I have a more conservative critique of traditional music theory, along the same lines. Forget pop, jazz, and rock - standard music theory courses don't even equip students to properly analyze Western art from music the late romantic period, including things like impressionism. Most voice leading textbooks have very little material on post 1850-ish classical music, and some have essentially nothing. They seem to focus on Mozart, Beehoven, Haydn, etc., or aspects of later music amendable to the analytical tools they develop for those classical period composers.
Here's an exercise you can try. Choose a more harmonically adventurous French or Russian composer from around the turn of the 20th century (perhaps Debussy, Ravel, Scriabian, maybe even Shostakovitch), and get some sheet music for a solo piano piece off the internet. Grab any of the standard college harmony textbooks and attempt to write down a harmonic analysis of that piece. You're going to have trouble.
Maybe -- but the context to understand what Debussy and Ravel were doing (maybe not Scriabin) is to get the Bach / Haydn / Mozart / Beethoven / Schubert under your belt.
I agree! But it seems that the books all stop at 1850. Or they toss in a few cursory chapters at the end. (If there's some text that doesn't do this, I'd love to read it.)
I've looked at that book before, and while I agree that it's probably worth reading it sure doesn't answer all the questions. It just talks about voice leading and gives scientific explanations for why the 18th century rules of part writing reliably turn out pleasing music. It doesn't account for all the music that satisfies listeners somehow even while violating some of those conventions. Nor does it cover anything aside from tonality, from what I remember.
But yeah, the development of tonality kinda stopped in the 1850 range, with maybe Stravinsky, Tatum, and the 1940s Bebopers extending it as an exception. But at that point, tonality had passed out of the "art world" -- everything post-Duchamp's "Fountain" has been a bit more deconstructive and nihilistic.
Maybe of note, pun intended, Schoenberg was pursuing the "emancipation of the dissonances" while the Bolsheviks were destroying Russia. And of course, that's part of why nobody listens to Schoenberg or performs his stuff -- it's grating and kinda horrible, at least after he abandoned high Romanticism after Opus 5.
To be clear, I agree with you on the mindless labeling of stuff that's in current music pedagogy at universities -- that's mainly out of Yale. With my students, we wrote Lieder.
The Common Practice Period [1] still forms the basis for standard music education, just as equal temperament tuning [2] forms the basis for standard teaching scales and chords and as the piano (forte) acts as the reference instrument in music education.
Basically the Period of Common Practice still provides a useful way of communicating musical ideas without performing…e.g. through sheet music and textbooks.
Hein seems to be advocating letting the way music is performed influence the way music is communicated without performance a bit more than it has traditionally.
But there is a lot of economic incentive to maintain the focus on the Common Practice Period. A lot of jobs and institutions depend on continued interest and it is what conservative wealth tends to want…suburban parents aren’t sending their kids to scratch and sample lessons.
"Standard college harmony textbooks" don't even properly account for Mozart, Haydn or Beethoven, let alone these later composers. The shared structural framework that helps explain them all is thoroughbass, combined with a repertory of common patterns and moves (known as "schemata" in the recent music-theory literature) and styles of melodic elaboration that ultimately come from the improvisation-heavy performance practice of vocal music. (Conversely, melodic reduction would've been needed to understand complex melodies as elaborations of simpler ones. We now know that this was standard practice in the 18th-c. equivalent of solfège!) None of these things are explored, however cursorily, in the standard textbooks. Even counterpoint is not really developed properly - the way it would've been understood by successful 18th-c. musicians - and is often presented in a needlessly obscure and unfamiliar manner as a result.
I don't really understand your comment. Figured base and and common harmonic sequences are well covered in most standard theory texts (as is melodic/harmonic reduction).
I'm also amused by your remark that counterpoint is not taught in "the way it would've been understood by successful 18th-c. musicians." Most contemporary counterpoint instruction still follows the method of Fux's 1725 textbook (species counterpoint). Indeed, the fact that the pedagogy hasn't really changed for hundreds of years is often advanced as a criticism of current-day instructional practice!
In fact, Fux was basically a reference text on 16th-c. counterpoint in its most complex and developed form, as it was understood after-the-fact in a 18th-c. context. It doesn't do much to pedagogically explain even the simpler foundations of 16th-c. style (as they show up in earlier texts), let alone tonal counterpoint in the common practice period.
> common harmonic sequences
Common harmonic sequences are not voice-leading schemata. If anything, the former are a side-effect of the latter. Even teaching cadences as a "harmonic" motion rather than a pattern involving the melodic motions of tenorizans (2^--1^) cantizans (8^--7^--8^) and bassizans (5^--1^) is a very flawed understanding that would've been quite foreign to 18th-c. musicians.
As for the thoroughbass, the older textbooks may give a cursory explanation of the notation involved, but what about the practice of it? Where is the règle de l'octave - the "harmonic" bread-and-butter of so much music of the common practice, known even to amateur accompanists back in the 18th c.? A lot of the time, it isn't there. And that's literally the simplest and most basic part, there's plenty of more involved patterns that musicians back then would've known in some way.
Again, I am confused by your claims. The species system taught by Fux is, as far as I recall, the exact same way that counterpoint is introduced in, e.g., Gauldin's "A Practical Approach to 18th Century Counterpoint." (Gauldin goes into much more detail on other things, but the approaches are consistent.)
The fact that the upper voice goes 2-1 or 7-1 and the bass 5-1 at cadences is one of the first things taught in a counterpoint class. The rule of the octave is in most theory textbooks. The first example that comes to mind is Laitz, "The Complete Musician."
