Now what?

In my previous post I talked about two different approaches to teaching theory: a compositional one and an analytical one. This comparison raised the question "What should students be able to do at the end of the undergraduate harmony sequence?" Analyze the Tristan prelude? Compose a piece in the style of Scriabin? Write four-part chorales?

But the questions don't stop there, as those questions apply to only a small part of the musical population that most of us serve. What about the aspiring record producer? What about the high school band director? What about the jazz drummer? How are we helping them to realize their goals? I certainly think it's important for them to be acquainted with classical music and common-practice harmony techniques, just as I think it's important for the classical folks to be acquainted with jazz and world music. But should jazz majors spend all four semesters learning Roman numerals and the finer points of Wagner's chromaticism?

I closed my last post by asking "Is common-practice harmony still so important? If not, what will take its place?"

Conceivably we could alter the current model ever so slightly to embrace a wider variety of musics. Here are two suggestions. First, keep things basically as they are. Everyone, I think, needs the fundamentals: reading music, spelling scales, intervals, chords, etc. Let's devote a semester or two to that. We (I) could certainly stand to introduce non-Western scales, non-diatonic scales, more unusual chords, etc. right at the beginning of the theory curriculum so that they're not viewed as aberrant later.

After that, the students have the opportunity to take electives that are more attuned to their chosen path. Students may opt for a rock harmony course, where they learn typical structures and progressions found in popular music; they may opt for a jazz harmony course, where they learn extended tertian harmony, ii-V-I progressions, and lead-sheet symbols; they might opt for post-tonal theory, where they learn how the fundamentals play out in 20th-c. music.

The possibility for extreme customization exists here: imagine a student who takes the post-tonal class and the jazz harmony class. Said student could produce interesting work on Milhaud, Stravinsky, Ornette Coleman, etc. A variety of upper-level electives could serve as a capstone class here, most likely some kind of form class or stylistic analysis where the diverse strengths of the reunited student body could be put to good use. The difficulty of this approach would be finding a faculty that's large enough and qualified enough to offer such a diversity of courses.

A second idea that has interested me for a long time is to break the four-semester sequence up according to the elements of music. The first semester would be devoted entirely to rhythm and meter, from the smallest level (subdivisions of beats) to the largest levels (hypermeter). Examples from across the musical universe would illustrate how different genres address issues of rhythm. One day, we look at gamelan music, Ligeti, and electronic dance music--how do they use rhythm and meter?

The next semester would be the study of only melody. Again, a broad spectrum of examples would illustrate how melody is treated across a variety of musics. The third semester would be harmony (and counterpoint, as appropriate). The fourth semester would be form. This approach also cuts easily across genres. In contrast to the previous concept, here the musical quality is held invariant (as opposed to the genre), permitting side-by-side comparison of otherwise disparate musics. The down side of this approach would be narrowing down the material to fit in a semester (is it more important to talk about time cycles in African music or the normalization of irregular hypermeter?) and, to my knowledge there are no textbooks that proceed in this fashion.*

(Actually, it occurs to me that this approach is not unlike Jan LaRue's Guidelines for style analysis, which one of my colleagues uses in his freshman musicology classes.)

We could, of course, abandon the paradigm entirely and shift to a new one. Here are some new philosophical orientations:

• Music perception
  
• Performance studies
  
• Semiotics
  

I've chosen these three in particular--I suspect others are certainly available--because they seem to have the ability to cut across repertoires quite easily. In my next few posts, I'll look at what each of these might have to offer as replacements for the traditional undergraduate theory sequence.

Comments are always welcome.



*I have time next week. Maybe I'll write one. :)