On Classroom Repertoire

As calls go out for greater diversity in concert repertoire, certainly the same call should resound in music classrooms. Every student deserves the opportunity to see themselves as a professional composer, theorist, performer, educator, therapist, etc. as they are, and repertoire is a powerful way to help students feel belonging. Furthermore, the inclusion of composers from a variety of backgrounds tells the truer, more complete story of music.

Yet, we can’t cover everything. An undergraduate curriculum cannot cover every music tradition in the world nor can it even cover every notable genre of music in the United States in depth. It isn’t even possible to capture the Western music tradition from the Medieval period to now without serious omissions due to a student’s already packed schedule. Equally difficult is the race to cover Western concepts of tonality and harmony along with good ear training in 3-5 semesters. So, how do we choose what to cover, and how does this relate to repertoire?

Some might say it has always had to do with repertoire. The reason we study history is to know of the “masters.” The chronological approach to history shows the indubitable influence of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Debussy, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg on where we are today: case closed. The reason we study theory is to better understand the music of the “masters.” The system of tonality as we know it received perfection in their hands, and it’s the portal into their minds. Such veneration of a select few composers is obvious when perusing outdated theory anthologies, and even today’s anthologies still represent Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Dvořák far more than anyone else.

To continue in this framework and include a more diverse repertoire, we must expand the list of “masters.” To do so, we must decide on what defines a “master.” Does it come from the number, length, or intricacy of symphonies, operas, or sonatas written? Must the composer have a large output? Does it come from the ability to analyze a piece of music in the same way as the traditional “greats?” But we deal with some realities:

1. Composers who did not enjoy the same privileges as white men (specifically Austrian or German men) truly did not have the same privileges. They could not get regular orchestral performances unless they had favor of the right people. They did not get patrons as easily as their competitors.

2. The preservation of repertoire from the composers considered “masters” came from people dedicated to that cause. The lack of preservation of works from underrepresented composers skews our knowledge of their output, which might have been greater than we imagined. Or, records show repertoire that existed, and we have yet to find them. Side note: Many of the original manuscripts from underrepresented composers in the public domain are not on websites like imslp.org and can only be found in expensive Urtext editions. I love the professional editions, but keeping public domain documents out of reach from others does not reflect an inclusive approach to scholarship…

3. Some composers wrote impressive music that simply does not follow “the rules” as stringently, though many actually do. And every disgruntled composer or theory student has found solace in the fact that “even the masters broke the rules at times.”

So, the expansion of “masters” to fit some standard, or even a focus on showcasing masterpieces at all, might not best solve the repertoire and curricular issues. There might be a better venue for such showcasing (and it need not be showcasing every masterpiece in every 5-year orchestral cycle, though there have been great improvements recently).

So, perhaps there is a more pragmatic approach that puts aside the “master” label. Following the counsel of my dissertation adviser, I did a post-graduation memory dump. Everything that was extraneous to my overall understanding of music was left behind (or at least placed on an external hard drive deep in the back of my mind), and the principles that stuck became my professional foundation. This led me to experiment with core theory curricula. Over the past years, I have learned the following:

1. Students learn chord progressions faster in groups of 3-4 chords rather than identifying chords individually. These are taught through historic partimento patterns or through Laitz’s harmonic paradigms (which are more focused on just basslines). Such progressions also simplify part-writing, reveal potential harmonic implications in 2-part compositions, and even guide students to improvise over a bass line. The voice-leading rules of four-part writing become more about the natural and instinctive flow of the music.

2. Students understand tonicizations and modulations better when taught in conjunction with structure. Structural concerns give such deviations from a tonal center purpose.

3. Chromatic harmony is all about style and character in music. Neapolitan and augmented 6th chords add weight to predominant function harmonies, as do modal mixture passages. Applied chords (secondary dominants) lift into the next chord, as do common tone chords in many settings. A composer’s style in terms of harmony does depend on their use of these chords.

4. Students like to understand how a piece comes together, and this requires a narrative. Basically, an overview of the flow, structure, and stylistic developments in a piece of music ties together the loose ends and makes for a satisfying conclusion to an analysis (it’s what we do in analytical papers, though not necessarily in a start-to-finish manner).

