International audience The founding opposition or distinction between theory and musical practice, in other words between those who know what music is made of and those who practice it, has been effective since Antiquity. Relayed by Boethius, it crystallizes in the Middle Ages through the judgment without appeal of Gui d'Arezzo, who establishes a hierarchy between the musicus, the one who knows, and the cantor, who acts without knowing. The networks of oppositions that have developed around these two concepts over time are identifiable, variable, sometimes recurrent, depending on the location or institutional positioning of the judging party. These oppositions, often resulting from binary representations, induce hierarchizations, scales of values (which are judged positively or negatively), which go so far as to generate discourses marking belonging and ideologies.This work aims to better understand the epistemological issues related to the concepts of theory and practice, in music education, throughout history (nature, function, evolution). It is a question of verifying the acceptability or, on the contrary, the necessity of exceeding such a dichotomy. This approach leads to an uncovering of the deficits that today stand in the way of an approach that integrates and goes beyond the couple of theory and musical practice, when it comes to teaching.