Vieuxtemps5

Wow thank you Lorelei, you are totally right that a lot of that stuff is not helpful at all. It's just busy work and very time consuming.

You comparison with the poet idea doesn't make any sense, especially since most of the greatest performers of the 20th century hardly even studied theory or any of that. What they knew came from reading books on their own or from their teachers. If you seriously need theory to perform well then you probably aren't a musician, because theory is just a way of notating what we hear, and being able to visually see how different harmonies and counterpoints work. Any half decent musician feels these things. Of course they might need some help and direction but nowadays there's just way way way too much theory and all that other stuff. Way too much. You can learn much more by studying art and history on a high level, not through the lense of music, because when you do it in music history, everything is forcibly related to the music, and things get left out. Study the painter or the politician or philosopher with the same intensity and focus that a regular student would.

I'm sorry but it's true... the current crop of musicians are doing something different. They are finding a great teacher (sometimes in a dual program), and doing some kind of bachelors of arts or science. People are realizing that being totally in music is something that came from the modern idea of university education. It wasn't like that before and really it was all done in many ways to just create jobs for theory teachers. Of course those subjects are crucial, but to spend that much money for 4 years of the same stuff really isn't the best idea for a lot of people.

I come from a background where you have to consider how are you going to make a living. Maybe all of you are really rich and your kids don't have to worry, but I do, and so do most of the kids I know from my school and from summer programs. A very prominent dean said that musicians need to start thinking more like Division 1 NCAA atheletes, except ones who go to class. You do a degree that can get you work in the real world, or at least put you in a decent position for graduate school, and work on your instrument separately. The things you learn will be valuable to your music, and you get a much broader education. It's the newest trend in music (and while it isn't big yet, it will get bigger)... kids go to a top university and just study their instrument on the side, and these are people who want to perform.

If you think theory provides better context than knowing poetry, literature, and art history, then you really need to think things through. Music is about expression at the end of the day, and knowing what trends and counter cultures were going on at the time of the piece you are playing, or even just starting to think about different aesthetics and means of expression by studying past artists from other disciplines is orders of magnitude more valuable than sitting and hearing some guy drone on about secondary 7th chords and 12 tone rows. Again, the history of performance is on my side with this. This whole complete musical education is a fairly new concept meant to make music acceptable academically in this university machine.