As occasionally happens, yesterday in a conversation with a performing musician, I was told that she feared that learning music theory might stifle her musical creativity. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by that, as that thought seems somewhat commonplace. Nevertheless, whenever I hear it, I am taken aback. Music has a history that dates back to the very beginnings of our species and as it exists today, is the product of thousands upon thousands of years of accumulated experience and knowledge. That anyone who has made music their calling can willfully ignore all of that on the presumption that their creativity is somehow tied to their lack of knowledge of their own craft is, at best, depressing.
That misconception has at its root yet another misconception about music theory, namely, that theory is a rigid set of rules that sets boundaries about what can and cannot be done in music. It is not a set of rules. To the contrary, it is simply a vocabulary that allows us to describe what happens in music. As an example, I have on occasion read remarks that even Bach occasionally “broke the rule” against parallel 5ths. There is no such rule! Rather, there is an accurate observation of the music composed during Bach’s time that parallel 5ths were generally avoided in order in order to maintain the independence of the different moving voices. Earlier periods of music used parallelism extensively, but as Western music became more contrapuntal, that changed. That’s not a rule, it’s a description and explanation of the techniques employed by composers in order to achieve a certain kind of sound.
It is the descriptive language of music theory that provides the analytical framework to understand what is happening in any sort of music – and, more importantly, to understand what differentiates great music from the rest of the pack. That is the opposite of a drag weight on creativity – but rather an essential tool to create better music. Music is a craft, and like any other craft, the more you know about it, the more you practice it, and the harder you work at gaining both a deep and broad understanding of it through the ages, the better musician you will be.
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