Originally Posted by
JeffD
I totally disagree with this. With all due respect.
A bunch of things. First of all:
In classical music, composed music, and even a pre-existing song or tune, I don't want to hear what the player feels. I want to hear what the composer felt. I want the emotions and drama of the tune expressed. In genres where you are not improvising, I think it is a mistake to express yourself. Express what is in the music - play expressively - absolutely.
A musician can bring a lot of their experienced emotions and their unique reactions to the slings and arrows of their own outrageous fortune, as elements and vocabulary to help play expressively and bring out what is in the music. But my goodness, nobody wants to hear me express myself. People don't listen to me play because they are interested in me, or my life or experiences. Music is a performance, not a confessional.
Secondly:
Learning music theory, scales, modes, etc., will absolutely help one become a better player and a better improviser. If one is playing flat and constrained, lacking feeling and emotion, "soul" if you want, it is not at all because of the learning of music theory. It is because one hasn't learned to play expressively and musically. They are two different things to learn, and one does not teach the other. They are not mutually exclusive. What ever you haven't learned you don't know, and learning something else does not provide it. I mean, ya gotta learn them both.
Learning how a car works is a good thing. Learning to drive is also a good thing. Someone who is a bad driver cannot blame it on having learned how the car works. And that there are many good drivers that never learned how a car works, or that you don't have to know how completely how a car works in order to drive it - these are not arguments for avoiding learning how a car works.
Kind of a clunky analogy, I admit.
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