There's a discussion in the Adult Beginners section about being taught music theory. Apparently that term can cover a variety of subjects so I'd like to ask our teaching community about a couple of specific "for instance" topics. I picked these arbitrary to represent things that are definitely "theory" (not just note reading, musicality or practice techniques) but not way beyond what a typical student is likely to care about.

Subject 1: The harmonized major scale explained.

Subject 2: The basic cadences (perfect, imperfect) introduced.

My question is, at what point would an adult beginner with no musical background typically encounter either of these topics?

Maybe it should be called a "harmony" question rather than "theory" but terminology aside after say 2, 3, 4 years of weekly lessons have you gotten around to introducing harmony even at a fairly basic level?

There's a large amount of vernacular associated with music, and because of evolution, we're involved in terminology from many languages. Further, in English, we have terminology from different backgrounds, classical, jazz and pop, which mean the same thing but use different words and/or symbology. As a general rule, I will mention this to a student up front and very early on, and tell them that I will use the terminology interchangeably and often so they become familiar with the terms. Then, as is useful in their playing, we will explore meanings to more and more depth. An example might be the dominant seventh chord, aka seven chord, V7, G7, etc. It might be several years before we can take a IV or VI chord and show its resolution to a I chord and then explain cadences. Of course, quicker or more dedicated students will be able to grasp this sooner.

I am not a teacher, but I feel theory as typically taught in many books I have read is not presented in a quickly understandable fashion. It is like teaching children to diagram sentences before they can read. What starts with the simple harmonized scale quickly degenerates into all kinds of weird-sounding modes, whole step/half step patterns that are hard to keep straight, raised this and lowered that scale degrees, and 3 different minor scales. Ok now multiply this times 12 keys. YIKES!

I would think a better approach is to yes go over how scales are built and why black keys come into play, but mainly drill down on the I,V then the I,IV,V progression. Once these are learned in some common keys, the student will be able to hear this in loads of songs and pieces from Bach to the Beatles and even be able to begin improvization and even playing by ear. The other chords built on scale degrees can be learned from there. Just my opinion.

Somebody planted the idea that theory should not start in books, and if it starts abstractly it's not real. The idea was that in playing a major chord, we get the feel of major chords, and the name follows what we understand in our ears and bodies. When you call a note A, isn't that theory too? So I wonder - is theory something you "start" at a certain point when a student is "ready", or is it something that you ease into the picture from day one, from more than one angle?

My answer: EVERYTHING about how music is written ends up being important, but how music is written will not sink in until people can play music.

However, there are people who are surprising good at playing music who know very little about theory.

So if you think of actors, some of the greatest of them probably know very little about grammar, punctuation, verb conjugation, many other things. But writers are likely to know a great deal about all these things.

This is why I encourage all my students to at least TRY to start writing music of their own, even if it is not very good (at first).

Short of that, MOST players (almost all) play much better when they gain a deeper and deeper understanding of how music works.

My personal way of teaching involves teaching as much theory as possible but to keep it connected to music, at all times, if possible.

Meanwhile, calling "how music works" either "theory" or "harmony" is just giving it a name, which is really unimportant.

EDIT: I've given the impression that theory is all about how music is written. There is a ton of theory that does NOT need to be linked to written music, obviously...

I THINK that the "somebody" you are quoting was trying to say that things need to be connected, that they are not "real" if they are just names to "things" that are not yet used, dynamically, in music.

I say that each "thing" we learn should be experienced with as many senses as possible and used as creatively as possible, because this makes what we are learning vivid, exciting, important, etc.

I don't care if students first discover how to play a C chord by discovering it, independently, or from my showing them how to play it, without music, or by discovering it from reading it.

In the end, if things connect, students will recognize a C chord when they see it, in music, without playing it, and HEAR the C chord, without playing it themselves or seeing it, and they will know how to write it, transpose it to 11 other keys, morph it to minor, diminished, augmented, and so on, then USE the chord in some kind of improv.

That, at the least, involves the ear, touch (feeling it), vision (recognizing the written form), seeing the chord mentally without touching keys. That's three of the senses.

Of course.

The staff has five lines. We need two of them for a grand staff. We need key signatures. Time signatures. There is logic behind fingering. This fingering logic works into playing scales.

To me it's ALL theory, and all 100% necessary...

I had asked a question about theory recently as i am a new student. Scott Coletta said it quite well to paraphrase: anyone can paint by numbers but to be a true artist one must understand colors etc. i see his point. As I learn more theory I no longer paint by numbers but am able to create ! I suppose with rudimentary reading skills and lots of practice anyone can play any piece but add theory to that and we have interpretation, improvisation etc.

