paulbailey.us

pedagogically most theory textbooks are organized by teaching students the skills to analyze basic harmony in a sequential manner. first we teach students how to identify and create the fundamentals; scales, intervals, chords, and non-harmonic tones, and then things get pretty tricky when many books start to wade into the deeper waters of counterpoint (via 4-part writing which has major pedagogical limitations and is a whole other post) and harmonic analysis in which we get to the crux of some major problems.

after the fundamentals are mastered, treating harmonic analysis and part writing as music theory are like treating phonics and sentence structure as reading. further separating the elements of music into different classes (like form and analysis and orchestration) make it pretty hard to give the students the big picture needed to make sense of the music they are playing (and later teaching and conducting)

after the fundamentals are mastered, another option would be to focus on teaching full works, which brings up even more problems like how do you give your students enough skills so they can open a score and understand the western canon of art music?

i’m also not going to say all the music theory textbooks are bad, but i think we are doing are students a huge disservice by using mostly short excerpts as primary our source material.  even with the best if intentions the main strategy of each chapter use brief musical example with easily identifiable answers of the concepts being taught which leads to the students inability to make sense of the same concept when it presented in a full score (especially if it isn’t as clearly delineated) .

no matter which pieces we decide to study i really think the sooner we can start looking at music from the it’s elements (form, melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre) the more relevant our teaching will be of the skills needed to decode and perform music.

at the end of the day we need to find better ways to make the complex more simple instead of the simple more complex