Category: Composing

Anyone who has studied music history knows that musicians have been theorizing about music for millennia. However, that theory has not always served as the basis for musical training.

In particular, many classical composers did not learn “music theory” as contemporary musicians typically understand it. Reconstructing how composers used to be taught has been a major facet of Robert Gjerdingen’s life’s work.

Gjerdingen is an emeritus professor of music theory, cognition, and history at Northwestern University. In interviews, articles, presentations, and two main books, Music in the Galant Style and Child Composers in Old Conservatories, he paints a detailed picture of how different composers’ training was.

The Origins of the Modern Music Theory Core

Most pointedly, he shows how our modern university music theory core is a 19th-century invention. In an interview with Nikhil Hogan (see also this interview and Child Composers pp. 311–324), Gjerdingen explains:

“Chord grammar was developed for middle- and upper-class dilettantes who were taking college classes. They were in a higher social status than musicians. Musicians were artisans. They worked with their hands. They went to trade school. They worked for the people who got to go into college.

“The artisans spent a lifetime learning all the details of this stuff, and in college, [the dilettantes] just learned about it. [For instance,] you could take a class on space travel: You don’t how to go to space, you just read about it. In the same way, in a harmony class, you read about harmony. 

“The sleight of hand that was developed in the 19th century was to imagine that everything is a cadence. Whole pieces are cadences. Everything’s a cadence, so you only have to learn the grammar of cadences, and now you know harmony.”

In this post and my previous one, when I say “music theory,” it is to these simplifications I am referring. Most university and online courses, plus AP Music Theory, assume this chord grammar as their starting point. It is the “core” of the theory core.

Now, in a university setting, these simplifications have many advantages:

• They’re easy to teach and grade, as compressed into four semesters
• They aren’t composition-specific and can be easily applied by performance and education students to their specialities
• They make it easy to segment composition-focused training into different courses and semesters
• They’re interesting in their own right as theory and useful as a gateway to the current, rich and vibrant academic theory discourse
• They’re flexible enough to encompass contemporary vernacular styles
• They’re easily contextualized with other theoretical traditions from around the world
• They’re concepts that professional musicians are expected to know
• Most of all, they’re sufficient for amateurs while also being serviceable in training professional musicians

So, if musicians and institutions want to focus on teaching and learning this theory, I can see and respect why.

That said, the theory core and its assumptions is neither the only or best way of training composers.

How Composers Learned Music — With Minimal Theory

For composers and musicians who want to learn “all the details” of counterpoint, for those who really want to understand how classical composers thought about music based on how they learned it, for those who want to learn music from a compositional perspective from the outset — Gjerdingen describes an alternate path in Child Composers in Old Conservatories.

This alternate pedagogical tradition began in 18th-century Italy and spread to France and Russia, where it continued into the 20th century.

Essentially, rather than centering theory, it focused on vocabulary and usage.

Students learned dozens of short contrapuntal patterns, or “schemas.” These schemas included cadence formulas but encompassed many more patterns besides.

Through hundreds of solfeggi, partimenti, dispositions, and counterpoint exercises, students learned how to

• Spot these contrapuntal patterns given only single-line fragments
• Recognize the patterns’ implications and affordances
• Identify which fragments fit together and how they could be recombined
• Order the fragments to create a convincing musical rhetoric
• Embellish and disguise these fundamental structures

As Gjerdingen explains, students spent “hundreds and thousands of hours . . . working on patterns . . . and variations of things. . . . At the Paris Conservatory, they had entire pages where you’d have 20 harmonizations of the same melody or 20 harmonizations of the same bass. Those were skills that really helped developed a rich understanding of what the underlying pattern was.”

And this was the dominant pedagogical tradition that trained composers from the 18th to the early-20th centuries, including Rossini, Verdi, Rachmaninov, Debussy, Ravel — and even Berio. It’s also the tradition that the legendary Nadia Boulanger taught to her students. It further shares many common elements with the training Bach, Haydn, and Mozart received (e.g., see Nicholas Baragwanath, The Solfeggio Tradition, 22-30).

Through this training, even these composers’ second- and third-rate peers achieved a fluency in composition and counterpoint that most contemporary college graduates cannot begin to match (see Child Composers 322–23).

“But Didn’t They Know Theory?”

Now, did these musicians know and discuss theory? Generally, yes — but it was peripheral to their training in much the same way that composition is peripheral to contemporary theory instruction.

For instance, Gjerdingen explains that, at the Paris Conservatory, Rameau’s theories “never had any influence.”

“That may be a slight overstatement,” he concedes. “But [Charles] Catel, who was one of the early authors of a widely used harmony book at the Paris Conservatory, basically said, ‘Yes, there is Rameau, but we don’t deal with that.’”

Likewise, they often didn’t conceive of theory the same way we do. For example, Gjerdingen, citing C.P.E. Bach, relates that J.S. Bach “did not really buy ‘this inversion business.’”

“If you’re writing in the style of Bach,” Gjerdingen explains, “you can’t throw in any inversion of a chord in a particular instance. It’s usually a very particular version of the chord, so, from Bach’s point of view, those were different things because they were used differently.”

Gjerdingen collected many of his sources into the website partimenti.org, where interested readers can find the aforementioned “entire pages where you’d have 20 harmonizations . . . of the same bass,” among dozens of other historical documents.

