What is music theory for? Here are a few possibilities…
- A barrier to weed out insufficiently “studious” musicians from college programs.
- A set of “universal” concepts that all musicians need to understand to be successful.
- A set of tools for more efficiently describing the music we are working with.
- An incomplete shorthand that should sit on top of a deeper non-symbolic understanding of music.
(These aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive!)
I personally interact with music theory most regularly in the third possibility above – as a way of describing the music. It’s more efficient to talk about music with theory than without – assuming that we share a common theoretical framework.
That said, let’s think about the second half of that statement.
the music we are working with
I don’t personally know any musicians that work solely in 18th century music. (I know they exist…) Most musicians cross genres as easily as they streets, comfortably moving from Baroque to post-Romantic, and many are equally comfortable playing or singing in Renaissance and Rock genres.
So if the music we are working with ranges widely across cultures and over four centuries of human creation, I keep coming back to this question.
Why do most music theory surveys spend nearly 50% of their time focusing on chorale-type four-part writing most appropriate for the early 1700s?
Is this the best tool to describe the music we are working with?
It is time for a large-scale overhaul of the traditional music theory curriculum. Students need proportional time spent on all of the musical tools they will use in their musical careers. I love Bachian theory, but it is just as useless in describing a Gershwin song as jazz theory is for describing a Bach fugue.
Let’s fix this.