If I don't like music theory, do I not like music?

yeah i sometimes do too user. you always have to end it at the peak they say. Well, I think 12 was the peak for me, after that everything went downhill.

>tfw i never peaked

It might be difficult to believe but things will improve if you try. I was so miserable at 22 I made a serious suicide attempt. I’m 29 now and deeply grateful and relieved to be alive. Life is a series of peaks and troughs, you can get yourself out of the shit.

Of course you can like music without liking music theory, you're just not interested in it or passionate about it.

For example, I like ice-cream but it's not something that interests me or about which I'm passionate, so I wouldn't have a clue about it's structural composition.

Aging, curing, smoking and ageing meats however, I'm a little interested in, so I've spent some time learning about various smoking, curing and ageing processes, and have dabbled a little in doing it myself. Because I was interested in the thing, I wanted to learn more about how it works; pretty straightforward, right?

Uhh, Meredith Willson studied at Juliard, didn't he?

Of course not. Theory isn't for everybody, although it's pretty easy. You're just not as passionate about knowing music inside and out, which is fine.

Music theory is awesome! But it's just a theory. Music =/= music theory. Some parts of music theory are fairly self evident like the V7 leading to I. But others fall out of use. Contrapuntal shit and compositional rules like no unison movement is a little different. There's also no depth to it really. You start learning the names of chords n shit and once you have all that learned you realize that's pretty much all there is. Music theory is pretty easily self discoverable. It is possible to manage to be a sort of half literate musician, you can learn how to sight read for an instrument and not know a shit about theory to the point you don't even know the names of the notes you're playing, but you definitely have to understand the metre n shit.

Music theory is just the tip of the iceberg. There's songwriting, performing, recording, music theory is totally worth learning but it takes longer to be competent at the other shit usually.

But there are some serious advantages. I can "see" any key on my guitar instantly, not by memorizing the notes but having a real understanding of the theory so the names reveal themselves. All you have to do is learn the seven natural keys in open position, then string them up in reverse like CBAGFEDC. It's just like CAGED but with 7 shapes using all 7 notes of a key.

There's a lot of jargon there but if I showed you the 7 shapes, you could do it without any theory. So idk,

Wait do you even play anything

>Of course you can like music without liking music theory, you're just not interested in it or passionate about it.
>Aging, curing, smoking and ageing meats however, I'm a little interested in, so I've spent some time learning about various smoking, curing and ageing processes, and have dabbled a little in doing it myself. Because I was interested in the thing, I wanted to learn more about how it works; pretty straightforward, right?

>Assuming you can't make music or figure out how to make good music without music theory
There's lots of people who are interested and passionate about music who don't know music theory. They don't necessarily understand the structures of pitch relations and rhythm in their heads, but they can feel it. There's been enough great musicians who don't understand music theory for your point to be rather moot.

Music theory shouldn't alter your opinions, it's just a language through which you can express them more effectively

>But it's just a theory.

What do you mean by this? Firstly, music theory is not a single body of knowledge, it's a collective term for all of it which relates to the organisational principles of music, and which borrows from fields as diverse as psychology (see: psychoacoustics) and history (see: ethnomusicology).

>Music =/= music theory.

What do you mean by this? Literally the soul purpose of the discipline is to describe music.

>Some parts of music theory are fairly self evident like the V7 leading to I

That's not at all self-evident, and expresses a phenomenon which has only been employed in that form for the last 400 years or so.

>But others fall out of use. Contrapuntal shit and compositional rules like no unison movement[...]

None of those are rules. Music theory doesn't posit rules, it's descriptivist, not prescriptivist. Also, contrapuntal textures still exist in all sorts of forms - no, of course they aren't exactly the same as they were when Fux formalised their study in the 16th century, but being able to analyse and compare contrapuntal movement in it's new forms is a skill that studying 16th century counterpoint (with it's clear study-pieces in the form of chorales) helps with, and is a thing which music theorists absolutely do and attempt to formalise.

>There's also no depth to it really. You start learning the names of chords n shit and once you have all that learned you realize that's pretty much all there is.

You act like learning the names for stuff and classifying stuff is a simple task; what you're kind of forgetting is that it's the basis for literally all scientific knowledge ever accumulated by humans. You name stuff, and you work out how to classify it according to it's function and it's relationship to other things, and by doing so you build up a picture of the web of interconnectivity between different concepts. That's literally how science works.

>Music theory is pretty easily self discoverable. It is possible to manage to be a sort of half literate musician, you can learn how to sight read for an instrument and not know a shit about theory to the point you don't even know the names of the notes you're playing, but you definitely have to understand the metre n shit.

I think it'd be pretty hard to learn to sight-read without knowing the names of notes.

But more importantly, why would you wilfully ignore the two-and-a-half-thousand or so years of accumulated knowledge on music and musicmaking when it's right there for you to read, even served up all neat on a silver platter for you in the form of codification into tried-and-tested pedagogical systems?

>Music theory is just the tip of the iceberg. There's songwriting, performing, recording...

You do know that all those things are studied by music theorists, right? Music theory is not limited to key-signatures, time-signatures, note-values, counterpoint, harmonic functionality, and the other basic rudiments they teach you in first-year undergrad, you know? In fact, scratch that, I can't think of a single non-specific undergrad course which does not teach at least some basics of all three. Certainly not here in Australia.

Understanding music theory and not liking it means you love music.

>There's lots of people who are interested and passionate about music who don't know music theory.

What else in your life are you genuinely interested in and passionate about but which you have absolutely no desire to look into, or learn more about? That simply doesn't make sense. The truth is that there are a lot of people who like to claim to be interested in and passionate about music because it's tied so closely to social group identification and self-identity.

>They don't necessarily understand the structures of pitch relations and rhythm in their heads, but they can feel it.

Then they have intuited aspects of music theory. I'm not here claiming that all musicians need formal training - you can absolutely pick up the basics on your own, and if that's enough to sate your interest, good for you.

But we also have to remember that just because someone is good at making music, it doesn't mean that they've retained interest in it, it's their job; they practice a lot! Musicians often complain about the industry sapping their passion for music - hell, I've been there, when I was churning out arrangements for a local string orchestra, you can bet I wasn't going home to research and study music after 10-hours of mindless arranging of the same old shit - doesn't mean I didn't get damned good at arranging for strings.

^this

I find I only really need music theory for chords, melodies bass etc I feel its better to improvise because you're supposed to pick notes (passing tones etc) from outside chords anyway and its more contemporary that way

knowing music theory gives you some cool tools though like iii -> vi which is great

>If I don't like music theory, do I not like music?
If I don't like coin, do I not like boing?

>I feel its better to improvise because you're supposed to pick notes (passing tones etc) from outside chords anyway and its more contemporary that way.

Why would knowing and understanding music theory prevent you from doing that?