Jon Johanning wrote:

>The sense I get from observing pop musicians and their audience is that
>they choose to be "musically illiterate" because they are following in the
>tradition of popular musicians going back to the dawn of the human race.
>That is, when you feel like singing a song or beating out a rhythm to dance
>to, you just open your mouth and sing away, or grab whatever is handy that
>makes a noise and beat away.  This doesn't take any music theory at all,
>and people were doing it thousands of years before there was any such thing
>(presumably) as music theory.

Yet, most pop music is admittedly more complex than mere monophonic music
with drum accompaniment.  The very fact that songs are arranged, harmonized
and improvised upon by anything from garage bands to mega corperate stars
implies to me that whether or not music theory is overtly discussed, its
rules must have seaped into the lexicon of common usage even by pop
musicians.  Perhaps there is a misunderstanding here between the lack of
knowledge of music theory concepts as such versus the lack of their use.
I would say that most pop music today owes a good deal to music theory and
particularly harmonic and tonal theory, whether musicians know the jargon
of those theoretical branches or not.

>On the other hand, if you aspire to do anything a bit more elaborate that
>than with your music, then it would behoove you to get some theory under
>your belt.  One of the big differences between pop music and CM is that
>the latter is usually *much* more elaborate.

None of the Beatles could read or write music, yet many of their balads
show a particular and marked resemblance to Schubert or Schumann's lieder
in their harmonic constructs.  Other pop artiststhat I know are able to
come up with very interesting and elaborate melodies, chord progressions
and rhythmic ideas without necessarily knowing the names of the processes
they undergo to achieve those results.  In fact, much music throughout the
world has no etic lexicon of music theory, yet ethnomusicologists study
such music in great depth to try and uncover the possible theoretical
underpinnings that may not have yet developed a vocabulary by the
practitioners of those forms of music.

Orlando