So, my framework became centered on what I call “pillars of craft.” And a focus on craft in this way does not favor one set of rules that best applies to a specific style of music. The parlor music and music published for amateurs can be analyzed for these elements without any need to compare with the three B’s. I also learned that such a focus gave me a way to reduce the Western theory curricula’s length for room to include full units on jazz and on popular idioms. And finally, the tangly issues of analysis in the Romantic era are much easier to comprehend with a solid craft-based framework.

How does one know if they have achieved diversity in their classroom repertoire? One goal is to avoid tokenism. For example, an undisclosed textbook has exactly one women composer at the starting of each workbook chapter. While a great effort, this still ends up being a vast underrepresentation of current student demographics (in which most theory classes are at least half female). Guidance from the Institute for Composer Diversity suggests 24% representation of equity-seeking composers (broken into subcategories). This takes serious effort because, unlike the “masters,” many pieces from the common-practice period by such composers have not been analyzed, do not have a neat score, or do not have a recording. Great work done by Expanding the Music Theory Canon, Music Theory Examples by BI-POC Composers (spreadsheet), and Diverse Music Theory Examples are all helpful in finding historical repertoire for the theory classroom. Part of reaching the 24% is the exclusion of some of the masters. They are so easy to use because they’re prepackaged in anthologies, workbooks, and textbooks and are intimately known by so many professionals, but they are not essential to the theory curriculum.

A careful framework for a course, much like a thesis statement, has further allowed me to craft more diverse repertoire into a curriculum. And what an opportunity educators have in a class like an introductory orchestration class! My orchestration class’s framework relies on the scientific aspects of timbre and how those inform idiomatic writing. So, the goal in the repertoire search is to simply find idiomatic music for each instrument, analyze chamber music with said instruments, and then showcase good orchestration in large ensemble music. It took time, but I am stoked to teach the course with a compelling repertoire list representative of diverse backgrounds and aesthetics among contemporary composers.

Because of the openness of repertoire opportunities for Orchestration, I decided to match the demographics of the United States in terms of representation. So, 50% of the music is from female composers and 42% of the music is from BI-POC composers. This required a few hard decisions to exclude some of my favorite works for various instruments, but the choices made to replace them might become new favorites in a short time (there’s so much great music out there!). Some resources that helped me reach this goal were: the UMKC Music Library’s Shining a Light: 21st Century Music from Underrepresented Composers and lots of instrument-specific lists such as the ones Bret Pimentel’s Woodwind Music by Composers in Underrepresented Groups and Last Row’s Diversity in Brass Music. Unlike historical works, many of these works are not in the public domain. I hope to present these works in a way that is exclusively for educational purposes while encouraging, by virtue of the high quality of music, students and others to perform music from the composers. Curating a class like this also gives impetus to how to better stock a university library.

As musicians strive to seriously and permanently diversify repertoire in the classroom, the next generation of musicians will have a much easier time at programming and championing composers from underrepresented groups. And there will hopefully be an equally robust group of new composers from whom further repertoire can be chosen. But why wait? It’s a great time to be part of something big—something that noticeably does affect people for good, does not take an inordinate amount of time (it’s a summer project), and builds a truer sense of the expansive repertoire choices available to musicians today.

Happy repertoire finding!

*Note: It is difficult to truly ascertain gender identities of many historical composers, especially prior to the 20th century. LGBTQ representation among living composers is easier to identify if a composer chooses to publicly announce sexual orientation in a biography or other public document (a program note or interview), yet many composers who identify as such do not do so professionally. All this being said, about 7.1% of people identify as LGBTQ in the United States and 20.8% of Gen Z identify as such, which offers some benchmarks.

A New Kind of Course

Introspection. The word encapsulates 2020 for me. This year brought out inner tendencies that are seldom tested and proved. The circumstances unearthed underlying fears and anxieties along with more heroic resilience and compassion. At a societal level, deep-rooted tensions were brought to the fore as ideological battles ensued over how to deal with a quick-spreading silent killer. A reawakening to inequalities that have persisted for generations at systemic and individual levels compounded the impetus for reflection and action.

What does this have to do with music? It requires a framework to understand. For well over a century, musicians have been taught according to one theoretical tradition. This study includes a robust dive into historical tonal harmony, often accompanied by ear-training exercises based on tonal progressions. The intense study of a tradition reveals truths only found by digging deep. However, in a time of introspection such as this, it’s hard to not think what might be different.

