Piano Forum

There were certain conventions in playing of the early days that were useful to professional musicians playing in groups.  The most obvious example is the "credenza", a part of an early piece that was left blank that real artists took as license to fill in something artistic and new.  In those days, the improvisation had to fit the established conventions or be hooted down.  Similar but different conventions have built up now around jazz, rock etc.  Arrangements in the early days were not totally spelled out, since everything had to be copied by hand, musical shorthand was very useful.  As published scores became more common, the arrangements were filled out and the knowledge of the player was more piece specific than just a general cultural canon.  I have not taken college level music theory, it sounds as if you have the curiosity to make such a course worthwhile for you. I do know what I like, and pieces that follow the historic conventions are more pleasing to my ear usually than pieces that flout them.  I find Schoenburg (?) and followers of his twelve tone school tedious and boring no matter how loud they are.  Oddly enough, masters of the historic scale and chord relationships have mostly moved out of the classical orchestra into the realm of popular music, especially "rock" and "pop". (There are modern orchestral composers that use chord structure, but they are usually segregated off to the "pops" orchestra and looked down at by the over-educated).   The move of pop away from the piano to the guitar had more to do with the economics of pleasing  a crowd and splitting the money 4 ways, instead of 60 ways, than with any musical defect of the piano.