Michael Jackson Was Told “You Don’t Understand Music Theory”—Then He Went to the Board
UCLA music building. Tuesday afternoon, October 1993. The third floor lecture hall held 40 seats. Only 22 were filled, which was exactly how Dr. Marcus Richardson preferred it. Small enrollment meant serious students. Students who could sight-read Bach fugues, dissect Brahms symphonies, and spend 30 minutes debating the nuances of modal interchange without checking their watches.
This was advanced harmonic analysis, a graduate level elective. Not a class you wandered into by accident. Dr. Richardson had been teaching music theory at UCLA for 17 years. 52 years old, PhD in musicology from Yale. He genuinely loved what he did. Loved the architecture of harmony. Loved the moment a student’s face changed when a complex chord progression suddenly made sense.
Loved the feeling of pulling back a curtain on something most people experienced only as feeling and revealing the mathematical skeleton underneath. He also held a belief that he wouldn’t have stated this bluntly in public, but that shaped nearly everything about how he taught. Classical music was simply more sophisticated than popular music.
More complex harmonically. More demanding technically. More worthy of serious academic attention. He wasn’t dismissive about it. He was just certain. That Tuesday, he was teaching harmonic complexity versus simplicity. A unit he’d refined over many years, walking students through examples that ranged from Renaissance polyphony to contemporary jazz.
Demonstrating how chord progressions could be measured, ranked, understood. He’d been talking for about 10 minutes when the door opened. Quietly. The kind of quiet that suggests the person opening it is trying not to disturb anything. ; ; A young man slipped in and took a seat in the back row.
Or at least he appeared young. It was hard to tell. He was wearing baggy cargo pants and oversized UCLA sweatshirt with the hood pulled up. A baseball cap underneath the hood, thick frame glasses, and a medical mask covering the lower half of his face. Flu season was beginning and students sometimes wore masks when they were fighting something off.
Dr. Richardson didn’t think much of it. He paused his lecture. Can I help you? Sorry, I’m late, the young man said, his voice muffled by the mask. I’m auditing. I cleared it with the department yesterday. Dr. Richardson vaguely remembered an email, an audit request, something he’d approved without paying much attention.
Name? Michael. Michael Johnson. All right, Mr. Johnson. Please don’t make a habit of being late. We’re discussing harmonic complexity. Won’t happen again. The young man pulled out a notebook and pen. Dr. Richardson returned to his lecture. As I was saying, he continued, pulling up a score on the projector, a passage from a Chopin nocturne.
Harmonic complexity can be measured several ways. The number of chords in a progression, the frequency of modulation, the use of extended harmonies, the sophistication of voice leading. He walked the class through the Chopin secondary dominance, borrowed chords, chromatic voice leading that moved with the precision of a chess game played at high speed.
The students took careful notes. In the back, Michael was writing in his notebook. Something, though from the front of the room, Dr. Richardson couldn’t see what. “Now contrast that with popular music,” Dr. Richardson said, clicking to his next slide. “I want to be clear. I’m not saying pop music is without value.
It serves its purpose, but harmonically, it operates at a fundamentally different level. Three or four chords repeated, minimal modulation, basic voice leading.” He pulled up a chord chart for a well-known song from the previous decade, one he’d chosen specifically because it illustrated his point cleanly. “Four chords, 1 6 4 5. That’s the entire song.
This is why we can’t analyze pop music with the same depth we analyze classical. There’s simply less material to work with.” A student near the front raised her hand. “Dr. Richardson, couldn’t pop music achieve complexity through other means? Production, rhythm, melody?” “Perhaps,” he conceded, “but we’re discussing harmonic complexity specifically.
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And harmonically, most popular music is quite basic.” He clicked to his next example. “Take Billie Jean by Michael Jackson, ; ; enormously successful song, sold millions of copies globally, but harmonically,” he pulled up the chord structure on the projector, “this might be the simplest chord progression in popular music.
It’s essentially one chord for the entire verse. The chorus adds two more. Three chords total. Minimal movement. A beginning piano student could play this progression. In the back row, Michael’s pen stopped moving. He was very still. “This is what I mean,” Dr. Richardson continued, warming to the point. “Pop music relies on production, on the personality of the performer, on marketing.
