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> It's amazing how little you actually learn about music when all you're doing is reading sheet music as a kid. I would add that historically, most musicians d

> It's amazing how little you actually learn about music when all you're doing is reading sheet music as a kid. I would add that historically, most musicians did not read music or theorize. They were practitioners who picked up the skill by listening to others, practicing, and improvising. Improvisation was what historically characterized musicianship, not theory, not sight-reading. As the philosophical joke goes: anything you can do I can do meta. Theory is about music; it is not the practice of music. You can learn as much theory as you want, but theory is not practice. Theory can, of course, later sharpen or lead you to certain insights that can shape the music you produce, but practice is what produces facility, familiarity, and understanding, whereas theorizing produces knowledge. Learning theory too early is a pedagogic mistake. By analogy, consider speech. You don't begin to speak by learning grammar first. You begin by practicing. Only later can some knowledge of grammar help, perhaps. The way you become good at speaking is by practicing, and what is speech if not some combination of recitation and improvisation? Reading is entirely incidental and secondary.

mtalantikite 4y ago
Totally agree. The practice is what's important. My teacher won't let you look at sheet music for songs at first, he'll make you listen to Donna Lee 1000 times, sing it and work it out yourself before you check your work with the sheet music. Which reminds me of an anecdote in Hampton Hawes' autobiogrophy [1] where some famous teacher convinces him to take a lesson, after which Hampton writes he didn't really care for all of that theory stuff, he learned from playing with people like Mingus and Charlie Parker. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Hawes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Hawes
- analog31 4y ago
  I'm a jazz musician, and have likewise learned very little theory. On the other hand, there is a lot of attrition in jazz, so watch out for survivor bias. And it depends on what you want to do. Everybody I know who is active in composition and arrangement is fluent in theory. Being able to create original material is super cool and valuable. And there were certainly theory experts among the greats.
  - mtalantikite 4y ago
    Oh absolutely, there's always the anecdotes of Coltrane carrying around Slonimsky's thesaurus, or George Russel claiming Miles used his lydian chromatic concept. But personally I find none of it really makes much sense until I sit down with the theory and practice it on my instrument. Memorizing theory with flash cards, like the OP mentioned, I don't find to be all that helpful.
jdiez17 4y ago
Your last point is one of my long-standing pet-peeves about language teaching methods. It seems the universally accepted practice is to give students mountains of vocabulary to study, grammar rules that make no sense, and a little bit of speaking practice. It is no wonder that native speakers of language X have a characteristic accent when speaking in a different language. When they try to read a word in the foreign language, they default to their native language's pronunciation heuristics. That is completely backwards from how children learn languages. They are exposed to the sounds and intuitively figure out the rest.
- mtalantikite 4y ago
  After years of starting and stopping language learning via classes that take the typical vocab/grammar approach, I've found I'm actually progressing with confidence using Pimsleur and other listening based approaches. It just makes a whole lot more sense to me this way and I wish my middle school/high school foreign language teachers had just handed me this instead (at least at the beginning).
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  If you look at modern teaching getting it's root in nation formation in France/Germany where there was no 'national' language but regional dialects blending one into another it makes more sense. What if the original purpose WAS TO CREATE that 'characteristic accent'?
wwweston 4y ago
> Theory is about music; it is not the practice of music. I'd quibble a bit with this: theory is language to speak of certain experiences and patterns one discovers in the practice of / play with music. Saying this to (perhaps) refine your point rather than contradict it. I quite agree that practice is key and theory was dead for me until one summer as a teen where I noodled freely enough in front of a piano and suddenly noticed "oh, this is what they're talking about." Everything up until you have enough up close and personal experience with the music to notice doesn't matter. And then once you notice it becomes a name you can call it with.
- yadingus 4y ago
  The gist of it is that music theory is descriptive, not prescriptive.
  - fuzzfactor 4y ago
    In the beginning there was no theory. The instrument itself is all you basically need to make music. People spent thousands of years just trying not to hit the wrong notes without knowing the difference between a sharp or a flat. Theory was reductive to begin with, it codified what was already acceptable to qualify as music. With deeper understanding the theory can be built upon creatively on its own, and rewarding composition or improvisation achieved independent of a particular instrument. Even better documentation in many cases. Every instrument is different, but I do think it's a good idea if you're going to get into theory, you do it on an instrument where you have the greatest proficiency beforehand. If you concentrate on the instrument itself primarily, you might spend some time producing relatively unmusical passages, but each instrument only has so many notes. If you play each note every day for some reason or another, you can become more familiar with all of them than otherwise. If you succeed at making it sound better over time, by playing however you like more & more regardless of theory, that would be notable accomplishment. That's more like instrument theory rather than music theory, but if your instrument familiarity is good enough you can do your part and pull your weight along with advanced theorists who can cover the academic areas that are encountered. Once you're groovin' these are the ones to build up your theory about what you're already doing together. Edit: There's also the alternative approach of playing only a limited number of the notes available on any one instrument. Almost theoretically in a statistical way to completely limit the output to that which is proven most acceptable to the mainstream. For instance Irving Berlin only played on the black keys and became the most popular songwriter that way.

