In music education, music - as represented by the core body of works of the genre which is practised in music life - is often described in terms of rules: the dynamics of the music seem to obey certain ways which seem to be the same or at least, very much compatible between many different composers over long stretches of time. But in classical, serious Western art music there are no rules. The idea that there are rules in this type of music, is an invention.
What is called ‘rules’ are in reality habits, related to style, culture of the place and period, personality etc. etc. First there are habits, later-on they are classified by theory and mostly that means death. It is no coincidence that in music the urge 'to be modern’ and ‘to break rules and conventions’ and ‘to be up-to-date’ – the first stirrings of modernism – happened in the course of the 19th century when music education got academicized – i.e. codified into rules. And they were ‘established’ because in public music life, which was then developing, standards in composing and performing were defined by the classics: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Their habits were filtered through mediocre minds and petrified into ‘tradition’ which is not real tradition at all: living habits were frozen into orthodoxy and it was against this orthodoxy that composers like Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, Mahler, Strauss, Debussy et al protested; they created their own alternatives to this orthodoxy, while taking anything which they thought usefull from the available means of expression, and made them their own, and invented some means themselves along the way.
How then can music education, for both performers and budding composers, be conducted? Best seems to try to make students feel the inner dynamics of what is happening within the music, and master these dynamics, when necessary helped by theory but only as a crutch to something better, or as a stepping stone towards internalization. Music making, be it performing or writing, is always born from interiority.
Ironically this is all stuff that was articulated by Adorno ... . A broken clock can be right twice a day if it's not a digital clock using 24-hour time. ;)
ReplyDeleteThe orthodoxy itself is a fanciful chimera. Many of the rules were simply post hoc attributions to already canonized composers who didn't bother to follow the rules 19th century theorists and pedagogues ascribed to them, particularly in the cases of J. S. Bach and Haydn. The orthodoxy itself was a scholastic post hoc fantasy rather than a reflection of what was going on in published literature. Very few of the sonata forms published by guitarist composers in the 1808 to 1820 period conformed to a "textbook" sonata form. It turns out that not recapitulating the first theme was not that unusual as a compositional gambit, although almost any listener would agree Chopin pulled off the technique more successfuly than Simon Molitor did, I think.