Music Pedagogy: Starting Points

We listen to music, and we hear things. Then we look at music, and we see things. But mostly the things we hear and the things we see are not the same things: the overlap is never very substantial, and often zero. The connection between means and ends typically eludes objective, or even intersubjective, description, except on a trivial level. This is the broader notion of "legibility", and in that sense, much music -- even music to which we assign high status -- is profoundly illegible. That is a problem, because it crimps the transmissibility of tradition.

There are corpora of analytical technique and of applications of analytical technique. From these emerge, to take one example, a notion of "common practice". We "know how" to "analyze" music from the "common practice" period. Very well, let us "analyze" two contemporaneous works: one by Mozart, one by Ditters. They have a lot in common, don't they? Do you see the problem?

This is what gave Schenker his opening. He recognized that there are higher layers, where the operations occur that allow us to distinguish between the supremacy of Mozart and the defiant inanity of Ditters. He also recognized (probably only intuitively, as he could not explain it) that what matters is not the existence of the higher layers, nor yet the ability to recognize them in a musical text¹, but the management of complexity at the interfaces between the layers. When we assess the "quality" of musical works, this is what we are assessing -- using, as one thinks, criteria unlike and beyond Schenker's.  That assessment is functionally adequate, in that we do it all the time, in real time, with high repeatability and high confidence; but very little of it is conscious, and very little of that can be expressed in transmissible form. So: still not good enough.

If we were going to "analyze" music, the purpose must be to explain the connection between means and ends. "Analysis" that falls short of that goal is waste motion, but that is nearly all "analysis". A few isolated, pinhole insights can be gained by the study of selected repertoire. We are so far sunk into learned helplessness that we celebrate those few microscopic successes and try to erect systems out of them: exhaustive, algorithmic, explanatory systems. We call this "learning", though it is mostly not transferable. The bar has been set that low.

Next time, we will try to inject a composer's perspective on analysis. Won't that be fun.