Hey, man, first, I'm not trying to stereotype or "school" anybody. I've learned tons of stuff about synthesis from everybody in this forum including you Blank, I just come to the table from a jazz and classical pianist's background and I feel like the discussion of harmonic theory is an appropriate place for me to contribute to this archive.
Theory is really an elusive beast...it means a million things to half a milion people. Its especially complicated because it keeps changing, and oftentimes people try to pigeonhole it into too small of a subject.
When I say "traditional" theory, I am referring specifically to what is called Functional Harmony. This is the basis of the classical era of concert music, cats like Mozart and Haydn, Handel, etc. It's called functional harmony because everything has a function and intervals between inner voices, etc., follow certain rules, many of which still apply today.
However, functional harmony started evolving, first with Beethoven, and later with the Romantic composers, into a situation where the functions of each chord become more vague and less important than the actual sound of the chord. This is what I'm referring to as "color", in the sense that Beethoven often chose altered chords and (at the time) unconventional chord structures purely because of how they sounded. This is fundamentally different than how composers in Mozart's etc. time chose chord structures, as they were most interested in navigating key centers with functional chord formulas.
At the turn of the 20th century Debussy made a huge splash in this direction when he used chords that sometimes had absolutely no function, changing the conception of what a chord was! He would write entire works in the whole tone scale, in the modes generated by the functional major and minor scales, etc. This is called pandiatonicism (in other words, each note of a scale now has equal weight and function) and led up to the concept of modalism, as presented by Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Billy Strayhorne, Coltrane, etc. Dizzy Gillespie even said that the harmonic underpinning of bebop (which is the beginning of modern jazz) was based on the ideas of Ravel and Debussy.
In modal harmony (the vast majority of electronic music employs modal harmony in some form), there is a direct correlation between chords and modal scales. For example, Dmin11 directly refers to the D dorian scale, Amin6 correlates with the Aeolian scale, etc. Now, I don't mean to say that the intervals are unimportant, as the internal intervals of a voicing totally determine what it is going to sound like. Rather, this type of harmony totally broke the dependence of the interval structures from the chord changes. Sure, certain notes need to be present to outline the chord (jazz players call these "guide tones"). But because every chord is also an entire scale or "pitch set", every pitch has equal musical weight and the intervals can be chosen by the player or composer (or producer!) without changing the chord/mode. This is quite different from a purely functional look at harmony!
Anyways, this is already far too long and for that I apologize. I hope that this makes some sense though, because theory to me is just a blanket term like "techno" or "hip hop."
peace
Drew
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