As a child and teenager, I did not enjoy learning music theory, but I had to because my piano teacher made it compulsory. I am not alone. Many piano students do not enjoy doing theory, simply because it isn’t as fun as actually playing the piano.
By the time I got to study music at university, my theory knowledge was quite significant and taking theory classes was a compulsory part of studying music at this level. At first, I wasn’t thrilled about it because theory is just theory, however, I soon found out how interesting advanced theory could be.
Learning theory of music is never enthusiastically embraced by kids or teenagers – it is usually just tolerated and because of this, music theory has gotten the reputation of being boring. It doesn’t have to be this way. Music theory can explain the why and the how notes can be arranged and grouped to make the most extraordinary and wonderful sounds.
I think that learning some music theory is important for every person that learns a musical instrument and once you get to an intermediate level, then learning about music theory actually becomes really important.
Music theory gives you an understanding about everything to do with structure, pitch, chords, rhythm and expression in music.
Because it gives you a knowledge of how music can be structured, it can give you an idea as to how a piece of music can progress. The result of this is that having this knowledge of music theory can act like a short cut to learning a new piece of music, no matter what the genre is. For instance, if you are playing a piece of music in C major, you can almost guarantee that the last group of notes are going to be C, E and G and that the notes that are immediately before are either going to be G, B and D or F, A and C.
Using the example of C major again, learning the theory about C major tells you that there will be no sharps or flats in a piece of music based on this scale.
Taking this example further, this example of a piece of music that is in C major, is in Ternary Form. This gives you the information that the piece of music is divided up into 3 distinct sections, where the first and the third sections are either identical or nearly identical to each other and the middle section will be distinctly different. Knowing that a piece of music has a significant chunk of the music is repeated at the end , wouldn’t that information be useful in sitting down and learning to play it?
The bottom line is that learning theory of music may never be exciting but it is certainly useful in helping to learn different pieces of music. I think it should be embraced by everyone who wants to learn to play the piano.