Appen you are right, but is there any need for a prelim course to music theory? Is there a prelim course for reading and writing? I guess the alphabet, but its part of the same thing. Where else would you begin? You got to start somewhere, that's a fact.
Well, I actually agree with you. It's not the music theory that truly turns people off, it's the lame way that it is often taught. It's just not taught in an intuitive way often.
The same is true of mathematics. When I was in high school I used to love math, until I got to algebra. When I was introduced to algebra everything came apart at the seams and I just didn't understand it. It was just a bunch of rote rules and regulations that needed be remembered, and they didn't make a lot of sense to me. That was really frustrating for me because deep inside I really loved math. But I just couldn't handle the formal axioms and rules of algebra. I actually dropped out of high-school altogether I was so distraught over it.
It wasn't until I learned electronics that algebra really started to make sense. Not as a bunch of axioms and rules, but as a genuine intuitive understanding of the relationships between actual physical quantities and measurable characteristics. After I got an actual intuitive handle on algebra I got a GED and went to college. I ended up majoring in physics and mathematics. The rules started to make sense then because I actually understood why they had to be the way they are. I had an actual intuitive understanding of the math.
I think the same thing can apply to music theory. For some people it just appears as a bunch of rules. And they don't understand where the rules came from or why they are the way they are. Therefore the rules make no sense. They just have to be memorized for no apparent reason.
So learning music in this more intuitive non-axiomatic way can help someone to see how things start to fit together. Then all of a sudden it will all start to click and they will start to realized that the "rules" of Music Theory aren't just arbitrarily made up, but instead they are what they are because that's what music IS.
So sometimes it's just a matter of having the right perspective on things before they can begin to make sense.
Sometimes these kinds of music courses that are aimed at the intuition can actually be just what a person needs to break the ice of "music theory". Like I say, what is this guy ultimately teaching? SCALES in every KEY!
That's the basis of music theory. It's all about how to play scales in keys. Music theory just gets into it so much deeper with concepts like modulation, etc.
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Just like you say,..."Is there a prelim course for reading and writing? I guess the alphabet, but its part of the same thing. Where else would you begin? You got to start somewhere, that's a fact."
Well think of this course as a Sesame Street introduction to the musical alphabet. That's really all it is. It's an introduction to scale forms in terms of patterns on instruments (instead of dots on sheet music), and it's an introduction to ear-training for playing over harmony by having the student listen to the music and SING over it intuitively. Then try to find those notes on their instrument using the scale patterns that they have learned.
Reading the dots is far easier for those of us who can do that. But for people who have a phobia of dots, doing the same thing by ear can seem like "freedom". And it can't be freedom for those who can't read dots. They can actually play if they toss out the sheet music, learn scale patterns on their instruments, and learn to play anything they can sing. If they can hum the tune they can play it! What could be easier?
And that's what this course teaches a person to do. Hum the tune and then play it on the instrument.
But I
AGREE with you,.... they could be learning to read the dots at the
SAME TIME with no loss of effort really.
That much is true.