The article resonated with me. I seem to frequently respond to people who suggest that what we learn in music theory class is “irrelevant and useless, since we’re not eighteenth-century court musicians.” Fine, nobody has ever really said exactly that to me. If they did, I think I would fall out of my chair. But many students over the years have asked me to explain to them how music theory is “relevant to their musical lives.” The tone of Hein’s article reminded me of these students. Perhaps more importantly, the article was being “published” (curated?) by Slate, a seemingly reputable journalistic website, and Hein was being touted as some kind of “music theory expert.” Moreover, Hein’s blog had gained significant traction on Reddit and Twitter, having been promoted by popular writers such as Dylan Matthews, and Eric Alper. My dear beloved field of music theory was being smeared all over the internet!
I disagreed with several of the claims he made in his post, and as we do in today’s society, I took to Twitter to air my grievances. Through the magic of the internet, I was soon thrust into a conversation with Hein about his article. While I love Twitter, it isn’t a great venue for lengthy debate. I promised Hein (who turns out to be a really nice guy) that I would write a “counterpoint” to his article, in which I more clearly spelled out exactly how I thought he was misrepresenting the discipline of music theory. And here we are.
Hein begins his discussion by describing what he sees as one of the central problems with music education today:
“The academic music world is slowly coming to grips with the ways that the conventional teaching of music theory serves practicing musicians pretty poorly.”This is the first of several straw-man arguments (which I learned recently is called an “Aunt Sally” in the United Kingdom!) posed throughout the article. What evidence is there that music theorists are “coming to grips” with the failings of their own teaching? I certainly haven’t seen any “crisis of faith” panels at any recent meetings of the Society for Music Theory. Moreover, by what measurement can we determine the degree to which music theory classes have benefitted musicians? Most of what is taught in undergraduate theory curricula is rudimentary, and becomes deeply ingrained into our students’ musical knowledge. Students who have gone through our classes may not be able to articulate exactly what it is that they gained from studying counterpoint, but that doesn’t mean that studying counterpoint hasn’t had a positive impact on their musicianship or their careers.
Hein’s main premise is that today’s music students draw upon a diversity of musical experience, especially popular music. He suggests that, while some scholars have become proponents of studying popular music in the academy, music theorists have primarily ignored this repertoire.
“The pop music pedagogy movement, spearheaded by Lucy Green, is doing some creative work aimed at aligning music education with the way people experience and understand music in the present.”Indeed, Lucy Green and several other scholars have done some tremendous research into the use of popular music in the public school system. However, I don’t think that many music theorists, or even Green herself, would really consider her work to be “music theory,” and it’s not really appropriate to compare her work to what might be seen as lacking in music theory scholarship or the classroom. Moreover, it’s a bit ridiculous to suggest that what is successful in general music programs in public schools can be automatically be transferred to conservatories and universities that train would-be professional musicians.
Hein then gets into dangerous territory in attempting to define music theory and its purpose. This is a question that I pose to my graduate students every year, and it’s definitely a tough nut to crack:
“We should be asking: What is it that musicians are doing that sounds good? What patterns can we detect in the broad mass of music being made and enjoyed out there in the world?”Generally speaking, music theory does not attempt to discern what sounds good or bad. Music theory certainly helps explain why a chord might sound dissonant in one context and not another, but questions such as whether a piece sounds “good” or “bad,” or why a piece is popular, are much more difficult to answer. Learning music theory, more than anything, is about “learning to think in music.” It’s about developing the critical thinking skills and musicianship necessary to engage more deeply with musical performance, composition, and interpretation.
Hein tries further to suggest that music theory needs to ground itself in a “common practice,” and that most music programs are grounding it in the wrong “common practice”:
“I have my own set of ideas about what constitutes common-practice music in America in 2014, but I also come with my set of biases and preferences. It would be better to have some hard data on what we all collectively think makes for valid music.”Again, I don’t think the purpose of a music theory class (or any music class, really), is to solely concentrate on a “common practice”, nor even to try to discern what a common practice might be. More egregious, though, is that Hein asserts that (his) music theory professors equate common practice with musical validity. He goes on to cite a wonderful study by Trevor de Clercq and David Temperley that investigates harmonic usage in rock music (loosely defined by the Rolling Stone Top 500 list) as a means of “proving” that music no longer works in the way that his stodgy, ivory-tower dwelling theory professors would have you believe. Let’s unpack all of the things that are wrong with this sentiment:
1. Though the Temperley and de Clercq study indeed reveals some differences in harmonic usage between common practice and rock music, Hein fails to mention the tremendous amount of overlap that exists between these two styles (my own dissertation investigates this idea as well). The music of Bach is certainly markedly different from that of Jimi Hendrix, but discussing them using a common language isn’t akin to comparing apples to beavers. We can safely talk about the commonalities and celebrate the differences.
