Having said that, I’ll address the interesting part of the previous comment:

Composers do not write music by writing a schenker background and then filling in the gaps

That’s because composers, by definition already know how to write music. They don’t need to explicitly go through the most elementary stages of musical construction; to them, the latter are either obvious or subconscious. Music isn’t mysterious to composers, so they don’t need it to be demystified.

The target audience for pedagogical music theory is not Mozart or Chopin, and nor is it historians interested in a particular composer’s sketching procedure. It is people — musicians or laymen — for whom the act of musical composition itself seems like a transcendent feat, beyond the reach of ordinary human cognition. People who know not of what ingredients music is made. People who are unable to mentally imagine music they have never heard before.

You cannot necessarily gain this kind of knowledge by observing a composer in the act, the way you can learn the ingredients of a meal by watching the chef prepare it. For between each sketch, or each improvised variation, the composer is silently using, in his or her mind, all the knowledge that he or she has and that you don’t. This is why theory is different from composition. Theory — that is, demystification of composition — is where the study of music begins; in order to study composition per se (how to actually put a piece together, effective sketching procedures, refined questions of aesthetics and rhetoric, etc.), you really have to be a composer already.

If you ever want to know about chopin check out this website its very good.

http://www.socyberty.com/History/Chopin-a-Great-Pianist.166961

I never said that. What I said was that I don’t believe in harmony or chord progressions. Regarding Schenker, I said:

It is a model so hallowed by tradition that even Schenker needed several decades to break free of it — and he almost succeeded.

Note that critical word “almost”! Yes, it’s true that there are Roman numerals in Free Composition — but the role they play there is very limited in comparison with their role in traditional “harmonic analysis”. In fact, he could have dispensed with them altogether, had he wanted or cared to. (This may be a good topic for a future post.) Of course, it did take him a while to get to that point…

He wrote a whole book on harmony

Indeed he did — his very first book, published in 1906. The theory presented in that book represented a radical departure from the theories that were widely taught at the time (and still today!). Since I’m on vacation at the moment and don’t have my copy handy, I’ll just refer you to the Wikipedia article on Stufen , and the passage from Harmony quoted therein. See also “Rameau or Beethoven?” from the third volume of The Masterwork in Music (if you can get past the francophobic ranting).

Have you read Free Composition?

Yes. Have you read An Introduction to Tonal Theory?

I don’t have time right now to debate each point you make, perhaps in a few weeks after I finish putting my tenure file together.

I’ll still be here, so there’s no hurry. I look forward to it.