mtalantikite 4y ago

Totally agree. The practice is what's important. My teacher won't let you look at sheet music for songs at first, he'll make you listen to Donna Lee 1000 times, sing it and work it out yourself before you check your work with the sheet music. Which reminds me of an anecdote in Hampton Hawes' autobiogrophy [1] where some famous teacher convinces him to take a lesson, after which Hampton writes he didn't really care for all of that theory stuff, he learned from playing with people like Mingus and Charlie Parker. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Hawes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Hawes

analog31 4y ago
I'm a jazz musician, and have likewise learned very little theory. On the other hand, there is a lot of attrition in jazz, so watch out for survivor bias. And it depends on what you want to do. Everybody I know who is active in composition and arrangement is fluent in theory. Being able to create original material is super cool and valuable. And there were certainly theory experts among the greats.
- mtalantikite 4y ago
  Oh absolutely, there's always the anecdotes of Coltrane carrying around Slonimsky's thesaurus, or George Russel claiming Miles used his lydian chromatic concept. But personally I find none of it really makes much sense until I sit down with the theory and practice it on my instrument. Memorizing theory with flash cards, like the OP mentioned, I don't find to be all that helpful.

jdiez17 4y ago

Your last point is one of my long-standing pet-peeves about language teaching methods. It seems the universally accepted practice is to give students mountains of vocabulary to study, grammar rules that make no sense, and a little bit of speaking practice. It is no wonder that native speakers of language X have a characteristic accent when speaking in a different language. When they try to read a word in the foreign language, they default to their native language's pronunciation heuristics. That is completely backwards from how children learn languages. They are exposed to the sounds and intuitively figure out the rest.

mtalantikite 4y ago
After years of starting and stopping language learning via classes that take the typical vocab/grammar approach, I've found I'm actually progressing with confidence using Pimsleur and other listening based approaches. It just makes a whole lot more sense to me this way and I wish my middle school/high school foreign language teachers had just handed me this instead (at least at the beginning).
ROTMetro 4y ago
If you look at modern teaching getting it's root in nation formation in France/Germany where there was no 'national' language but regional dialects blending one into another it makes more sense. What if the original purpose WAS TO CREATE that 'characteristic accent'?

wwweston 4y ago

> Theory is about music; it is not the practice of music. I'd quibble a bit with this: theory is language to speak of certain experiences and patterns one discovers in the practice of / play with music. Saying this to (perhaps) refine your point rather than contradict it. I quite agree that practice is key and theory was dead for me until one summer as a teen where I noodled freely enough in front of a piano and suddenly noticed "oh, this is what they're talking about." Everything up until you have enough up close and personal experience with the music to notice doesn't matter. And then once you notice it becomes a name you can call it with.

yadingus 4y ago
The gist of it is that music theory is descriptive, not prescriptive.
- fuzzfactor 4y ago
  In the beginning there was no theory. The instrument itself is all you basically need to make music. People spent thousands of years just trying not to hit the wrong notes without knowing the difference between a sharp or a flat. Theory was reductive to begin with, it codified what was already acceptable to qualify as music. With deeper understanding the theory can be built upon creatively on its own, and rewarding composition or improvisation achieved independent of a particular instrument. Even better documentation in many cases. Every instrument is different, but I do think it's a good idea if you're going to get into theory, you do it on an instrument where you have the greatest proficiency beforehand. If you concentrate on the instrument itself primarily, you might spend some time producing relatively unmusical passages, but each instrument only has so many notes. If you play each note every day for some reason or another, you can become more familiar with all of them than otherwise. If you succeed at making it sound better over time, by playing however you like more & more regardless of theory, that would be notable accomplishment. That's more like instrument theory rather than music theory, but if your instrument familiarity is good enough you can do your part and pull your weight along with advanced theorists who can cover the academic areas that are encountered. Once you're groovin' these are the ones to build up your theory about what you're already doing together. Edit: There's also the alternative approach of playing only a limited number of the notes available on any one instrument. Almost theoretically in a statistical way to completely limit the output to that which is proven most acceptable to the mainstream. For instance Irving Berlin only played on the black keys and became the most popular songwriter that way.