2. Music theory professors are not concerned with finding “musical validity.” Literally nobody I’ve ever met in my nearly 15 years working in the environment of university music programs has tried to tell me that they’ve found the “ultimate musical truth.” A music theory graduate student who proposed that they did find something like this would be laughed out of the program.
3. Though I can’t speak for every music theory teacher in the Western world (though it should be noted that neither can Hein, even though he tries to), I can say that in my classes, I strive more than anything to empower my students with the ability to speak intelligently about the technical musical differences between disparate styles. I want them to be able to talk about how and why rock music’s harmony is used differently than the harmony found in the music of Bach or Beethoven (or even why Bach’s use of harmony is different from Beethoven’s). In order to do so, my students need to understand voice leading and harmonic syntax, and how that differs in the music of Bach, Beethoven, Mahler, Schoenberg, The Beatles, Thelonious Monk, Stevie Wonder, and The Wu-Tang Clan.
While I certainly haven’t conducted a thorough study of all of the theory curricula across the country, I can still point to the growing body of scholarship produced by people like Walter Everett, John Covach, Allan Moore, Nicole Biamonte, David Temperley, Mark Butler, Tim Hughes, Anna Stephan-Robinson, Guy Capuzzo, Jocelyn Neal, Fred Maus, Adam Krims, Mark Spicer, Joti Rockwell, Jay Summach, Drew Nobile, Brad Osborn, Kyle Adams, Chris Endrinal, Victoria Malawey, Dave Easley, Christopher Doll, Greg McCandless, and countless others over the last 20 years to show that popular music has a prominent place within the world of music theory. Moreover, this scholarship has trickled down into nearly every major music theory textbook that has been published in recent history. Heck, at their 2011 meeting, the Society for Music Theory staged a formal public debate, attended by hundreds of theory professors, that directly addressed the very issues that Hein claims we don’t ever think about. The resolution of the “Great Theory Debate” was:
“Be It Resolved … Common-Practice Period Repertoire No Longer Speaks to Our Students; It’s Time to Fire A Cannon at the Canon.”
To suggest that music theory as a discipline is purely invested in the music of the common practice from Bach to Brahms is simply wrong.
A lot of what Hein writes in his Slate article is drawn from earlier posts on his blog. In “Against Music Theory,” Hein explains why he felt so compelled to investigate a “new music theory”:
“I am mercifully finished with music theory in grad school and couldn’t be happier about it. You may find this surprising. My blog is full of music theory. How could a guy who enjoys thinking about music in analytical terms as much as I do have such a wretched time in my graduate music theory classes? It wasn’t the work, I mostly breezed through that. No, it was the grinding Eurocentrism. Common-practice period classical music theory is fine and good, but in the hands of the music academy, it’s dry, tedious, and worst of all, largely useless. The strict rules of eighteenth-century European art music are distantly removed from the knowledge a person needs to do anything in the present-day music world (except, I guess, to be a professor of common-practice tonal theory.)”Terrible music theory teachers who don’t provide their students with a broader context in their classes surely exist. But terrible teachers of calculus, medieval history, economics, and marine biology also exist. That these classes are a waste of time is a failure of the teacher, not the discipline. At the heart of this is an argument that I hear a lot from younger students: “I don’t see the immediate utility of what we’re learning and how it relates to my current interests, so it is obviously useless to me.” I think this attitude is dangerous, especially among those who are dedicated to higher education. Ultimately, university is not meant to be job training. We go to university to become intellectually-engaged critical thinkers; to become better members of society. While I’ve just spent several hundred words explaining why I think music theory is a diverse discipline that is relevant to today’s musicians, I don’t think that investing time in learning something that might seem esoteric is a worthless endeavour. As students of music we should yearn to become musical experts; strive to become knowledgeable about all of its facets, from Josquin to Cecil Taylor to A$AP Rocky. If we have to constantly justify the immediate value of what we study, we will eventually fall into the same rhetorical trap that politicians use to question the value of studying music at all.
