Tangents I enjoy
When I teach music, what else I teach
[Note—I had my routine colonoscopy today. It’s recommended every 5 to 10 years once you reach a certain age and I strongly urge you to get on that if your doctor suggests it. It can save your life! Also, coming out of the anesthesia makes me a bit prolix. So here’s a rather long, discursive post.]
I truly enjoy teaching music theory, music analysis, music history, music lore…but the older I get the more it all gets connected; the categories spill over into one another, digressions become more interesting than the main point, and how things connect to things outside my ostensible subject or topic become at least as engrossing as the subject or topic itself. So here are a few of my favorite pedagogical digressions, side-obsessions, and so on.
Folk music, Art music, popular music
I no longer, in this year 2025 CE, have the luxury of pretending that there’s music that matters and music that matters less. Whether I’m teaching pre-meds and business majors, violinists and vocalists, comparative literature students, or music theorists, composers, and musicologists I have to at least try to present a framework in which we can discuss music as music. Whatever that ends up meaning.
The New Criticism movement that snuck its way into everything in the mid-20th century devalued the effect that music has on listeners (too squishy and hard to quantify—although my friends in Music Perception and Cognition assure me that they have data sets and T tests for that), and over-valued the centrality of complex musical structure (aha! we can quantify that!). I say complex musical structure because some of the most essential music in all of human history displays a very simple structure, at least if we zoom in and examine each bit of it as an autonomous Kunstwerk. Take Fats Domino’s “My Girl Josephine,” for example. This track comes close to a cookie-cutter, textbook 12-bar blues, unlike Robert Johnson’s iconic “Crossroad,” whose phrase rhythm Johnson stretches and compresses like Silly Putty. Unlike Johnson, Domino has a band to lead, so he keeps it clean and simple—also, he’s performing dance music! In New Orleans! This is music whose function is quite clear, and it serves that function perfectly.
We know a lot less about the social context of Robert Johnson’s music, or at least I do—while I can imagine the crowd at a Fats Domino gig pretty vividly, dancing, blowing off steam, etc…and I’ve been to a few music venues in New Orleans where Domino played, so I have somewhat of a sense of place for his music too. Robert Johnson went all the way to San Antonio to record his solo tracks (why?), although they’re the music of the Delta through and through. So there’s a fascinatingly under-determined quality to the social setting of Johnson’s blues, as opposed to the quite well determined social setting of Domino’s.
By a formalist criterion, “Crossroads” is more complex, more worth analyzing, than “Josephine.” But this sort of criterion ends discussion and exploration rather than initiating it, or making it more interesting (and respectful to the musicians and listeners involved). Exploring these two tracks together as different faces of the blues tells you much more about America than you might think upon a casual listen.
Or take “Fatal Flower Garden,” performed in 1929 by a pair of gentlemen calling themselves Nelstone’s Hawaiians (the featured slide guitar accounts for the whimsical self-identification as “Hawaiians”—the duo was from Alabama). This is an Appalachian interpretation of an old Child Ballad dating from the 13th century. Structurally it is primitive—a strophic ballad, each of whose verses is mesmerizingly identical, the delivery as flat and bleak as Joe Friday and Bill Gannon delivering Just the Facts, Ma’am—and indeed the ballad professes to be an example of the True Crime Ballad, Plantagenet Edition. The 1929 track wouldn’t occupy a pure structuralist for more than five minutes. But once you dig into the supposed “true crime” from which the ballad derives, you see that this song is possibly the skeleton key to an entire dark, horrible substrate of European history—go read Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery if you want a really deep dive into the topic. This ballad encapsulates the dark persistence of anti-Semitism in Western culture (hellooo social relevance); it’s a horror movie in miniature. (The version of the original Child ballad that comes closest to the Nelstone performance is probably variant H, by the way. Somehow the original story has been transferred from the English Midlands to Scotland. Folk ballad geography is fascinatingly fluid and trippy.)
In order to start to examine the richness in seemingly simple music, and in order to place it on some sort of plane with “high art” (which I also want to de-mystify for my students), I use a (very simplistic) three-part taxonomy that relates music to the society in which it happens.
