Why you should be mad at theory

[Christian Miller]

My composition teacher in college told me that he thought Webern's music sounded like a bunch of little farts!

He's not wrong is he?

[Christian Miller]

- Remember the scene in "Amadeus" where Salieri looks through Mozart's scores, and has a break down because he must have "written it from his head"? When you study 18th century music, you quickly realize that most composers had to have been doing something very close to that.

Yeah, those scenes are so cringe. As if Salieri wasn't a high level professional composer who had been writing music since early childhood too, with incredibly fluency and speed. Salieri may not have been as innovative or as influential or Mozart but he was no slouch, and a great musician, as they all were.

[James W]

Personally, I am very fond of Webern's music. Austere, crystalline and visionary are the words that spring to mind.

[Jimmy blue note]

My composition teacher in college told me that he thought Webern's music sounded like a bunch of little farts!

The miniatures are the model of poetic brevity in chamber music. They're the inspiration for all the short free improvisations I play. All the elements of brilliantly composed music and none of the obligation of weighty development.
I always thought they got marginalized when they're presented in a full concert program.
To my mind, they're the soul mates to what Jim Hall's playing is in jazz.

[Christian Miller]

Personally, I am very fond of Webern's music. Austere, crystalline and visionary are the words that spring to mind.

You obviously don’t know my farts.

[Christian Miller]

Actually to be fair, my farts are more Mahlerian in scope

[Jimmy blue note]

You obviously don’t know my farts.

Let me give you a bit of friendly advice: Don't use this as a pickup line or an ice breaker at the first meeting with the future in-laws.

[grahambop]

Actually to be fair, my farts are more Mahlerian in scope

Mine are more Haydnesque, e.g. Le matin, Le soir, the Echo, the Drumroll, the Hornsignal, the Surprise, etc.

[rpjazzguitar]

Here's another reason I get irritated with theory.

At some point I learned the alt scale, probably as "melodic minor a half step up from a V7 resolving to a Imaj".

So, I tried that and it sounded mediocre.

Sometime later I transcribed a fragment of Chico Pinheiro playing a V7-Imaj. His improv sounded great and absolutely recognizable as Chico. A unique sound, to my ear.

The notes? You guessed it. All of them right out of the same alt scale.

Theory can get you excited like you've learned the secret of jazz. But did you?

[AllanAllen]

Here's another reason I get irritated with theory.

At some point I learned the alt scale, probably as "melodic minor a half step up from a V7 resolving to a Imaj".

So, I tried that and it sounded mediocre.

Sometime later I transcribed a fragment of Chico Pinheiro playing a V7-Imaj. His improv sounded great and absolutely recognizable as Chico. A unique sound, to my ear.

The notes? You guessed it. All of them right out of the same alt scale.

Theory can get you excited like you've learned the secret of jazz. But did you?

But you can’t fill up pages and pages of a forum with diligent practice. And if you can’t throw out that you know to use a Plutonian scale over a subterranean front door VI - ii. What’s the point of learning it in the first place? Nobody here actually PLAYS music, that’s so pedestrian.

[sgcim]

I think there's a few misconceptions worth clearing up.

- Gjerdingen does not dislike music theory. He's a music theory professor, for goodness sake, I don't think he's advocating putting himself out of a job.

- What he doesn't like is the way music theory has traditionally been taught for composers and classical musicians in universities and conservatories.

- The last bit is important, because many, many great musicians with lots of theoretical knowledge do not know that stuff unless they specifically studied it. For shorthand, I will call it "traditional harmony" to differentiate it. How do you know if you studied traditional harmony? When someone says a 6 chord, do you think of a triad in first inversion (as opposed to a major triad with a major 6th above it?) Do you know the difference between a French and German augmented sixth? Do you have reoccurring nightmares about parallel fifths? Then you studied traditional harmony.

- This is very different from the theory that's usually used to train jazz, rock, pop, country, etc players. It's usually taught concurrently with species counterpoint. At Berklee College of Music, "Traditional Harmony" is a completely separate required course from its "Harmony" courses. The latter being geared to jazz and other popular music, and is usually what people think of when they think of Berklee theory (chord scales and the like).