Well said, Dr. Hughes. I believe what I find most compelling is your point on the purpose of teaching Music Theory:
ReplyDelete"...in my classes, I strive more than anything to empower my students with the ability to speak intelligently about the technical musical differences between disparate styles. I want them to be able to talk about how and why rock music’s harmony is used differently than the harmony found in the music of Bach or Beethoven (or even why Bach’s use of harmony is different from Beethoven’s)."
It seems to me that this sentiment is actually quite strongly linked to the point Hein is trying to make. The simple fact that he can make a statement such as “Flat sevenths sound as “natural” to me as natural sevenths. (Actually, flat sevenths are a lot lower in the overtone series; you could make a case that mixolydian should be the One True Scale.)” relies on a number of points students learn in a traditional Music Theory class. Developing an argument for why Music Theory is out-of-date requires a good bit of Music Theory.
That said, I can sympathize with Hein’s attitude toward Music Theory, and I am aware that there are plenty of professors who fail to adequately communicate the value of Music Theory as a means of communicating about and understanding music, and I am truly sorry for those students who miss the opportunity. Luckily there are those teachers who “get it” and are training a generation of students to be musically intelligent. I’m happy to see these types of exchanges going on as a reminder of that.
wonderful rebuttal!
ReplyDeleterestrained yet nuanced with smackdown..
First of all, let me just say that you are a much better music theory teacher than the ones I've had.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I'm addressing a straw man in my posts; I'm addressing my lived experience as a music student in high school, college and grad school. By all accounts, my experience is a pretty ordinary one. And the faculty at NYU who I've enjoyed working with represent the community of music academics who are coming to grips with the mismatch between the baseline standards of their profession and the music being made in the world. You are clearly part of that community, much to your credit. Sadly, most of the people I've studied with aren't.
I think I'm a good person to address issues in music theory pedagogy, because I had fifteen years in between college and grad school as a practicing musician and teacher. During that time I had ample opportunity to reflect on what I learned and how, especially as I tried to teach myself and others things like the blues that my theory vocabulary was inadequate to explain.
I know that you engage with a whole universe of music beyond that of the western European aristocracy in the eighteenth century, and more power to you. However, degree requirements at NYU and most music schools don't appear to be shaped by your (or my) values. To get any music-related degree at NYU, you have to pass a tonal theory curriculum centered around the Laitz textbooks, which I'm led to understand are quite typical. Laitz uses the words "music" and "common-practice-era tonal music" interchangeably. He speaks constantly in terms of "right" and "wrong," of "correct" and "incorrect" practices. Even more exasperatingly, he appeals regularly to the reader's "musical instinct." While I was doing my theory requirement, I started out trying to do the exercises at the piano, using my ear. But my instinct kept causing me to make "mistakes" like leaving in unresolved tritones and parallel fourths. Eventually I had to stop thinking of the exercises as musical and treat them as a kind of Sudoku -- I usually listened to unrelated music while doing them. I got an A in the class, and it didn't feel like I earned it for any reason related to musicality, just for my ability to memorize and recite systematic arcana.
If, generally speaking, music theory doesn't attempt to discern what sounds good or bad, then what is it for? It's certainly true that asking why music sounds good or bad is more difficult than asking whether it adheres to one rule system or another, but what other point is there to formally studying music at all?
It isn't just my professors who equate common practice with musical validity, it's examination and licensing bodies throughout the western world. These bodies are not content to let us talk about the commonalities and celebrate the differences between Bach and Jimi Hendrix. I wish they were. I'm glad you think that your job is not concerned with finding musical validity and I wish more of your colleagues shared your attitude.
I certainly can't speak for everyone, but I can observe trends, and I don't think my assessment of mainstream practice is inaccurate. My graduate theory prof told us that the way the Beatles voice their chords is "wrong" and both the Laitz text and the degree requirements of NYU agree with her. NYU is a comparatively progressive school, famous for its film scoring and pop songwriting programs, but even those students have to pass common practice theory. No one has to learn to improvise, or play the blues, or record something, or create a dance beat, or demonstrate any other musical skills that I'd consider to be fundamental. It's wonderful that the Society for Music Theory wants to Fire A Cannon at the Canon, but the word hasn't made it to NYU yet, or to most schools.
