Sweet Sweet Free-of-Charge Ivy League Music Geekery
This semester's Tuesday/Thursday lunchtime course audit: twentieth-century music theory. I took this back in the day, but I'm curious how I'll react to music theory after spending a few years out of the loop. One of the side effects of convincing myself that I don't want to be in grad school is that I've developed a healthy disdain for academic musical analysis. I wonder if this feeling might reverse. Mostly, though, I want to get the attentive-listening juices flowing again.
Hearteningly, the professor has included Stravinsky and Shostakovich (and Ligeti, Adams, Reich) on the syllabus, and he started the class with a "drop the needle" CD excerpt of a hard-to-identify neo-Baroque-sounding string orchestra piece (which turned out to be Stravinsky's Apollon Musagete). Good point: twentieth-century music ranges widely, and you can't make assumptions about its sound and style.
Less hearteningly, he approached the first musical example, Bartok's fugal first movement of Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, by embarking on a baffling, undirected foray into identifying pitch classes, then drawing out patterns in them that aren't really there. This is a fascinating movement in terms of structure, and he spoke to that fairly clearly, but for a solid half hour everything he said seemed to lose the class entirely, and for good reason.
(This class, like the others, is composed of undergraduates; there are a surprisingly large number of them, probably because the course is a requirement for the music major. I sent an awed murmur through the crowd during the introductions when I said where I used to work, which I found pretty amusing.)
One of the things I've always appreciated about the music theory courses I took back in college was that the professors were good at making an important point: you analyze to gain an insight into how the music works and what the composer was trying to do. Outside of this, music theory is completely pointless. So I hope the prof here rights his ship.
In any case, I expect to stick with it and to gain more from it than the philosophy course I audited last semester. I ended up quitting that after a few weeks; I think the iconic "cogito ergo sum" class was the last one I attended. Too much reading! I was in the middle of one of the Richard Ford novels at the time, and I wasn't putting that down in favor of Descartes, and that was the end of that. So I still don't know spit from Spinoza. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I don't care.
Hearteningly, the professor has included Stravinsky and Shostakovich (and Ligeti, Adams, Reich) on the syllabus, and he started the class with a "drop the needle" CD excerpt of a hard-to-identify neo-Baroque-sounding string orchestra piece (which turned out to be Stravinsky's Apollon Musagete). Good point: twentieth-century music ranges widely, and you can't make assumptions about its sound and style.
Less hearteningly, he approached the first musical example, Bartok's fugal first movement of Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, by embarking on a baffling, undirected foray into identifying pitch classes, then drawing out patterns in them that aren't really there. This is a fascinating movement in terms of structure, and he spoke to that fairly clearly, but for a solid half hour everything he said seemed to lose the class entirely, and for good reason.
(This class, like the others, is composed of undergraduates; there are a surprisingly large number of them, probably because the course is a requirement for the music major. I sent an awed murmur through the crowd during the introductions when I said where I used to work, which I found pretty amusing.)
One of the things I've always appreciated about the music theory courses I took back in college was that the professors were good at making an important point: you analyze to gain an insight into how the music works and what the composer was trying to do. Outside of this, music theory is completely pointless. So I hope the prof here rights his ship.
In any case, I expect to stick with it and to gain more from it than the philosophy course I audited last semester. I ended up quitting that after a few weeks; I think the iconic "cogito ergo sum" class was the last one I attended. Too much reading! I was in the middle of one of the Richard Ford novels at the time, and I wasn't putting that down in favor of Descartes, and that was the end of that. So I still don't know spit from Spinoza. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I don't care.
2 Comments:
My 20th Century music theory classes were split across three classes, all upper-level undergraduate courses (definitely not required courses - usually about 9 people in a class (maybe a few more in the one of them)), and I found them all to be quite rewarding. That's a shame about Bartok - my professor that I had for Bartok had done his dissertation on Bartok and gave us an incredible interpretation of the "polar tonality" of his works - complicated, but lucid. I've still got all my notes from the class - I'll have to double-check it for any notion of pitch class.
I took that course last semester, and it largely dealt with pitch classes, but then we each did an individual project, and so we learned different ways to see it at work through analyzing one piece and listening to presentations. I did the Ives Second String Quartet.
This semester, its a seminar on chromatic music. So far, a bit rambly, but always interesting and always grounded.
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