I'm curious, what is music theory pedagogy moving to?
Although as a PhD you obviously know the subject much better than I do, I'll venture a tentative dissent, mostly because I'm curious what your rebuttal will be.
As an undergrad I took a two-course sequence in music theory, I loved most of it. I still remember nearly everything I learned, and twenty years later I was able to more or less reproduce one of my compositions from memory.
Our professor promised us that at the end of the semester we would compose four-part chorales and sound like Bach. I flat-out didn't believe him, but indeed I was able to compose something I was happy with. Overall, at the end I felt like I to a large extent I understood music -- much more so than I initially believed to be even theoretically possible.
By the end of the second semester, as we got into the twentieth century, the "rules" got broader and broader, and the course seemed to get vaguer and vaguer. Although I love twentieth century music, I stopped enjoying the class: different compositions had less and less in common, and there didn't seem to be any large-scale "theory" to be explained. Every piece had its own theory, and I didn't feel like I "understood" anything at all. Rather than attend class, I'd rather just go to a concert hall.
I certainly agree that there are a tremendous variety of musical traditions, many of which arose in places other than Western Europe. Calling it "music theory" is a disservice, when what's being explained is the theory of a single one of these traditions. Nevertheless, I'd rather study one of them in depth than take a broad survey.
I'm not sure what your dissent is, so I'm not sure how to respond to it. I think you're saying that you had a good experience in your music theory classes, which used Bach chorales, and you wouldn't want to discard that experience in favor of a shallower, broader curriculum.
If so: that's not really what I'm saying at all! Even in courses that focus primarily on, say, Western common-practice harmony (as many basic undergrad theory courses do), you're likely to find a much broader variety of music being taught than just the Bach chorales. That's partly because the field as a whole has been moving away from strict adherence to the traditional canon, but also more basically it's just good pedagogy. That is: most music that students play isn't going to be four-part homophony, and so learning to do harmonic analysis of string quintets or saxophone quartets or lead sheets provides a much stronger grounding about how harmony works in real music -- even if you circumscribe harmony quite strictly as "harmony as deployed in Western common-practice music betwen 1700 and 1850."
Disclaimer: I left the field and have been employed full-time as a software developer for more than 5 years, and pedagogy isn't an area of the field I follow closely. A good recent example is the open-access textbook Open Music Theory (https://viva.pressbooks.pub/openmusictheory/); perusing the examples there I think will be a good demonstration of the breadth of both styles and composers that's pretty representative of current pedagogy, even without radically altering the aims of the undergraduate music theory curriculum (which is also happening).
It seems I perhaps misunderstood you and was dissenting against a strawman! Certainly, your second sentence accurately characterizes my point of view.
I remember that our textbook (Kostka and Payne's Total Harmony) had a lot of examples other than Bach chorales, and if I recall correctly the homework exercises did too. The composition exercise I remembered 20 years later was something vaguely similar to a Bach invention. That said, chorales were used quite heavily -- perhaps because they were the simplest interesting examples that illustrated the theory.
My professor wrote out music at the chalkboard during class; he even had a special chalk holder that held ten pieces of chalk, to produce a grand staff. I suspect that other types of music might be less well suited to chalkboard lectures, but that seems to be a trend in academia anyway. I'm a math professor, and we seem to be among the few holdouts in that regard.
Anyway, thanks for the textbook link, I will have a look!
The thing is, all those traditions blend together. You can't say much about the last century of music without talking about jazz, rap, breakbeats, et cetera, and formal western education has just barely figured out those exist. You can go deep in what's taught in formal Western theory education, but you'll miss out on a lot, and you won't be able to make sense of most music.
The longer ago it was, the more the rules of an era of music get codified. You can run the four-part chorale rules like an algorithm.
But it's not just that - prior to Beethoven, composers were seen as not having some internal genius, but were praised by their ability to channel some kind of divine source of music - this view makes music pretty homogeneous for any era. I see a similar (arguably more extreme) outlook in many subgenres of EDM, the music isn't for stroking the producers ego but serves a purpose, the best can make something engaging in a hyperspecific style.
Coming from the increasing individuality in romantic era, 20th century explicitly tried to break those rules and one group explored ideas from folk music (Bartok, Stravinsky, Debussy) and another tried to form new ones from first principles (Schoenberg). In my opinion the latter group mostly failed - maybe they assumed rules come before music, instead of rules being written afterwards to describe music?
I think the "music theory" that will come to define our current era is the same kind of post-modernism that defined literature and art - bands that use different genres like people used to use different instruments, music that explores how rules relate to finished product (Serialism), how fundamentally different recorded music is compared to live performances, sampling, or the exploring artifacts of recording/production/codecs (Alvin Luciers I am sitting in a room/Steve Reichs tape loops/Paul Lanskys Idle Chatter, respectively).
What these all have in common is stepping outside of working in a singular "music theory" and instead working with "music theories". I like this, but not everyone does - this way of thinking about music can become detached from the actual musical experience leading to something like Punk, which then gets quickly subsumed by the thing it was rebelling against.
As another former music student turned engineer I think the breakdown comes from the misinterpretation of "rule" which could better be called "practice" or "style."
My barely-above-pedestrian take is that music theory is an analytical exercise that tries to separate order and patterns from the spontaneous discovery of what "sounds good" in a piece so that the practice can be reapplied to another. The rules of theory aren't really rules, they're a taxonomy of practices exercised by composers and musicians that came before us. And what works changes with the taste of audiences.
A great example to me is parallel octaves, fourths, and fifths. You would be hard pressed to find popular music composed in the 20th century that didn't make liberal use of those, and the technique for writing and playing them is so commonplace it makes no sense to call it a "rule" to avoid them.
That's really interesting. I believe that's the hallmark of a mature field, where it starts bumping up against the limits of understanding in an almost fractal way.
People who have lived the field for long enough can ignore all the curlicues and find a beating heart. Anyone coming in fresh is hammered with detail after detail.
I've noticed something similar with the game I play, Dota 2. It's obv not as rich or beautiful as music, but it's been around for a few decades already, and skill is percolating through the community in a beautiful way. Years and years of muscle memory means people can forget about all the minutae and practicalities and just play.
Although as a PhD you obviously know the subject much better than I do, I'll venture a tentative dissent, mostly because I'm curious what your rebuttal will be.
As an undergrad I took a two-course sequence in music theory, I loved most of it. I still remember nearly everything I learned, and twenty years later I was able to more or less reproduce one of my compositions from memory.
Our professor promised us that at the end of the semester we would compose four-part chorales and sound like Bach. I flat-out didn't believe him, but indeed I was able to compose something I was happy with. Overall, at the end I felt like I to a large extent I understood music -- much more so than I initially believed to be even theoretically possible.
By the end of the second semester, as we got into the twentieth century, the "rules" got broader and broader, and the course seemed to get vaguer and vaguer. Although I love twentieth century music, I stopped enjoying the class: different compositions had less and less in common, and there didn't seem to be any large-scale "theory" to be explained. Every piece had its own theory, and I didn't feel like I "understood" anything at all. Rather than attend class, I'd rather just go to a concert hall.
I certainly agree that there are a tremendous variety of musical traditions, many of which arose in places other than Western Europe. Calling it "music theory" is a disservice, when what's being explained is the theory of a single one of these traditions. Nevertheless, I'd rather study one of them in depth than take a broad survey.