Actually I became interested in music theory unintentionally. When my grandfather (who had attended the now defunct Ornstein School of Music in Philadelphia) moved to Florida, he gave me boxes of books he no longer had room for, among them his old music textbooks—heavy, serious and fascinatingly dense stuff like Goetschius’s Theory and Practice of Tone-Relations that I found very absorbing.

Music is an excellent source of analogies for education: I use them often and structured an entire essay (on specialization) around one.

Williams is certainly worth looking up; Bream is still alive, so he’s not the best respected living classical guitarist, but certainly the best one in his prime. Štěpán Rak (a name to copy-and-paste) is one of the two classical guitarists (with Kazuhito Yamashita) who unquestionably qualify as virtuosi, if virtuosity as such appeals to you.

I don’t know if your experience necessarily invalidates my little provisional outline here — though it definitely needs some refinement.

The first thing I should do is emphasize these stages as aims of education (or maybe “vanishing points” is a better way to put it), and the aim at each stages doesn’t necessarily exclude others, it’s simply the primary focus — or should be… the second thing I should emphasize is this is a prescriptive suggestion for improving education, not an account of how it always happens.

It’s impossible to do much in any stage without incorporating the aims and practices of at least a few of the others. I need to stress this more.

By the way, I found it interesting that my own experience with guitar isn’t too far from yours. Unlike most people, I happen to have a passion for theory too (but not exactly for discipline). I did play bass by ear for a few years, and I’ve always loved music as a listener and secret-aspirant, but it wasn’t until I got interested in the more intellectual aspects of music that I managed to take it seriously.

Actually, come to think of it, a big part of my motivation was that I always used music to mine analogies for education.

I’m curious, what exactly brought you to music theory? I wonder if maybe this model could accommodate your experience by redefining exactly what it is you’re trying to learn.

PS I’m debating whether to admit to having never heard of Williams and Rak before… No doubt I’ll be looking them up shortly.

I actually began with music theory and then took up the guitar because I needed a polyphonic instrument to test things on and a guitar was easy to get. It was only after I had begun to research & analyze the technique that I began to try to appreciate the instrument. I knew music, but I knew as little about the guitar and its tradition as is possible for a Westerner. Shamefully I was simply unaware of the guitar’s classical tradition. But once I began listening I fell hard in love with the instrument.

Since then I have indeed found that passion and discipline alternate, but in approach, not in subject matter: something gets me excited and I want to learn how to do it; something becomes possible for me and I seek models to get me excited about it. For example, Segovia gave me a passion for good tone that I have pursued with discipline; but tremolo never moved me much at all until I began to study it and sought out excellent examples like Williams or Rak. (All of whose names I mention with abject humility.) Passion creates discipline, certainly, but discipline can also foster passion.

I suppose that what makes my unusual experience possible is simply that I began late and already had a number of skills that required precise awareness of physical technique. Your progression models someone acquiring their first skill with accuracy, but it breaks down as a general model for education because in further skills because there is always some overlap that throws off the sequence.

Possibly some of this is irrelevant, but I don’t often get the chance to talk about the guitar & I was tempted to enthuse.

I read the article you linked to at the beginning. It reminded me of some rather more substantial I had read here. You might find it of interest.