3 ms·

Is it really the case that teaching music theory is hard? I suppose what is hard is teaching music without using actual music -- which is what these sheets atte

by nandemo 14y ago

Is it really the case that teaching music theory is hard? I suppose what is hard is teaching music without using actual music -- which is what these sheets attempt to do. It's pretty easy to teach what a tuplet is, even without written notation: play all eighth notes over a regular ♩♩♩♩ (that's 4 quarter notes) rhythm, then sixteenth notes, then play triplets. > a lot of the building blocks are arbitrarily weird for historical reasons, and it takes too much meaningless memorization before you can do something as trivial as sight-reading a piece of music you could already pick out by ear 10x faster. That's why I like the Suzuki method. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_method

jtheory 14y ago
I'm thinking mostly of teaching theory via textbook, website, etc. -- but even one on one with a good teacher, very few of them actually manage to make it interesting. Just conveying the material clearly is important. Finding a way for the student to grasp the material while using it, while actually achieving something useful with it, is far more difficult. I studied Suzuki method when I was little; I still remember playing the tune of Twinkle Twinkle to "see you later alligator", but we never touched on music theory beyond the very basics needed to read music notation (and not even much of that). We pretty much memorized everything we played AFAICR. I do agree that it's essential to involve actual music in the instruction, but it needs to go beyond "a 5-tuplet looks like this; here's what it sounds like" -- that's still little more than a dreary list of definitions to memorize. The trick is to engage the student in the music such that they need a name for this next concept so they can talk about it (which is what theory is for, really).

by nandemo 14y ago

jtheory 14y ago

I'm thinking mostly of teaching theory via textbook, website, etc. -- but even one on one with a good teacher, very few of them actually manage to make it interesting. Just conveying the material clearly is important. Finding a way for the student to grasp the material while using it, while actually achieving something useful with it, is far more difficult. I studied Suzuki method when I was little; I still remember playing the tune of Twinkle Twinkle to "see you later alligator", but we never touched on music theory beyond the very basics needed to read music notation (and not even much of that). We pretty much memorized everything we played AFAICR. I do agree that it's essential to involve actual music in the instruction, but it needs to go beyond "a 5-tuplet looks like this; here's what it sounds like" -- that's still little more than a dreary list of definitions to memorize. The trick is to engage the student in the music such that they need a name for this next concept so they can talk about it (which is what theory is for, really).