Music theory is one of the oldest fields of study in the western tradition of education. Pythagoras and Plato, for instance, were leaders in, among other things, music theory. In fact, music theory is one of the seven liberal arts that formed the core of every advanced education in the western system from the days of ancient Greece up through the Renaissance. Not that what we call music theory was necessarily very much like what they used to teach. One difference was that folks used to think of musical knowledge as not just explaining how audible pitches and rhythms work together but as a way of viewing the whole world. Our kind of music was just one kind to the ancient and medieval thinkers. Another kind of music held the cosmos in order, and another linked the soul and the body. We have given up these theories. Yet we still don't know what really holds the Earth and Sun together even though we know the mathematics of the force. And we still don't know how the objects we see form a picture in our minds that we can study, enjoy, remember, etc. I hope that while talking about chords, scales, forms, and keys, I help my students to see that studying the workings of one of the most beautiful of human activities helps identify, if not clarify, issues of aesthetics, theology, biology, physics, epistomology, psychology, ontology, and cosmology, and cannot be totally separated from thinking in mathematics, logic, politics, astronomy, sociology, economics, grammar, rhetoric, semiology, dance, drama, and anthropology.