When you call a note A, isn't that theory too?

Yes, of course that is theory. That is why theory starts from day one of learning playing piano. Just as mentioned above, everything on the page is theory and as a teacher, I tend to teach everything on the page.

Maybe another problem comes up is that if we need a textbook to teach theory or we just teach it when it occurs in the music itself?

In my studio, more serious students will have a theory textbook/ workbook that I teach from the first page to the last step by step to make sure that all the concepts in a certain level are all covered.

Less serious students will not have a theory book, and I will just teach theory as needed in the pieces that we play.

When you teach from the textbook/workbook, do you link it to music?

When I finally did theory as a student, I used a book but because I had played music for a lifetime a lot of what I studied meant something. Still, after passing the exams I felt there was a gap between what I could put down on paper and music, so I played everything I had written in my workbook, and listened. Then on PW it seemed a lot of people had theory on one side, music on the other, and theory was this abstract foreign thing.

Seeing that, when I finally taught theory from the text/workbook I had used, we tried to link it to real things. If the page talked about intervals, the student played intervals and listened to them, and started listening for them in music. Writing down answers was paired with going back to the piano and hearing what had been written. I'm thinking - if as students we write things out in theory books, and play our music and studies as a separate thing, does the stuff in the theory books connect to the music?

Thank you for that, and everything that followed. You have added a lot more things to the mix, and all of it is part of "how music works" aka "theory". Very enlightening.

I wrote yesterday about somebody saying that experience has to come first, then formal theory, otherwise it is not real. Ultimately I found that too rigid and rejected it. The more important thing is that things are connected and should connect. But we don't always learn in strict order. Even small children, who are supposed to be concrete thinkers, wonder about abstract things and then try to figure them out in physical play and experiments.

Like supposing that you play various major chords and after a while you subconsciously recognize a certain quality. Then you are given the concept of "major", and then you are also given the names G major, D major etc. The named concepts helps you sort out what you've been hearing. It is useful to have both things, and having either one alone is more limiting. But you could also be told about "major" first, experiment trying to find this "majorness" and then you have the same thing. It is not less real.

The most important thing I got from your post is the idea of going at something from as many angles as possible: names, hearing, writing, experimenting. We learn things in many different ways, and often we're not even aware that we have learned something.

Not in my view. Calling a note 'A' is simply a labelling convention -- it's 100% a pragmatic matter.

It's really only in music that such practical matters get labelled 'theory'. In most disciplines, theory implies some sort of study of general principles, or abstract concepts.

Not that it matters -- it's just a name.

FWIW in the ABRSM syllabus theory these basic ideas about harmony don't appear until abount grade 4, not properly until grade 5. So this means that a student following the traditional ABRSM program won't be examined in these things until after maybe four years' practice.

Of course, I imagine that many teachers will introduce these things earlier if the student seems interested.

That is why I emphasized the integration of the various aspects. Names and labels in and of themselves are useless. When they are studied that way, people can have a lot of theoretical facts which they can put down on paper and name, yet it is entirely divorced from music. But trying to work with music without any names is also limiting. And sometimes names contain theoretical concepts. Think of "cadence". Or "major chord".

Talk about cherry picking. I wrote a lot, and you take the time to argue about whether or not naming something is theoretical.

When do names stop being just names and START being theory? If labeling an A is 100% pragmatic, what about A C# E being called major? Or talking about what major is? Of how A got defined as A440? Or how what we now accept as a diatonic scale got named in ANY way?

Honestly, I am getting more and more disgusted with this place. You guys just want to pick holes in ANYTHING without contributing anything. It really sucks.

Well, I'm sorry if an issue that is important to me is not important to you. But that's life, isn't it?

I'd be happy to explain why I think it's such a big deal but, honestly, what's the point? Addressing any issue beyond the ones that you think need to be discussed just sucks, right?

So [censored] it.

You might be interested to know that your "So [censored] it." is only censored on the public screen, but your f-bomb is clearly visible for anyone who hits "quote".

To be fair, I had not noticed that you were (I assume) only replying to ezpiano.org, since he answered:

"Yes, of course that is theory."

And I answered:

"Yes, of course."

Nevertheless, you think that making a big point about the fact that a "name" is not part of "theory" is a useful contribution to talking about what theory is. I still think it is cherry picking.

We disagree.

"Well, that's life, isn't it?"

What bothers me about this is that several people had already proposed an idea that the "what-music-is"/"how-it-works" component is integral. That it flows and interrelates with the other aspects of music. That is what I was aiming at when I wrote that question. Your response comes after that, and ignores those ideas as though they had not been posted.

