“5”

May  2020

Coming up in two weeks is the APMusic Theory exam. I taught a class to prepare for the exam. I was originally hired at the small private school to teach a couple of students. I think over seventeen years I probably taught 25-30 students. “Class” is a slightly off term when it’s only for one or three, but hey, it felt like class to them.

After I retired, the school didn’t offer the course any more. As in, the newly hired music teacher ( my replacement) was not allowed to teach AP Music Theory.  Like something really bad had happened! Judging by the grades I was able to pull out of the students I taught, probably did. I never saw the scores, actually, but I imagine on the whole they were pretty bad. One’s, twos, hopefully a bunch of threes, one four I think and I know for sure of one five. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were students who skipped the exam entirely.

I tried to discourage students from taking AP Music Theory. I said it wasn’t for the faint of heart, that it was the hardest AP exam there was.  Probably not the best strategy, because there were always one or two who insisted. One year I even had four! My largest class. 

Now these were bright kids, every one of them, a solid number played in youth orchestra. More than a few studied classical piano, two of those won awards at competitions. A couple were into jazz. One student was into Imagine Dragons and Slayer. One student could only listen to opera, and knew more about it than I ever will.

As for me, I felt like I could say a thing or two about music theory: Schoenberg, Hindemith, Persichetti, and, of course, Piston. Did the exercises. Not all, there are a lot of them. But enough. I didn’t use any of those texts for the students— too dense and written for an earlier generation. I tried several high school textbooks, settled on— . 

One particular observation stands out above all others: a student can not know one wit about “music theory” and it will make no difference in their ability to play whatever music that entices them. It was sobering. As in, where do I begin? Here I am corralling a talented student into reassessing a skill they have spent hours in dedicated practice perfecting, however overwrought they felt about it.

My first student studied piano with a Russian teacher, and could play, from memory of course, a Beethoven sonata. And she played it with feeling, with intensity. But she had not the faintest idea of how it was put together. I do not exaggerate. And perhaps more importantly, the study of modulation, secondary dominants, cadence types, didn’t result in those wonderful “ah-ha” moments that is the reason teachers work in secondary education. I could point out connections in the relation of a held note to the modulation in the next section and the student would humor me with a smile. As in “Sure, Mr Rose, whatever.” I can’t even think of a suitable metaphor to elucidate the feeling.  I suppose it might be like being told, after having proudly painted your bedroom brown and yellow, that you definitely chose that purple coverlet because purple is the complementary color to yellow. Huh? No, you just like those colors, and what business is it of mine anyway? Me “explaining” their music was an invasion of privacy.

The teaching of Roman numeral and figured bass analysis would often get hopelessly confused with scale degree, chord inversion, and chord character. Structural comparisons between the vii˚ and V7 chord would end in a hung jury. One of my favorite students, an eleventh grader, violist, an excellent reader, great musical skills, with whom I had accompanied to audition for an important local youth orchestra, flatly contradicted me when I described the melodic minor scale as having different ascending and descending pitches. “No it doesn’t Mr Rose, you raise the 6th and 7th degree going up and down.” After a short discussion I learned that that was the way her orchestra string teacher taught the scale. I get it— simpler that way with forty-five violin and viola students from  ages twelve to seventeen. But it ain’t the melodic minor scale. It misses the point entirely. But if you want violin students to work on intonation, best to have them cover the lowered pitches in natural minor, the raised pitches in melodic minor. And she was also letting me know who held the power. I might be right, but that wouldn’t get her first seat, nor a summer tour to Europe.

And then there was the work. Analyzing a Bach chorale for the first time is tedious, detail work. What begins as a love for unlocking the mysteries of music turns into a math problem. For a student used to picking up her instrument and just, well, practicing, no matter how boring or difficult the part, she still had the sound at her fingertips. The physicality of the wood, the bow, the strings, the tailpiece, the vibrations. But now I’m asking her to just look at the notes themselves. Jelly Roll Morton referenced them as “[those] little dots on the page.”  

So I wonder if for many of the students, I was taking away their one saving grace, the joyful noise. Without it, to these young, gifted people, the score really was just a bunch of dots. 

And so, in the end, I failed to capture their imaginations, and the classes would devolve into vain efforts to talk theory without actually doing theory. Or really understanding what the word theory had to do with it at all. Any text expounding a theory of music is just that— a theory.  Oh, I would assign projects and tests and maybe even a paper, but as the 2nd semester ground on I would know in my theoretical heart that they would be woefully underprepared come May. There was just too much to explain, too many confusing terms to memorize, with exceptions to virtually every rule I gave. “I thought you said no parallel octaves Mr Rose, but right here in the orchestra score the ‘cellos and basses are playing an octave apart. What gives?”  And I could explain about orchestration and reinforcing one voice but it wouldn’t matter— in the literal sense they were right. 

  Speaking of parallels, try having a discussion with a guitarist into death metal about how in four-part choral harmony parallel fifths are not allowed.