BTW, the thing is that my graduate theory professor is terrific at her job. She's unfailingly professional, passionate and engaged. She's up for a tenure-track job at NYU and by the department's standards, she deserves it. She isn't the problem, and neither is any particular teacher. It's the cultural history of the music academy, the nature of cultural privilege, the long lag time between popular culture and scholarly acceptance, and general resistance to change. I'm not a petulant undergrad who has failed to see the bigger picture. I'm an adult with a kid and a mortgage. I've seen and lived the broader picture. In school I saw classrooms full of passionate musicians bored and angry by a music class that we were all paying thousands of dollars for. Something has to change. NYU's music programs are about as far from "job training" as it's possible to get. But it would be nice if the music theory requirements there prepared people to make the music the world wants and needs us to make. I'm glad you're part of the change, and I hope you succeed in getting more Cecil Taylor and A$AP Rocky into music classrooms and onto exams.
ReplyDeleteEthan:
DeleteI think the thing that Bryn and others (like myself) find disappointing in your article and your response is the seeming absence of a good faith attempt on your part to find transfers between common practice and any other music. There are lots of them, and if you haven't found them on your own, I don't think that represents a failure on the part of your teachers.
You also seem to have a fairly superficial and inconsistent understanding of, variously, music theory, postmodernism, and relativism, based on the few comments you make regarding common practice and related views on particular musical choices. The result is that your article and response look more like an attack on the discipline of music, intellectual rigor, and the liberal arts approach in general than a legitimate critique of teaching theory through the lens of common practice. So...kind of petulant. As one of your commenters points out, although theory teachers often joke about wildly successful groups like the Beatles being "wrong," prescriptive theory isn't really a philosophy that's held by many musicians, except undergrad professors really tired of trying to sell theory to...petulant undergrads.
This blog includes a nice little list of why "the world" isn't really with you on the sentiment of "firing a cannon at the canon" and throwing the baby out with the bathwater:
http://properdiscord.com/2014/02/13/f-u-stats/
Most of the "real" disciplines (did you notice all the value judgments you make?) about which you're writing, such as blues/jazz/pop/songwriting/recording/production, work best in apprenticeship or do-it-yourself educational modes, not classrooms, if you're referring to job training. And they're not moving toward the classroom, but away from it. How would you advise a high school student to go about getting into music production, for example?
Additionally, many of the gaps in your education (improv, alternative scales/chord usage, composition) are explicitly part of the national standards for all music students in public school, so if NYU isn't covering them...I'm not sure that's indicative of where the rest of the country is on music education.
While I'm with you that cultural privilege is a thing, and a problem, your article comes off sounding more like sour grapes than an inspiring critique. Great teachers like Bryn, many of his colleagues, and mine, are incorporating the "vernacular idiom" into their teaching. Speaking for myself, I still find common practice to be the best entry point and see no alternative proposal that could fit the bill, either out there in the world or in your various posts. Revisions and expansions to the curriculum? Sure. But those happen slowly.
Best wishes.
Hi Ethan, Bryn, and everyone else involved in this discussion.
DeleteFirst of all, I'd like to thank Ethan for his original article in Slate. I assigned it to my Analyzing Modern Rock doctoral theory seminar here at KU. We've been reading a host of articles about rock harmonic theory, and they had to write a response to your article, as well as post a response to each of their classmates' responses. It was a wonderful exercise, and I am grateful to you for writing about music theory in such a public forum.
As someone who 1) teaches a class devoted to rock music theory, 2) wrote a dissertation on post-millennial rock, 3) publishes almost exclusively on rock music, 4) grew up playing in rock bands, 5) learned classical music as a "second language, and 6) who still writes and records rock music, I certainly have the pedigree and trappings of Ethan's model professor.
However, I almost never teach popular music in my undergraduate theory core.
And here's why. It's inconceivable that a philosophy major shouldn't learn Plato. How could a painting major not know and appreciate Rembrandt? I could go on. Am I saying "it is necessary to know these works in order to produce meaningful contributions in your modern practice?" Absolutely not (though I shudder to think what contribution a philosopher could actually make without knowing the foundational works in the field). And so, I don't think it's "necessary" to know the various voice-leading tendencies of Bach, Schubert, or Schoenberg in order to make modern music.
You know where you learn the voice-leading tendencies of modern music? As you rightly point out: with your ears. Where? Everywhere around you. Why would we teach something, then, in an academic institution that charges huge sums of money, that you could learn by walking through the grocery store, turning on the radio, or, if you were really interested, watching guitar videos online? I have it on good authority from some very senior scholars in my field that, "back in the day" (and here I'm talking the 1960s and 1970s) music students didn't have to be taught classical form (or piano) because these were things you picked up from the culture you were immersed in. Yes, classical form is aurally salient if you listen.
