I have to relate a story. A bright physics grad student I became friends with—we met when I was the resident engineer for the electronic music studio at UCLA—had what developed into extraordinary envy of my musical abilities. So much so that, having gotten his PhD, he tried to go back to school as a music undergrad, and as a composition major no less. Well, they wouldn’t let him do this at UCLA, so he wound up at Cal State Northridge. And it became painfully obvious that he wasn’t going to cut it as a composer, so he wound up in performance, voice, and did get a degree. And one day he admitted to me that his motivation for all of this was to outdo me musically.

Now, being the sort of person who felt that his intellect and determination would conquer all, he believed that by diligent immersion in “theory” and lots of hard work, he would triumph (whatever that meant to him).

Before his admission to me of his motivation, I would periodically remind him about the relatively early age that I had discovered music, the amount of time I spent at it, and even the role the music room played in providing a safe haven from the hazards of bullies and miscreants outside. I suggested that this sort of a head start might be essentially irreplaceable.

Now, I had learned a bit of “theory”, despite never taking a class in it. But I could hear. But this guy’s assumption was, what I played or wrote had to be done with the full knowledge of how it might be analyzed. He just couldn’t imagine how one would get there otherwise.

One evening, listening to a piece with him, I misspoke and said Ah there’s the good old six-four chord (preceding a cadenza). I must have been loaded (a not-uncommon state in those days). It was a five chord, plain and simple, and he called me on it and I said Oh yes of course how stupid of me. But he concluded from this one event that I was an “Idiot Savant”. He had the tendency to jump to such conclusions and thereafter retain them with great tenacity.

In those days I also tended to let things go by and avoid argument. Today I would say WTF! Idiot Savants are idiots, with isolated peculiar talents! I’m not an idiot!

By the way, have any of you seen the article by the Princeton guy that made it into a major science journal on orbifold geometrical analysis of music?: Tymoczko, The Geometry of Musical Chords, Science, 7 July 2006. I haven’t been following developments in musical analysis for a long time and it came as quite a surprise to see this. Clearly there’s been much work afoot for some time, and I’m still wondering how it got into Science, although pleased that it did.

Brad

So, I think that I agree with you that dropping the word theory is in order, because what is being taught, after all, is practice.