You're right that these textbooks don't teach how to improvise an accompaniment from a figured bass, but I'm not sure that's a good use of time for a theory class.
> They seem to focus on Mozart, Beehoven, Haydn, etc., or aspects of later music amendable to the analytical tools they develop for those classical period composers.
At least wrt voice-leading, I'm not sure what your after. Even the custom cadential formulae Wagner came up with tend to follow the voice-leading rules that Bach would have been familiar with. Hell, his "crash landing" cadence from Götterdämmerung[1] even avoids parallel fifths!
1: start with a half-diminished seventh chord in root/close position, reinterpret the outer voices as an augmented-sixth and have them resolve outward to the octave to form the root of a minor triad. (Oooh, evil is afoot!)
I don't agree that anything beyond common practice harmony is necessary, although it can certainly be helpful.
Moreover, even common practice harmony doesn't include all the tools needed to analyze the harmony of the common practice period, but we get by. For example, in the first movement of the Symphony in G minor, K. 550, Mozart inverts the motive toward the end of the development section over a dominant pedal and harmonizes the initial lower chromatic neighbor of that three-note motive. So you get a fully-diminished 7th chord built on d that is immediately followed by a dominant seventh build on d. What do you call that fully-diminished 7th chord in Roman numeral analysis? Perhaps there's a standardized name or symbol for this now, but even if that's the case there wasn't always. But it didn't matter because you could trivially come up with something like calling it a "neighbor seventh" or some other such name and everyone would know what you are talking about because 18th- and 19th-century music was full of that chord progression.
Now look at, say, the opening to Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. Debussy's solo flute solo holds a note over the ensemble playing the first chord of the piece-- a half-diminished 7th chord. This sounds similar to the beginning of the Tristan Prelude cellos when they hold a note over a half-diminished 7th chord. But unlike Wagner, Debussy has it resolve to a dominant seventh on the same root as the half-diminished seventh. (In fact, I'm not sure Wagner ever used that progression to resolve the Tristan chord throughout the entire opera.)
Just as we could talk about the function of that same chord progression in Mozart without a name for the "neighbor seventh," so too can we do it in Debussy. It just so happens there are a lot more harmonic shifts in the Debussy to talk about, so its more work, added to a discussion of the various allusions to Wagner and how they come off.
I guess having some common language for discussing the historical development of octatonicism would help in this case. Still, this was an experimental time in harmony with a lot of bespoke forms. I'm not sure how much a common extended toolset would add to any given piece. (Not to mention you had your Rachmaninoffs and others who are almost fully analyzable using Roman numeral analysis and tonal chromatic voice leading.)
Thanks, I think I basically agree. I guess my complaint is that these later composers generally involve more "bespoke" analysis because of the additional complexity, which is not treated adequately in the textbooks. (Whereas, for example, for a lot of Mozart piano sonatas you can just write down all the roman numerals and call it day -- I'm joking but only slightly.)
Also, I think you'd call your Mozart example a common tone diminished chord, notated CT7. I think this is pretty standard nomenclature now; see this book excerpt for example: https://viva.pressbooks.pub/openmusictheory/chapter/common-t.... Especially the example under the section "recognizing CT7 while analyzing."
I’m sorry what? Did you actually study harmony at college level? I can assure you the textbooks are more than adequate to analyse late romantic and all 20C music. My functional harmony teacher used to use “Structural functions of harmony” by Schonberg. Can easily handle everything up to the second viennese school and then we used to use “A New Music” by Reginald Smith-Brindle after that
I used Aldwell-Schachter, Voice Leading and Harmony. Part VI is relevant to the composers I mentioned but didn't really explain many of the things I was wondering about. Sure, I can name the chords (most of the time), but on a compositional level there's much more going on.
Structural functions may be better for what you want because the thing that it does well (better than other books I have read certainly) is explain the sorts of harmonic substitutions that start happening as you get into the late romantic period. He believed (“Theory of Harmony” is also like this) in explaining harmonic theory entirely from the perspective of composition so it explains from first principles what you see composers actually doing rather than trying to find rules and then examples of those rules. So in “Theory of Harmony” he builds up an entire theory of harmony starting from simple 4 part voicings and voice leading, in “Structural Functions” he sort of condenses that into a couple of very quick chapters and then moves on to talk about key relationships in more depth.
It also breaks sharply with the old orthodoxy where authors used to talk about everything as key modulations and then struggle to explain things which were really related to the original key area but seem very remote in the new “modulated” key. What Schoenberg points out is that music actually very seldom actually changes key. In fact almost the only time this happens is in the classic “Whitney Houston” where a pop tune just goes up a tone for the last chorus and never goes back. Music in the classical tradition almost always ends up in the same key that it starts in even if it visits some remote areas along the way and therefore as Schoenberg argues it makes sense to understand key areas that are temporary in relation to the original tonality. It also means you end up with a harmonic theory that works perfectly to explain jazz standards and pop music.
Thanks for the explanation! That sounds exactly what I'm looking for, and I will definitely read those Schoenberg books. Really appreciate the pointer.
Here's an exercise you can try. Choose a more harmonically adventurous French or Russian composer from around the turn of the 20th century (perhaps Debussy, Ravel, Scriabian, maybe even Shostakovitch), and get some sheet music for a solo piano piece off the internet. Grab any of the standard college harmony textbooks and attempt to write down a harmonic analysis of that piece. You're going to have trouble.