That is why I don't teach popular music in the undergraduate core. Sure, a more nuanced understanding of these things is possible, but that's why we have doctoral seminars in Analyzing Modern Rock music—for the things you probably didn't pick up by ear
I'll leave you with my most personal reason for this. As a songwriter who "knew what I was doing" before learning classical theory in college, the most valuable thing I have ever learned in my craft is "what would Schubert do?" Indeed, I taught a master class called this to songwriters at Ohio University. That is to say, some of the most interesting music I've ever made has been by taking something I already know (rock harmony) and blending it with things I learned in college (Schubert's harmony). The result, which contains one example of a common-tone diminished 7th chord (1:12), an enharmonic reinterpretation of an augmented sixth chord (2:31), and an augmented triad with parsimonious voice-leading (3:13), can be heard here: http://bradleyheartvampire.bandcamp.com/track/like-masochists
Cheers,
Brad
Hi Balthasar. Nowhere in any of my writing do I maintain that common practice harmony is absent in contemporary pop music. If you take a glance at my blog, you'll see that it's full of attempts to explain things like the blues using vocabulary taken from classical theory.
DeleteMy frustration stems from the fact that of American high school students who have access to elective formal music study, 95% choose not to avail themselves of it. Given that 100% of teenagers care about music, this statistic horrifies me, as it should horrify all music educators (especially since this 95% is drawn from the segment of the population that's lucky enough to have access to elective music in the first place.) Somehow, our music education system is scaring away an awful lot of potential participants. My own abandonment of formal music was driven by the seeming irrelevance of tonal theory to the music I wanted to learn about and produce. I ended up learning about that music on my own. When I went back to grad school after fifteen years of being a practitioner, it was maddening to have to demonstrate mastery over a set of skills that tangential to what I was there to study.
It's wonderful to study classical voice leading and tonal practice. Everyone should have the privilege. And you're right, such study can enrich one's understanding of any kind of music. But in my high school, college and graduate school, common-practice classical theory is the sole graduation requirement. Things like improvisation, recording and non-classical music are optional. I expect that if we reversed the requirements and electives, we wouldn't drive kids away from music study in such appalling numbers.
If my article and response look more like an attack on the discipline of music, intellectual rigor, and the liberal arts approach in general than a legitimate critique of teaching theory through the lens of common practice, go read it more carefully. I know prescriptive theory isn't really a philosophy that's held by many musicians, but it is a barrier standing in front of people who want to study music formally in most schools in the United States. That's the focus of my rant. Ad hominem rhetoric like calling a 39-year-old professional musician "petulant" isn't constructive. My fondest wish would be for textbook and exam writers to read all of the "heated agreement" here on this blog and reshape music pedagogy into a more descriptive and less off-putting form. I want people to study music theory. Really! I just want an approach that doesn't put the kids off in such numbers. If I'm wrong about how to retain some of the 95%, I'd love to see constructive alternative suggestions.
Ethan:
DeleteI appreciate your response, and won't expect a response to this, but want to answer anyway.
While you don't directly charge that common practice is absent from pop music, you do seem to be saying it's worthless. To address your final question first, I don't think retaining 95% of undergraduates in the study of music should be a goal. If I get 75-80% of my students from freshman year to senior year as a music major, that's consistent with my historical experience as a teacher and as a student. As a matter of fact, that's better than. Do you see a shortage of professional musicians? A shortage of teachers? A shortage of degree-holding liberal arts majors with degrees unrelated to their eventual field of employment? I worked in the public secondary school and am now in higher ed. The goals are not the same. I retained 99% (more, actually) of my music students as a high school teacher, and added to them. I didn't and don't see a problem.
Regarding the current state of music education, like Bryn, I don't buy your premise. Students are participating in formal study music less? By what metric? Who's doing that measuring? In what geographic areas? Those are all important questions, and I don't think you've taken the time to ask or answer them. I have taught in five states in three different regions of the US. Music education is not a uniform endeavor. In higher ed, liberal arts majors like music are up, not down. In public school, I would wager participation fluctuates with availability more than desire on the part of students.
You say I should read your article again, but I don't think the reaction to your article is happenstance, Ethan. I've also read many of your tweets, now, though I haven't explored your blog. You seem to have unrealistic expectations of music theory curriculum for freshman and sophomore music majors, and you don't seem to understand how imminently useful it is for the vast, vast majority of them (who will be teachers, not full time performers). You also seem to have a very high estimation of the forms of music you like, and a very low estimation of any other. That's what I glean from reading between the lines of your writing, anyway.
