I took most of a year of AP music theory in high school (dropped out of it because I was being picked on) and never got the impression that we were learning about anything but archaic, old rules of music followed by dead composers. That, and how to take musical dictation, but none of the examples were contemporary. Was my music theory teacher just incompetent? Did I miss the generally applicable parts by leaving the class early?
And while having a variety of music is definitely good, there’s plenty of variety within a genre! It doesn’t seem obvious to me that you can get more valuable variety per ounce of effort by taking classes to learn to appreciate more genres than you can by spending time on Pandora.
I don’t know how I missed this comment at the time, but it demands a reply.
Although it’s difficult for me to mentally organize such a reply, because I simultaneously believe all of the following:
You probably were learning “old rules of music followed by dead composers.”
That doesn’t constitute music theory.
Your teacher’s incompetence was likely not personal, but inherited from the discipline of “music theory” as a whole, which in my opinion has a far from satisfactory understanding of its own subject matter.
However, your objections to the class you took are not necessarily related to this criticism of mine; in particular, the fact that that doesn’t constitute music theory has nothing to do with whether certain composers happen to be dead or alive.
There was probably considerable value in the curriculum they were trying to teach you, both for what it really was (music history; familiarization with art music as a pursuit, distinct from popular music) and as an indirect, nonexplicit (and frankly inefficient) way of teaching music theory (its traditional purpose).
Hence your attitude is probably misguided, even though I wish you had been taught differently; in effect, you’re “right for the wrong reasons”.
Musical dictation, though it may have seemed to you like merely one particular topic on the syllabus, really is the shibboleth for demonstrating understanding of music theory.
You would not want examples from contemporary art music in your first introduction to musical dictation. The reason the examples were old is the same reason the examples in your math classes were old, rather than being drawn from contemporary journals.
What you were really complaining about, probably, was that none of the examples were popular. (I really, really hate when people equate “contemporary” with “popular”!)
However, as I mentioned above, it is among the purposes of such a course to familiarize the student with the pursuit of art music, as opposed to popular music (with which they are likely to be familiar already).
In any case, conventional wisdom to the contrary, there aren’t “separate magisteria” of music theory; the skill of musical dictation is what it is, and it doesn’t matter exactly where the examples were drawn from, so long as they are of the appropriate level of complexity for the student’s level. (Otherwise the theory being used is wrong.)
I’m sorry that the course didn’t communicate this to you, but there exists considerably more intellectual depth to the pursuit of music—in particular art music—than you are likely to have encountered just by living in the general culture, “spending time on Pandora”, and the like.
Please bear these points in mind—in particular, the existence of people like me, who regard the creation of art music as an academic pursuit comparable in sophistication to science or philosophy—when assessing the implications of your own experience in the domain of music.
What readings and activities would you recommend to someone interested in becoming able to compose music, as opposed to learning how to play any particular instrument?
Reading: An Introduction to Tonal Theory by Peter Westergaard.
Activity: Study scores. Copy them out by hand. (This is actually the traditional method of learning composition, believe it or not; it might be compared to tracing drawings in visual art). Make simplified versions (e.g. write out the “main line”, then “main two lines”, etc.). Make analyses of works as in Westergaard. And, above all: attempt to compose, and learn by trial and error.
Oh man I miss Pandora since they stopped streaming to the UK. :(
On topic: I had quite a few years of music lessons (though I wasn’t really much good) and some musical theory, which I really enjoyed. And I do quite like listening to classical music in a vague sort of way, but I wouldn’t say I have an “appreciation” for it: it’s not as though I can pick out features or analyse it or anything. So am I appreciating it without a tuned ear, or am I just unaware of the work my bit of theoretical knowledge is doing behind the scenes?
Actually, I think appreciation and enjoyment are related but not symonyms. Enjoyment is visceral and emotional, it denotes the sheer pleasure of the experience. Appreciation implies recognition of the elements of the music, why those particular elements were chosen, how they might have been different, etc., as well as the extra enjoyment that comes about as a result of that appreciation. Not that I’m trying to say that’s what everybody means by the terms, but that’s how I think of them and how I’ve heard some other people talk about them.
My music theory course only had a slight emphasis on classical music. (Mainly because classical music is more analyzable with theory, I guess.) Probably your textbook was just old or inferior. But I got very little out of the course anyway.
