Saw this and thought I'd give my perspective on why A-Level music (esp theory) is so frustrating.
Disclaimer - I can't comment on whether it's worse now than 15-20 years ago.
Spoiler - I don't think it's the current syllabus or current teachers. It's much deeper. MEGATHREAD.
Disclaimer - I can't comment on whether it's worse now than 15-20 years ago.
Spoiler - I don't think it's the current syllabus or current teachers. It's much deeper. MEGATHREAD.
In the C18th, a young musician studied harmony and counterpoint every day from an early age. That student's present-day equivalent doesn't really get started until the age of 16 at the earliest - giving her ancestors almost a decade-long head start.
This is not a new problem - it’s been getting worse ever since students in the C19th started spending more time on mastering their instruments than on learning about music.
A student who started learning as big and complex a subject as music theory at 16 is still a beginner at 18.
When modern teenagers try to learn tonal theory in like two years, they experience a great deal of bafflement and shame because the subject so obviously outweighs the frame it's put into.
Everyone who's done Music A-Level knows what I'm talking about. The tests we give students on this stuff ask them to pretend, to fudge it, to fake an understanding of something they can’t possibly have learned in such a short time.
No wonder they can’t express themselves creatively in this medium.
And so most young musicians who want to learn the craft of writing music do so by learning music production, where they easily put in their 10000 hours and become excellent musicians. But they don't learn traditional tonal theory this way.
Should we even try to teach traditional music theory, then? I think the answer is yes, we should. But we need to have a serious think about how to go about it.
Follow the problem to its root cause: classical music is still the foundation of the West’s musical culture, so we feel deeply that we should maintain it and teach it to young people.
But those foundations were laid so long ago that we no longer remember how much work they took our ancestors to lay down.
Why did we forget? Once upon a time, every musician wrote their own airs; improvised their own preludes and fantasies. It was the principal mode of expression.
Not that this music was especially impressive. It was mostly pretty forgettable. But it was serviceable. However, over time, as with so many industries, specialization took over.
Great composers wrote pieces so complex and monumental that the game changed. C18th listeners thought J. S. Bach and Mozart's music terribly overwrought and overly complicated; but gradually this high level of complexity became the norm.
Musicians began to devote themselves to interpreting these compositions rather than writing their own. Thus the culture of "classical" music was born.
Classical music's "theory problem" is very much a problem specific to classical music. Jazz, rock, pop and folk music don't have this problem: everyone learns music theory at the same time as learning to play and sing.
(Now you may not think pop music involves any theory. It may not be described as theory. It's also not *traditional tonal music theory*. But it IS theory.
If you don't think kids learning pop music are learning music theory, try this experiment: ask a 15-year-old immersed in pop music to make up a song for you on the spot, and then ask a 15-year-old classical musician to do the same thing, and see which one can actually do it.)
What's to be done? I think we need to decide whether to a) keep fudging it and paying lip-service to music theory, b) abandon the pretense, or c) overhaul the system and start teaching music theory properly again.
If (c) intrigues you, I have one word for you: SCHEMATA. I recommend you look up Robert Gjerdingen to find out what that means. I think he's right on the money.
You could start here: artofcomposing.com/aoc-011-partim…
He also has a great moustache.
