Raw Material: A Roadmap and a Detour

When we come back to the different respective impacts of Schoenberg and of Webern on successive generations, we will need to drag in Stravinsky, which may only be an indication of how tangled the whole situation is, or was. It will need a lot of unpacking.

Therefore, the next few installments of this series will be on a different track. The ultimate goal has always been to try to find a workable approach to pedagogy, because hitherto there has never been one. There has never been an effective framework for teaching and learning music. The problem starts at the level of terminology. The available descriptions of the rudiments of music arose from a ghastly farrago of historical accidents, going back over a thousand years. Subsequent discoveries could not even be classified, at the time they were made, as either cumulative or independent. The linguistic tools for transmitting those discoveries were so poor that they led then to tendentiousness and lead today to guesswork. It is a miserable and totally unworkable situation, because the rudiments of music make sense if their rationales are understood, but not if they aren't. The upshot is that no one is taught music: if they learn it, it is despite the teaching. And that, intrinsically, is a matter of luck, and luck is nobody's friend.

Suppose one wanted to clear away all that confusion: where to begin, and how justify that particular starting point? That, too, will need a lot of unpacking. Watch this space.