers when we're done with a track. Stockhausen realized the need for a new notational system when he was confronted with the increasing possibilities of his instrumental capacity (through electronics). Schoenberg would beat this point like a deadhorse in his writings. (Of course he was hypocrite, because he wrote serial pieces in baroque forms. But he's allowed, I love him all the same..)

I'm rambling..

The point is, unless you want to play major and minor chords and write inappropriate and unideomatic tunes, don't bother with diatonic/chromatic theory. If you're never going to use a C major chord, why bother learning that it is made up of C-E-G and it relates to this other major chord and that. Just go for the jugular and learn that this pitch collection represents 0-4-7 (equivalent of C-E-G) and here are its transformational possibilities..

This is not to say that you can just leap straight in. Yeah, you need to know what the notes are and other basic tenants of musical theory. Furthermore, I would still wholeheartedly reccomend studies in counterpoint (the tendencies of multiple voices in motion). But honestly, wasting 2 semesters (or a year) on defunct theory you'll never use is stupid. If the text or teacher you were studying made references to tonal music, then this would be a different situation. Straus' book, however, leaps straight in and BRAVELY attempts to build a NEW system with a NEW vocabulary straight from the start.

To take myself as an example, I HONESTLY don't believe I would have had any additional difficulties studying post-tonal theory had I not learned diatonic/chromatic first. Though I definitely would not have known what the fuck I was doing if I had not had basic music theory and counterpoint. I probably would have been writing much better music sooner rather than being embarrassed when presenting my silly tonal pieces in composer's colloquium meetings for my first year of study.

In the end, theory is a means to an end. Only morons sit down and write "c major followed by f major, etc."- or "(0-4-7), (5-9-0), etc" for that matter. I believe that post-tonal theory allows you to start seeing pitches as free units and to see them "unconventionally" in new and exciting ways. Unless you would like to continue writing redundant music that we've already been making for hundreds of years, you need to find an aesthetic that reaches beyond the mold. To my knowledge, post-tonal theory is the best we have at the moment for grounding yourself in preperation for such an exploration. Probably some newer, better systems are out there. But the point is: you have to stretch it.

Strauss ain't bad. Don't sweat the major/minor chords. Let Mozart take care of that!

(ps I love Mozart)

(and all of you for having this discussion..)