heinrich schenker, miles davis, & technical knowledge

Here is a passage from Heinrich Schenker, included in the Norton Critical edition of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (ed. Elliot Forbes), p.171. (Original source is Der Tonwille, I (1921) (27-37).

"How happy the listener would be if he could share with the master his long-range hearing, and tgavel and soar with him over distant paths! If only he could! Then his fear that better hearing might encroach somewhat on his pleasure would give way to rapture."

And here is a quote from Miles Davis's Autobiography [full cite to
be added--I believe the page is 61]:

"Another thing I found strange after living and playing in New York was that a lot of black musicians didn’t know anything about music theory. Bud Powell was one of the few musicians I knew who could play, write and read all kinds of music. A lot of the old guys thought that if you went to school it would make you play like you were white. Or, if you learned something from theory, you would lose the feeling in your playing. I couldn’t believe that all them guys like Bird, Prez, Bean [Coleman Hawkins], all them cats wouldn’t go to museums or libraries and borrow those musical scores by all those great composers, like Stravinsky. Alban Berg, Prokofiev. I wanted to see what was going on in all of music. Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery, and I just couldn’t believe someone could be that close to freedom and not take advantage of it. I have never understood why black people didn’t take advantage of all the shit they can. It’s like a ghetto mentality telling people they aren’t supposed to do certain things, that those things are only reserved for white people.”