More Theory Thoughts Again

Maybe I should just change the name of this blog to "Theory Thoughts."

I'm really enjoying the challenge of the new job - excellent students who are engaged with the material, faculty and administration who are supportive of exellence in our discipline, and an institution that encourages the integration of faith with one's teaching.

I'm particularly feeling at this stage that the teaching of theory is the central aspect of my calling here. I cherish the freshness and joy of gathering with my students at noon and sharing around music. It feels a little like church and also like I am at the pulpit. But the real challenge is this: this is the activity in my current professional life that I can pour my heart into the most. But caring a lot means it hurts more when things don't go so well! How to care? How to do well?...

Bringing one's faith to bear on such work in an intentional fashion takes lots of reflection. Doing the basic job of teaching theory excellently is hard to begin with. One basic of which we need to periodically remind ourselves is that the process is messy. That is, the process of adjusting our consciousness to the logic of the music at hand is a marvelous but messy activity. But I want to articulate that activity in a deeper and broader context. The temptation might be to go for too much - too much aiming for profundity and thereby turning one's self into a cliche. The challenge is to keep a framework that allows us to shift from the highest level of living and the universe and beyond, back to the most local details of the organization of the music and styles studied. Being conscious that this is a continuum or a multilayered endeavor should help to hold it all together for me and the students.

As first year faculty at Southeastern, we're reading Parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach, and just in time for me, too, as it addresses the issues of identity and integrity as a person that I am facing in this new classroom setting. Two passages that have sharpened my understanding in our first reading are as follows.

Palmer writes:

Once again, when I seek my identity and integrity, what I find is not always a proud and shining thing. The discoveries I make about myself when I remember the encounters that have shaped and revealed my selfhood are sometimes embarrassing - but they are also real. Whatever the cost in embarrassment, I will know myself better, and thus be a better teacher, when I acknowledge the forces that play within me instead of allowing them to wreak havoc on my work.

Florida Scott-Maxwell, writing in her mid-eighties, made the point powerfully: "You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done . . . you are fierce with reality."

In the margin, I wrote, "This happens in performance." So many times, I have discovered what was actually within me while performing music. There's such an interplay between self and the work of art and the audience when we perform that we often discover feelings, ideas, and aspects of our identity that have very old roots or may even seem unfamiliar to us because we have tried to plan so much of who we are. This dynamic reminds me of the phrase from Fred Pratt Green's "When in Our Music God is Glorified" - "How often making music we have found a new dimension in the world of sound . . ."

This issue of being performers is something to which we musicians who also teach should be sensitive. A lot of good teaching involves active participation and creation on the part of the students. That has to be good for the majority of students. But we who were trained as performers are accustomed to presenting and developing our own ideas. What's more, as students, we sought out master teachers to give us their input and perspective. In the process, we discovered our own voices, but the process was traditionally designed to teach us the art and expose us to the voices of our teachers.

Here's the other passage that immediately shed light on what I'm doing:

How does one attend to the voice of the teacher within? I have no particular methods to suggest, other than the familiar ones: solitude and silence, meditative reading and walking in the woods, keeping a journal, finding a friend who will listen. I simply propose that we find as many ways as we can of "talking to ourselves."

These words made me realize that I might already be developing as the type of teacher Palmer is describing. What's more, since these are all things I do to some extent in my own way as part of my daily routine, maybe I'm actually a contemplative and just don't normally describe myself in that way. Ongoing reflection keeps me moving and refreshed in the midst of work that might seem like a draining activity to those on the outside of it.

Theory Thoughts

As I gear up for teaching music theory in my new job at Southeastern, I'm thinking about what a lot of music theory consists of, especially in the early stages of learning - recognizing and labeling musical materials. When I was a student, I thought those activities were pretty mundane and not very theoretical.

While I have come to accept that mastering some basic concepts is a normal and necessary way of entering into a discipline, I also believe there might be more profound and exciting implications to the seemingly simple act of naming things.

As described in Genesis, one of the first things Adam had the opportunity to do was to name the animals. There are many things I really like about that passage:

One is that it sounds like God made all those creatures because God was concerned about what things were good for us and what things were not good for us. It wasn't good for us to be alone. My dog and cat really are helpers and partners of sorts to me at times, mostly by accepting me and by being small, cute, energetic, and random creatures around the house.

