Reassessing Theory

Why Do People Distrust Theory?

The use of theoretical principles and frameworks is a long-standing and effective tool for learning. The process of learning can feel mysterious, and in that mystery is a sacred crucible wherein the student pushes beyond existing boundaries to gain new skills and insight. The deeply personal nature of this experience can lead to intense feelings about this process, which results in strongly held beliefs about the correct way to go about learning and transmitting knowledge.

Difficult experiences with a given methodology will naturally seed distrust of that methodology or theory in general, and over time, that distrust can lead to a galvanized view of that methodology as inherently flawed. In addition to difficult experiences, mistrust of a methodology can also be passed on socially. This happens when the method is packaged together with oppressive or villainous initiatives and presented as a target for disapproval and dismantling.

In these situations, there are two possibilities: that the method or framework is inherently oppressive or that it is not inherently oppressive. In either case, the claim should bear scrutiny. Claims that a method is oppressive should not invoke situations where the method was anecdotally oppressive, such as when a specific abusive teacher is teaching a theory or lesson that is not inherently oppressive, but the learning conditions set up by the teacher are oppressive in one way or another.

In this case, we should not confuse, say, the merits of a principle of mathematics with a math teacher who shouts at and belittles their students. This kind of conflation is a very common barrier to many students making use of valuable methods and frameworks; it is also a cheap way for anti-theory proponents to gain clout for their anti-theory arguments. Conflating anecdotal evidence with the essence of a theory or method creates a straw man scenario where the actual theory being attacked is mischaracterized until the person calling it out stops being wrong about it.

Much like the misplaced valorization of rejecting virtuosity, skepticism toward theoretical study in the arts has found champions who claim to protect 'real,' 'living,' or 'embodied' artistic expression. Yet these attacks often amount to little more than anti-establishment posturing, with no substantive or rational foundation. In practice, anti-theory rhetoric proves a poor guide for anyone engaged in the serious work of learning, about the arts or about anything at all. Let’s look at why this is the case.

What Is Theory, Really?

Theory, as a learning tool, abstracts the mechanisms of practice in order to enable contemplation. That might sound kind of dense, but what it amounts to is that theory is a place where you work something out outside of the actual execution of your art for the purposes of understanding your process. Theory is a framework or architecture that forms the conceptual basis of practice.

This does not in any way mean that the use of theory or knowledge of a specific strain of theory is necessary before proceeding with practice; it simply means that it is a reflective tool, a way of naming, organizing, and examining practice, not a prerequisite for doing it.

Now, for one of my favorite parts of defining things, going to the word's origin. In the English language, we get the word “Theory” from the Greek: θεωρία (theōria) – meaning "a looking at, viewing, contemplation, or speculation. This word itself derives from θεωρός (theōros) – “spectator”, and ὁρᾶν (horān) – "to see”. In Arabic, we see the word for theory often used as نظرية (naẓariyya) “to look at, to observe, to consider,” and in early Turkish treaties, we see the variant “nazariye”. In numerous languages, the word for theory traces back to verbs of seeing or reflecting. I would suggest that when we refer to theory, we keep these origins in mind, as the true use of theory is essentially a way of reflecting upon something, a way of seeing.

After reflection, when conclusions are arrived at, found useful, and passed down, a Theoretical canon is gradually produced, and that canon is meant to address and comment on the artistic practice it was born from.

How Theory Strengthens Practice

Since this article responds to anti-theory rhetoric, I must mention something that should be self-evident: reflection is a powerful cognitive tool. Whether you are working on your own composition or recreating someone else’s work, reflection helps you understand intention and whether or not the desired effect is taking place. If the desired effect is not taking place, the theory generated by the tradition or lineage you are working with will provide you with a list of familiar places to look for remediation.

Far from diminishing the complexity of creative work, theory provides a framework that deepens awareness and intentionality within practice. For students, a theoretical canon is an effective way to transmit key practices as concepts while working through real examples in practice. In language, this might be like telling a student the use case of the past tense instead of having them infer it only by contextual examples. In this way, theory accelerates learning and empowers pattern recognition.

What Theory Does Not Do

Theory does not assert its own primacy; it is only a tool for reflection as part of a larger practice. Theory is descriptive, not prescriptive. Most anti-theory rhetoric is really fighting against prescriptive universalism, not theory. Theory does not reduce the richness of practice; it works alongside it. It makes no claim as a complete and insular method, and it makes no claim that phenomena outside of its purview do not exist.

Theory does not purport to describe any practice or cultural context it has not arisen out of. If you misapply a theory to analyze a culture or art form that the theory was not meant to address, then it is you who are misapplying the theory, not the theory colonizing your mind. If someone else forces you to do this, then it is they, not the theory, who is to blame. For example, western music training does not hold you back from learning the music of another culture; you are free to learn that music on its own terms, and the fact that you tried to shoehorn another culture's music into western music theory just means you were poorly guided into doing so, either by your own assumptions or another equally errant external force.

