Hi all and thanks for all your efforts - I've already learned some useful things from this forum.
Quick version: any entry-level music theory books / websites / apps / etc. that don't try to hide mathematical concepts where they come up, and assume only a bare minimum of musical literacy?
Not looking for "the maths of music" - just basic music theory but presented by somebody who "gets" how to explain things to people who know nothing yet about music but enough about maths.
Long version:
My background: I'm in my mid forties, didn't learn any instrument as a child, and I'm now learning from Faber "Adult Piano Adventures" without a teacher, wanting to play classical music. Slow progress at the moment due to only 2 practice sessons of 40 mins per week - I need to increase that. I started 15 months ago, slipped into just learning / playing only Messiaen's "Regards du Pere" instead of actual practice (I know, that's weird and I've ruined my learning process, you're probably right - but it was and is very motivating!). 5 months ago started on the Fabers' book, I'm only 1/3 through still.
I think I would benefit from starting to learn about music theory, but right now I'm doing nothing on that.
I'm a hard science/maths sort of person and I think music theory connects with that well, but my very strong impression from my limited past experience is that many (most?) authors/teachers/learning materials don't do well communicating music theory to people like me: no music background but not scared of maths. From my point of view, musicians write in a very quirky foreign language, which obscures, for musical illiterates like me, what are sometimes relatively simple concepts behind a wall of "the curse of knowledge"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge.
To be clear, I'm happy to eventually learn that foreign language over time, I don't expect music theory to be 100% maths about music, and nor do I want to learn about the maths of music for its own sake. But I do think at my level the "language issue" and perhaps a presumption that "obviously nobody wants to see ANY maths" are potentially major hindrances for me in making some rapid initial and motivating progress, given that I've seen from occasional glimpses that some of the musical content is far easier for me to start to grasp with the help of somebody who has some mathematical background and knows how to talk to other people with that sort of background. In fact I have a strong memory of being put off music as a child by exactly this kind of problem (not the only problem, but certainly one).
Any advice for somebody like me? Books, general advice/tips, suggestions how to stay motivated, online tools, ... whatever you think is relevant.
One note: I'm keen to hear about online things, but to avoid annoyance let me be open up front about one of my peculiarities: I'm also a free (as in freedom) software geek who's keen on decentralisation, and often steer away from many online services (music or otherwise). So I'm actually very keen to hear about such things, but I'm interested much more in what they do, and not so much in simple links to websites or apps that are rather opaque until you sign up - I *might* not sign up, but I think I might well still learn something very useful from hearing about what it is they're doing!
Thanks again