The two camps of musicians who always have a hard time understanding each other are on the one hand the defenders of knowledge, and on the other hand the defenders of creativity. Naturally, a sensible approach implies a golden mean, and so today a little more reflection on why you can’t make music just for fun.
The usual arguments of the defenders of creative freedom are based on the fact that knowledge and theory get in the way of their creative imagination, and if the author hears it that way, he doesn’t need to know any rules.
Well, if you have naturally impeccable taste, absolute hearing, and innate compositional thinking, then maybe you really don’t need to know all that. Unfortunately the remaining 99.9% of musicians can’t boast of having such talents. It follows that:
- Your musical tastes are shaped by what you listen to.
- You’ve likely already acquired an enormous amount of fences and inner fences that you can’t break down without the involvement of your mind
- You won’t be able to create anything new, because the only criterion for judging the quality of your music will be your hearing, which has been brought up on some music and you get an ouroboros i.e. a vicious circle.
I remember a story that happened to me when I was in high school. I met a group of musicians, most of whom had no musical education and were very critical about the need for musical knowledge. The guitarist of this group said – the theory of music is limiting, so I play what I want. Having gathered once to jam with these musicians, my musician friend and I found out, that this particular guitarist played all his improvisations within one scale, not a single step to the left or to the right he could do.
Now I propose a simple experiment to supporters of creativity, and you can suggest it to your friends who are opposed to learning music theory.
One of the key systems of modern music is tonality. Tonal music is very much tied to the rules of movement of functions, steps, etc. That is, it is built to “limit the author’s flight of thought.”
It is logical to assume that if a musician claims that he does not follow any rules, then it would not be difficult for him to create something outside of these rules. So we ask the proponents of this method to play a melody outside of tonality. Or atonality. That is, a melody that will not aspire or resolve anywhere.
I don’t know exactly what the results of this experiment will be, but I’m sure that a large percentage will fail and play the melody in tonality, because without knowing the rules, you don’t know how to break them.
But the one percent who will hit the notes just like that and get an atonal melody, you can ask to just match the chords to that melody. And here I don’t think anyone can solve that problem. At least not fast enough and convincingly enough, because in order to find the chords to an atonal melody, you either have to use knowledge or have an incredibly developed ear, and paradoxically, one is impossible without the other.
So we can draw a very simple conclusion: if you don’t control the rules and boundaries that are in music, they control you. The less we know, the more we rely on taste and listening habits. And any habit kills creativity far more than knowledge of music theory.
I think it would be interesting to know the results of such an experiment, so if you can suggest it to your friends, or if you yourself are a supporter of pure creativity, then write what you have got, because perhaps I am wrong, and atonal music can be composed by anyone who is not familiar with music theory.