Folk music happens everywhere. I don’t know if we have discovered a single human society without some kind of music. All you need for folk music to occur is groups of people, and possibly enough of a food surplus to give some members of the community enough spare time to come up with (1) poems and tunes to sing them to, and (2) a beat and a melody for people to dance to when they’re not working. Also, most (but not all) deities we create seem to require some kind of rhythmic recitation, which may (usually does) blossom into a kind of sacred music.
Art music happens when urban societies develop. Urban societies are hierarchical; somebody has to tell somebody else where to put the streets signs, somebody gets to be mayor and somebody else has to work on the road crew. Some concentration of population, and some social stratification, needs to take place in order for there to be some people who pay other people to specialize as musicians full time. Music that is expensive to produce needs some sort of full-time artistic community. You find “classical music” (or at least expensive music that reflects or glorifies the social order) in societies that reach a certain level of hierarchic organization; im such societies you also find a split between folk musicians (they’re always there, in pubs or wherever, playing for tips) and professional art-music musicians. It’s almost as if the consumers, purchasers, performers, and composers of “serious” music need the other kind of music (and musicians) to exist so they can separate themselves from them. (My teacher Peter Westergaard used to say that the classical part-writing prohibition against parallel fifths is simply a way to tell people how much you’ve paid for your music—parallel fifths = music of the people (cheap), no parallel fifths = high art that somebody paid for. Any other explanation for them is a rationalization of this sort of social snobbery.)
Popular music is, surprisingly, the most sophisticated musical genre, if we look at the society that produces it. Where folk music just requires people, and art music requires people living in a hierarchical urban society, popular music needs all of these things plus mass media. This is the most satisfactory distinction I’ve been able to find between folk music, art music, and popular music: that prior to the existence of mass media, all music was basically either folk music or art music. Starting in the 16th century, printing presses that used moveable type (and thus affordable mass production of things like ballads texts and music scores) began to set the stage for popular music by allowing dissemination of music through means other than oral transmission. But it wasn’t really until the 19th century, when telecommunications, the phonograph, radio, and motion pictures created the conditions that caused the split between popular music and folk music to be clear and permanent.
(Are we in a post-split era now where, since all music is disseminated through mass media—since virtually all music is, in some sense, electronic music—this three-part taxonomy is no longer valuable? Maybe. Stay tuned, I’ve got Marshall McLuhan on the Ouija board…)
Narrative and lyrical voices
One concept that I’ve borrowed from poetry and use whether or not the music in question is texted is the distinction between the narrative voice and the lyrical voice.
Conventionally, it’s said that the narrative voice “tells a story”—and this is true enough, but the more essential feature of a narrative voice, flow, or sensibility is the presence of an internal chronology. If the order in which events happen (not the order in which they’re noticed, but the order in which they happen) matters, the logic of narrative is at least somewhat in force. Years back I ran into a brief article by the literary scholar Jonathan Culler that clarified some things about narrative for me—the article is in his The Pursuit of Signs, and Culler also has provided this excellent short introduction to the study of narrative. He simply points to the way in which the tools or devices that separate discourse (the order in which we’re told things by the author of a narrative) from story (the straightforward inner chronology of a narrative) include ellipsis (leaving things out), prolepsis (telling us about things that chronologically come later), and analepsis (returning to chronologically earlier spots in the narrative).
(How can music, a temporal art which unfolds from now to later, incorporate things like ellipsis, prolepsis, and analepsis? In much the same way that painting on a flat canvas can convey a sense of depth, of near and far…)
Lyric poetry, or lyric music, lacks (or devalues) a sense of such an internal chronology. It creates a sense of “nowness” that often delves into the inner, emotional life of a viewpoint persona—the persona that the poet assumes within the poem (is there a composer’s equivalent of such a poetic persona? Edward Cone says yes.) I’ve written elsewhere about music that seems to create what Jonathan Kramer called vertical time. This is one mode of lyrical music, but probably not the only one.
Hybrids of lyrical and narrative voices abound, of course—and teasing out the places where one or the other modes of “speaking” predominates in a song or a work of instrumental music is a technique that is often provocative and fruitful in the classroom.
