Music THEORY isn't "all about the ears" at all, though.
It is the conceptual framework & vocabulary you use to talk about music, not perform it.
If kids love performing and listening to music, they'll want to talk about it. And initially they'll be limited to things like "I love that thing it does near the middle when the bass is going baBONG baBONG baBONG then everything suddenly get really quiet and strange".
That's obviously ridiculously imprecise, right? And aren't you curious to know what "strange" means in this context? Suppose you want to write a piece of music that sounds "strange" like the piece you liked, but more so? So even piss-poor black kids end up with a thirst for a subject that looks pretty dry to the unmotivated.
"""Some do end up learning theory but many great musicians don't."""
We're talking about music theory in genres where it is important, i.e where the music is involved and advanced. Three minute fifties rock-n-roll tunes is not where this happens.
Little Richards is great, but not in the musically advanced way Charles Mingus, Miles Davies, etc are great. He's great for the raw fun/energy/danceability impact of his music.
You're making a huge mistake when you say that. This sort of snobbishness is really bad for art. Great art is always connected to the lowly and the popular. Disdain for that which is not "advanced", imagining barriers between high and low, is associated with nothing so much as creative exhaustion. It's the mentality not of the artist but of the critic, and the second-rate critic at that.
It's ironic that you would pick a couple of jazz musicians to illustrate this, since for most of its formative history jazz was derided as a vulgar form. Only in later stages was it championed by the priests of "advancedness". This is a sign of decadence. When the Davises and Minguses appear, that is the late-blooming of a genre, and by the time the scholars move in, the muses for the most part have moved on. (Which is not at all to say that Davis and Mingus aren't great artists.)
An awful lot of performance involves skills that are NOT addressed by music theory -- basically everything that distinguishes a mechanical MIDI performance of some piece from an real performance by a professional is not part of foundational music theory.
There's also a great deal of ground that music theory formalizes that long-time musicians will grasp intuitively (but be less able to discuss, of course).
Yeah, but I also mean that they also seem to pick the theory/names just fine -- i.e not just playing complicated stuff by ears, but also understanding how everything is called and how it works.