I’m not suggesting that it’s necessarily worth the effort to increase one’s appreciation of classical music, given the opportunity cost. (I’m not exactly chomping at the bit to appreciate Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow, or Hegel or Kant or Foucault or Derrida. Or wine, for that matter.) But the easiest way would probably be to pick a CD with some good classical music on it and listen to it many times through until you start to understand it musically. Courses are likely overkill. When I first started learning Bach (around the age of 10) it made no musical sense to me at all. I forget how long until I started to understand it, so I don’t know how long you’d have to listen to start to get it. Maybe too long to bother.
there’s plenty of variety within a genre!
Hmmmmmmmmmmm no. Doubt there’s a good way to resolve this disagreement.
As for learning if coming to it as an adult, I’d recommend resources like Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts (and any of his many writings on music, such as The Joy of Music), as well as Aaron Copland’s What to Listen for in Music and works of that nature.
The key point in my opinion is that you have to learn to hear more in the music, to be able to hear and follow the different voices in a fugue, or recognize the development of a theme in a sonata allegro form, and this sort of ability only comes about through some offline study and intellectual training that is then applied when listening to music and the knowledge really comes alive.
I don’t get much enjoyment in consciously recognizing long-horizon forms or themes, although I do enjoy many pieces that heavily rely on them, e.g. Liszt’s Sonata in b
I probably lack perspective since I was a decent classical pianist in my youth, but I don’t feel like any formal study is necessary to get a full pleasure-soup response to great classical music. Also, tastes vary; I don’t enjoy a lot of highly regarded classical music (but there are at least a few hundred hours that are really great for me). I doubt my favorite hundred hours are the same as anyone else’s.
Giving up either all music before 1950 or all after would be easy; I’d keep 1950- since there are still many good contemporary “classical” composers crowded out by the higher-status old masters.
Well, I like Bach most of all, and I find that as I’ve learned to hear more, sometimes by following along with a score and doing a bit of musical analysis and kind of hacking away at the piano and butchering parts of the works, I enjoy them more and get more from them. Sometimes it seems that the enjoyment is proportional to how much of it I can keep in mind at the time as I’m listening, how much I can pay attention to (both of which are facilitated through knowledge of the work), as well as how much the distinction between me and the experience disappears and I lose the sense of being a person listening to the music. I enjoy having a kind of high-level cognitive/emotional/musical blueprint of the work as a whole and feeling how the moment relates to the whole, knowing where it’s going and remembering where it came from. Just as we can have a greater appreciation for a moment or portion in the life of a historical figure or in a movie by thinking about the future consequences that we’re aware of, I think we can have the same kinds of reactions to music where the pieces mean more as a whole than as just the sum of the parts, and on multiple levels. I don’t hear that much in Bach relative to what a great and well-studied performer of Bach would, but I hear more than I used to, and far more than I did before I had studied music at all. I think it is probably a matter of personality though, and that many would find my approach would detract from their experience.
Puts me in mind of this quote from Pratchett’s Soul Music:
Lord Vetinari, the supreme ruler of Ankh Morpork, rather liked
music.
People wondered what sort of music would appeal to such a man.
Highly formalized chamber music, possibly, or thunder and-lightning
opera scores.
In fact the kind of music he really liked was the kind that never got
played. It ruined music, in his opinion, to torment it by involving it on
dried skins, bits of dead cat and lumps of metal hammered into wires and
tubes. It ought to stay written down, on the page, in rows of little dots
and crotchets, all neatly caught between lines. Only there was it pure. It
was when people started doing things with it that the rot set in. Much
better to sit quietly in a room and read the sheets, with nothing between
yourself and the mind of the composer but a scribble of ink. Having it
played by sweaty fat men and people with hair in their ears and spit
dribbling out of the end of their oboe … well, the idea made him shudder.
[...] Then he picked up the third movement of Fondel’s Prelude in G Major and
settled back to read.
I wonder if anyone does this with music they’ve never heard played before?
Glenn Gould was said to sometimes analyze and completely memorize works from the sheet music alone before playing them at the piano. His father recalled an instance of him learning an entire concerto from the score alone and then playing it from memory the first time, and Bruno Monsaingeon saw him play an entire movement from memory of a Mendelssohn string quartet after hearing it once on the radio (quoted in Bazzana’s book on Gould).
That pales in comparison though to the fourteen-year-old Mozart transcribing from memory after once hearing the secret Miserere of Allegri, a dense polyphonic work that was performed only in the Sistine Chapel and was forbidden by the Vatican to be transcribed or reproduced under penalty of excommunication.
