Music Theory Debate

music theory is not for writing music, it's for understanding it.

You are conflating music theory with musical understanding. These two things are separate. For example, many singers know nothing about musical theory, but if you ask them to sing a song in a different key they will do it flawlessly (if they know how to sing in tune). A guitar player can do the same, even because of the shape of the instrument allows this. Maybe this is harder for an instrument like the piano, but it is not a limitation of the player, it is the instrument that requires you to le

Not to sound dogmatic but I would suggest learning notation also at some point so that you can read the original sheet music. It will open up an entire world of what the composer wanted to express apart from just the notes.

I'm a very good musician and have never thought about it exactly that way before but I have to say, that's a very good explanation and way of thinking about it. I think it's a bit abstract for someone trying to learn to read music, but it's absolutely correct.

I have to agree with TaupeRanger here. This certainly has (almost) nothing to do with playing an instrument. It has little to do with music theory in the traditional sense. This is for the programmer/mathematician side of your brain, primarily. For the musician side, get a little electronic keyboard, poke around at it, and buy an introductory music theory book.

This is the same kind of logic that leads to whiteboard algorithm questions. Music theory and musicianship are not the same thing. There are many many great musicians who only enough to make the sounds they want to make. Sure they might be better if they took the time to learn, but not necessarily.

I'm sorry you had that experience as a kid - it sucks to have your passion drained like that.Playing pieces from sheet music has nothing to do with "exact" replication. It has to do with understanding a work and faithfully interpreting it in your own style. New interpretations of the Hammerklavier and the Paganini caprices come out rather frequently.Once a piece gets to a certain scale, it becomes incredibly hard to do that without musical notation. Picking up each note by l

Some responses might involve analogies with musical notation. Knowing the notation allows you to read the modern literature and also great documents of the past. But it would seem that an awful lot of math could be applied with out having that depth of understanding. Guitar tableture serves as a suitable proxy for guitarists...

A better understanding of music theory?

Does any programmer suffer with music theory as well, just based on the fact that an exact thing could be called in many different ways, depends on its position, function..etc?my brain kind of cannot accept this fact and I struggle with it