For a layperson or budding musician, musical training should try to reach to the core of what music is and why it has such an effect on us. Doesn’t our listening experience lift our mood, make us think, inspire us to dance, enlighten us spiritually, and/or help us socially bond? A solid pedagogical method would use all the resources possible to understand why, even if fraught with paradoxes and unknowns. It would be interpret music of many varieties with traditional and contemporary theories.

A cursory glance over music theory materials reveals that much is missing. Some glaring omissions include:

1. Concert music happening today. 10 weeks (or less) out of a 60-week curriculum discusses 20th-century music, and usually music after 1960 receives 1 week (or less!).

2. Other styles of Western music. There are exceptional programs (Frost School of Music), but most see the Western classical tradition the only history worth tracing and manner of musical construction worth considering.

3. Non-western traditional musics across the world. While it would be wrong to pretend that all music theorists know the nuances of Indian raga or Balinese gamelan, it would be worth at least acknowledging similarities and differences that lead to further insights.

4. Musical elements besides harmony, counterpoint, phrasing, cadence, and meter (as it pertains to harmonic changes). What of melody, rhythm, timbre (tone color), instrumentation, texture, articulation, dynamics, and register? And what of noisiness, pitch nuance, spatialization, quotation (sampling), semantics, and gesture? What of the harmony, counterpoint, and cadence material outside the Western classical tonal tradition?

So what? The current system develops nuanced voice leading skills for powerful tension and release mechanisms through careful counterpoint. Most composers extrapolate these ideas to a broader context. The systems also give a deeper understanding and appreciation for Western tonal music and some post-tonal idioms.

But is it representative of Music? The tradition is of a time long past and a place far away. The archeological dig is fascinating but overlooks nearly all music, especially excluding minority groups. Only a number of composers and performers from Central Europe from 1750-1900 were women and/or non-white. Many try to uncover the exceptions of the past without acknowledging the omission of the much larger diversity of voices today. Simply said, a traditional curriculum marginalizes most people and their associated musical styles. Is that an honest approach to a class considered “core” knowledge for every musician to know?

Let’s reimagine music theory. I did so. It took starting from scratch. I wrote out my values—the most important lessons I learned through today. I asked friends to evaluate their most treasured musical values. What similarities and differences were there? I identified enough groundwork to gain vision of a new kind of course. Some of that foundation includes the following principles:

1. Music is perception-based. The best learning environment is experiential and thus psychological.

2. Music has everything to do with repetition, variation, and contrast. Our brain seeks after patterns and requires consistency for comprehension.

3. Music must first set expectations. Without expectations, how does the brain make sense of what is to come? The presentation of the music before, during, and after the music itself also sets expectations and can enhance or alienate the audience.

4. Musical ideas need cadence/breath to them. The brain needs to segment information to remember it.

5. Musical speak is metaphorical. We leap, skip, step, run, articulate, fall, rise, go high, go low, etc. Sounds are rough, smooth, gritty, dirty, clean, open, pinched, full, empty, weak, strong, etc. Embodied cognition theorizes that music empathetically connects to our bodily lived experience. So interpretative dancing does have something going for it after all…

6. Good musicians train their intuition to increase in sensitivity to musical relationships. Their interpretation of phrasing, dissonance, pacing, rhythmic placement, etc. comes from careful and unwritten experiential understanding. The notes we read rarely capture the music brought to life by an excellent performer. Ears govern musical interpretation.

7. Music is about community and sharing. It requires open, candid discussions of taste. Hard questions are good questions and welcome new perspectives.

8. Music is about relationships, and music is enhanced by layers of relationships called counterpoint. Good counterpoint sensitively mediates musical elements. It adds multi-faceted meaning to music and heightens artistic expression. In its purest sense, counterpoint crosses cultures and is the process of collaboration with other arts.

9. Every musician should be well-versed in technology. They should be able to record and use a DAW. Musicians should make basic videos to promote themselves online. They should then be confronted with this uncomfortable question: If you can give someone a perfect listening experience on headphones, then why should they come to your live concert?

10. Music is about the human experience, so rawness and vulnerability are common and prized expressive qualities. Because we all are built from different experiences, it would be tragic if there were only one right interpretation of the notes on the page. A musician only intent on playing the music right might miss the music...

I framed The Musician Certificate Program with these and other values. Students explore core musical questions grounded in psychological and practical concepts. They listen to music of many styles and train their ears to analyze music through their perception. Musicians outside the university get to experience it starting in January. Learn now and/or enroll here.

