Music rage made sense once I understood most people learn One Way, and don't learn there are many convergent cultures and applications that work with the same underlying wiggly airs, and there's often animus between those traditions. Hip-hop has as much potential for exploration in theory as anything else, but a lot of people raised on Western music theory consider it inferior mumbling.
An electronic musician working in a DAW needs to understand notes as ratios and frequencies lest they produce a mix that sounds like goop on club speakers, but a pianist can get away with not having any idea. Put them in a room and ask them to explain the difference between a mode and a scale, and you'll need a hazmat crew.
Realizing all this led to a handy heuristic: the best musicians to know and work with are those who can navigate those different conceptions and traditions without fear or judgement. There's no reason an orchestral composer can't learn from riddim without tripping over triplets.
I only dabble in music as a hobby, started later in life, never had any professional instruction whatsoever. So occasionally I find myself on forums populated in part by people who have been taking formal music lessons from strict teachers since the age of three and OH BOY do they get fired up when someone suggests anything that differs even slightly from their training.
There is definitely some subset of musicians that cannot conceive the notion that someone somewhere on the planet might be learning music just for fun and don't WANT to take it uber-seriously.
An electronic musician working in a DAW needs to understand notes as ratios and frequencies lest they produce a mix that sounds like goop on club speakers, but a pianist can get away with not having any idea. Put them in a room and ask them to explain the difference between a mode and a scale, and you'll need a hazmat crew.
Realizing all this led to a handy heuristic: the best musicians to know and work with are those who can navigate those different conceptions and traditions without fear or judgement. There's no reason an orchestral composer can't learn from riddim without tripping over triplets.