Music Education Priorities

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.


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