I’d also love to learn about your values and ideas. Comment or send me a message, and let’s talk.

On Universals (Something to Say Pt. II)

As I mentioned in the previous post, the first rule of academic writing is to avoid superlatives at all costs. "Always" and "never" are almost always asking to be rebutted and almost never help an argument. This especially rings true in music. Sounds are intangible, and we as listeners largely perceive music based on prior experience and learning. Some ethnomusicologists assert that it is almost impossible to understand the music of a different culture because the preconceived notions we carry with us permanently taint our perspectives. Each person will comprehend and enjoy music of any style and variety based on their upbringing (and surely some of that nature that accounts for individual personality differences).

Despite this strong argument, I cannot help but point to certain universals that underpin any sonic experience. These, in and of themselves, are not emotional, but they do have potential to "play with the heartstrings." In fact, some composers treat the compositional process like a game or a riddle to solve, and many musicologists would point to Beethoven as one of these in how he treated musical form. The primary universal (and the only one I feel confident about) is that there is an opposition in all things. The most basic sonic opposition is between sound and silence. Composers must deal with this question, and different cultures take it in different ways. Balinese Gamelan avoids silence during the performance due to traditional beliefs, and Western music emphasizes silence. Indian Carnatic music abolishes silence altogether with a continuous drone that sounds before the first audience members enter the room. While each culture treats silence differently, there is, at the very least, the potential for this opposition to become a factor in the music.

Carnatic music demonstrates the essential opposition between stasis and activity. Our brains are designed to give attention to the most active parts of our surroundings. Hopefully, the music at a concert performance takes this active role the moment the baton falls. Yet, after some time, some aspects of the music take on a passive role due to sameness. Composers and performers, in response to this natural phenomenon, must ensure that their music contains enough variety to sustain interest. Every variation to the music arises out of opposition to something else. High or low, loud or soft, fast or slow, clarinet or violin, muted or overblown, consonant or dissonant, major or minor (or whole-tone or octatonic), choppy or sustained, groovy or floating: these are some of the tools musicians work with. This game of oppositions becomes as simple or as complex as the musician desires it to be, and each culture deals with opposition in its unique ways.

Nevertheless, a caveat exists in this game. When is there too much variety? The brain can only process so much information before the music becomes incomprehensible. Novice composers may vary their music to the point that the variation becomes sameness (and thus static and boring). A good friend pointed out that perhaps the key to writing music is establishing a sense of consistency and tactfully working to build in musical surprises. I believe in this principle as well, and I also believe that the more familiarity one has with a style of music, the more attuned one is to the subtle surprises at play. For example, a Western musician may have great difficulty hearing the difference between common scales in the Middle East because of the melodic limitations of a twelve-note collection. Also, people from non-Western cultures may not find much satisfaction in Western music's harmonic flow because their primary musical style sustains interest in other ways. Repeated, active listening attunes the ear to some of these differences.

To me, an understanding of how opposing forces interact in music is essential for anyone who engages in music as a musician or listener, even if at a subconscious level. It easily maps onto the human experience, in which each of us deals with variety and sameness (the brain is wired this way). So, from this angle, can someone enjoy music, despite its origin and their understanding? Definitely. Will some education help them enjoy it more? Surely. Will a product of one's immediate culture have the greatest impact? Perhaps. But they can certainly enjoy other styles too.

Music Fundamentals

I finished teaching a Music Fundamentals class last week for the first time, and I loved it. The class felt liberating to me. Instead of hard-pressing harmony, I took a large chunk of the semester exclusively on rhythm and meter and included a section and composition on melody before talking about chords. We also dug deep into why notation exists in the first place and how to take advantage of its benefits. Then we jumped into harmony, reaching even seventh chord labeling in diatonic harmony (and identification inside or outside a key). We ended class with a final composition project, built from harmonic schemes with the Western-standard part-writing. Within all this, I found opportunities to play tonal, post-tonal, pre-tonal, salsa, swing, and popular music styles, and I would love to incorporate an even more expansive selection next time I have the opportunity to teach the course. I loved teaching Music Fundamentals because I taught about music, how we engage with it, why composers make the choices they make, and how to communicate those ideas in the notation system we have adopted. 

