Appreciating music appreciation

Or, teaching about music without certain tools

I don’t know what I’m “qualified” to teach, exactly. While I was in graduate school I tried my best to teach music theory to undergraduates, as a “teaching assistant” or TA (the more pompous, ivy’d title at Princeton was “preceptor”). I did so with little or no guidance from the actual faculty members under whose nominal aegis I served. The exception was my dissertation advisor Peter Westergaard, who deserves to be better known as a composer and theorist, and who took undergraduate teaching very seriously, in his own slightly idiosyncratic manner—the sort of undergraduate that had the cultural and intellectual (let alone the musical) grounding that Peter’s methodology ideally required had stopped showing up at Princeton about a generation before I got there and tried to pass on his wisdom about counterpoint and tonal structure in the mid-1980s.

I wasn’t a very good teaching assistant and I wasn’t a very good fledgling teacher in the 1990s, when I started to teach full time. Being a good teacher requires what I think behavior scientists call a theory of mind—an ability to figure out what another person knows, thinks, and is likely to do in response to new information. A theory of mind worth half a plugged nickel is hard to come by. Slowly, with much trial and error, I figured out both some procedural rules that helped me manage coure organization and classroom logistics while getting through to at least some of the students in my care, understanding where they were coming from and what would help them to make sense of the concepts I needed to teach them. My sense of humor is definitely an acquired taste; sometimes it has served as an invaluable teaching tool, while at other times it has caused confusion or bad feeling. Lacking other natural defenses, I instinctively use humor to keep people at a distance, so reversing the polarity and using it to connect with students hasn’t always been easy.

I tend to cause certain kinds of students a great deal of anxiety while others enjoy our time together. Just today I ran into an old student and his mom (he was helping her buy her first smart phone—that’s a good son!). She recalled him telling her that I’d helped him to a musical breakthrough, and he told me it had made a great difference in his subsequent career: at the time he was in my aural skills class he was a brass player and had never had to do any singing. Apparently (I don’t remember this!) I told him to consider his voice like just another instrument—like his trombone, but inside his chest—and that apparently gave him an insight he needed. This is a multi-instrumentalist, band leader, and very successful presence in both the New Orleans and the Baton Rouge music scenes—a better musician than I am in several ways!—and as such it made my day to hear that something I’d said had helped him get where he is today.

Such successes tend not to be something I can predict. There’s no Marie Kondo system for sorting through the clutter in students’ mind and putting it in an order that might make them receptive to new concepts, skills, or patterns. When there is one specific body of knowledge that needs to be mastered in one specific way the dynamic can be tense—that, I think, is part of the reason why so many good musicians despise the courses they were compelled to take with “music theory” in the name. In such a class the reasons why a given pedagogical task needs to be undertaken are seldom made clear; some “moves” in the partwriting game are right and others are wrong due to a kind of metalogic that can seem adjacent to “because that’s just how we do it.” Music theory and analysis is not chemistry or physics (those have explicit, well stated rules concerning the behavior of elements, compounds, atoms, molecules, and so on), but it can seem just as complicated when shorn of the aural logic that makes a phrase of J.S. Bach sound right. I concluded long ago that the reasons some heuristic of tonal syntax makes sense to me will be unique to my nervous system; others will need different reasons and pathways to clarity.

So it was a pleasant change of pace to begin teaching non-musicians ten years ago when I began to participate in LSU’s Study Abroad program. Since in 2015 I’ve co-led a summer program that takes a small group of undergrads to the United Kingdom. We spend the first three weeks of July in London, then spend four days or so in the Lake District, ending the month in Edinburgh. The students tend to be majoring in the sciences or humanities; they’re never music majors, although some have musical backgrounds. A few can read music but the course I teach explicitly does not require, or rely on, musical notation. The goal I set for the course is this: what can we say about music, and what musical experiences can we have and discuss, that require no specialized training?

The two tools I had at hand were (1) Prose and (2) Analogy.

Everyone talks about the music they enjoy, even if it’s just to say that they enjoy it. Having them say why they might enjoy it, what it feels like while they’re listening to it (or remembering it), and what it reminds them of isn’t analysis of the music itself, but it is a step toward analysis. Given the structuralist bias we inherited from the 20th century, writing subjectively about how music affects you is undervalued; but if you’re a non-musician you’re probably intimidated by the sheer amount of technical expertise, of craft, that making music seems to require, so being told that what you hear in music is worth putting down on paper is valuable. Music analysis is too important to be left to card-carrying music analysts; everyone should be encouraged to verbalize their experiences with music. As a means of anchoring prose observations about a given musical work to specifics, I adopted the listening guide format that authors like John Covach use. This is based around the premise that even people without musical training can feel a pulse and group pulses into a meter. Most popular songs (and most song lyrics) group into pairs, fours, and eights; these can be heard as patterns even without understanding a thing about either notation or harmony. So I have students create listening guides and count the duration in bars of each segment, using the lyrics as a guide. Covach provides simple formal schemes—twelve-bar blues, verse-chorus form, AABA—that are readily audible to everyone. Using a form chart that shows how a song divides into the sections of one of these standard forms as a jumping off point for verbal response allows the student to combine specificity with subjective reaction.

Analogy is the other tool. Somehow students trust their eyes more than their ears—that is to say, they have less trouble discussing the parts of a painting than they do a song. I introduce ideas like figure/ground and compare them to melody/accompaniment. I compare the distinct edges and clear focus on paintings like Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews to the hazier outlines and less hierarchical organization of Caspar David Friederich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog and ask students to find songs or genres that seem congruent with one or the other type of image.

I’ve also compared the use of one-point perspective in paintings from the Renaissance and suggested connections to imitative polyphony in music by composers like Josquin, Victoria, or Palestrina. These analogies seem to click at least some of the time.

More selfishly, getting away from musical jargon helps me think in terms of continuities between styles, genres, and cultures. This approach can also be “scaled up,” as it were, to the graduate level as a means of introducing a non-technical type of music analysis to literature or cultural studies students (as I do in the cross-listed comparative literature seminar I teach occasionally).