- The goal of traditional harmony and counterpoint classes is to sound like mid to late 18th century music: Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, and early Beethoven. It's best exemplified with textbooks like Walter Piston, Kostka, and Aldwell/Schachter (the last one has a more Schenkerian bent). Once you start getting to Romantic music, the theoretical mechanisms you learn start breaking down, and most teachers simply shrug and say "well, Chopin just liked breaking the rules." This generally holds until you get to Schoenberg, and can start analyzing things with 12 tone rows. So you can analyze Bach chorales and Webern pieces, and not much in between -- ironically, the most popular pieces in the repertoire are completely mysterious theory-wise (but that's another rant).

- For harmony, it pretty much starts with four part SATB pieces. You are given a list of things you can do, and a much, much longer list of things you cannot do. Then you practice voice leading -- sometimes freely, sometimes by having figured basses at the bottom and trying to realize them. For counterpoint, you're given a cantus firmus and gradually introduce new complexities with each additional "species." Analysis is mostly done intervalically (thirds and sixths are good, seconds and sevenths bad unless they're suspensions, fourths and fifths handle with care, etc).

- I cannot emphasize how incredibly un-musical the whole thing is. Most students write on paper, never play it on a keyboard. Does it sound good? Does it sound like the music you envisioned? I don't know, but it doesn't have any parallel fifths and I got an A on it. If you think that jazz schools pump out too many musicians without essential practical skills, wait until you see composition departments.

- The irony is that we're trying to emulate 18th century music, but we know that 18th century musicians did not think this way. This is not even a case like Barry Harris, a next generation practitioner who tried to systematize how his predecessors thought post facto. We have tons of primary sources from composers and educators at the time. For heaven's sake, we have a book CPE Bach wrote himself. We know, for example, that they did NOT think of triad inversions as being the same thing in different orders, but totally different structures in and of themselves with their own rules.

- Remember the scene in "Amadeus" where Salieri looks through Mozart's scores, and has a break down because he must have "written it from his head"? When you study 18th century music, you quickly realize that most composers had to have been doing something very close to that. They just wrote insane amounts of music, in addition to their teaching, conducting, and ensemble/choir director duties. How did they write so damn quickly? It seems amazing. But then again, many classical musicians are amazed that four accomplished jazz musicians who have never played together can be handed a leadsheet with no notation except for chord symbols, and immediately play together and improvise without any rehearsal.

- This is not a case of "theory vs. no theory." This is about praxis (the ability to synthesize theory and practice together) vs. purely abstract theory. Jazz musicians should be very sympathetic to the former. We cannot just analyze a Charlie Parker solo or "Stella by Starlight" or whatever on paper -- we need to theoretically understand it in a way that helps us to play it. This is what the Partimento Crew have been emphasizing over the last 10-20 years. Do you understand harmony in a way that helps you compose and play it on the keyboard? It's a very exciting field, and many people who have taken traditional harmony courses but felt that something was seriously *missing* in terms of how to apply it have found it to be a breath of fresh air.

This is a good description of the hell I went through on my journey to get an MA in Music.
All they cared about was parallel 5th and octaves. I played my chorales on the piano, and added counterpoint in 8th notes and 16th notes, and I liked the way they sounded.
I'd hand them in to the teacher, and he'd complain to me, "Spiderwebs! Again with the spiderwebs!"
They discourage musical creativity, and emphasize mathematics.
As you said, the 'virtuosos' who followed all the rules had no idea what they wrote sounded like! They couldn't even distinguish between the quality of chords.
The teacher would play a diminished 7th chord, and the students would think they were dom7th chords!

When I got into a composition class on the basis of a string quartet I wrote, they told me I had to write 12-tone music (the big fad back then).
Again, mathematics.
One student tole me he was using a slide rule to compose his music. I asked him if he knew what it sounded like, he said no, but his teacher liked it. He wound up being an accountant!
I told my composition teacher that I liked only one piece of 12-tone music, Wallingford Riegger's Quintet for Piano and Woodwinds, and only one movement of it.
After listening to all the 12-tone music they suggested, I noticed the one movement I liked of the Riegger sounded nothing like the 12-tone music I listened to. I went back to the album, and read the liner notes, and Riegger said that he abandoned the 12-tone system for that movement, and used the modal technique to write it!
That did it. I just did my assignments and got my degree, and never looked back.

