Education has changed radically in the 21st century, and access to incredible technologies has become the norm. But, our institutional approaches to music education have remained unchanged. Today, STEM students have access to powerful tools such as Mathematica that enables them to engage in practical and interactive exercises that reinforce their knowledge and help them apply newly acquired skills. Outside of academia, games like chess have had outstanding success in educating new players because of access to high-powered chess engines that give players feedback on their games. Musical education has nothing resembling this technical capability.

Today’s Curriculum

The common practice music theory curriculum taught in the music schools of today is cumbersome and too theoretically-oriented. Completing a theory handout and waiting a week for the professor to grade it is a far cry from the tight feedback loop that the modern chess learner experiences. By the time the student has the feedback they require, the context of the problem has long since escaped their mind. Students attempting to learn an abstract music theory concept are often mystified as to how to apply it in context. These problems are then exacerbated by overly abstracted music theory concepts, complicated conditional rules, and a slow feedback process.

The Role of Music Theory

The role of music theory should be to simplify, not to complicate. Why is it that in training a young musician we teach them a method that is an order of magnitude more complicated than the actual historical methods used in the common practice period? Shouldn’t such a course teach the musical concepts as used by the greatest practitioners of that era? Why wouldn’t we musicians want to learn how Bach and Mozart thought about music? The point of music education should be to empower young musicians to feel like skilled musical practitioners themselves, not to further obscure the nature of music and make them feel inferior to real musicians like Mozart.

The Modern Practice Approach

With modern scholarship and modern technology, we can teach the modern musical tradition in a more efficient way. Instead of contriving some method for explaining how music works, we can teach the actual musical methods used by Bach and Mozart. Instead of relying on a slow feedback loop, we can build intelligent musical programs that give instantaneous feedback and understand the foundations of modern music perfectly. This gives music students access to the same context-rich feedback loop that empowers today’s precocious students of chess. With this new approach combining a practical orientation with advancements in music technology, we can give young musicians the power over the domain of music that they desire.