Amateur musicians consider music theory to be the most useless and boring thing about music, so much so that it actually harms creativity. However, this is false. On the contrary, it helps composers quickly write pieces and allows musicians to understand what to play and how to play it without needing to listen to a song or practicing it before. As a result, musicians should study music theory in order to play several hundred performances without needing so much practice.

What is Music Theory?

First of all, let’s learn what music theory is. Music theory is the study of music structure, and it is how composers and musicians compose their music. Music theory benefits any musician, no matter what instrument you play.

Music theory is just like a language. When you see the word “cat”, you don’t see that it is “C-A-T” to know that the word is “cat”. Instead, you look at the word as a whole, and you know what the word is.

Music theory is the phonics and grammar of music. It allows musicians to see a section as a whole and know what to play. As a result, pretty much all professional musicians who play classical music have learned about music theory.

Myth: Music Theory Harms One’s Creativity

Many people think music is supposed to be creative, and learning music theory restricts one’s creativity because of the rules set in music theory. However, this has never been the case.

Music theory does not teach one how to write a piece. Instead, it teaches one how the chords and notes used by a musician will affect the audience’s feelings. As a result, the audience has a stronger connection and a sense of sympathy for the composer after listening to the piece.

Music theory is like a language; there are certain words that can express one’s feeling. If a writer writes “he walks across the room”, the reader will not receive a feeling as strong as if the writer says “he stumbled across the room”. By looking at the two sentences, most people cannot sympathize with the character in the first sentence. However, most people can feel that there is something wrong in the second sentence. Learning how to write descriptively allows the audience to sympathize with the characters, but the writers can still write creatively. Learning how to write descriptively does not restrict their imagination.

Take pop singer Charlie Puth as an example. Charlie Puth is known for his many love songs, such as “We Don’t Talk Anymore” and “Attention”. However, every song produced by Charlie Puth is in a different chord. The main four chords in “We Don’t Talk Anymore”, the chords are F# Ab Bbm Fm; However, the chords in “Attention” are G Em C D.

Without music theory, many composers simply used the same chords in all the songs. Take the famous Taiwanese singer JJ Lin as an example. Most of his popular songs have the exact same chord progression: F G Em Am Dm G C C7. Listeners can hear this same set of chords in his songs “Practice Love”, “Back to Back”, “Tales of the Red Cliff”, “She Says”, and “Beautiful”. As a result, many people loved JJ Lin at first and got tired of listening to the same thing over and over.

So, with music theory, composers can actually produce more creative pieces, and composers without music theory can only copy and paste what they’ve created previously.

How it Helps Performers

1. They Learn Pieces Faster and Improve Sight-Reading

When people practice a music piece, it might be difficult at first, because you have to look at every note on the sheet in order to play the song correctly. However, with music theory, musicians are able to accurately play notes and chords, because learning music theory helps you know the flow of the music. As a result, you will learn pieces faster.

Also, it improves performers’ sight-reading. Sight-reading is reading the sheets while playing, and it is often used when performers get a piece and they have to play it without practicing. Without music theory, performers do not know the structure of the song, so they have to look at the notes one-by-one. However, with music theory, performers can guess which notes should be played.

2. Helps Remember More Pieces for a Longer Time

Once musicians have the knowledge of music theory, they can actually memorize more pieces. The reason is because music theory helps musicians memorize the song flow instead of every single note on the sheet, and memorizing the song flow is easier than memorizing notes. As a result, musicians can memorize more songs with music theory.

It also helps musicians to remember for longer periods of time because they don’t need to memorize every note on the sheet. So, music theory benefits the musicians because they can remember more pieces for long periods of time.

3. Communication

In music, we often use musical terms, and they can be separated into three parts.

The first part is used to describe the tone of the music. Some examples may be piano and fortissimo, which means quiet and loud.

The second part is used to describe the speed of the music. Some famous ones are Largo and Allegro, and they are slow and fast.

The third part is used to describe the notes played. The most famous one is an octave.

Maybe you’ve heard all these terms. However, there are a lot more terms used to describe the piece more detailed. Also, these terms come from all different places, like French, Latin, Italian, German, and English.

Although there are a lot of terms, there are still some terms used more often than others, so musicians should be familiar with all the common terms, and these terms could all be learned in music theory.

4. It Enables Performers to Enjoy the Piece More

Music theory teaches musicians about how pieces were created and how these techniques help express the feelings to the audience. Therefore, musicians can discover the beauty inside the music and musicians can know why the piece was written in this specific way. For example, composers use many octaves and perfect fifth in happy songs; major third and augmented fourth are rapidly used in sad songs. As a result, performers can experience how the songs were written, why it was written this specific way, and this allows the performers to enjoy the piece more.

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Music theory is important for anyone who is studying music. It is the fundamentals of music, and it does not harm performers like some people say. Instead, it benefits performers in many ways, including learning pieces faster and remembering them longer, as well as communicate with other performers and enables performers to enjoy the piece more.

Stop finding excuses for not wanting to learn something that is hard. Music theory isn’t that scary, and once you’ve mastered it, I guarantee, you will enjoy music more than you ever have.