I was vindicated by Gunther Schuller's( the leading US 12-tone composer) article in which he stated, "Something's wrong. We're emptying out the concert halls! No one wants to hear Serial Music!

Today, the colleges have abandoned Schoenberg's system of 12-tone composition, except for a few desperate holdouts, and have opted for a more eclectic approach.

[Bobby Timmons]

I've had that same experience, knowing the alt scale but not really applying it well. Hearing how my teacher applies it made it click better. Still not theory's fault, that's your fault. Did theory tell you it's supposed to be applied in a vacuum? Who made that rule? Noone. It's supposed to be applied correctly by consulting examples in the music.

[rpjazzguitar]

I've had that same experience, knowing the alt scale but not really applying it well. Hearing how my teacher applies it made it click better. Still not theory's fault, that's your fault. Did theory tell you it's supposed to be applied in a vacuum? Who made that rule? Noone. It's supposed to be applied correctly by consulting examples in the music.

It's true. Theory makes no promises.

[BWV]

This is a good description of the hell I went through on my journey to get an MA in Music.
All they cared about was parallel 5th and octaves. I played my chorales on the piano, and added counterpoint in 8th notes and 16th notes, and I liked the way they sounded.
I'd hand them in to the teacher, and he'd complain to me, "Spiderwebs! Again with the spiderwebs!"
They discourage musical creativity, and emphasize mathematics.
As you said, the 'virtuosos' who followed all the rules had no idea what they wrote sounded like! They couldn't even distinguish between the quality of chords.
The teacher would play a diminished 7th chord, and the students would think they were dom7th chords!

When I got into a composition class on the basis of a string quartet I wrote, they told me I had to write 12-tone music (the big fad back then).
Again, mathematics.
One student tole me he was using a slide rule to compose his music. I asked him if he knew what it sounded like, he said no, but his teacher liked it. He wound up being an accountant!
I told my composition teacher that I liked only one piece of 12-tone music, Wallingford Riegger's Quintet for Piano and Woodwinds, and only one movement of it.
After listening to all the 12-tone music they suggested, I noticed the one movement I liked of the Riegger sounded nothing like the 12-tone music I listened to. I went back to the album, and read the liner notes, and Riegger said that he abandoned the 12-tone system for that movement, and used the modal technique to write it!
That did it. I just did my assignments and got my degree, and never looked back.

I was vindicated by Gunther Schuller's( the leading US 12-tone composer) article in which he stated, "Something's wrong. We're emptying out the concert halls! No one is wants to hear Serial Music!

Today, the colleges have abandoned Schoenberg's system of 12-tone composition, except for a few desperate holdouts, and have opted for a more eclectic approach.

Ah, good old evil serial composer cabal myth - its a strawman, (and modernist music has not been serial/12-tone since the 50s) Sure, professors in any field and persuasion can be petty tyrants, but a big yawn on the ‘bad professors wanted me to write ugly music trope’. Reality is, like anything else, a mixed bag. A lot of great music from Carter, Boulez, Lutoslawski, Ferneyhough et al, that atonophobes want to convince others is merely some sort of naked emperor con, that only those with pure hearts can see through.

dont have to like or listen to modern classical, but serious musicians take it seriously, if you doubt that, watch this:

[humphreysguitar]

Robert Gjerdingen demolishing Roman Numeral Analysis and Harmonic Function Theory is a thing of beauty.

[Christian Miller]

The squeaky bonk guys found out that you can’t actually tell people what to like. And I say that as a fan of a lot of that music.

anyone digging into the old writings of Boulez, Babbit etc would see quite quickly that post war high modernism was a quite consciously technocratic and ideological project involving eliciting robust support from state arts bodies and public broadcasting, and denunciations of ‘counter revolutionaries’ like… err… Schoenberg. I don’t for a minute doubt those that tell stories of that era being very dogmatic and narrow and I suspect that era cast a long shadow within the education as most composers in that style would find their home most naturally as academicians with long careers even while compositional styles outside the academy moved on.

Tbh I think they would have been better off keeping it cool, avant garde and edgy like in the 20s if they actually wanted anyone to listen to it, which famously according to Babbit wasn’t a forgone conclusion either. It’s hard not to read Babbit’s essay as endorsing a type of pseudoscientific academic grift to be quite honest. I feel like jazz and rock/pop musicians have a totally different and much more healthy relationship with this stuff.

