Should New Piano Students Know Theory?

Written By Chouhab on vendredi 5 décembre 2008 | 07:37

By Georgia Reader

Music theory encompasses chords and how they are built and structured, understanding and building scales, building a melodic passage, learning about rhythmic meters, and studying ear training. Most music programs in a typical college level curriculum include the study of music theory. Many students presently don't want to spend the time on music theory because they feel that it doesn't relate to their instrument and does not make sense to them.

Except for people that are intellectuals, most people believe music theory is boring and needlessly complicated and music is supposed to be fun, not a mathematical exercise; and it's hard enough training the muscles of the hand and learning to sight-read without bothering with all that theory. Music theory helps tremendously with training your ear and gives you very enhanced improvisational and compositional powers and learning chords and how to play them is a very valuable tool for the pianist.

Unless you have perfect pitch, you need theory to truly gain a sharp ear. And, even if you are one of the rare ones who has perfect pitch, you still need theory in order to enhance your relative pitch and your sense of melodic and harmonic structure so you can compose, improvise, and perform with depth and dexterity. Just because you can hear a note and name it doesn't mean you understand it sufficiently, just like being able to read notes and play them back doesn't automatically give you great dexterity or allow you to write a great symphony.

Have you ever heard someone reading aloud with no feeling, no sense of when to emphasize, no "flow"? But they obviously knew how to speak the words and how to read to be able to read aloud. They sound so bad because they lack a depth of understanding of what they are actually reading.

Even if they know the meanings of all or most of the words, the true meaning and all of the mental and emotional subtleties contained in the content are going over their head. They would do so much better if they actually knew what they were reading about. It's the same with a musician.

A music student with perfect pitch who can perform with uncanny accuracy and beauty still needs to acquire the knowledge neccessary to understand music theory. Most colleges require music students to learn music theory as a part of their program of study. And most music students know that it is necessary to study music theory to understand how music works.

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