Thanks for your feedback on the Westergaard text. I think many of your problems will be addressed by the material I plan to write at some indefinite point in the future. It's unfortunate that ITT is the only exposition of Westergaardian theory available (and even it is not technically "available", being out of print), because your issues seem to be with the book and not with the theory that the book aims to present.

There is considerable irony in what you say about aural skills, because I consider the development of aural skills -- even at the most elementary levels -- to be a principal practical use of Westergaardian theory. Unfortunately, Westergaard seems not to have fully appreciated this aspect of his theory's power, because he requests of the reader a rather sophisticated level of aural skills (namely the ability to read and mentally hear a Mozart passage) as a prerequisite for the book -- rather unnecessarily, in my opinion.

This leads to the point about counterpoint exercises, which, if designed properly, should be easier to mentally "hear" than real music -- that is, indeed, their purpose. Unfortunately, this is not emphasized enough in ITT.

I think that your comparison is very interesting because I would predict that a phrasebook is much more useful than a grammar text for learning a language

Thank goodness I'm here to set you straight, then. Phrasebooks are virtually useless for learning to speak a language. Indeed they are specifically designed for people who don't want to learn the language, but merely need to memorize a few phrases (hence the name), for -- as I said -- ad hoc purposes. (Asking where the bathroom is, what someone's name is, whether they speak English, that sort of thing.)

Here's an anecdote to illustrate the problem with phrasebooks. When I was about 10 years old and had just started learning French, my younger sister got the impression that pel was the French word for "is". The reason? I had informed her that the French translation of "my name is" was je m'appelle -- a three syllable expression whose last syllable is indeed pronounced pel. What she didn't realize was that the three syllables of the French phrase do not individually correspond to the three syllables of the English phrase. Pel does not mean "is"; rather, appelle means "call", je means "I", and m' means "myself". Though translated "my name is", the phrase actually means "I call myself".

A phrasebook won't tell you this; a grammar will. If you try to learn French from a phrasebook, you might successfully learn to introduce yourself with je m'appelle, but you will be in my sister's position, doomed to making false assumptions about the structure of the language that may require vast amounts of data to correct. (It's no defense of a wrong theory that it didn't prevent you from learning the right theory eventually.) Whereas if you learn from a grammar, not only will you learn je m'appelle without thinking pel means "is", but you will also be able to generalize outside the scope of the "Greetings" section of your phrasebook and produce apparently unrelated phrases such as "I call you" (je t'appelle).

I think your comments are revealing about the mindset of people who resist or "don't get" my attack on harmonic theory. It seems to be assumed that of course no one actually learns musical thinking from a harmony book. Likewise, in defending phrasebooks, you help yourself to the assumption that the learner is going to have access to extensive amounts of data in the form of communication with speakers, and that this will be where the "actual learning" is going to occur. Well in that case, what do you need a phrasebook for? You can, after all, learn a language simply by immersion, with nothing other than the data itself to guide you. If you're going to have any preliminary or supplementary instruction at all, it surely may as well be in an organized fashion, aimed at increasing the efficiency of the learning process by directing one toward correct theories and away from incorrect ones -- which is exactly what grammar books do and phrasebooks don't do.

Harmony is actually worse than a phrasebook, because at least a phrasebook won't cause you to make worse mistakes than you would make otherwise; and it doesn't pretend to be a grammar of the language. With harmony, the situation is different. Harmony books are written as if they were presenting an actual musical theory, something that would be useful to know before sifting through vast amounts of musical data doing, as you put it, "actual learning". But then, when push comes to shove and it is pointed out how terrible, how actively misleading the harmony pseudo-theory is for this purpose, its defenders retreat to a position of "oh, well, of course everybody knows that you can't actually learn music from a book" -- as if that were a defense against an alternative theory that actually is helpful. It's enough to drive one mad!

(You'll understand, I hope, that I'm not reacting particularly to you in the preceding paragraph, but to my whole history of such discussions going back a number of years.)