Thread by @la_meme_young

critical music education is the music teacher holding a mirror up to themselves and asking the question “am i being aesthetically dictatorial?”

a music teacher should never allow their aesthetic biases to become the basis for the concepts they are teaching. we can talk about four part harmony without focusing solely on baroque, just like we can talk improvisation without focusing solely on jazz.

it’s almost expected that the conservatory setting will be dictatorial to some extent, the job is to “conserve” “art” music, and in the western world that means almost exclusively concert music from the 1500s-1800s

but even if now in the 21st century, if conservatories seek to continue “conserving” “art” music, then the inclusion of various forms of electronic and improvised musics must be prioritized. we have over 100 years of electronic music that needs to be taught to all music students.

this trajectory of “western” electronic and improvised musics may have begun with the differing likes of musique concréte and the blues, respectively, but it now has found convergence through the proliferation of consumer music technology in the 21st century.

this is why now, in the 21st century music classroom, specifically when regarding composition, it should be our imperative as teachers to constantly update our materials to reflect this constantly shifting music and technological landscape existing outside the conservatory.

if a student successfully learned keyboard and harmony skills through a 2 octave midi controller strictly using only one hand, track by track, quantized and recorded to a click track, who are we to tell them that is the “wrong” way to compose using the piano interface?

and even more importantly, we as teachers could use this as an opportunity to relate the contemporary MIDI DAW practices of young composers to that of the earliest electronic composers. 100 years later and we are *still* primarily making and arranging loops.

and hence full circle, the importance of teaching electronic music theory in the conservatory setting, some of which is a century old, as a bridge to contemporary and popular electronic music production practices of the 2020s.

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