I’m by no means an expert at the piano, but I’m probably halfway there, and I can without too much trouble get the general gist of complex unfamiliar piano music, and I can easily read simple music. I’d say it’s pretty much analogous to the ability of expert chess players to play blindfolded, which is definitely a well-attested ability. (The record for simultaneous blindfold matches is around 50, played by Janos Flesch in Budapest in 1960.)
I took most of a year of AP music theory in high school (dropped out of it because I was being picked on) and never got the impression that we were learning about anything but archaic, old rules of music followed by dead composers. That, and how to take musical dictation, but none of the examples were contemporary. Was my music theory teacher just incompetent? Did I miss the generally applicable parts by leaving the class early?
And while having a variety of music is definitely good, there’s plenty of variety within a genre! It doesn’t seem obvious to me that you can get more valuable variety per ounce of effort by taking classes to learn to appreciate more genres than you can by spending time on Pandora.
I don’t know how I missed this comment at the time, but it demands a reply.
Although it’s difficult for me to mentally organize such a reply, because I simultaneously believe all of the following:
You probably were learning “old rules of music followed by dead composers.”
That doesn’t constitute music theory.
Your teacher’s incompetence was likely not personal, but inherited from the discipline of “music theory” as a whole, which in my opinion has a far from satisfactory understanding of its own subject matter.
However, your objections to the class you took are not necessarily related to this criticism of mine; in particular, the fact that that doesn’t constitute music theory has nothing to do with whether certain composers happen to be dead or alive.
There was probably considerable value in the curriculum they were trying to teach you, both for what it really was (music history; familiarization with art music as a pursuit, distinct from popular music) and as an indirect, nonexplicit (and frankly inefficient) way of teaching music theory (its traditional purpose).
Hence your attitude is probably misguided, even though I wish you had been taught differently; in effect, you’re “right for the wrong reasons”.
Musical dictation, though it may have seemed to you like merely one particular topic on the syllabus, really is the shibboleth for demonstrating understanding of music theory.
You would not want examples from contemporary art music in your first introduction to musical dictation. The reason the examples were old is the same reason the examples in your math classes were old, rather than being drawn from contemporary journals.
What you were really complaining about, probably, was that none of the examples were popular. (I really, really hate when people equate “contemporary” with “popular”!)
However, as I mentioned above, it is among the purposes of such a course to familiarize the student with the pursuit of art music, as opposed to popular music (with which they are likely to be familiar already).
In any case, conventional wisdom to the contrary, there aren’t “separate magisteria” of music theory; the skill of musical dictation is what it is, and it doesn’t matter exactly where the examples were drawn from, so long as they are of the appropriate level of complexity for the student’s level. (Otherwise the theory being used is wrong.)
I’m sorry that the course didn’t communicate this to you, but there exists considerably more intellectual depth to the pursuit of music—in particular art music—than you are likely to have encountered just by living in the general culture, “spending time on Pandora”, and the like.
Please bear these points in mind—in particular, the existence of people like me, who regard the creation of art music as an academic pursuit comparable in sophistication to science or philosophy—when assessing the implications of your own experience in the domain of music.
What readings and activities would you recommend to someone interested in becoming able to compose music, as opposed to learning how to play any particular instrument?
Reading: An Introduction to Tonal Theory by Peter Westergaard.
Activity: Study scores. Copy them out by hand. (This is actually the traditional method of learning composition, believe it or not; it might be compared to tracing drawings in visual art). Make simplified versions (e.g. write out the “main line”, then “main two lines”, etc.). Make analyses of works as in Westergaard. And, above all: attempt to compose, and learn by trial and error.
Feel free to inquire further.
Thanks!
Oh man I miss Pandora since they stopped streaming to the UK. :(
On topic: I had quite a few years of music lessons (though I wasn’t really much good) and some musical theory, which I really enjoyed. And I do quite like listening to classical music in a vague sort of way, but I wouldn’t say I have an “appreciation” for it: it’s not as though I can pick out features or analyse it or anything. So am I appreciating it without a tuned ear, or am I just unaware of the work my bit of theoretical knowledge is doing behind the scenes?
I’d say appreciation is really just a synonym for enjoyment. You can be a world-class performer without knowing any theory at all.
Actually, I think appreciation and enjoyment are related but not symonyms. Enjoyment is visceral and emotional, it denotes the sheer pleasure of the experience. Appreciation implies recognition of the elements of the music, why those particular elements were chosen, how they might have been different, etc., as well as the extra enjoyment that comes about as a result of that appreciation. Not that I’m trying to say that’s what everybody means by the terms, but that’s how I think of them and how I’ve heard some other people talk about them.
