experimentalmeowsiclesbian said:

i read a paper last year that said that music in the west is treated as a science, only accessible to specialised practitioners with appropriate training, and i think the heavy criticism of theory teaching is a response to that attitude, that you "need to know the rules to break them" kind of thing, rather than seeing theoretical knowledge as part of a personal relationship w/ art

i’m replying to your replies as a post lol bc this got long-- but yeah that makes sense! thank you for adding these and especially your points re: spirituality, which i hadn’t thought about in that light. what i was trying to get at was a specific attitude towards wam in particular and how i’ve seen people use “theory isn’t always helpful” to mean that this music is too special/precious/transcendent to analyze, or that it doesn’t have just as specific a cultural context as any other music (e.g., bach is just obviously good bc he was a genius individual, there are no shared aesthetic preferences governing his decisions or trends his music falls into). i should have used more precise language there though, bc i think having a personally spiritual &/or otherwise non-theoretical relationship w/music is great when cultivated on your own terms. i’m also coming from a background of choral singing in the southern u.s., which i have found to be fraught about this even in nominally secular contexts. you can’t get through a typical voice degree here w/o singing casually xian music, sometimes church gigging, etc, so that is informing my use of the term “spiritual”