Finally, it isn't really ad hominem (the internet's favorite faux fallacy) to call your tone petulant when it is petulant.
Some suggestions:
1 - Broaden your horizons. You seem to be writing based on your experience. You have not experienced the breadth and depth of music ed in the US, I can assure you.
2 - Narrow your sights. If you want reform in higher ed, be more explicit and detailed in your critique, and offer some solutions. A narrow band of inquiry from some prominent music theorists does not make a great basis for a new brand of pedagogy for novice undergrads.
3 - Engage in some scholarship. That's how things get changed. If it's compelling, folks will engage right back with you.
4 - Try teaching it, if you haven't. I think your perspective will shift significantly.
Finally, I want to raise a new point that occurred to me in reading your tweets: I am not a music theorist. I teach conducting, music ed methods, history, I compose, teach applied lessons...you get the idea. I love lots and lots of different kinds of music. As a teacher I recognize that you can't throw in everything plus the kitchen sink when it's time to choose a system for, say, introductory sight reading. "Fixed do" solfege? Not a great approach for 15-year-olds with no ability. I hope you can see the connection here. It is not apparent that you do based on your critique.
To be clear, I don't think that common practice theory is worthless. It's super valuable for understanding western tonal music, and like I said, everyone should have the privilege to study it. I question its centrality and primacy in the music curriculum, however. Whenever people try to apply classical theory to Afrocentric vernacular music, they tend to neglect rhythm and devote all the attention to harmony. This is a bit like studying Mozart and only talking about the beats, while giving a cursory glance to the harmonies.
DeleteI think it's a perfectly reasonable goal as a society to get 95% of people participating actively in music. Walk down the street in Cuba, and every kid can at least beat out a son clave. I consider our lack of widespread music participation as symptomatic of our deeper sickness and unhappiness as a society. It should absolutely be the job of general music programs in high schools to get everyone excited about participating in music in a way that is meaningful to them, the same way it's reasonable to want 95% of people to be able to cook their own dinner and sew their own shirt buttons. I'm less worried about undergrads; if we take care of the adolescents, the adults will take care of themselves, especially the music majors.
At no point do I ever equate "active participants in music" with "professional musicians." I couldn't care less how many professional musicians there are, any more than I care about the number of professional French pastry chefs. I'm talking about routine daily amateur participation. It's part of the sickness of America that we think that only the professionals should be making our music for us.
It's wonderful that you personally retained 100% of your high school music students. The statistics suggest that you are an outlier. I got the 95% figure for abandonment rate of elective high school level music study from Geoffrey Lowe's 2012 paper, Lessons for teachers: What lower secondary school students tell us about learning a musical instrument. It's the most recent data I could find while researching my masters thesis. My own observations and those of my mentors do not contradict Lowe's statistics. And Lowe is only looking at kids who have access to elective music study.
Again, if you look at what I wrote on my blog and elsewhere, I'm not talking about music majors. I'm talking about everyone else. As I've said many times elsewhere, our current system works very well to produce professional classical musicians and educators. But it fails the vast majority of amateurs, who are the people I'm concerned about.
I am businly engaged in some scholarship. The current batch of writings comes out of my masters thesis and will form the basis for my eventual PhD. And people are engaging me just fine. Also, I've been teaching for fifteen years; my experience validates my philosophy just fine. I'm not teaching college-level music majors, mind; mostly high school kids and adult practitioners. It's the yawning gap between the needs of non-classical practitioners and the baseline school offerings that concern me. So for example, reading is not a skill much in demand if you're in the worlds of rock, country, hip-hop, electronic dance music, some forms of jazz, Indian classical music, African drumming, etc, etc, etc. These folks need improvisation, ear training, groove and (increasingly often) recording and production skills. Sight reading is super important for classical, Broadway and club date musicians, but I question whether the general population needs to learn that skill at all. So it goes with a lot of the traditional music curriculum.
Ethan:
DeleteThanks for this follow up.
It seems to me that you've changed the subject. Who are we talking about, college music majors or everyone else? Because that certainly wasn't clear from your article (which mostly centers around professional musicians and higher ed) or your comments here. My thoughts about what kind of music theory would be appropriate for each of those several populations vary pretty wildly.
