Were you assuming that I took this position because I'm a "technical [person]"?
Incidentally, I'm a musician and music teacher who started out focusing on creative exploration, improvisation, composition, and world music. I found it frustrating that I went through years of "music theory" only to much later realize that all the deeper insights and questions I had were already understood and studied by people in music cognition and related fields and yet most music education never brings up any of it and most music teachers are totally unaware.
One good intro: Music and Memory by Bob Snyder. That was written not for technical people but for multimedia artists at the art school where he teaches. They needed to understand music to use it better in their art. So, he wrote a book to actually explain music in a usable way. It's far and away more insightful and practically applicable than the traditional "music theory"
Nope, it really was intended to be a broader generalization.
That book seems interesting. Oddly enough I'm a jazz musician, but I never learned theory. I mean, I understand scales and chord symbols, but never learned anything beyond that in a formal way. Comparing myself to players who have studied theory, my limitations are that I can't compose or arrange, and I struggle to improvise over complex chord changes.
Yeah, learning the grammar of what has become consensus-jazz (if you will) allows you to better play that game with other people. In that sense, I do just very much dislike that such grammar is presented under the guise of "theory" (that's both in the word and in having a pretense of explaining music rather than just being the general rules that lead to standard jazz).
Compare to cooking: if you don't know how to use a measuring cup or the difference between baking and broiling, you will have a harder time following recipes or adapting them to your own tastes. And knowing deeper ideas like the effect of baking soda or eggs or the smoke points of different oils… it can get advanced and deep, but I still insist that learning about how cooking and digestion and taste actually work would be deeply insightful to cooking even if you can get by without that understanding. Same applies to music. Jazz musicians who just memorize all the scales and voice-leading ideas and forms etc. would gain a ton by learning about what music cognition offers.
Incidentally, I'm a musician and music teacher who started out focusing on creative exploration, improvisation, composition, and world music. I found it frustrating that I went through years of "music theory" only to much later realize that all the deeper insights and questions I had were already understood and studied by people in music cognition and related fields and yet most music education never brings up any of it and most music teachers are totally unaware.
One good intro: Music and Memory by Bob Snyder. That was written not for technical people but for multimedia artists at the art school where he teaches. They needed to understand music to use it better in their art. So, he wrote a book to actually explain music in a usable way. It's far and away more insightful and practically applicable than the traditional "music theory"