Music theory gets a bad rap. For a lot of people, it brings up memories of dry lectures, confusing rules, and the dreaded circle of fifths looming like a final boss. Students dread the abstract nature of drawing meaning from a chord printed on paper. But for me? Music theory is one of the most beautiful, emotional, human parts of music. It’s the story behind the sound. I read lines of music like words in a book, and chord progressions set the mood for the pictures appearing in my head.
When I teach theory, I’m not just teaching symbols on a staff. I’m teaching how tension builds and releases, how a chord progression can feel like a question being answered, how a simple melody can break your heart with the right harmony underneath. Every measure is a sentence. Every phrase has a turning point. The best theory lessons feel like storytelling- and I love helping students realize they already know this language. They just didn’t know it had a name.
There’s something powerful about watching someone’s face light up when they finally understand why something sounds the way it does. When they can feel the logic of it. When the “rules” stop being rules and start being tools. Theory gives us the words to describe what we already feel. That’s not boring, that’s magic. I make students sit and imagine different scenes, I ask them what does a certain passage evoke for them. We discuss the background of the piece we’re working on, and we see how the composers brought that story to life with the notes on the page, and how we can convey that through our performance. However, we aren’t beholden to the composer’s story- sometimes there is no story, and we have to think of what it means to us in order to convey it to our audience. That’s what makes the difference. My All State Orchestra students say that had it not been for the visuals, or the emotions, or the senses we discussed as we pieced their solo together, they wouldn’t have been able to deliver a performance to land them in the top Orchestra in the state.
So yes, I teach theory. But more than that, I teach people how to listen differently. How to write differently. How to connect dots they didn’t know were connectable. That’s what keeps me coming back. That’s the story I want to tell.