It doesn’t require harmonic sophistication because harmonic sophistication isn’t what sells records. And that’s fine. Different art forms have different priorities. But let’s not pretend popular music is harmonically complex. The evidence simply doesn’t support it.” A hand went up in the back row. Dr.
Richardson looked up, mildly surprised. Auditors rarely participated. “Yes, Mr. Johnson.” “I don’t think that progression is simple.” Several students turned to look at the figure in the back row. The mask, the baseball cap under the hood, the thick glasses. “I’m sorry?” “The song you just mentioned, I don’t think it’s harmonically simple.” Dr.
Richardson smiled, the practiced, indulgent smile of someone who has been challenged by students many times and knows how to handle it. “Mr. Johnson, I just showed you the chord progression. Three chords with minimal variation. That’s the definition of harmonic simplicity.” “But you’re only looking at the chord symbols,” Michael said.
“You’re not looking at what’s actually happening in the music.” A few students shifted in their seats. This was bold. Challenging Dr. Richardson directly in front of the class was not something most students did. The chord symbols accurately represent the harmonic structure, Dr. Richardson said, his tone cooling slightly.
That is their purpose. They represent the basic framework, Michael said, but they don’t show the voice leading, the inversions, the way the bassline creates harmonic tension against the chords. The suspended notes that resolve and then resuspend, the way the string arrangement adds passing chords that don’t appear in the basic progression at all.
Dr. Richardson frowned. You’re describing production choices, not harmonic complexity. Production choices create harmonic complexity, Michael said. Especially in that song, the bassline functions as an independent harmonic voice. It’s not playing root notes, it’s moving through its own melodic line that sometimes agrees with the chord above it and sometimes creates deliberate tension against it.
That’s called a walking bassline, Dr. Richardson said. It’s not particularly sophisticated. It’s called counterpoint, Michael said, gently, not aggressively. The correction offered the way you’d offer a glass of water to someone who was thirsty and didn’t realize it. The bass is in counterpoint with the chord progression, which is in counterpoint with the melody, which is in counterpoint with the string arrangement.
You’re analyzing the song as if it’s three chords played on a piano. What it actually is is multiple harmonic layers interacting with each other continuously. The classroom was quiet now. Students who had been half listening were fully listening. Several were writing quickly. Dr. Richardson felt something shift in the room. A subtle redistribution of attention.
The way a room reorients itself when something genuinely unexpected is happening. “Can I explain?” Michael asked. “Explain what?” “Why that song is harmonically complex even though it looks simple on paper.” Dr. Richardson made a show of checking his watch. “We have 5 minutes before the break. Go ahead.” Michael stood up.
He walked to the front of the classroom and Dr. Richardson noticed something. He moved with unusual grace. The ease of someone completely comfortable in their own body. Someone who had spent years learning exactly how to occupy space. “Can I use the board?” “Certainly.” Michael picked up the chalk. He didn’t write chord symbols.
He wrote staff notation. Actual musical notation. Multiple staves. Drawing out the bassline, the chord progression, a simplified version of the melody, and the string parts separately, each on its own staff, aligned vertically so the relationships between them were visible. The handwriting was fast and assured. Someone who had done this 10,000 times.
“Look at measure three,” Michael said, pointing. “The chord symbol says F sharp minor, but the bass plays D sharp, which is the sixth scale degree. That gives you an F sharp minor six chord, which has a completely different harmonic color than a standard F sharp minor triad.” He continued writing. “Meanwhile, the string arrangement holds an A from the previous measure, creating a suspended sound against that D sharp in the bass.
Then the bass descends to C sharp, which is a different inversion again. The melody lands on B, which becomes a fourth against the F sharp, adding tension. The strings move through a passing G sharp that isn’t part of the chord at all. It’s a passing tone. It creates a moment of dissonance that resolves in the next beat.
Several students were standing now, leaning forward to see the board more clearly. “This is all happening in the first four measures,” Michael said. “The chord symbol says F sharp minor, but what’s actually occurring is a constantly shifting harmonic texture. The bass creates one layer, the chords create another, the melody creates another, the strings create another.
All four layers are interacting, agreeing, disagreeing, creating tension, resolving it, even though the underlying chord hasn’t changed.” He stepped back. “Then in the chorus, when the chord finally moves to B major, the reason it feels like release isn’t just the chord change, it’s that all four of those layers, which have been in productive tension with each other for the entire verse, suddenly align.
