Math and music are similar in so many aspects. Are the people good at one also good at other? I mean, do mathematicians understand musical theory better than those that have no background in mah?
> Einstein's violin playing took a gypsy turn when he improvised, often while thinking about mathematics. He was a very good musician. He could navigate the piano well enough. But his real love was for the violin. Even so, Einstein's violin playing was not of the first rank. Yet such was his love for the violin that he played and practiced anyway. Such is the spell that musical instruments cast on people's minds.
> In addition to studying the classic violin pieces of Bach and Mozart that he adored, Einstein was also given to improvisations. Some have told of the haunting, gypsy-like quality of these rhapsodies. Einstein himself stated that many of his greatest mathematical ideas came when he was improvising on the violin.
[0] https://pianobynumber.com/blogs/readingroom/einsteins-violin...
Improvisation has little to do with music theory; most Folk and Jazz music is improvised; even what we know today as "classical music" was often improvised in the past; many great composers were also great improvisers.
You do not need theory to perform existing pieces all that much. Which is why you can learn to play classical music while ignoring theory.
Also, I'm just plain not as good a musician as, say, Duke Ellington was, and there's a benefit to being able to understand what he was doing so I can try to imitate that style and incorporate his techniques into my own playing -- I don't want to rediscover all of his lessons completely on my own because I'm not talented enough to do that; very few people are.
> To improvise you first of all require musical talent on both harmonic and rhythmic dimensions
I mean, you need ability to keep rhythm and play notes. But beyond that, you absolutely can get away with theory only with basically zero special talent. You wont become world famous, but you will be able to match what the rest of group is playing.
> even what we know today as "classical music" was often improvised in the past; many great composers were also great improvisers.
Also going back to original comment, you seem to put theory and improvisation into some kind of dichotomy. But, both being great composer and great improviser are heavily facilitated by understanding theory.
When jazz music appeared, there were no conservatories or theory for it. The first jazz conservatories emerged fifty years later. Today they find many graduates, for example, from Berklee. But this is a development that has only begun in the last forty years. It didn't make the music better, it just made it different.
> You wont become world famous
Very very few world famous exponents of popular music have a formal musical education.
This is just false. If you start to dig into this a little bit, you will easily find connections between almost all famous musicians, and universities. If they didn't have formal education themselves, they often had private lessons from someone with a degree. Or someone in the band had a degree etc. Or in the case of the beatles, the "producer" just happened to be a trained composer who was giving a lot of "suggestions".
Other examples: punk band green day songwriter billie joe had 15 years of lessons with a jazz guitarist with a university degree. Bluegrass guitarist tony rice had private theory lessons with a berklee graduate. etc etc.
It's part of the marketing to downplay the theory and knowledge involved, people want to relate to musicians, and not feel like their being outsmarted, or manipulated by "some formula".
Are you from the industry? I am, with forty years of experience under my belt. Believe me, there is no correlation between success and formal musical education.
Obviously, there are also plenty of artists who only have this influence indirectly, through other artists that inspire them. Or in the case of hip hop and electronic, through sampling. So I think their point was overstated.
Yes, to study the tropes and patterns of theory applied by the great jazz musicians, who certainly knew what they were doing with theory, even if "the theory of jazz" didn't exist. You don't have to know "jazz theory" in order to use theory to create a new genre of music that became known as "jazz". There were a community of performing musicians who had at least some formal theory knowledge (if not to a rigorous Berklee standard), who shared ideas and patterns and tropes, which eventually became a recognised genre, and later on an academic field of study.
It's funny, because out of all the niche subgenres of music out there today, jazz is almost certainly one of the most "theory influenced" genres of the last century.
Pro folk musicians are some of the most theory adept people I know, my uncle is one and he knows 1000s of songs, and can basically play any song in any key through his theory chops.
Jazz musicians... I mean, cmon, Jazz is all about doing wild things with theory that surprise and amaze you. Good luck being a jazz musician without understanding seventh chords, modal/metric modulation, etc.
Improvisation doesn't mean "making up random stuff", it means knowing your instrument and the ways in which chords, melodies, harmonies interact, knowing changes and progressions, inside out so well that you naturally can use that knowledge to come up with something unique.