Many mellowed somewhat and produced better music because of it. I even saw Boulez conduct late Schoenberg once. Imagine!

[James W]

Ah, good old evil serial composer cabal myth - its a strawman, (and modernist music has not been serial/12-tone since the 50s) Sure, professors in any field and persuasion can be petty tyrants, but a big yawn on the ‘bad professors wanted me to write ugly music trope’. Reality is, like anything else, a mixed bag. A lot of great music from Carter, Boulez, Lutoslawski, Ferneyhough et al, that atonophobes want to convince others is merely some sort of naked emperor con, that only those with pure hearts can see through.

dont have to like or listen to modern classical, but serious musicians take it seriously, if you doubt that, watch this:

Completely agree (I happen to be listening to Ferneyhough's 5th string quartet as I read this).

[pcjazz]

Mine are more Haydnesque, e.g. Le matin, Le soir, the Echo, the Drumroll, the Hornsignal, the Surprise, etc.

or Handelian, as in royal fireworks.

[grahambop]

or Handelian, as in royal fireworks.

as long as they don’t turn into water music...

[Gabor]

I think there's a few misconceptions worth clearing up.

- Gjerdingen does not dislike music theory. He's a music theory professor, for goodness sake, I don't think he's advocating putting himself out of a job.

- What he doesn't like is the way music theory has traditionally been taught for composers and classical musicians in universities and conservatories.

- The last bit is important, because many, many great musicians with lots of theoretical knowledge do not know that stuff unless they specifically studied it. For shorthand, I will call it "traditional harmony" to differentiate it. How do you know if you studied traditional harmony? When someone says a 6 chord, do you think of a triad in first inversion (as opposed to a major triad with a major 6th above it?) Do you know the difference between a French and German augmented sixth? Do you have reoccurring nightmares about parallel fifths? Then you studied traditional harmony.

- This is very different from the theory that's usually used to train jazz, rock, pop, country, etc players. It's usually taught concurrently with species counterpoint. At Berklee College of Music, "Traditional Harmony" is a completely separate required course from its "Harmony" courses. The latter being geared to jazz and other popular music, and is usually what people think of when they think of Berklee theory (chord scales and the like).

- The goal of traditional harmony and counterpoint classes is to sound like mid to late 18th century music: Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, and early Beethoven. It's best exemplified with textbooks like Walter Piston, Kostka, and Aldwell/Schachter (the last one has a more Schenkerian bent). Once you start getting to Romantic music, the theoretical mechanisms you learn start breaking down, and most teachers simply shrug and say "well, Chopin just liked breaking the rules." This generally holds until you get to Schoenberg, and can start analyzing things with 12 tone rows. So you can analyze Bach chorales and Webern pieces, and not much in between -- ironically, the most popular pieces in the repertoire are completely mysterious theory-wise (but that's another rant).

- For harmony, it pretty much starts with four part SATB pieces. You are given a list of things you can do, and a much, much longer list of things you cannot do. Then you practice voice leading -- sometimes freely, sometimes by having figured basses at the bottom and trying to realize them. For counterpoint, you're given a cantus firmus and gradually introduce new complexities with each additional "species." Analysis is mostly done intervalically (thirds and sixths are good, seconds and sevenths bad unless they're suspensions, fourths and fifths handle with care, etc).

- I cannot emphasize how incredibly un-musical the whole thing is. Most students write on paper, never play it on a keyboard. Does it sound good? Does it sound like the music you envisioned? I don't know, but it doesn't have any parallel fifths and I got an A on it. If you think that jazz schools pump out too many musicians without essential practical skills, wait until you see composition departments.

- The irony is that we're trying to emulate 18th century music, but we know that 18th century musicians did not think this way. This is not even a case like Barry Harris, a next generation practitioner who tried to systematize how his predecessors thought post facto. We have tons of primary sources from composers and educators at the time. For heaven's sake, we have a book CPE Bach wrote himself. We know, for example, that they did NOT think of triad inversions as being the same thing in different orders, but totally different structures in and of themselves with their own rules.