The bass plays the root, the melody resolves, the strings support rather than create tension. That simultaneous alignment after extended tension is what produces the emotional impact of that moment.” He set the chalk down. “So yes, on paper, three chords. In practice, multiple harmonic voices creating continuous complexity through layering, voice leading, and interaction.
What academic analysis calls simple and what actually generates the harmonic experience are looking at two completely different levels of the same music. The classroom was silent. Dr. Richardson walked slowly to the board. He studied the notation, followed the voice leading from measure to measure, traced the relationships Michael had drawn between the layers.
The analysis was correct. More than correct, it was sophisticated. Graduate level, possibly beyond. The kind of analysis that requires not just theoretical knowledge, but deep practical understanding. The kind that comes from having made the thing, not just having studied it. “Where did you learn this?” Dr. Richardson asked.
“From doing it.” Michael said. “Doing what?” “Writing songs, producing, spending thousands of hours in recording studios working on arrangements.” Dr. Richardson turned from the board. “You’re a producer?” “Sometimes.” “You wrote what you just analyzed?” “Yes.” Dr. Richardson actually laughed. Not unkindly, but with the involuntary quality of someone who has just heard something that doesn’t fit inside their current understanding of the situation.
“Mr. Johnson, I appreciate creative thinking, but let’s not” Michael reached up and removed the mask, then the glasses. Then he pushed back the hood and took off the baseball cap. The classroom erupted. Two students screamed. Not the polite gasp of surprise, but the full-throated scream of people whose nervous systems have just received information they were not prepared for.
Someone dropped a textbook. The sound of it hitting the floor was enormous in the suddenly chaotic room. Standing at the front of the advanced harmonic analysis classroom, chalk dust on his fingers, notation still visible on the board behind him, was Michael Jackson. Dr. Richardson’s face moved through several expressions in rapid succession.
Confusion, disbelief, recognition, shock, and finally something that had no single name, but lived in the neighborhood of embarrassment. “Oh my god,” Dr. Richardson said. “My name isn’t actually Johnson,” Michael said with a slight smile that acknowledged the obvious. “I apologize for the deception, but I wanted to observe the class without” He gestured at the room, now buzzing at a frequency that made coherent conversation difficult.
“This.” It took Dr. Richardson several minutes to restore order. He had to threaten to end the session early before the room settled enough to continue. When it did, the dynamic had changed completely. The professor who had been confidently holding court from the front of the room was now sitting on the edge of his desk, uncertain in a way he hadn’t been 45 minutes earlier.
The auditor who had slipped in late and taken the back row seat was standing at the board, the notation he’d drawn still visible behind him. ; ; “Mr. Jackson,” Dr. Richardson said, and his voice was different. The confidence replaced by something more careful, more searching. “I apologize. I didn’t realize.
” “You didn’t realize I’d be here,” Michael said. “But you also didn’t realize that calling something simple might mean you’re missing what makes it work.” “I was analyzing the harmonic structure.” “You were analyzing the chord symbols,” Michael said gently, the same way he’d said everything. “Which is valid.
That’s one legitimate way to look at music, but it’s not the only way. And when you call something simple based only on chord symbols, you’re missing the production, the arrangement, the layering, the performance choices that create the actual harmonic experience the listener has.” Dr. Richardson was quiet for a moment. “I’ve been teaching that pop music is harmonically simple for 17 years,” he said.
“Some of it is,” Michael said. “Some classical music is simple, too. Folk songs arranged for orchestra, simple hymns. Simplicity isn’t a flaw. It can be exactly right for a particular purpose.” He paused. “But when you assume all popular music is harmonically simple because the chord charts look simple, you’re making the same mistake as someone who says all classical music is boring because they’ve only ever listened to the melody line and ignored everything happening underneath it.
” Dr. Richardson sat with that for a moment. “So, what you’re saying is that I’m teaching music theory divorced from musical reality.” “I’m saying academic analysis and creative practice should inform each other,” Michael said. “Theory without practical experience misses complexity that exists but doesn’t appear on paper.
