source file: mills2.txt Date: Sat, 8 Jun 1996 17:45:09 -0700 Subject: Re: Music Education Priorities From: Gary Morrison <71670.2576@compuserve.com> Aha! I suspect that Enrique nailed it right on the head: Much of our music education system seems backward-looking to innovators, because they're concerned with understanding what's already out there at higher priority than (or at least earlier in the curriculum than) what is possible for the future. And as mentioned earlier, the classic Harmony, Ear-Training, Counterpoint, Orchestration, and such classes exist for the benefit of more musical concentrations than composition majors. They appear in Applied curricula, for example, so that so-educated players can understand what's going on in the music they play, and thus improve their interpretations. That particular usage of theoretical coursework inherently must be backward-looking. There's not a whole lot of point, from an Applied major's perspective, in learning vital background information for how to interpret a form of music that has only marginally materialized at this point in history when what they'll be required to interpret in real life is several centuries of preexisting works of the great masters. My personal opinion is that Bill Alves' rebuttal to Enrique's statement is valuable not such as a refutal, as much as a possible way out of the deadlock, if we can call it that. (Actually, I hope Bill will forgive me if I'm putting words into his mouth here, because I read his post quickly and deleted it before I realized that I had something to say about it.) He points out that, in effect, that 300-year body of Western music does not by any means encompass all precedents for interpretation, because there are myriads of other musical traditions world-wide. With the globalization of culture now possible with real-time satellite links, web pages and such, it is certainly much easier than ever before to convince Academia that learning a variety of other theoretical underpinnings is not only educationally valuable, but also downright marketable. There's a tricky angle to this though: Academia has always been interested in authenticity, again at least at higher priority or earlier in the curricula, than innovation. I suspect that the most likely to get such things into standard musical curricula, is to begin - and this has already started to a limited degree - by recognizing the concept of a Sitar Major, or perhaps a Gamelan major, at equal stature with a Piano or Violin major for example. These concepts exist to some degree as exotic specialties at the PhD or occasionally MA levels, but to admit them as alternative meat-and-potatos theoretical underpinnings will require that they be available at the BA level. That sort of effort will prove difficult to make accepted practice, we must realize. Andres Segovia fought one heck of battle to get the guitar recognized as a legitimate instrument for Applied curricula. Perhaps it's fair to argue that that was then and this is now, and again with globalization of culture, it just may work this time. Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Sun, 9 Jun 1996 03:58 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id SAA24875; Sat, 8 Jun 1996 18:57:58 -0700 Date: Sat, 8 Jun 1996 18:57:58 -0700 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu