How is he not suicidal?

what is this image of wh*te w*men trying to convey

Not that user, but all of those musicians literally could not have written music or had it performed without training, patronage, being in a position to even receive training, etc. You're selecting from a sample of people whose music would never even have been transmitted if not for theory, so it's really not much of an argument you're making.

Folk music in the past was considered 'low-level' bullshit and wasn't written down in a standardized form, but I'm sure plenty of it was great and could stand up to the quality of much of the work of the composers in your picture.

Don't get me wrong, I love music that's heavily based on theory, but the user your replying to's point still stands.

>music that's heavily based on theory
what the fuck does that even mean? theory is descriptive, not prescriptive.

But that's precisely the problem with a lot of 'theory heavy' composers: they use the theory prescriptively.

how do you "use theory" prescriptively exactly? music theory is the study of the practices and possibilities of music; you use knowledge while composing, not theory.

But they do. They actively go out of their way to write music that pushes at the boundaries set by the music theory they know (e.g. fucked up time signatures, key changes etc.), rather than pushing at the boundaries of artistic expression. They're thinking within the framework set out by the music theory they already know, rather than thinking in artistic terms.

he making that youtube green my guy

>They actively go out of their way to write music that pushes at the boundaries set by the music theory they know (e.g. fucked up time signatures, key changes etc.)

I would hardly call key changes and odd time signatures "pushing the boundaries of music theory," those concepts have been around for literal centuries. Besides that, how do you know they're doing that for that reason, and not just because they like the sound of it?
I really like the sound of 7/8. It sounds cool and I like it, theory be damned.

no, it doesnt. Its impressive but its just that, all masturbatory bullshit

Precisely, in the composing practice theory should be damned. But to these guys, it's not. It's the guidelines that they use.

They're not creating art, what they do is just generating music through the rules they learned. The true artist composes without rules