Three inventions that shaped modern music
This leads me to one of my favorite digressions from nose-in-the-score music study: three machines that changed how we interact with music of whatever kind. Here they are, in chronological (and therefore narrative) order:
The printing press
You should have seen this one coming from what I said above. Suddenly, by the early 16th century, printed music could travel long distances, and Composer A in City X did not need to make the arduous journey to visit Composer B in City Y in order to influence them. Yes, you say, but influence across distances had always occurred—the fact that Josquin Desprez (d. 1521), for example, influenced composers all over Europe even before printed music was a major thing attests to that. Yes, BUT—every musician knows that a score is always an incomplete set of instructions. Printing music leads to more ambiguity, not less—if Josquin came to your city and led your choir, you’d know exactly how his music was intended to sound. But if all you have is a printed score of one of his works (he did, actually, live long enough for his scores to be printed and disseminated throughout western Europe), you’d have to make an educated guess as to tempo, balance, and so on—the act of composing becomes diffuse, in a way. Just as tiny mistakes in a genome lead to mutations (and eventually to new species), printed music’s incompleteness can lead to influence rather than simple duplication.
The steam engine
The steam engine isn’t usually considered a musical instrument—it usually isn’t, unless you’re into this sort of thing. But the appearance of steam power in the 18th century led to the amassing of great wealth and great power in places like Great Britain, changing the social equation that determined who was able to pay for music. Now the wealthy middle class had the wealth (and need for status) that the aristocracy had possessed in earlier centuries. That’s one reason the steam engine was important to musicians—a new class of patrons required a new sort of music, less of the palace and cathedral and more of the salon and concert hall. Another reason the steam engine was important to musicians was that in the 19th century it began to pull trains and propel steamships—and thus to shrink the world. If Mozart (d. 1791) wanted to travel from Vienna to Paris, he had a grueling journey in a horse drawn coach ahead of him, one that might have taken weeks. If Brahms (d. 1897) wanted to make the same journey he could hop on a train and be in Paris within a day or two. Likewise, composers like Tchaikovsky, Dvorǎk, and Mahler (and performers like Jenny Lind) could take a steamship to North America and contribute to America’s cultural inferiority complex, whereas to earlier composers like Beethoven America was primarily a mythic place rather than a real, attainable place for potentially lucrative gigs. And then there’s the constant demand for more coal to drive the steam engines, and for feed stock and new markets to monetize the darned things…these lead to a shrinking globe but also things like the exploitation of labor, colonialism, imperialism, and world wars. Are these things reflected in music? Certainly.
The phonograph
Finally, a more intuitively music-adjacent invention. To some extent I use it as a meronym for sound reproduction and broadcasting technology as a whole; but it’s worth studying on its own for its impact on how music has been heard, learned, valued, and performed since its invention in the 1870s (and its refinement into something fully useful with the advent of fully electric recording and sound reproduction in the mid-1920s). Just listening to my one of my favorite recordings, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music makes it clear that in the 1920s and ‘30s some musicians were already used to performing into a microphone (or sound horn) and could pitch their voices and blend their instruments accordingly; others were not. The first type of musicians are communicating directly to us through the medium of the phonograph, and in some cases are using the phonograph to shape their sound—the tracks these musicians created are familiar to us as technologically-mediated musical objects. The second type of musician, however, hasn’t made the switch over to the new paradigm; we overhear them rather than listen to them performing directly for us. And this is just one facet of the phonograph equation: sometimes I gingerly insert some observations by Sontag on what photography did to art and to human perception, and see if students agree that something similar happened once people started using the phonograph to record music.
Foreground, background, figure and ground, representation and abstraction
I discussed these concepts in an earlier post. Analogies between music and not-music things like visual art are to be approached with caution; we know a lot about the differences between how our ears work and how our eyes work, for instance, and how we discriminate between different colors and different pitches are two very different things. But because we have such easy access to visual art it’s tempting to encourage students to seek analogies and metaphors that borrow from painting, sculture, and architecture when attempting to describe their interactions with music. I may, with some trepidation, introduce John Berger’s Ways of Seeing to my students this summer. He has an agenda and an axe to grind, but his arguments about the social setting for art (and the porosity of the art/advertising divide) might make for good conversations.
[Post-anesthesia prolixity just about ended. Time to wrap up. Thanks for reading—stay healthy!]