For some, learning theory has been accompanied by the misfortune of having been taught by a dogmatic teacher. This can absolutely ingrain prejudice, but it doesn’t take too much reflection to understand that this dogmatism on the part of the teacher or institution is not a function of the theory; it is a function of the teacher's short-sightedness.

Theory does not reduce musical practice to a set of rules; it codifies common likelihood in practice, it identifies species of tendencies.

Theory and notated music scores or diagrams are not some homogenized version of music, stripped of depth. They are representations, tools that capture certain perspectives, patterns, and possibilities. A score does not flatten music into lifeless symbols, nor does theory reduce practice to rigid prescriptions. Instead, both offer frameworks that interact dynamically with performance, interpretation, and cultural context. They carry depth precisely because they invite engagement, questioning, and variation, not because they claim to contain the totality of artistic experience, musical or otherwise. Western classical music is often the target of this critique of the lifelessness of the written score, but anyone who has worked within that tradition knows that a lot of interpretation in the realm of time, intonation, and ornamentation takes place beyond the score. Ask any string player in an orchestra how they adjust their intonation based on the period of music they are playing to harmonize intervals or increase gravity in resolutions. All of these details are worked outside of the score, and no matter how complex it is, there is never a claim that the score contains every musical consideration. If such a claim were made, no students of Western music would seek instruction after achieving functional literacy, and conductors would simply be metronomes instead of maestros, but this is not the case.

Another problem is the false equivalence of Theory = Rules. Anyone who actually works with theory knows it is far more dynamic than that.

Take a simple example: suppose I ask, “How does theory tell us to play over a diminished chord in Western music?” The answer is not a single fixed rule; it depends. Is it classical? If so, from which era? Is it jazz? Again, which era? Even within a single period, are we looking at conventions that are just emerging at the time, or drawing from a range of possibilities developed over time? What are the surrounding chords? And beyond that, what effect do you want in terms of phrasing and note density?

Yes, you still have to play it in real life and internalize all those variables. You can take a purely experiential approach to learning in context and absorbing content, hopefully with good players. But when you store that content in memory, you inevitably come to conclusions and organize it in some form, written or otherwise. And if you can, then pass on how you’ve organized it to students or collaborators; you are passing on theories; working, living ecosystems of their own.

Does The Use Of Theory Carry Political Weight?

As I mentioned, critics of the theory depict it as a cold and regulating reduction of artistic practice. I described above at some length how that is not true. The reason for this misconstruing of theory is that if you can successfully convince someone that the codification of tendencies in an art form is inherently oppressive, then you can easily claim it as a parallel to colonialism.

The fact is, even in the unfortunate case of a misguided teacher using a theoretical rubric to stifle a student's creativity, a claim of colonialism is still just an analogy. If, in the most literal sense, a colonizing entity supplants the music of the colonized for its own, for the purposes of dominance, then it is not the theory or the music that is doing the colonizing.

For example, the representation of scales, whether in music or in color, through mathematical systems, is not inherently political. It only takes on political weight when that framework is imposed on cultures it was never meant to describe. In such cases, the political element lies not in the theory itself, but in the desire of one group to assert dominance over another. Theory itself is not an actor; it cannot impose, it can only describe. Scholars are right to call attention to the ways theory has been entangled with power. Theory may be embedded in systems of power, but theory need not, and most often does not, necessarily become a system of power.

Conclusion

The claims that music theory is inherently colonizing or complicit in systems of cultural domination fail under logical scrutiny because they confuse the misuse of theory with the nature of theory itself. Theory is not an agent with volition but a descriptive framework created by people to organize knowledge; Blaming theory for colonization is as illogical as blaming architecture for prisons, or cartography for land theft.

If theory itself is said to colonize, then by the same reasoning, every human framework for reflection, grammar, logic, mathematics, and even cooking recipes would also colonize. That makes the charge meaningless; to preserve the meaning of colonization, we have to locate the agency in people and institutions, not in the framework itself.

In practice, artists and craftspeople everywhere already use internalized vocabularies, and naming these patterns is itself a form of theory that clearly aids learning rather than suppressing it. Likewise, accusing theory in academia of being inherently tied to cultural domination conflates institutional bias with the discipline as a whole. The real issue lies in prescriptive misuse, where one tradition’s standards are enforced as universal; this is an abuse of theory, not its essence.

Properly understood, theory is simply a toolkit whose meaning depends on how communities employ it, either to exclude or to preserve, reflect on, and transmit their traditions.