Bruce K H Kau wrote:
At 04:26 PM 2/10/2005 +0100, Daniel Wolf wrote:
There is a tremendous fear of music theory out there, with many musicians having the sense that music-theoretic discourse "kills the magic" of music making.
*sigh* I have run into more than my share of people who even say that learning to read music (music theory at its most basic level) is not important to their being able to make music. Trouble is, these people often have better chops that I do (not that hard to achieve).
Chops will get you gigs, but reading well will git you MORE gigs. And reading ANYTHING will get you a lot of gigs.
As a generalization I would have to agree with you, but that ignores the fact that in a lot of styles, some of them very commercially viable, your statement is NOT true. I don't know what the scene is like nowadays, but Anita Kerr said in her book that there were two kinds of backup vocal sessions in the Nashville scene, the reading sessions (for whom your statement is very true) and the head sessions, for singers who had the equally valuable ability to sing harmonies by ear, even though they didn't have the vocabulary to analyze what they were singing.
And of course there are non-Western cultures in which music is never notated, and the very thought of tying someone down to a fixed and unchangeable part is not just foreign but ludicrous. And I don't even need to do more than mention jazz, which has finally made it as an academic study and lost sponteneity and creativity in the process (referring to the current fad of be-bop worship).
Learning music theory is learning labels to attach to what your ear can already hear. If you don't have that ear and can't hear what the music is doing, studying theory will not make you a better musician. The ear is an absolute necessity; the theory is a nice, useful add-on.
On the other hand, there are situations in which sightreading skill is money in the bank, as you say, and in which the charts (the "music") ARE what's on the paper, and you get paid for being able to bring the chicken scratchings to life and get it right the first time. I was on tour with the Henry Mancini orchestra, and during a rehearsal break one of the cellists, who had just done poorly on a graduate theory exam, said something to Hank about, "You never really USE any of that, do you?" He smiled and said, "It's the basics, honey, it's the basics!" And we went on stage never having played all the way through any of the charts. He just hit the spots he knew could be problematic. (And the "Pink Panther" theme remains the single most widely-heard example of parallel 5ths since the 9th century!)
John
-- John & Susie Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