If what you mean is "some musicians can implicitly understand this stuff without knowing the academic language", well yeah, music theory isn't prescriptive, it's a language used to communicate with other musicians. You can get away without knowing the terms, but knowing what it's describing is important.
Edit: I should add, knowing what it's describing is important up until the point that you want to readily communicate with other musicians and have them communicate with you with full understanding, as quickly as possible, sometimes during performance - then the language of music theory becomes very useful.
A skilled/talented musician just hears that. It's like cooking: a good cook knows from experience which spices go with which dishes, without having to know the basic physics.
> making up random stuff
It always has random components, that's how humans operate; but good improvisers can produce music in real-time which sounds like composed/arranged music; the purpose of music is to entertain and please people; this goal can be fully achieved without any theory or prior arrangement.
> And knowing lots of recipes allows you to much better understand how to tweak and improvise on your existing knowledge
Sure, practice is helpful. And it is to be hoped that the conservatories are also helpful for something, if society invests so much money in them and so many professional musicians come out of them.
Last night I was improvising a melody based on a chord progression I had just come up with. I heard the chord progression in my head without thinking about what the chords were. But then when I thought about it, I knew what they were, tested on my instrument, and wrote them down.
Beginning to melodically improvise on the progression (with no backing) I was initially looking at my chart the whole time and thinking in theoretical terms. But, before long, I was having moments of losing track of where I was in the chart, but my mind's ear and my fingers still knew what to do to keep going within the harmony.
I.e., you reach a point where you have internalised the sound of the chord changes, and you can just hear the lines you want to play, and your fingers just know how to play the notes that you hear.
But to get to the point of being able to do that in a reasonably sophisticated way, one is mightily helped by thinking about things and practising things in a theory-informed way.
One way to 'improvise' is to have an understanding of the relationships between keys and while moving around at pleasing intervals and making interesting chords, regularly jump keys at points where they overlap -- that's .. pretty music-theory driven, and can be very mathematical! There's a lot of fun math in jazz.
It's not the only way to improvise, certainly. But someone who knows the rules can make them run a long way.
Some of the grammar rules are sometimes useful to general public.
I don't think theory is strictly necessary, there are great musicians who don't know anything about theory. Theory should never be used as a way of gatekeeping or deriding people's efforts to build things. However, unless you are also a musical genius who has spent decades honing your craft, there will probably be some benefit from learning from the people who came before you.
It's not necessary essential, but very little theory is essential. You can technically be a great game designer without ever looking at other games, you can technically be a great UX designer without learning UX rules. The rules just make it much, much easier to get to that point -- because the rules allow you to more quickly learn from a large body of extremely talented individuals who shaped the entire genre.
Trying to separate theory from its basis is folly. Like the scientific method and the body of scientific knowledge, it's important to remember one follows the other, but I'm still employing centuries of science every day even if I can't name it all.
Jazz musicians who can't cite theory don't use 7ths by accident.
> Jazz musicians who can't cite theory don't use 7ths by accident.
I don't understand this argument. It's unavoidable to use 7ths, regardless whether the musician can name the interval or not.
Music and music theory are two different things. A person who is an expert in music theory is not necessarily a good musician and vice versa. There are approaches to music theory based on mathematics (see book list below); here at the latest, your assumption is likely to be correct, but hardly in general.
Book list:
Mathematics and Music - Composition, Perception, and Performance
Musimathics Volume 1 and 2
Music and Mathematics - From Pythagoras to Fractals
Mathematical and Computational Modeling of Tonality - Theory and Applications
Sure, but it's an add on. Music theory is developed after the fact by analyzing music created by people who (mostly) didn't know the theory. It's a (more or less useful) means to understand what the original creator did.
However, the theory really was deeply tied to the practice of composition and performance. One of the first exercises Mozart set his composition students was to write out various cadences. Likewise, Bach started his pupils with voice-leading. Theory was also needed for various forms of performance -- look at any manual on continuo playing (this is where the figures on roman numeral notation come from). Handel wrote a manual on continuo playing in which he touches on how to improvise a fugue!
But - importantly - a background of math can be a tremendous asset later in one’s career as a music theorist. It can help provide a unique way of looking at and improving on theory.
The same can be said about science ignoring philosophy, morality and spirituality just to get by
Becoming a great musician is more about developing your ear, technique, repertoire, etc. It's more similar to learning a foreign language than learning math, in my opinion.