Why all music students learn it, and why your child needs it!

 

When a student, be it an adult or a child, starts learning how to play an instrument, they are not aware that they start from learning the basics of music theory. How many notes are there, what are their names, what are treble and bass clefs, what kind of notes are there, how do we write down the music - all this information is what one needs to know in order to start reading a simple musical piece from a musical score. This is the very basics of music theory. 

 

 

When I explain to my students why they need to continue studying music theory beyond these basics mentioned above, I usually play them a succession of random notes and ask them if it sounds good. Their answer is always a “no”. Why does it sound bad? Because it is a disorganized array of random pitches, without any system to it, without any thought put into making it sound good. 

 

 

Music theory the way we know it now, has been developed over many centuries by the generations of outstanding composers and music theoreticians, who devoted their lives to understanding and improvement and evolution of music writing. When they were creating the music, we now admire so much, not a single note or rest, or other musical signs were not thought through. They knew the rules of how to make the music sound beautiful, knew them most profoundly and as extensively as their time period had permitted them at the moment. 

 

 

Nowadays, when students learn to read music, and they do it without learning music theory together with it, that means that all they do is just read the notes, without any understanding of why these notes are there and why they sound so good when played as written. Students might notice some patterns and have some vague intuition about certain chord progressions, but on the whole, they wouldn’t have a clue about why they are playing the notes they are playing. 

 

 

But learning music theory opens up a whole new world for them. They start seeing the harmonies, how they interact with each other and why, start seeing the texture and structure, what notes are more important than the others, how the music is organized in general etc. It helps them understand how to make the pieces they are learning sound better, helps them become much better sight readers, be better at memorizing the music, and just generally become better musicians. 

 

 

To conclude this little article, as a professional musician with a doctorate degree in music, I can say with complete assuredness how much I myself now appreciate that I had an opportunity to get an excellent music theory, harmony and analysis education in my youth, and that makes me be very passionate about teaching the subject myself, alongside with understanding of the importance of THE MUSIC THEORY.