Why I Teach Musical Literacy

I try to address pertinent areas of music theory musical literacy throughout my teaching – whether private, academic, or ensemble.

Here’s why.

Mastering musical literacy makes everything else you’re doing work more efficiently. It’s the grease on the axle that keeps you moving swiftly.

The point of musical literacy is to facilitate you in the creation or performance of music. That’s it.

My understanding of melody, rhythm, harmony and form help me because I can recognize structures in each new piece of music I interact with. I use my literacy to recognize familiar components, and then to interpret, learn, and perform them more quickly and more musically.

That’s it. That’s the point of musical literacy. Without literacy, each new piece I started to learn would be utterly foreign. It would be like trying to read poems, but each poem was in a new language that I had to translate first before I could interpret it. That would be a hard way to try to enjoy poetry.

Music theory Musical literacy gets a bad rap as a collection of abstract topics that bear little relation to the music we trying to perform. That couldn’t be further from the truth – when well-introduced and made pertinent rather than lofty, the musical literacy topics we address should make every piece we ever touch afterwards easier to work with.