This is the big trap in how art education is conceptualized. 'Thing is, if you can't follow the rules there's nothing interesting about you breaking them.

> At best it gives you a way to express creativity.

I'm more on board with this, but there's still the implication that creativity is fixed and just waking to break free. There are the old aphorisms about writing to think, and so one needs to learn music to wield the medium richly.

Also, I care about originality sure, but I also care about complexity. Take a bunch of absolute beginner and professionals, I bet a) the beginners improvisations are no more diverse between people (don't most of us all grow up awash in similar ambient music in this increasingly globalized world?) and b) each professional's improvisations (by and large) are have more variety.

Mathematically, I imagine some big state space of possible music, and everybody starts with some tightly scattered small subsets/topological balls/whatever, and then those grow, and maybe even spread a bit (so they don't completely grow together) with training.

> At worst it's a dead thing you keep repeating over and over because you can't think of anything interesting to say.

I do agree that all music education should involve at least one of composition and improvisation, preferably both, or otherwise there's risk of that. Not going to lie the archetype here is classical, but until decently through the 19th century actually there was more emphasis on improve and creativity in Europe too (even before modern cults of individuality! Contradictory as that sounds). So in some sense we need to recover what is lost.

> Music theory can become a huge set of if...thens... and unfortunately even talented people don't always get past that.

Hmm I think this is a broader failure of education that music theory just puts into stark relief. I think many people have trouble connecting everyday experience and intuition with learned rules. For example all of are hardwired with an immense amount physics intuition, and learning basic classical physics is basically cross-referencing with a few surprising axioms and math that one should have been already taught.

Yes, musical is cultural/learned and not innate, but my does it hack the brain and in deep and surprising ways (does visual art vampire-tap your emotions like major vs minor??). The unconscious knowledge here is both deep and abstract. Music theory done right should function a lot like linguistics, and there there should be a lot of "gosh darn that does explain it" moments. Only without introspection do the rules become worthless bureaucracy.

But I do need to rant about a personal gripe. Functional harmony is a funny thing because it arrived to Western music fairly late yet is already on it's way out. I sometimes have a weird disconnect as I feel I have more of an innate "in-cultural" understanding of it than many of my peers. I think when it was "trending" music theory education got more of a free pass, but now the inadequacies are in sharper relief. Mathematically, it's roughly a state machine, but no teaching even covers that. Furthermore the meaning/asethetic/whatever-you-wanna-call-it is not in the states but the transitions, yet everybody gets hyped up on the chords. We teach roman numeral analysis and voice leading, but don't get right to the point that it's the chord progressions that count the most. A chord out of context carries a lot less information.The skills you need to be a brilliantly competent session musician or a successful teacher are only distantly related to the skills you need to be an interesting and original music creator.

> The skills you need to be a brilliantly competent session musician or a successful teacher are only distantly related to the skills you need to be an interesting and original music creator.

Yeah but we don't exactly teach the first two either from the beginning do we :)