What Does All This Mean in the 21st-Century

Like Gjerdingen, I would argue that these historical methods of learning composition — and their modern revivals — are NOT for everybody. Still, knowing about them provides composers an eye-opening contrast to the common, 21st-century university curriculum.

In the English-speaking world, only over the past decade or so have these pedagogical materials and strategies begun to be revived. In addition to Gjerdingen, scholars such as Nicholas Baragwanath, Job IJzerman, Giorgio Sanguinetti, Peter van Tour, and others, have been working to develop not only a clearer picture of the historical pedagogy but also its potential applications in the modern day.

Besides Gjerdingen’s website, partimenti.org, the Learn Partimento podcast is a great source for learning more about them and the scholars and musicians pursuing these threads today. (There are dozens of other good sources to which I’m happy to point interested readers.)

For me personally as a composer and a composition teacher, these historical methods and strategies are a significant inspiration, but, as I’ll describe in future posts, they are not my only influence.

[Ed. — After publishing this post, I discovered that many readers were misreading my intent and were unfamiliar with the background of my critique. Accordingly, I added and tweaked several paragraphs below and wrote an additional post. New readers may want to start by reading that subsequent post, “How Composers Used To — and Could — Be Trained.”]

You may think as I did — when you took AP music theory, or completed the standard college theory core, or watched a theory video on YouTube — that you were learning how music works.

As an aspiring composer, you may have even hoped, “If I learn music theory, I’ll know how to write music.”

Unfortunately, that’s not true.

What Music Theory Actually Teaches

Unless you were unusually well-informed as a young composer and happened to win at “theory-instructor roulette” (or got deep into weeds of the grad-level theory discourse), it would be easy to infer — incorrectly — a certain set of assumptions about what theory offers.

Because learning theory involves writing and analyzing music, it is natural to assume you were learning composition on some level. Unfortunately, such assumptions often reflect more your own musical goals than they grasp the pedagogical objectives of most textbooks, university curricula, and online sources.

The music theory core, as it is commonly taught, does three things. It —

1. Explains staff notation and music fundamentals (e.g., meter, rhythm, intervals, scales, chords)
2. Describes what is normative to a specific repertoire, with an emphasis on harmony
3. Gives dumbed-down recipes for how to recreate those norms

For the vast majority of university and online courses, that’s about it.

Now, a few courses (typically those focused on a film music, jazz, or songwriting) do go one step further: showing you how to recreate several different musical styles.

But even when it involves some composing, learning theory is fundamentally a descriptive enterprise.

Theory mostly teaches you how to talk about music, not how to make it. This is, of course, useful, but there can be a yawning gap between understanding music conceptually versus being able to create it practically.

As Robert Gjerdingen put it, the modern university theory core is like taking a course in space exploration. You end up able to discuss the subject and perform some rudimentary tasks — but that doesn’t make you an astronaut.

The Glaring Holes in Standard Music Theory

For those hoping to learn how to write music, the common theory curriculum has some glaring holes:

• Despite melody being central to much music written today, few universities or online courses rigorously teach how to write a melody. True, they often teach general melodic forms and features (e.g., sentence form and high points), but only occasionally how to create the things that go into the formal boxes and how to control their features.
• Likewise, melody and accompaniment has been hands down the most common musical texture of the past 300 years, yet many theory courses never teach that skill — instead, focusing on how to write approximations of chorales.
• Regarding harmony, most universities and online courses teach far less than it seems because they teach a grammar of harmony, but not a vocabulary of specific harmonic gestures and their usage. As with melody, students are then taught formal boxes that can string together these grammatical utterances. The result is like teaching someone how to make grammatically correct English words, sentences, and paragraphs — while having only the haziest understanding of what the words actually mean.
• And then there’s the big elephant in the room: How does music take listeners on a journey that gives them goosebumps or takes their breath away? The common curriculum avoids the question entirely, even though solid scholarship exists on the topic.

In essence, music theory gives composers a rabbit and a hat . . .

And then expects them to figure out how to create the magic on their own (or “in a different course”).

Why Theory Training Can Leave You Frustrated

Is this theory’s fault? Of course not.

But if you don’t understand what the theory core is trying to do, it is easy to become confused and frustrated.

As a result of these misunderstandings,

• You end up writing vanilla, run-of-the-mill music . . . and you don’t know how to spice things up.

Why? Because, by design, theory teaches you how to create what’s common and general, not unique and specific.

• You come to believe that excellence is a result of “geniuses breaking rules.”

Why? Because when you try to break the rules you were taught, your music just sounds worse.

• You feel like you’re reinventing the wheel every time you compose.

Why? Because the rules you were taught work were the equivalent of short-order recipes for specific styles. You were never taught how to make bespoke pieces in different or original styles.

• You feel like your music has to sound a certain way to count as “original.”

Why? Because most composition programs replicate the same issues from the theory core of focusing on norms and recipes rather than mastering possibilities and principles. The only difference is that, instead of passing tones and augmented-sixth chords, now those recipes include pitch-class sets, multiphonics, and bowed crotales.

So if you feel frustrated as a composer . . .

If you feel like something has been missing in your musical education . . .

You are 100% correct.