You also wrote when these things are examined in the ABRSM. This would have a bearing if music studies were for the purpose of passing exams, which for some teachers and students might be the case. In that case, I would also see theory as being only general principles and abstract concepts - things we can write on a piece of paper and get graded on it. Is your view an exam-oriented one?

My basic premise is that lessons are for the purpose of learning to play music on an instrument, and ideally it would include musicianship. In that case, theory must have a pragmatic component, and it must mesh with real things. It would be multidimensional like other posts described, no?

In the "real world" we see in some countries that an engineer in training has to spend some time working as a technician. During that time his practical experience gives meaning to the theoretical things he is learning. That integration is there. In other parts of the world, the educational streams leading to high university degrees are very theoretical and abstract, with little connection to anything practical. Theory sits in one corner, and life in another. That is not necessarily a good thing. In any case, practical things like music shouldn't have that kind of split.

Well, I hate to intervene in a good contretemps but I must say a good many thousands of people at any given moment are somewhere on the ABRSM curriculum. So knowing they see harmony concepts at about Grade 4-5 is helpful in the sense that is where a large number of piano student do in fact encounter those concepts. So I appreciate that rather large data point, so to speak.

The one thing I'm realizing is that there's a "two kinds of people in the world" thing going on. Among piano learners, there's "one kind" who already know how to read notation and the "other kind" who are learning to read while they are learning the instrument. That seems to have a huge influence on the timing of what can be learned when.

Someone who reads sheet music fairly well when they start the piano can be wrestling with harmony concepts a lot earlier on than with someone who must go through the slow process of learning to read ab initio. And it's a lot easy to teach "real theory" to someone who knows "that note is called A" than to someone for whom there's still some question as to where exactly an "A" might be found.

Thinking of my lesson today my brain was working pretty hard to picture how my new concept of the day (the "Tritone Substitution") could fit into my chord progression in the key of G. At least when I was asked "which notes in that D7 chord are a tritone?" I had an immediate image in mind of where a D7 falls on paper and on the keys. If I'd had to stop and think "Every Good Boy Does Find" before locating the D7 my brain would have shut down long before find the hidden tritone.

The issue is not about whether calling something one name or another is part of theory, although that is a symptom of the issue. The issue, as I see it, is the ongoing trivialisation of theory in music. It's been trivialised so much that what I assume are reasonable and intelligent people can have the idea that how you name things is theory. It's not the specific problem that bothers me, but the fact that it is symptomatic of a much wider problem, which is how little we value an understanding of conceptual and perceptual aspects of music.

Everybody talks about the integration of practical and theoretical skills in music training, and how it is a good thing. I agree, but I don't think that I am using the word 'theory' in the same sense as many people who make such statements.

The theory of evolution is a conceptual model that makes sense of the practical observations of biologists. The theory of gravitation is a conceptual model that makes sense of the observations of phycisists. To call the sorts of things that many musicians call 'theory' theory is like telling a physicist that learning to draw a graph or measure a velocity is theory.

You talk about a 'useful contribution to what theory is' but, outside of music, there simply is no debate about what theory is. It's only in music where routine pragmatic matters are grandified with that term theory.

To my mind, the fact that the ABRSM has a separate 'theory' syllabus is hugely detrimental to teaching musicianship. The stuff they call theory is everyday musicianship, not theory at all. But students don't want to learn it, because it comes in a separate book and has a separate exam.

What the ABRSM really means by 'theory' is 'stuff that isn't specific to any one instrument'. But that's like say that, because biologists and physicists both use test tubes, we can have a separate teaching syllabus called 'theory' that deals with the issues of test tube management.

The practical consequence of all this is that we're raising a generation of violinists who can't read the bass clef, of pianists who don't know what the compass of a singer's voice is, of flautists who don't realize that a Bb clarinet can't play from the same score, and so on.

And this, in my view, is all because musicians abuse the word 'theory'.

My starting point is concepts, and more specifically core concepts. To understand general, broad, abstract theories we have to have a grasp the core things. Otherwise we get people who can spout nebulous things about music and even try to bend music to the theory, because their whole "understanding" is vague. In fact, this problem is not isolated to music but it is especially big here.

I think I get your objection to pragmatism. It takes a very shallow view. Here are two attitudes toward the same thing. 1. You want your student eventually to grasp real concepts in theory, and to do that, he has to get some basic things first. You let him understand what an interval is by starting what he can experience so you start with piano keys, sound etc. Over time you expand on that and use it. 2. Your kids need to learn how to read music. "Intervallic reading works. You tell them about piano key distances, "skips", lines and spaces and that's it forever. --- The two things resemble each other but there is a vast difference.

