Remember diagramming the first sentence of Milton’s Paradise Lost? I do. My junior year in high school was pretty much defined by this act and memorizing “Wann the aprile with its shoorest southe” or whatever that was. So why did I have to construct a diagram of Milton’s ancient verbosity? Why, later in college, did I take test after test on various forms of Beethoven sonatas and Schubert songs and Brahms symphonies? What is the point of examining the inner workings of a piece of music, or any art for that matter?
Shouldn’t art be enjoyed on the aesthetic level, appealing to a person’s intrinsic value judgement on what “good” is? Shouldn’t we allow music (or any art) to wash over us and be contentedly enraptured by its wonderful sounds? Isn’t theory just a concocted way for the self-important music academician to make scholastic mountains out of molehills, a system overwrought with jargon designed to keep the art just out of the reach of the everyman?
No.
We should never judge the validity of something based on how people have corrupted it. It is true that there are some wonderfully arrogant musicians out there who can’t equal the successes of the amateur songwriter and therefore declare those fruits sour. And there have been theorists and scholars who have written treatises and papers and delivered lectures and “talks”, pouring the most lofty and stilted language into a mold intended to discuss some of the most sublimely artistic contributions mankind has ever seen. I’ve read lots of it. I’ve watched as some musicologists have cultivated briar patches of terminologies and smiled with malicious glee when their ideas were lost among the audience. But music theory opposes them. It doesn’t applaud them.
Perhaps the best description of theory I’ve ever read comes from Charles Rosen’s book, Sonata Forms. He devotes a great deal of space to a discussion of a pivotal moment in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (you know, da-da-da-DUM). But then he takes a deep breath and concedes, “…analysis often elucidates with difficulty what we all already understand with ease–which is as it should be.”
Music theory may have a weakness–that it places too much emphasis on the how and not the why. But sometimes it is necessary to understand the how in order to appreciate the why. We can all make a judgement on whether we like some song usually when we first hear it. But it takes greater diligence to really get to know the music. And what if we find that looking deep into the workings of the piece that we like it even more? Or that we don’t like it as much? I’ve had this experience with countless pieces of music. Yes, it can be a curse. There are some songs out there that people call “gorgeous.” (Think Dances With Wolves or Pearl Harbor.) And yet, because I know a certain thing that was brought to my attention about that piece, I just can’t bring myself to like it. Yes, it’s pretty, but that’s where it stops for me. That’s because, as Arnold Schoenberg taught his students,”beauty, an undefined concept, is pretty useless as a basis for aesthetic discrimination.” And sometimes that can be a very frustrating viewpoint. Sometimes it would be nice to be able to just be consumed with something without worrying with the “how.”
But that worrying has brought me to some fairly ethereal moments, musically. And I couldn’t–wouldn’t–give those up for the sake of blissful appreciation. Like finding out that the melody in Brahms’ Intermezzo, Opus 118, no. 2 becomes hidden in the bass line later in the piece, and that the melody over that bass line becomes the basis for material later on. Or that Bach wrote a canon at each interval (okay, look past the jargon there and take my word, a jaw dropping display of technical skill) in his monumental Goldberg Variations.
So, ironically, the point of music theory is to help us look past the theory and gain a deeper appreciation for what the composer did. And this appreciation is sometimes unattainable unless we know why a certain thing is a big deal, and not just a bunch of notes that sound pretty.
And the great thing about theory is that it is retrospective. Beethoven didn’t write music a certain way because it was the correct way he learned in college. He was writing under intense inspiration, coupled with astonishing logic and good musical sense. Only later did people codify what he did into a system of rules. Rules, by very definition, are restrictive. And the great master composers probably never concerned themselves with what they weren’t allowed to do.
Certainly, students are taught how to compose and sing and play and listen according to rules today, but that’s because we’re not Beethoven. We need those rules to guide us until we find our own voice and can begin “breaking” them in a way that is true to what we are trying to say. We need those rules to understand more profoundly what our minds might have missed–but our hearts probably didn’t–the first time we heard something. But ideally, the theory of a piece should only come after we have experienced the music as innocently as possible. Again, Schoenberg said it best:
“Theory must never precede creation: ‘And the Lord saw that all was well done.’”
