Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!njin!princeton!phoenix!lseltzer
From: lseltzer@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Linda Ann Seltzer)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: Music Education (was: Re: MR Vol. 5, #21)
Keywords: possibilities, compositional freedom
Message-ID: <14655@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 18 Mar 90 21:03:39 GMT
References: <132393@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <8077@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> <14531@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <9073@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> <14580@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Reply-To: lseltzer@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Linda Ann Seltzer)
Organization: Princeton University, NJ
Lines: 55

>Some universities exaggerate the importance of theory studies because
>of the need to articulate a cogent curriculum. You can't say, "we let our
>students do whatever the fuck they want to because they're artists" and 
>have admissions agree. Admissions sez, "What is your curriculum." So
>you must make one up. And given that historical-theoretical literacy is
>low in this country, you make your undergrads do Fux.

Ideally, a traditional music curriculum will separate the music of the
past from the commercialization which such music has suffered in the
modern performance and media world.  Perhaps at UCSD the traditional music
curriculum made the music of the past seem hackneyed, but if you will go
a bit north you will find a program at Berkeley which makes the music of
the past come alive and which engenders a love for traditional music,
both Western and non-Western.  Perhaps some students feel it is a waste
of time to devote several years of study to the music of the past, but
for others, especially those who have played an instrument for many
years, there is an honest desire to understand this music.  In the
context of such study the relationship between fields such as signal
processing and composers of the past becomes real as one understands the
acoustic properties of such music.  If a program is not honestly
inspiring students to appreciate music of the past, then there is
something wrong with the program, not something wrong with the idea of
having traditional music programs.

If you take exercises in harmony and counterpoint to be mere
manipulation of musical materials, then it may seem remote and
inaccessible.  But it is necesary to look at exercises as practice in
the work and experience of composition.  The chorale melodies were very
deeply religious and have very deep emotions associated with them if one
opens one's heart to them.  I found the practice of harmoniizng chorales
three times a week for two months to be a deeply religious meditation
practice which required many hours of devotion and concentration in
order to create harmonizations which were alive and which suited the
sentiment of the melodies and their context.  To the present day I still
play my chorale harmonizations as a means of putting myself in the frame
of mind to compose.

Emotions have to be spontaneous rather than forced, contrived or
controlled, and it is hoped that the natural emotion towards the music
of the past can be one of love and of separating the music and its truth
from any means by which the commercial media, such as radio stations,
have presented the past and distilled it of its meaning.  It is with
this sentiment that the study of traditional music is undertaken. The
purpose is not to engender means by which the composer can simply take
surface phenomena and mechanistically "apply" them.

As for the relationship between digitial signal processing and
traditional music, to say there is none is quite untrue.  The
relationships must be discovered by means of one's own insight and
one's own ability to view the past in a new light.

This is not to say that education in a traditional music is a *requisite*
for musical creativity.  I do see a traditional education as a desirable
and valuable experience in itself, however, which is worth the required
devotion and time.