Before the class began, I knew that my students would feel like they were in a "remedial" course. I concluded that they are not in a remedial course because they had no needed to be "remedied." Knowing the great variety of circumstances in schools across the country, how can we suppose that every incoming student will know basic harmonic theory? So the course was designed to be a 2-credit hour college course. I included challenging material, and my students rose to the challenge. They can read music and identify beat patterns in 9 32 time. They can get around alto clef easily, and if they understood everything in the lessons, they can read any type of clef presented to them. They know how to label seventh chords with several double flats and read key signatures with 6 or 7 sharps. They proved it in written assignments and piano assignments. They did it in prose and in notation. These are challenging for students only because they do not fit into the realm of their familiarity; they are much simpler when students understand why meters exist, how clefs came to be and what they represent, and what accidentals refer to and their function as part of a key signature. Tricks like transposition and inversion, understood by the majority of the students to some degree, also facilitated their musical dexterity. I'm proud of my students for stepping up to the plate, and in some areas, I believe their core understanding of music notation excels that of many of their peers who did not take such a course. Music Fundamentals does not need to be a "remedial" course, and it should more than make up for any lost ground from limited music instruction prior to college.

I am writing this in gratitude for the opportunity to teach and as an advocate for teaching all music core classes based on those fundamentals more universal to all music than four-part writing and the common-practice period. I think there is a fear to embrace the limitless world of music outside the standard repertoire, but the wonderful and relevant music of all times and places beckons us seek after greater nuance in our craft and a more expansive comprehension of the sound we deal with. I have plenty of revisions to make to the course next year (if I get to teach the course again), but I'm happy to report that the experiment worked in that our class achieved excellent results, mastering all the "remedial" topics and thankfully much more.

Musicking and Improvisation

I was reminded of the concept of "musicking" yesterday, which is the late Christopher Small's term to help people think of music as an action rather than a thing (though adding a "k" to a word makes it feel archaic so I use the term warily). Thus, listening to music is musicking, performing music is musicking, and creating music is musicking. Sheet music or recordings themselves are not music until someone engages with them. While he goes in depth on this topic in his book Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, I would rather talk about how musicking as brought life to the music around me.

I recently joined UMKC's Imp Ensemble, a free (not necessarily jazz) improvisation ensemble. Several years ago at BYU I was part of a similar group called GEM (Group for Experimental Music). Both these ensembles provide a creative outlet where I am invigorated to musick without the restrictions of societal convention. I believe that we should strive to engage with our culture by putting forth our best contributions to the art, I also believe in what Ned Rorem termed "the distortion of Genius." It helps to step outside the bounds of classical concert music culture to reassess one's work and musical purpose. Next month, the Imp Ensemble will be performing at West Bottoms as part of the West Bottoms Reborn initiative. More details here.

This upcoming Tuesday, my work Improvisations VI: Just, Plane, Natural will be performed by Gabbi Roderer, an amazing flutist (see the event details here). This is the third in a series of improvisation pieces for soloist and live electronics that I originally wrote for myself as a way I could continue improvising outside of a group. But now they have become a fascinating means of collaborating with performers as musicians, tapping into fellow performers' intuitive abilities to musick, not according to the societal norms of their repertoire but according to the dictates of their ear in response to the electronics (which are wholly dependent on the performer's playing).

These improvisations are free for the performer, but while this sounds liberating, it actually invites the performer to solve their own compositional puzzle. The piece only progresses with a tap of a pedal that initiates a change in the electronics. These changes provide the overall structure of the piece while leaving pacing up to the performer. The puzzle for performers is to effectively navigate these changes to achieve their artistic vision. In this manner, the performer also becomes a creator and sculptor of sound in time. The performer also must engage carefully in listening. It is a perfect example of musicking to a composed work without the strings attached.

This work is a joint effort, a true collaboration. Rather than the composer acting as dictator or even as visionary, the composer becomes the facilitator and architect, providing a space and flow to accentuate the performer's work. While the composer is not active on stage (though I can easily code in my own laptop part and devise the form in real-time), the contribution of the electronics provides a unique mark that, while at times sounding very different in each iteration, infallibly remains. The contributions of composer and performer are equal; the electronics can only be engaged by the performer's input and the performer must engage with the electronics to play out the work. Through this partnership, the new work is born every time, and I love this sort of relationship. 

If you are a musician and want to musick with these Improvisations or have insights or comments on these concepts, I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to comment below.