Practice without theoretical understanding misses structure that would make the work stronger. You need both. The people who have both, who can hear with trained ears and also understand what they’re hearing because they’ve made things themselves, those people see the most. A student raised her hand. Mr.
Jackson, when you’re writing, do you think in theoretical terms? Do you think about counterpoint and voice leading while you’re actually creating? Michael considered this. Not consciously most of the time. When you’ve internalized something deeply enough, when you’ve spent enough time with it, it becomes instinct.
You hear whether something is right. You feel when tension needs to resolve, when a line needs to move somewhere, when a layer is missing something. He paused. But the theoretical understanding is underneath all of it. It shapes the instinct even when you’re not consciously accessing it. That’s why learning theory matters.
Not so you can think about it while you work, but so it becomes part of how you hear. Another student. How long did it take you to develop that kind of instinct? I’ve been singing since I was 4 years old, Michael said. I’ve been performing professionally since I was 10. I’ve been in recording studios for most of my life.
The instinct comes from that accumulation. There’s no shortcut. Dr. Richardson had been listening carefully. Something in his expression had shifted. Not just the embarrassment of having been wrong, but something more productive than embarrassment. The look of a person who has just discovered a door they didn’t know existed.
Can I ask you something? He said. Why audit my class? Why come in person in disguise rather than simply, I don’t know, send a letter? Michael smiled. Because I wanted to understand how you teach. I wanted to see what students learn about music from an academic perspective, not just hear your conclusions, but watch your process.
He paused. And honestly, you teach theory very well. Your explanations are clear. Your examples are well chosen. Your students are engaged and learning. You just need to remember that the chord chart is a map, not the territory. The territory is always more complicated than the map. The rest of that class session became something different from what it had started as.
The lecture format dissolved. What replaced it was a conversation. Michael at the front, students asking questions, Dr. Richardson listening and occasionally asking questions of his own. They talked about harmonic perception, about the difference between what analysis reveals and what listening reveals, about how the same piece of music can be simultaneously simple in structure and complex in effect.
Michael talked about the experience of writing, how certain decisions that look arbitrary from the outside are the result of hours of searching, of trying something and abandoning it and trying something else, of chasing a feeling that exists in the imagination before it exists in any recording. The three chords in that song, Michael said at one point, took a long time to arrive at.
The simplicity wasn’t the starting point. It was the destination. I tried more complex progressions. They all did too much. They pulled attention toward the harmony when the harmony’s job was to create a foundation, not to be the thing you notice. He looked at the board, at the notation he’d drawn. Simple on top, complex underneath, so that the listener doesn’t think about harmony at all.
They just feel what the harmony is doing to them. That’s what I was going for. Dr. Richardson was quiet for a moment. That’s a sophisticated artistic choice, he said. Made for an emotional reason, Michael said, not a theoretical one. But the theory is why it works. After class, Dr. Richardson caught Michael before he left.
Would you be willing to give a guest lecture? He asked. To this class, my other classes. Yes, Michael said, on one condition. Name it. You spend time in a recording studio. Not observing a session that’s been cleaned up for your visit, an actual working session, so you can see how music is built from the inside.
Dr. Richardson agreed. They did both. Over the following year, Michael gave three guest lectures in Dr. Richardson’s courses. Each one demonstrating, with specific musical examples, how popular music creates complexity through means that don’t appear in chord charts, how production is a form of composition, how arrangement is a form of harmony, how the distinctions academics draw between different kinds of music often reflect the limits of the analytical tools being used rather than genuine differences in the music itself.
Dr. Richardson spent a week observing recording sessions, watching musicians and producers make decisions, hearing arguments about whether a particular bass note should be a semitone higher, watching an arranger add a string line that transformed the emotional character of a track without changing a single chord.
He came back changed, not converted. He still loved classical music, still believed deeply in the value of theoretical understanding, ; ; still taught Chopin and Brahms with the same enthusiasm, but changed in a specific and important way. He had seen from the inside the complexity that doesn’t show up on paper, and he could no longer un-know it.
