Once, when teaching a course on the 1970s, I wanted to show my students the difference between funk and disco. I didn’t have the theoretical chops to explain it … it wasn’t about being able to play music, I could poke out examples of each style on a bass guitar, for instance … it was about putting the difference into words. So I played two songs. The first was a typical disco song, don’t recall which one, and as it played, I pounded the beat out on the podium and talked a bit about why BPM mattered to DJs playing to an audience on the dance floor, why consistency was important. Then I played “The Big Payback” by James Brown, and when the guitar riff started up, I hit the podium along with the beat, as best I could, and told the students that the difference between those two kinds of beats was the difference between disco and funk.

Musically speaking. It was an American Studies class, not a Music Theory class, and I spent more time talking about disco subcultures than I did with how funky JB could be. Which, I suppose, means in the end I don’t think we need to know music theory to write about music. But it wouldn’t hurt, either.