My music theory course only had a slight emphasis on classical music. (Mainly because classical music is more analyzable with theory, I guess.) Probably your textbook was just old or inferior. But I got very little out of the course anyway.
I’m not suggesting that it’s necessarily worth the effort to increase one’s appreciation of classical music, given the opportunity cost. (I’m not exactly chomping at the bit to appreciate Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow, or Hegel or Kant or Foucault or Derrida. Or wine, for that matter.) But the easiest way would probably be to pick a CD with some good classical music on it and listen to it many times through until you start to understand it musically. Courses are likely overkill. When I first started learning Bach (around the age of 10) it made no musical sense to me at all. I forget how long until I started to understand it, so I don’t know how long you’d have to listen to start to get it. Maybe too long to bother.
Hmmmmmmmmmmm no. Doubt there’s a good way to resolve this disagreement.
As for learning if coming to it as an adult, I’d recommend resources like Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts (and any of his many writings on music, such as The Joy of Music), as well as Aaron Copland’s What to Listen for in Music and works of that nature.
The key point in my opinion is that you have to learn to hear more in the music, to be able to hear and follow the different voices in a fugue, or recognize the development of a theme in a sonata allegro form, and this sort of ability only comes about through some offline study and intellectual training that is then applied when listening to music and the knowledge really comes alive.
I don’t get much enjoyment in consciously recognizing long-horizon forms or themes, although I do enjoy many pieces that heavily rely on them, e.g. Liszt’s Sonata in b
I probably lack perspective since I was a decent classical pianist in my youth, but I don’t feel like any formal study is necessary to get a full pleasure-soup response to great classical music. Also, tastes vary; I don’t enjoy a lot of highly regarded classical music (but there are at least a few hundred hours that are really great for me). I doubt my favorite hundred hours are the same as anyone else’s.
Giving up either all music before 1950 or all after would be easy; I’d keep 1950- since there are still many good contemporary “classical” composers crowded out by the higher-status old masters.
Well, I like Bach most of all, and I find that as I’ve learned to hear more, sometimes by following along with a score and doing a bit of musical analysis and kind of hacking away at the piano and butchering parts of the works, I enjoy them more and get more from them. Sometimes it seems that the enjoyment is proportional to how much of it I can keep in mind at the time as I’m listening, how much I can pay attention to (both of which are facilitated through knowledge of the work), as well as how much the distinction between me and the experience disappears and I lose the sense of being a person listening to the music. I enjoy having a kind of high-level cognitive/emotional/musical blueprint of the work as a whole and feeling how the moment relates to the whole, knowing where it’s going and remembering where it came from. Just as we can have a greater appreciation for a moment or portion in the life of a historical figure or in a movie by thinking about the future consequences that we’re aware of, I think we can have the same kinds of reactions to music where the pieces mean more as a whole than as just the sum of the parts, and on multiple levels. I don’t hear that much in Bach relative to what a great and well-studied performer of Bach would, but I hear more than I used to, and far more than I did before I had studied music at all. I think it is probably a matter of personality though, and that many would find my approach would detract from their experience.
Puts me in mind of this quote from Pratchett’s Soul Music:
I wonder if anyone does this with music they’ve never heard played before?
Glenn Gould was said to sometimes analyze and completely memorize works from the sheet music alone before playing them at the piano. His father recalled an instance of him learning an entire concerto from the score alone and then playing it from memory the first time, and Bruno Monsaingeon saw him play an entire movement from memory of a Mendelssohn string quartet after hearing it once on the radio (quoted in Bazzana’s book on Gould).
That pales in comparison though to the fourteen-year-old Mozart transcribing from memory after once hearing the secret Miserere of Allegri, a dense polyphonic work that was performed only in the Sistine Chapel and was forbidden by the Vatican to be transcribed or reproduced under penalty of excommunication.
I sometimes found piles of sheet music sitting around in my high school’s music room, and I’d read them once in a while.
I’m by no means an expert at the piano, but I’m probably halfway there, and I can without too much trouble get the general gist of complex unfamiliar piano music, and I can easily read simple music. I’d say it’s pretty much analogous to the ability of expert chess players to play blindfolded, which is definitely a well-attested ability. (The record for simultaneous blindfold matches is around 50, played by Janos Flesch in Budapest in 1960.)
Perhaps there are some genres with more or less variety than others? Or we’re counting genres differently?