simmerdown wrote:maybe we should drop the 'Theory' part and call it just...Music....learn Music
Music theorists call it "music fundamentals" since teaching it it is only a sub-discipline of what we do. "Music theory" includes things like analysis which can be anything from a scholarly paper on a classical composition with Schenkerian graphs to simply listening to a melody by an artist one admires in order to figure out why they like it.
There are a lot of people in the world who *play music* in one way or another and to varying degrees of sophistication. Having the fundamentals of how music within the Western tonal tradition works is sort of a given among many working musicians but not necessarily among those who just "play." Some people may have learned certain aspects of music fundamentals without really knowing it, without having names for the things they've learned. Ear training is where this happens the most. You have a kid who grew up singing in church and he will be able to match any pitch he hears but he might not be able to tell you what the interval was between the two pitches he just sang.
So then it comes down to what Angstrom said about being able to "figure out what to do" with what you're hearing in your head. That's where the music fundamentals of pitch, interval, scale and chord nomenclature come into play to help you organize the things you're hearing so you can either produce other sounds that make sense with the melody you've written or so you can play with other musicians. Other fundamentals such as notation can further help. Of course it depends on what you want to do. But the fundamentals aren't the end all be all, they're only the beginning. Knowing theory (fundamentals) doesn't guarantee sophistication in musical art, it just provides the best foundation on which to build musical art, sophisticated or otherwise.
