One more question. Do you also think that Westergaardian theory is superior for understanding jazz? I've encountered jazz pianists on the internet who insist that harmony and voice leading are ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL for doing jazz improvisation and anyone suggests otherwise is a heretic who deserves to be burnt at the stake. Hyperbole aside, jazz classes do seem to incorporate a lot of harmony and voice leading into their material and their students do seem to make fine improvisers and composers.
Oh, and for what its worth, you've convinced me to give Westergaard another shot.
Do you also think that Westergaardian theory is superior for understanding jazz?
Yes. My claim is not repertory-specific. (Note that this is my claim I'm talking about, not Westergaard's.)
More generally, I claim that the Westergaardian framework (or some future theory descended from it) is the appropriate one for understanding any music that is to be understood in terms of the traditional Western pitch space (i.e. the one represented by a standardly-tuned piano keyboard), as well as any music whose pitch space can be regarded as an extension, restriction...
We recently established a successful Useful Concepts Repository. It got me thinking about all the useless or actively harmful concepts I had carried around for in some cases most of my life before seeing them for what they were. Then it occurred to me that I probably still have some poisonous concepts lurking in my mind, and I thought creating this thread might be one way to discover what they are.
I'll start us off with one simple example: The Bohr model of the atom as it is taught in school is a dangerous thing to keep in your head for too long. I graduated from high school believing that it was basically a correct physical representation of atoms. (And I went to a *good* high school.) Some may say that the Bohr model serves a useful role as a lie-to-children to bridge understanding to the true physics, but if so, why do so many adults still think atoms look like concentric circular orbits of electrons around a nucleus?
There's one hallmark of truly bad concepts: they actively work against correct induction. Thinking in terms of the Bohr model actively prevents you from understanding molecular bonding and, really, everything about how an atom can serve as a functional piece of a real thing like a protein or a diamond.
Bad concepts don't have to be scientific. Religion is held to be a pretty harmful concept around here. There are certain political theories which might qualify, except I expect that one man's harmful political concept is another man's core value system, so as usual we should probably stay away from politics. But I welcome input as fuzzy as common folk advice you receive that turned out to be really costly.