Comment by stackghost
12 hours ago
> I come from the “music theory makes a lot more sense once one understands that 2:1, 3:2, 4:3 sound really whole and good to the human ear, 5:4 has a little more tension, and 6:5 has even more tension” school of thought
Ah, well, that makes sense. I come from the "music theory is a quintessentially rigid, British-Schoolroom-coded subject that emphasizes rote memorization over actual understanding" school of thought. The musical equivalent to Americans requiring their children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance before they can even understand what the words mean.
The student seeking to build their understanding asks: why is the order of sharps FCGDAEB? Why is the mode with a sharp 4th note the Lydian mode?
Music theory responds: Because fuck you, that's why.
Some subjects are hard. Music notation is mathematical notation that is optimized for ease of consumption by notation experts. It is not optimized for learning.
Same with many activities. Pedagogy and real-world use are different goals. Result is a confusing and horrible learning curve.
Indeed, in the typical progression, a music student is a fluent reader by the time they take a theory course. Reading was probably part of their entrance audition.
Maybe their needs to be a “music theory for engineers” like we have “physics for poets.”
My background is a field most would consider "hard", so I'm no stranger to jargon or dense notation optimized for real-world use. So, I don't buy the excuse that you can't have both good pedagogy and usable notation.
Some people are okay with being told "memorize this list of arbitrary factoids" and there's nothing wrong with that, I'm just not one of those people who can pretend that that's good pedagogy.
Even more, my experience as a person raised by and sometimes married to professional music pedegogs and who plays in a lot of professional situations is that the "theory" itself really isn't that hard when we understand the praxis.
I don't think rote memorization is super useful for me as a player- I've heard a lot of analysis that sounds "accurate" but often it doesn't follow my own thoughts and understandings.
If folks are playing, that raises questions about "why this here" and it's nice to have vocabulary for to understand. But I see a lot of folks (there are several in this thread) who think that is a bit backwards- that somehow folks could start with an abstract rule set and learn much. If that's the view on what is happening then I agree that "teaching theory is impossibly hard".
But if learning to play comes before the theory about why we play what we play the situation is a lot easier.
Almost all the theory I have comes from applying the stuff from "theory" books to what I do.
I learned what a secondary dominant sounds like by learning I should stay in an A chord instead of an Am in the turn around in G major blues songs long before I got the concept of what that C# might do to the local tonicity of the tune from whatever theory book.
And I think that's a reasonable way to learn: start playing whatever, try to pick up something you can read for (I read double bass and clarinet pretty well) take up a lot of piano (weather you read it or not), play a bunch with musicians, and eventually the arbitrary facts about your practice sort themselves out.