I ran across a new blog this morning titled Mathemusicality. The author James Cook raises some very interesting points about the purpose and teaching approaches of music theory. This led me to craft a very long response which I naturally thought would be equally appropriate as a Friday post to this blog.

In his most recent post, the James asked the following question:

Let me ask the Texas Tech faculty (or anyone else out there) this question: how exactly would your approach to any passage of music (say, one of the Beethoven examples discussed previously) differ if you were teaching composition students, as opposed to history, theory, or performance students? And why?

I initially started to reply directly to the question, but after reading the entire blog and giving it some careful thought, my response has grown into a behemoth.

I do agree with his point of view about theory curricula and our seeming over-dependence on Roman numerals and chorale textures as a vehicle for teaching harmony. As many of my students have expressed over the years, it doesn’t truly represent the true experience of music. Schenkerian theory provides a better approximation, but still falls short of the mark, at least in my opinion.

That being said, the question does indeed come down to the best way to systematically present musical material in a way that allows for both a clear understanding of the material as well as the practical application of newly found knowledge. (“The right knowledge at the right time” is how a former pedagogue once explained it to me.) That is ever the challenge for any teacher.

I have recently (finally) been given my own choice of textbook, and my decision to adopt a relatively new offering (The Musician’s Guide) has been fueled, in large part, by this very problem. Though still not (in my eyes) perfect, this text begins with the usual discussions of fundamentals, proceeds to two-voice counterpoint, notation, and basic instrumentation before moving to a more traditional four-voice presentation of harmony. Along the way it provides a large variety of well-presented musical examples from a variety of genres and styles.

It is my hope that this will provide students, especially in their impressionable first semester, with a more intuitive beginning to their formal theoretical training and will lay the groundwork for subsequent discussions of the works/passages that delve more deeply and meaningfully into the “art” of the music. As we all know, the best lectures/discussions are those that reveal hidden subtleties in a passage and then lead the students to make those magical connections to other works that they have performed and studied.

It also makes theory more pertinent to the student, a common enough problem at any program but especially problematic at my school, where the majority of students are aspiring music therapists. While I strive to be certain that they have a solid background in traditional theory, I am slowly learning that they also require a great deal more “practical” theory (is that an oxymoron or what??) than students at more traditional programs. (Words fail to describe the different approach, perhaps in a few more years I’ll have a more quantifiable explanation of this phenomenon.)

In the end, I would say that I am providing an introduction to the vocabulary of music as much as well as teaching them to be free thinkers and creative musicians. The two should not be mutually exclusive. A good semester for me is always one where the students come away knowing the “rules” but also understanding that these “rules” are in truth merely guidelines applied or ignored by composers depending on circumstance and need. It is especially rewarding when students can see (at least occasionally) how the “rules” are regularly broken or modified (particularly by the “great” composers) and evolve through use rather than through consistent and rigid application. After all, how do you define “great” or even “good” if you can’t explain what constitutes “average?”

As to the final question, in my experience (upon which I model my own compositional teaching) my best composition teachers were those that facilitated my learning by fostering, among other things:

• My ability imagine the music, fully orchestrated, “in my head.”
• My understanding of how a composer achieved a certain effect/sound/passage
• Developing my sense of form and proportion
• Gently molding my general aesthetic (as opposed to style) by pointing out less successful passages (according to their own aesthetic) and suggesting possible improvements while not demanding them.

Therefore, when I teach composition, theory rarely enters the conversation and when it does, it tends to focus on issues of meter, rhythm, orchestration, and motive far more than discussions of pitch collections and harmony. Though I almost always start a student with some basic acoustical properties, especially with regards to dissonance and consonance, pitch is well down the list of priorities for a variety of reasons and thus discussions of passages from the classical canon tend to be far different than those that might occur in a theory classroom or between myself and a colleague who is a theorist.