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Totally agree. The practice is what's important. My teacher won't let you look at sheet music for songs at first, he'll make you listen to Donna Lee 1000 times, sing it and work it out yourself before you check your work with the sheet music.

Which reminds me of an anecdote in Hampton Hawes' autobiogrophy [1] where some famous teacher convinces him to take a lesson, after which Hampton writes he didn't really care for all of that theory stuff, he learned from playing with people like Mingus and Charlie Parker.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Hawes

I'm a jazz musician, and have likewise learned very little theory. On the other hand, there is a lot of attrition in jazz, so watch out for survivor bias. And it depends on what you want to do. Everybody I know who is active in composition and arrangement is fluent in theory. Being able to create original material is super cool and valuable. And there were certainly theory experts among the greats.

Oh absolutely, there's always the anecdotes of Coltrane carrying around Slonimsky's thesaurus, or George Russel claiming Miles used his lydian chromatic concept. But personally I find none of it really makes much sense until I sit down with the theory and practice it on my instrument. Memorizing theory with flash cards, like the OP mentioned, I don't find to be all that helpful.

Your last point is one of my long-standing pet-peeves about language teaching methods. It seems the universally accepted practice is to give students mountains of vocabulary to study, grammar rules that make no sense, and a little bit of speaking practice.

It is no wonder that native speakers of language X have a characteristic accent when speaking in a different language. When they try to read a word in the foreign language, they default to their native language's pronunciation heuristics.

That is completely backwards from how children learn languages. They are exposed to the sounds and intuitively figure out the rest.

After years of starting and stopping language learning via classes that take the typical vocab/grammar approach, I've found I'm actually progressing with confidence using Pimsleur and other listening based approaches. It just makes a whole lot more sense to me this way and I wish my middle school/high school foreign language teachers had just handed me this instead (at least at the beginning).

If you look at modern teaching getting it's root in nation formation in France/Germany where there was no 'national' language but regional dialects blending one into another it makes more sense. What if the original purpose WAS TO CREATE that 'characteristic accent'?

> Theory is about music; it is not the practice of music.

I'd quibble a bit with this: theory is language to speak of certain experiences and patterns one discovers in the practice of / play with music.

Saying this to (perhaps) refine your point rather than contradict it. I quite agree that practice is key and theory was dead for me until one summer as a teen where I noodled freely enough in front of a piano and suddenly noticed "oh, this is what they're talking about." Everything up until you have enough up close and personal experience with the music to notice doesn't matter.

And then once you notice it becomes a name you can call it with.

The gist of it is that music theory is descriptive, not prescriptive.

In the beginning there was no theory.

The instrument itself is all you basically need to make music. People spent thousands of years just trying not to hit the wrong notes without knowing the difference between a sharp or a flat.

Theory was reductive to begin with, it codified what was already acceptable to qualify as music.

With deeper understanding the theory can be built upon creatively on its own, and rewarding composition or improvisation achieved independent of a particular instrument. Even better documentation in many cases.

Every instrument is different, but I do think it's a good idea if you're going to get into theory, you do it on an instrument where you have the greatest proficiency beforehand.

If you concentrate on the instrument itself primarily, you might spend some time producing relatively unmusical passages, but each instrument only has so many notes. If you play each note every day for some reason or another, you can become more familiar with all of them than otherwise. If you succeed at making it sound better over time, by playing however you like more & more regardless of theory, that would be notable accomplishment.

That's more like instrument theory rather than music theory, but if your instrument familiarity is good enough you can do your part and pull your weight along with advanced theorists who can cover the academic areas that are encountered. Once you're groovin' these are the ones to build up your theory about what you're already doing together.

Edit: There's also the alternative approach of playing only a limited number of the notes available on any one instrument. Almost theoretically in a statistical way to completely limit the output to that which is proven most acceptable to the mainstream. For instance Irving Berlin only played on the black keys and became the most popular songwriter that way.