A little long, but well worth the read!
Joe Satriani from Guitar.about.com
Who would you say is your biggest musical influence that is not a guitarist?
Joe: Well, probably my high school music theory teacher. He was the one that was able to reach me as a teenager and show me that there were mysteries out there that could be explained about music. That every musician that walked the planet before me started out equally ignorant and was taught by somebody, or a few people, about what all the musicians before them had done. I learned not only music history, but music theory and was enlightened by biographies of great musicians from the classical world, the pop world and the jazz world. All those things put together really help you sort things out. When you're a young kid and you've got music in your head, you really want to try to get it out, but you don't know how it fits together. So he was a big influence on me that way. He sort of helped me figure out what it was to be a musician. How you're supposed to go about your life. It can be very difficult. The way that all of the humans have progressed in civilization is to label things. You know, not only objects but feelings, inclinations, ideas. In the case of music, they call it music theory and make it sound more important than it really is. Basically, when you get a sound in your head, and you want to remember it, you've got to call it something. If you get a sound in your head, and you want someone else in the room to understand what it is, you've got to call it something. Whatever you call it, if that other person is familiar with that lexicon or that language, then they'll know what that sound in your head is. Imagine before there was measurement and somebody had to describe length to somebody. In music it's the same way. I can look at a musician and say "I need a minor 6th there and I need it in a triplet eighth note" and that's the language that we use and then I can communicate the sound in my head to that musician so they understand it. There's just this huge vocabulary that you have to learn in order to interpret what's going on inside of you and can understand and translate all the music coming at you from other musicians. A lot of starting out as a musician is learning that language. You learn a lot about the music that's in your head when you get that language together. It's a great experience.
Good luck on the musical journey! -Steve
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