By core concept I mean: what is an interval, pitch, etc. What we get are serious students coming to an advanced level suddenly starting with harmony and counterpoint theory, learning rules about things like "parallel fifths" and "dissonance". The studies themselves are geared toward exams and if you memorize the rules you'll do well in the exams. What is missing is:
a) no experience whatsoever examining the music they've been studying for x years, so it's divorced
b) no real exploration at any time of core concepts like intervals which are at the heart of the music making behind these rules
c) as you said, little idea about the real things behind it such as range of voices, attributes of musical instruments that would be playing these things

First there is no theory except what is immediately needed to play the instrument being studied, then suddenly there are these abstract conclusions on what music is about. So we absorb simplified dummied down rules that apply to Common Practice music and vaguely get that this is how music works. It doesn't connect to much of what we hear or play, because music ** doesn't ** work that way. We don't know that even Bach didn't follow the rules attributed to him. What we learn isn't connected to anything. That's why so many people are turned off of music theory. After "passing" it they want as little to do with it as possible.

I'm harping on both core concepts and integration for a reason. The core concepts are deep and probably the hardest to truly understand, and they lie on the bottom of everything. If you get what an interval is, including as sound and its effect on music, that is huge. If you have that, then the broader abstract theory can be grasped in a real way.

To do abstract theory we need the core concepts and the vocabulary of what they represent, and in that order. It would be good if it started with beginners in simple ways, leading them to explore. If they are following something like ABRSM or RCM, it would be good if it wasn't a case of "Omg, theory exam coming up - quick, let's push through the theory book." but rather that the student has been moving into those concepts all along. And it would be ideal if the goal was musicianship and going beyond the content of such exams.

(But I think there is also a reality here of teacher here often having very young beginner students, and parents who have limited goals that they would accept for their kids.)

Addendum: I don't know if it came across that my question about "A" was trying to make a point about all aspects that go into theory being important. Naming an A as A is singularly unimportant. But in context it matters.

I think we have at least two completely separate issues.

1) Definitions: the word "theory", as used by musicians, is a very "sloppy" word, and it is one I never use when teaching. To me it is like "classical music", a term I also refuse to use with my students. To me there is only "music", and if I have to put music into a category, I prefer specific labels that are at least fairly clear, such as "Classical" (meaning roughly the time of Mozart and Hadyn). If possible I prefer to stick to specific composers, so even using "Impressionist" for Debussy and Ravel already feels sloppy to me.

So "classical", lower case, is a word I am forced to use with non-musicians, although I loathe it. And I feel much the same way about "music theory". What is it? I would like to throw the word out entirely, in this sense. Music is art, not science, and our "rules" are conventions, or attempts to summarize what is commonly used, accepted, taught, etc.

2) Quality of teaching, in general, and the idea of accepting ever lower standards - a general dumbing down of everything.


For reasons I have already mentioned, I would throw the word "theory" right out of the language we use for music, but I don't have the power to do that.

I would say that nothing is theoretical the moment it is used, so I am 100% behind integration at all times. Music is much like language, so what we use is much like our vocabulary. The richer our vocabulary, the better our ability to communicate becomes, and analyzing what is going on in music, in a way that allows US to use it ourselves, is not theoretical. It is incredibly practical.

The elephant in the room is how to decide what to study, and when to study it. This involves making whatever we are studying as practical as possible, and also making sure that what we are learning is both absorbed now and stays with us for the rest of our lives.

I didn't mean to do that. I expressed myself very badly. My thought was that we have relative beginners who are struggling with the usual beginner problem: "What do I learn FIRST? What is most important NOW?"

It is the word itself, "theory", that is causing all the problems. I am thinking purely about what should logically come first, second, third, etc., knowing that the exact order in which things are presented can't be rigidly fixed. That ignores the obvious fact that different people learn in different ways, and it also assume that all people have the same musical objectives.

I totally agree. Watch as we both get stoned... <serious>

I don't care what ABRSM means. It's a bunch of letters. I have stated repeatedly that I am a member of NO organizations and so teach as I choose, which means being free to introduce anything at any time, according to what makes sense to me and my students.

I agree, but my view of WHY this is happening is that performance and composition have become separated into two worlds. I have to resist the temptation to go "off on a rant" about this.

I don't think it has anything to do with the *word* "theory". I think it has to do with something much bigger. I see modern piano competitions as no more encouraging to individual creativity and individuality than Olympic gynmastics or Americal Idol. And again I am resisting the urge to "go off on a rant" here.