Re: vid: sum Bird licks

The language metaphor only goes so far. Every normal child learns
their first language through exposure (and some would argue
interaction) by the age of 3-4. No instruction needed, and no
explicit knowledge acquired. It's all internalized and implicit. But
not everyone becomes fluent in music through exposure alone, and most
people start learning music a lot later in life, after some
significant changes have taken place in the brain. So learning a
first langauge seems like a pretty specialized kind of learning that
all human children are hard wired to do. Music, not so much.

Maybe learning music is more like learning a second language, which is
done all kinds of ways (exposure, various kinds of instruction,
seeking out of explicit knowledge on one's own, and combinations of
all these), and with many different levels of success. Some people
seem to do it a lot better than others, and some seem to be beyond
hope no matter how hard they try.

Sorry about being so picky on this, but since I do second language
acquisition research for a living, I often wince when I see the
language metaphor invoked for learning music.

Ken

On Nov 25, 10:32 am, pmfan57 <jwrag...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
If you speak perfect English without knowing the fact that you are,
e.g., correctly conjugating all the verbs, or even that there is such
a thing as "conjugating verbs," the only thing you don't know is THAT
you are doing it. You do in fact know how to conjugate all the verbs
because when quizzed you would always have the right answer.

Even if it's true (and it appears that it may not be true) that Wes
didn't know the names of chords or chord progressions, he always
recognized it/them and could play a series of melodic lines, in the
bop idiom, over it/them. He spoke the language as perfectly as did
the bop player who had studied theory.

And obviously you can speak a language fluently without the theory
(i.e., knowledge of the "rules" of grammar) because many people do it
in many languages all the time. It's only the theorist that has to
know the names. I speak English but don't remember what terms like
past pluperfect means. I'm pretty sure that I will have conjugated
most of my verbs correctly by the time many of you will have read
this, however.

If theory only means "knowing the names of what you are playing" then
it is undeniably true that if you don't know the names for something,
you don't know the theory behind it. But if knowing theory means
understanding the rules, then you can understand them without knowing
the names for them.

.

Relevant Pages

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