Also, I think it's dangerously misleading and irresponsible to cite a paper that is about a particular segment of a particular population in a particular place (48 instrumental students in the lower secondary grades in Perth, Australia) and generalize that to ALL students in the United States. You do more than that, however: you claim that 95% of students (all students?) with access to formal study drop out. That is insupportable. If that's consistent with your experience, fine, but now you know it's completely inconsistent with mine, and neither of us has definitive data, if one could find such a broad study.
I have some questions, based on your writing above:
1 - Does a Cuban's knowledge of the most common Afro-Cuban beat serve as an indictment of an American student's inability to....what? Sing? Play an instrument?
2 - Do you think 95% of all secondary students should participate in sports? Visual arts? Theater arts? Should all of that be compulsory?
3 - How many people do you think participate in music (as either performers or listeners) in a non-professional capacity today, compared with 10, 20, 50, or 100 years ago? Do you think that percentage is going up or down?
I'm happy to hear that you are engaged in scholarship and teaching, but I maintain that you do an awful lot of generalizing from your own experience. Broadening that experience could serve you well. Also, far from narrowing your focus, you seem to have stretched it from horizon to horizon. That complicates things.
While I agree with many of your sentiments, especially having to do with the overall conservatism of music education at various, I strongly disagree with some of your premises. Hopefully this gives you some insight as to why I and others view your writing as an attack rather than a critique.
Thanks again for the prolonged engagement on this one.
Hello all - I’m a student in the seminar that Dr. Osborn mentioned in his post, and what follows is my original response to Ethan's article. It was written before I read Dr. Hughes's post, so it treads similar ground at times, but I'll leave it mostly intact here.
ReplyDelete***
First of all, some nitpicking: I take major issue with bringing the harmonic series into things in the last paragraph. It has absolutely no bearing on any of this unless you want to get deep into scale theory and the history of music theory, and it almost feels like Hein is trying to imply that music theorists have been getting it wrong all along and the mixolydian scale is somehow more important than the major scale in tonal music. I don’t think he really means to imply that, but imagine reading that paragraph as someone with no music theory background - it kind of sounds like he just poked a major hole in music theory as a discipline. Reading it as a theorist, it’s basically a pointless comment that confuses me as to who exactly Hein is trying to reach with this article.
A bigger problem is the language that bookends the article:
“The academic music world is slowly coming to grips with the ways that the conventional teaching of music theory serves practicing musicians pretty poorly.”
“I think the best idea would be to just teach kids the supermode, rather than hitting them with the confusing idea that you have to modify the major scale to get the sounds you’re used to.”
If “practicing musicians” refers to everyone except classical musicians, maybe. Of course learning nothing but common practice part writing and harmonic progressions is not enough for a full understanding of rock music. Nobody is claiming otherwise. I think it’s disingenuous to not make that distinction explicitly, especially when ostensibly writing for a broad audience that isn’t already aware of these issues.
The same problem applies to the idea of teaching kids the supermode. What “kids” are we talking about? The supermode would be pretty confusing for a class of prospective classical musicians (assuming we’re talking about beginners, which means Theory I). I absolutely agree that theory pedagogy could often do a better job of communicating its goals to students, but getting the conversation bogged down in introductory-level pedagogy also ignores much higher-level questions - how does a classically acclimated ear hear certain kinds of rock/pop, to what extent can one separate one’s classical ear from one’s popular music ear, can tools like Schenkerian voice-leading graphs be adapted for other types of music, etc. These questions are more in line with what I generally think of as "music theory," rather than the low-level rudiments that our undergrad pedagogy subdiscipline necessarily deals with. Saying that "kids should learn the supermode" is just too reductive as a response to the question being tackled here.
I’m also deeply suspicious of the idea that the supermode is in any way meaningful without the massive baggage of common practice tonality behind it (and I don’t think Temperley is suggesting that either). New music is always in dialogue with past music. Perhaps at a beginner’s level, it’s too difficult to combine the two, but for grad students and academics, we would lose a critical part of the dialogue without at least considering the relevance of common practice tonality for modern popular music.
Essentially, I think that Hein has confused the hierarchy here - can anyone actually conceive of learning the supermode without understanding the major scale first? And if not, then is “Classical music’s obsession with the major scale” really the counterintuitive anachronism that Hein would have us believe? Is modifying the major scale such a “confusing idea?” Fundamentally, one has to decide whether “most Americans’ intuition” is reliant on or independent of Western common practice tradition; I don’t claim to know for sure, but I tend toward the former.