I also like the freedom that is part of this Genesis scene. It doesn't seem like God commanded Adam to name the animals, nor does it seem that God caused him to call the animals anything in particular. Instead, I think God and Adam shared a wonderfully relaxed and uncomplicated communion. I imagine them sitting down over coffee and looking at God's portfolio of work. In this pre-fall picture, Adam's behavior is presented as really healthy and whole. He naturally sees, processes, and acts in a good way. It reminds me of the really bright children I worked with at Collegiate School in Richmond who were endlessly curious and had lots of innate learning skills. What's more, they applied those skills with joy as it was naturally fun for them to do so! Maybe those are more layers of what "coming as a child" means.

I'm also really struck by God the creator's desire to see what each aspect of the creation meant to Adam. That's exactly how we human artists are about our creations. We want to know the significance of the things we create in the experience of our fellow human beings. It is through their feedback that we know that we are, indeed, serving. Because of this, it seems to me that creativity is linked to relationship.

Now, back to naming.

I would think that naming took analysis and reflection for Adam, and developing words to represent creatures must have involved some creative fun. Organizing is an important aspect of the creative process as we know it. Sorting the animals by name was a way of bringing order to the human understanding of the world God had created. In this way, Adam was getting to partner with God in creating.

I'm intrigued by the fact that it seems like language already existed when Adam named the animals. I have usually assumed that we humans created language from its foundations. But in Genesis, God had already spoken some pretty involved sentences to Adam before Adam was given the opportunity to name the animals. Also, I had been thinking that language arose from a communication need between humans, but it sounds like Adam was the only one of us around when this naming happened. That seems significant to me because, while the language Adam was creating would be for the use of the race, at its inception, the language was just between him and God.

While naming, it seems that Adam realized his need for someone like himself, and when Eve was brought into being, Adam verbally expressed his need and prayed a prayer of thanks through the act of naming her.

Maybe God left the animals unnamed so that we could fully appropriate the created order to our experience through thought and language. Through the language aspect, we expressed the need for community with other people, and language went on to create a shared human culture once there were other humans with whom to share it. All of this seems to have grown out of relationship with God and the Creation.

So as we continue to see and name patterns and organizations in the both the created worlds of living things and physical phenomena such as sound, I think we are following through on God's invitation to name, organize, and create within our own consciousness. And through that exploration of what God has made, we can discover and develop community.

Theory Fun

1.

In my Music Fundamentals class, we have been studying how to generate intervals above and below specific notes. I taught the students that for ascending intervals, they can use an ascending major scale as a starting point. For instance, if they need to determine a major third above G, all they need to do is consult the G major scale and note that the third note of the scale is B. All of the intervals from the tonic up to any other note in a major scale are major, except for scale degrees 4 and 5, which are perfect. Minor intervals are then generated by lowering the top notes of these major intervals a half step.

One of my students started asking questions about generating descending intervals and whether or not some sort of scale could be helpful. After thinking about this a little, we realized (something that is actually pretty obvious but I hadn't thought through before) all the intervals from the top tonic down to any other note in a major scale are minor, except for scale degrees 4 and 5, which are perfect! Thus, a descending major scale can be used as a template for determining descending intervals.

2.

I have one adult student outside the University. She plays for church services, and the focus of our lessons is for her to learn how to enhance her hymn accompaniments through improvisation.

An important skill to develop towards that end is the ability to quickly understand what chords and chord progressions are in the hymn at hand.

As we were analyzing chords in a hymn, we came upon a cadential six-four chord. As many of you know, the naming of that chord is controversial. Some call it "I six-four" since the pitches in the chord are those of a second inversion I chord. Some call it "V six-four" because it has a strong dominant feeling. The problem with calling it that, though, is that in the standard system for labeling chords with Roman and Arabic Numbers for roots and inversions, respectively, it is assumed that all the chords are stacks of thirds. Thus, the bass note of a cadential six-four chord couldn't really be the root of the chord since the distance from that pitch to the next chord member is a fourth and not a third. In addition to that problem, there is already a chord that is labeled "V six-four" without being inconsistent with labeling principles. The bass of that chord starts on scale degree 2, not 5. The phrase "Dominant six-four" is a little better, but it can still be a little confusing as "V" and "dominant" are synonymous when referring to scale degrees and chords (most of the time.) The phrase "cadential six-four" seems to be the clearest description of the chord's funtion and its inversion.

Now for the good part! I asked my student if the chord sounded like it had a tonic, dominant, or pre-dominant function. She accidentally but very accurately referred to it as "Tominant" - tonic pitches with rather dominant function.