Balance In Learning

Balance In Learning

There are basics to almost any field of endeavor. Let’s take a look at basketball, for example. I’m certainly no basketball player, so that makes me uniquely qualified to write about it.

I am fairly certain that things such as dribbling, throwing a ball, catching it and being able to get a ball into the hoop (I do remember a thing called the ‘layup’) would all qualify as ‘basics’ in basketball. There are probably at least fifty or more other things that are basics that I’m unaware of, not being a pro basketball player, as I’ve said.

I would guess that, when basketball players practice, they drill some of these basics, especially if they are newer to the game. Then, having all these basics under their belt, that is to say these basic skills have become more or less second nature, the players play the game, using each of the skills where needed with intention and focus now on playing and winning the game.

What do you suppose the reaction would be to a player who only dribbled the ball up and down the court during a play-off game?  Well first he’d have a red-faced coach yelling at him to ‘pass’ and ‘shoot,’ among other things and then he’d find himself warming a bench pretty quickly.

The coach would ask what the heck was wrong with him and he’d say ‘well, I thought dribbling was the game.’

No, dribbling’s not the game.

I use this example to try and show what happens when people fail to take into account how a particular skill applies to what they are trying to accomplish.

This is quite a problem, especially in music. Very often, especially in past times, people have tended to make a sort of Holy Grail out of music theory. It’s true that some musicians of the snob variety have piled complexities upon complexities to try and show superiority in their genre of music and this is all just silliness.

This has damaged pedagogy (music teaching) in the recent past and people and society in general have suffered for it. The diverse musical genres are not that different because they all use the same musical system.

The trick is not to make a separate study out of theory but to see how it applies and use just enough to get the ball down the court to the hoop.

Let’s take note reading, for example. You ask any high level musician ‘what are notes?’ and they will tell you that notes are just symbols that literally point the direction you go to play a piece of music. Notes are not like the hieroglyphs in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

Now because certain pedagogues were content to leave note reading almost purely over in the realm of theory, people struggled with this, looking at a note, figuring it out and then finding it on the instrument and this is all extra thought processing that is not part of playing music. Students became frustrated and gave up.

In answer to this, people came up with ‘new’ teaching systems that did away with theory. Well, this is ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater.’

Whether you like it or not, putting notes down on a printed page is still the most prominent way of conveying music.   

The answer, as I’ve said, is seeing how to apply music theory. In the case of note reading, it’s just there to point the direction up or down (the only two directions in music,) and also to let you know how many beats a note should get.

Of course you should also look at how much you are going to be using note reading. If you intend to go into jazz, you might not be using note reading that much, but you will need to know about chords and scales.

People make a big deal of how famous artists such as The Beatles didn’t read music, but this shouldn’t lead one to think they were musically ignorant as they had a very large chord vocabulary that they worked from.