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No Music Theory Here

(Saved from the original Piano Wizard website)

Why we don’t teach you musical theory,
or about musical notation.

First of all, this being the traditional approach, there are literally hundreds of books, lessons, teachers, websites, and other resources out there where you can learn that better than we could teach it.

Second of all, it is more confusing than helpful.

Third, it is historically embedded with multiple layers of code, added on with each generation or era to deal with the newest complexities and theories of the latest generation. These were no more than working theories about how to organize music, and how we hear music. It is as culturally arbitrary as Arabic scales or Javanese tunings, and at the end of the day, it is OLD theory. We use the conventions and theory of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven’s students to explain music that has evolved tremendously. Chopin muddied the waters of harmonic theory, and Debussy absolutely negated them, atonal and ethnic music ignored it or never new about it, and yet music has not only survived, it has evolved and exploded in a wonderful hybrid of styles and flavors. The theory is only useful to a limited extent in “explaining” music, and in fact leads to a great deal of confusion. It is as if we tried to explain modern English grammar and vocabulary (a language salad if ever there was one) with ancient Latin Grammar cases. It sort of works, because we have Latin as one of our roots, but it really confuses too, if you don’t realize it is just an arbitrary model that didn’t even really explain Latin.

Fourth, because there is an underlying simplicity and logic to music that one gets to after years of study, where consonance and dissonance are yin and yang, where pattern and deviation are yin and yang, and where pitch and time are yin and yang, and music is the eternal interplay of all of them and more, and all the theory in the world is just, well, not really helpful at getting to the core of music and music making. Especially if all you want to do is play and enjoy music.

MOST musicians cannot read music fluently, that is how bad it is. At best they decipher it. Forget the rest of us (until now). Those that can read, tend to read a melodic instrument, like a flute or clarinet, not a harmonic instrument, like guitar or piano. Melody is sequential, like language. Harmony, and rhythm, are simultaneous, multiple streams of information coming at us at once. THAT is challenging, and what takes years of practice to learn. You will STILL, with Piano Wizard, need to PRACTICE, but the SECRET to MASTERY, is to ENJOY the practice. We can help you enjoy the practice, and take you gradually to the farthest depths and highest mountains of musical notation, in an enjoyable fun journey through the greatest music ever written. A secret treasure chest of musical literature, wide open for you to enjoy for the rest of your life.

Finally, we don’t teach you about theory to read music, because at the end of the day, fluency is unconscious, automatic association, fluency is where a child STARTS their studies of language theory.

Think about it. A child of one can understand (passive comprehension) more than they can say. They begin to speak, they get corrected, (or not) and begin to learn the most complex languages in the world reasonably well by the time they are five, with or without guidance or training, just by doing. So, active speaking came second, after comprehension, in the natural learning process that we all have hard-wired into our brains.
Then, we teach them to read, again passive, then to write, (active), and after a year or two more we teach them the parts of speech, and then to diagram sentences, conjugate verbs, undangle prepositions.