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Thanks for the discussion, everyone!
Brian Miller
Classical musicians are very well served by existing music teaching standards. Most musicians are not classical musicians. As I point out elsewhere, of American high school kids who have access to elective music beyond general requirements, 95% opt not to continue. Does that number sadden you? It saddens me. I'm part of that 95% -- I found my way back to music through self-guided ad-hoc study, as did most non-classical musicians I know. I view music as being like cooking, something that anyone could be participating in, and that most people should be participating in. Right now our music education methods serve the future French pastry chefs well but send everyone else to McDonald's. I don't pretend to have a monopoly on good music teaching practices, but moving away from a focus on the music of the eighteenth-century western European aristocracy would seem to be a good start. If you have alternative suggestions for how to retain more of those 95% of high school kids, I'm all ears.
DeleteWhat a great discussion! The most recent post on RSME journal's blog brings together research about the role of theory and notation in music education, and may be of interest to some of you. Quite a few of the articles discuss the issues as they relate to teaching different styles of music, addressing the apparent dichotomy between Western classical music and popular music. In a study by McPhail (2013), music teachers tended to differentiate between "‘knowledge about music’ or theoretical and historical cultural knowledge, mostly associated with the classical paradigm (theory, harmony, analysis, history of Western music), as compared to ‘music as knowledge’ (Tagg, 2002), the socially-contextualized procedural knowledge of playing, singing and song writing, most strongly (but not always) associated with popular music" (p. 14). Despite this conceptual categorisation, most of the teachers did not aim to develop these knowledge types along the lines of particular music traditions, and combined informal and formal pedagogical approaches regardless of what music was being taught. Further, the findings indicated that, "[s]tudents seemed most engaged, motivated, and positive about their developing musicianship where their teachers were using forms of visible pedagogy to ensure awareness of conceptual knowledge and enable knowledge ‘boundary crossing’ (Young & Muller, 2010)" (p.18).
ReplyDeleteFor more research on this topic, please see the post at http://wp.me/p4fMuX-X
I honestly believe that American culture's quest for immediacy and the entitlement culture is playing havoc on the educational system as a whole. To understand the function of music is a powerful and meaningful tool to any musician in any discipline. I think many shy away from Theory because in order to truly understand its efficacy to the discipline you have to invest a lot of time and energy into the subject matter to reap the rewards. We have four or five semesters of arduous philosophical discussion of the function of music and them we get the payoff. There are bits and pieces of those awe inspiring "ah ha" moments along the way, but until we come full circle to the 21st century all of the musical dots aren't connected. Our culture isn't interested much in investment of time in a long payoff. Thus we get mediocre art that is rampant in culture. We have lost out to the immediacy of the now and only want results today, not 2 or 3 years from now. This is a highly opinionated statement, but if I can help my students believe that in the end they will be better musicians for having done the work I will die a happy man. Music Theory matters, it is important, and it can help all musicians, no matter what their area of expertise, get better.
ReplyDeleteI mostly agree with the thrust of Ethan's sentiment. The standard music theory curriculum is simply outdated in many ways, placing emphasis on many not-particularly-useful skills and completely neglecting skills that would be very useful for today's musicians. Just to get very specific, here is a list of items I was not taught in music theory or musicianship classes that would have been extremely useful to me as a professional musician:
ReplyDelete- How to read a jazz chart
- How to learn music by ear
- How to arrange music
- How to make sense of any non-twelve-tone classical music composed after 1910
- Recording technology
And here is a list of skills I worked extremely hard to acquire in my studies that have proven to be essentially useless in my professional life:
- How to realize a figured bass
- How to read soprano clef and other rarely used C clefs
- Mastery of all of the intricate common practice voice-leading rules about parallels, tendency tones, and doublings
- Schenkerian-style analysis
Now, I do acknowledge that had I decided to specialize in baroque music or medieval music, I would have made use of the figured bass and clef-reading skills. So fine, include at least an introduction to them. But by the same token, there should at least be an introduction to reading jazz charts and arranging music and recording technology and 20th century harmonic practice. I just think about all those hours I spent practicing figured basses and learning soprano clef and avoiding parallel fifths, and it feels like such a waste, considering all the skills I completely lacked when I finished my studies that I could have spent that time studying instead. I think that is where Ethan is coming from; not that music theory is useless, just that it desperately needs to be updated so that we're teaching skills that are genuinely useful for a life in music today.