- Remember the scene in "Amadeus" where Salieri looks through Mozart's scores, and has a break down because he must have "written it from his head"? When you study 18th century music, you quickly realize that most composers had to have been doing something very close to that. They just wrote insane amounts of music, in addition to their teaching, conducting, and ensemble/choir director duties. How did they write so damn quickly? It seems amazing. But then again, many classical musicians are amazed that four accomplished jazz musicians who have never played together can be handed a leadsheet with no notation except for chord symbols, and immediately play together and improvise without any rehearsal.

- This is not a case of "theory vs. no theory." This is about praxis (the ability to synthesize theory and practice together) vs. purely abstract theory. Jazz musicians should be very sympathetic to the former. We cannot just analyze a Charlie Parker solo or "Stella by Starlight" or whatever on paper -- we need to theoretically understand it in a way that helps us to play it. This is what the Partimento Crew have been emphasizing over the last 10-20 years. Do you understand harmony in a way that helps you compose and play it on the keyboard? It's a very exciting field, and many people who have taken traditional harmony courses but felt that something was seriously *missing* in terms of how to apply it have found it to be a breath of fresh air.

- Amadeus having mentioned, one sentence burned into my mind, when Emperor listens, and see Mozart's work he said: ... to many notes... simply too many notes... This became a family humor sentence for me, when trying to communicate, we discover a situation, where some not understanding (of an artist) in place.

***

- You are saying Gjerdingen does not dislike music theory. He's a music theory professor, for goodness sake, I don't think he's advocating putting himself out of a job..

Of course he do not want to put himself out if his job, Of course he does not dislike music theory. He just want to emphasize how superior is his understanding about what is important and what is not, what is real, and what is pseudo, compared to other average professors. He is practically selling himself. The video is more about him, than music theory.... still fueled a good thread with many interesting posts.

-

[Christian Miller]

[Christian Miller]

- Amadeus having mentioned, one sentence burned into my mind, when Emperor listens, and see Mozart's work he said: ... to many notes... simply too many notes... This became a family humor sentence for me, when trying to communicate, we discover a situation, where some not understanding (of an artist) in place.

Well I have one thing in common with WA then lol.

[Christian Miller]

Two things. Mozart would have appreciated the fart commentary.

[sgcim]

Ah, good old evil serial composer cabal myth - its a strawman, (and modernist music has not been serial/12-tone since the 50s) Sure, professors in any field and persuasion can be petty tyrants, but a big yawn on the ‘bad professors wanted me to write ugly music trope’. Reality is, like anything else, a mixed bag. A lot of great music from Carter, Boulez, Lutoslawski, Ferneyhough et al, that atonophobes want to convince others is merely some sort of naked emperor con, that only those with pure hearts can see through.

dont have to like or listen to modern classical, but serious musicians take it seriously, if you doubt that, watch this:

The funny thing is that composer is now writing jazz pieces!
It's not like I didn't listen to that music; our graduate final consisted of being played the music of Carter, Boulez, Messiaen and others, and being able to identify them by their stylistic traits etc...
I did so well on the test that the head of the Music Dept. scheduled a private meeting with me to find out why I was able to identify all of the music so well.
I told him that I did my undergraduate work at a school that emphasized contemporary music, and took undergraduate tutorial classes with composition teachers that assigned me to write music in those styles. He said, "Well, that must be it."
Apparently a lot of students failed that test.
When it comes to British music, I'm quite happy listening to Bax, Walton, Britten,Holst, and the jazz of Tubby Hayes, Dick Morrissey, Peter King, Terry Smith, Jim Mullen, Louis Stewart, Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth, etc..

I listen to contemporary classical music on Columbia University's radio station WKCR, and sometimes find some pieces I find interesting.

[Gabor]

Well I have one thing in common with WA then lol.

Yes, I clearly remember, back in the guitar school, there was three kind of lessons, the usual face to face with my guitar teacher, an ear training / theory in group, and a and a quintet exercise with rythm section and a horn player. In this band exercise, literally after all solos the teacher said good or nice or interesting (meaning terrible), and always said "too much, try to play less". Back then I did not even understood, what he meant. Now I understand at least, but still can not do.

Just a side note associating to the other thread, I can imagine what he would say if Pat Martino would participate: "Excellent.... but too much, try to play less"