On Thursday, we had the first meeting of my current trends in music theory course. The class comprises graduate students from a variety of disciplines: we have a theorist, a few composers, an ethnomusicologist, a few conductors, several percussionists and some vocalists. Following the usual administrative first-day presentation (introductions, going over the syllabus, etc.) I asked my students a series of questions and had them write down their answers. The questions were:
Most of the answers were pretty much what I (and many of you, I suspect) was anticipating. Most people said something about uncovering the structure of the piece. A few mentioned something about expression, and a few mentioned something about helping people perform the piece.
I then set them to task analyzing Schubert's "Du bist die Ruh." I had no particular reason for choosing that piece, other than it was short and had a text. I gave them no specific direction beyond "analyze this as though it were a final project in an upper-level undergraduate theory class." They were allowed to interpret "analyze" in any way they chose. I played a recording of the song, sung by Ian Bostridge.
Most students (again, as expected) went through and identified the key. The majority of them then looked for large-scale form and worked their way down to the smaller details of the piece (again, pretty much as I expected). One student--one of the vocalists--examined text setting in some detail. I put a hasty Schenkerian graph of the first phrase on the board to show them another possibility. After a general class discussion, I then asked them what their analysis didn't tell us.
A few people brought up the notion of cultural/historical context. In order to understand a piece fully, we need to know the circumstances under which it was composed. One person brought up the issue of translating the German, which, it occurs to me now, could have been an interesting point of departure for talking about interpretation. That is to say that we can only be so accurate when we translate from German to English: German, for instance, features gendered articles (der, die, das) whereas English only features the neutral article (the).
What emerged from that discussion was that music analysis (theory?) as it tends to be taught to our undergraduates is very much a structuralist approach. It presumes that most everything you need to know about a piece can be found in the notes themselves. If everything we need to know about the piece can be found in the notes themselves, then we could argue (as many theorists throughout the ages have) that there is a sort of objective truth implicit in the music that can be revealed through the thoughtful application of our analytical tools.
The conversation then veered toward subjectivity and how different people at different times understand music differently. I brought up the fact that there are a number of settings of "Du bist die Ruh" (Fanny Mendelssohn is the only composer that I can recall) and that, if we listened to her setting next, we'd need to examine it in light of what we (now) know about Schubert. We are also listening to it through ears that have heard not only Fanny Mendelssohn, but also Stravinsky, the Beatles, rap music, a variety of world musics, film music, etc. So try as we might, we can never fully understand the circumstances under which the piece was first composed or experienced. We talked about intention and the difficulties (impossibilities?) of knowing what the composer intended. We talked about a sort of embodied understanding (a la Mead's "kinesthetic empathy"): singers understood the piece--felt the piece in a very different way from the percussionists (who shared that they focused mainly on the rhythm).
This week, we're reading Catherine Belsey's Poststructuralism: A very short introduction and trying to put names with the faces of topics that started to emerge at the end of last class period. I've given them the option of reading Barthes' "The death of the author" and Althusser's "Ideology and ideological state apparatuses." If that doesn't scare them off, then I don't know what will! :)
What is music theory?
Is music theory different from musical analysis? If so, how?
What does music theory (and/or music analysis) attempt to show; that is, what is the ultimate goal of doing an analysis?
Most of the answers were pretty much what I (and many of you, I suspect) was anticipating. Most people said something about uncovering the structure of the piece. A few mentioned something about expression, and a few mentioned something about helping people perform the piece.
I then set them to task analyzing Schubert's "Du bist die Ruh." I had no particular reason for choosing that piece, other than it was short and had a text. I gave them no specific direction beyond "analyze this as though it were a final project in an upper-level undergraduate theory class." They were allowed to interpret "analyze" in any way they chose. I played a recording of the song, sung by Ian Bostridge.
Most students (again, as expected) went through and identified the key. The majority of them then looked for large-scale form and worked their way down to the smaller details of the piece (again, pretty much as I expected). One student--one of the vocalists--examined text setting in some detail. I put a hasty Schenkerian graph of the first phrase on the board to show them another possibility. After a general class discussion, I then asked them what their analysis didn't tell us.
A few people brought up the notion of cultural/historical context. In order to understand a piece fully, we need to know the circumstances under which it was composed. One person brought up the issue of translating the German, which, it occurs to me now, could have been an interesting point of departure for talking about interpretation. That is to say that we can only be so accurate when we translate from German to English: German, for instance, features gendered articles (der, die, das) whereas English only features the neutral article (the).
What emerged from that discussion was that music analysis (theory?) as it tends to be taught to our undergraduates is very much a structuralist approach. It presumes that most everything you need to know about a piece can be found in the notes themselves. If everything we need to know about the piece can be found in the notes themselves, then we could argue (as many theorists throughout the ages have) that there is a sort of objective truth implicit in the music that can be revealed through the thoughtful application of our analytical tools.
The conversation then veered toward subjectivity and how different people at different times understand music differently. I brought up the fact that there are a number of settings of "Du bist die Ruh" (Fanny Mendelssohn is the only composer that I can recall) and that, if we listened to her setting next, we'd need to examine it in light of what we (now) know about Schubert. We are also listening to it through ears that have heard not only Fanny Mendelssohn, but also Stravinsky, the Beatles, rap music, a variety of world musics, film music, etc. So try as we might, we can never fully understand the circumstances under which the piece was first composed or experienced. We talked about intention and the difficulties (impossibilities?) of knowing what the composer intended. We talked about a sort of embodied understanding (a la Mead's "kinesthetic empathy"): singers understood the piece--felt the piece in a very different way from the percussionists (who shared that they focused mainly on the rhythm).
This week, we're reading Catherine Belsey's Poststructuralism: A very short introduction and trying to put names with the faces of topics that started to emerge at the end of last class period. I've given them the option of reading Barthes' "The death of the author" and Althusser's "Ideology and ideological state apparatuses." If that doesn't scare them off, then I don't know what will! :)