His teaching changed. Not immediately, these things don’t change immediately, but over the months that followed, gradually and then more quickly, the shape of his courses shifted. He stopped using chord charts as the primary evidence for harmonic analysis. He started bringing in full recordings, playing them for students, and asking them to analyze not just the harmonic structure, but the production, the layering, the way all the elements of a recording work together to create a total effect that is more than the sum
of its parts. He started asking students to analyze pop music alongside classical music, not to argue that they were equivalent, but to develop the analytical tools necessary to understand both on their own terms. His courses became more popular. Students who had avoided music theory because it seemed disconnected from the music they actually listened to, found themselves in a a where that connection was being taken seriously.
Students who had come for the classical analysis found their ears opened to kinds of complexity they hadn’t known how to hear before. And Dr. Richardson found his own understanding deepening. He started hearing complexity in places he’d previously passed over. He listened to a piece of recorded music he dismissed as simple and find himself stopping, rewinding, listening again, realizing that what he’d taken for simplicity was actually restraint, a choice, the result of someone who understood exactly what each element of their music
was doing and had decided deliberately to keep the surface clear so the listener could feel the depth. 10 years after that October afternoon, Dr. Marcus Richardson published a book, Beyond the chord chart, harmonic complexity in popular music. It was reviewed well, taught in music programs, used as a text in courses that wanted to think seriously about popular music without either dismissing it or romanticizing it.
In the acknowledgements section near the end of a long list of colleagues and students and fellow scholars, there was a single sentence. To Michael Johnson, who taught me that what we call simple and what creates genius are sometimes the same thing viewed from different angles. What happened in that classroom on a Tuesday afternoon in October 1993 was, on the surface, a story about a famous person revealing himself in an unexpected place and surprising everyone.
But that’s the surface. What was actually happening was something older and more important than celebrity. A man who had spent 17 years teaching music theory had built a framework for understanding music. A sophisticated, carefully developed framework. Genuinely useful, genuinely illuminating, and had made the error that frameworks always invite you to make.
Mistaking the map for the territory. Mistaking the analytical tool for the thing being analyzed. He was using chord symbols to analyze music the way you might use a street map to understand a city. The map is accurate. The map is useful. The map will get you where you’re going. But the map cannot tell you what the city smells like on a summer evening.
Or what it sounds like from the third floor of a specific building. Or what it feels like to have grown up in one particular neighborhood. And then return to it years later. For that, you need to have been there. Michael Jackson had been there. Had been there since he was 4 years old. In the particular way that some people are in music.
Not studying it from the outside, but living inside it. Making things, failing at making things, trying again, developing an understanding that lives in the body and the ear, rather than in the mind alone. When he walked to that board and drew those staves, he wasn’t demonstrating that Dr. Richardson was foolish or wrong.
He was demonstrating that there was a level of the music that the academic tools weren’t reaching. And inviting the professor to come see it. The professor came. That’s the part of the story that matters most. Not the revelation. Not the moment of celebrity. Not the classroom erupting when the mask came off. The part that matters is what Dr.
Richardson did afterward. The willingness to sit with a discomfort of having been confidently wrong for 17 years and choose curiosity over defensiveness. The willingness to spend a week in a recording studio learning. The willingness to rebuild his courses around what he’d learned rather than defending what he’d already built.
That is harder than being right in the first place. That is, in its own way, a form of genius. The lesson that Tuesday afternoon wasn’t really about chord progressions. It wasn’t really about the difference between classical and popular music. It wasn’t even really about Michael Jackson.
It was about the moment you believe you fully understand something. Because that moment, the moment of certainty, the moment when the framework feels complete and the analysis feels finished, is precisely the moment you’ve stopped learning. The moment the map has become so familiar that you’ve forgotten the territory is still out there, more complicated and more alive than anything you’ve drawn.
Dr. Richardson had that moment sitting in that classroom. The moment his confidence cracked open and something new came in. Most people, when that happens, close back up. Defend the framework. Find reasons the challenge doesn’t really apply. Go home and teach the same class the same way the next Tuesday. Dr. Richardson didn’t.
He picked up the chalk, metaphorically, and started drawing something new. That’s what learning actually looks like. Not the comfortable accumulation of things you already believed, the willingness to stand at the board and start over in front of everyone because what you’ve just heard is more true than what you already knew.
Simple on the surface, complex underneath so that the listener doesn’t notice the structure. They just feel what it’s doing to them. That’s what the song does. That’s also, it turns out, what the best teaching does. And on an October afternoon in 1993, a professor and a musician taught each other both.
