• 118 Posts
  • 514 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
Cake day: October 13th, 2025
  • gigastasio@sh.itjust.workstoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Music education: thoughts and experiences?
    2·
    3 days ago

    Your suggestion that I create a competing music education system is kind of hostile and defensive and weird.

    I probably misread what you were saying up there. No hostility intended.

    I’m retired out of music now. I work in the industrial sector and do music on the side. And I’ve learned a lot more about music since escaping academia that I’d never have gotten, and encountered people who have similarly broken away from the formalized, conservatory educational attitudes and grown as performers.

    Regarding your question about samba and bossa nova, I’m not very experienced with those styles. You’d likely find instructional videos or articles out there that can explain what’s going on harmonically better than I could. I’m mostly a rock guy lol.

  • gigastasio@sh.itjust.workstoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Music education: thoughts and experiences?
    10·
    3 days ago

    but I think the theory should follow the music.

    My friend, it does. That’s has always been its purpose. That’s one of the points I’m trying to make. If your teachers never made that clear to you, they owe you an apology. And yes, I’m fully aware that there are musicians who place theory above practice. You don’t have to take them seriously.

    I get it - if I’m reading you right you’ve come to the conclusion that ear training isn’t being given the focus it deserves. Which may be your experience but I feel like in the larger musical world aural skills are highly valued. Yeah, I’ve seen many “highly trained” kids who can sight read their ass off but freeze when you take their sheet music away. It’s common. Their teachers failed them. The music education system at large is a very fragmented thing. It’s filled with microcosms created by short-sighted instructors who value X over Y. In the performing world that I lived in, we were all ear people. We had to be. That was the way you survived on our stage. There’s lots of that happening out there. If you think you can devise a system that doesn’t currently exist that hammers that home, I’d be the first person to encourage you to do so.

  • gigastasio@sh.itjust.workstoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Music education: thoughts and experiences?
    241·
    3 days ago

    Hard disagree on your point regarding music theory. Learn as much music theory as possible because that’s the path to understanding what you’re playing and why musical sounds gravitate towards and away from each other the way they do.

    If you’ve viewed theory as this abstract, academic set of “rules” designed to force you to play and write only in a certain way, this is just straight up wrong. It is not that and was never intended to be. If you wrote or played something that skirts your current understanding of music theory, and it’s still sounds good, great! Carry on. You may eventually come across a theoretical explanation for it, and if you never do, that’s okay too. It’s probably still out there somewhere.

    I spent several decades as a professional musician. I can’t begin to count the number of dunderheads I’ve encountered who’d say, “I don’t want to learn theory. I think it’ll limit me.” Those people are morons. There’s no such thing as knowledge that makes you less knowledgeable. If you’re one of those people, I implore you to stop being one of those people. I’m much more impressed by intellectually honest people who’ll say, “I don’t want to learn theory because I can’t get my head around it, but I still love playing.” Then carry on, brother!

    All that being said, music is, at its core, a uniquely human way of expressing the human condition. And we are all allowed to use it in any way we like for whatever reasons we choose, selfish or otherwise. We’re allowed to excel at it. We’re allowed to suck at it. We’re allowed to love that music that everyone else hates. Every musical sound is meaningful. And if a music teacher is failing to make that the core of their instruction, then that music teacher is failing, period.