Music Pedagogy: Negative Advice

I have alluded elsewhere to the fact that most of the guidance that I received in The Early Years was negative: "don't do X". There are several problems with negative advice in principle. Here are some, in no order:

1. The avoidance of X, if X is well-defined, may still leave an implicitly-permitted space that is unnavigably large.
2. It presumes knowing what to do.
3. The list of X's quickly grows beyond management or organization.
4. The well is poisoned with respect to each X (the voice on the shoulder says that this is the primary purpose).

As against all of this, there is a familiar cardinal principle of creativity, which has been either discussed or else merely presumed in many previous posts on this blog: "Don't repeat self". This principle even has its own Wikipedia entry -- written from the perspective of software engineering, but much of the discussion is directly transferable to the context of any particular creative activity, and can then be abstracted upwards (as we so enjoy doing) in terms of the technique of that activity.

Wikipedia also talks about two alternatives (again, in a software context). One of those is patently inane, but the discussion of the other contains an interesting formulation that may point a way forward: "Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction". What is an abstraction and what makes it wrong? The answers to those questions are again software-specific, but we may analogize. Perhaps it is not DRY, but WRY: Why repeat yourself? There can be good reasons, tightly coupled as they are with what kind of repetition is being considered -- and even with the definition of repetition, although it is literal repetition that is most often deemed problematic.

One place where parallels between software and art break down is that it is hardly possible for software to be too legible, but it is obviously possible for art to be too legible as well as not legible enough. Centuries have been spent trying to define the sweet spot in between; perish forbid that effort be renewed here. It is sufficient to point out that everything depends upon rationale, and that rationale can be internalized in the form of conditioning of the imagination.

Down that road (never mind exactly how far down) lies the ability to transform negative advice into positive -- where it is found to survive any validation at all and not deserve to be simply thrown aside.