How Composers Used To — and Could — Be Trained

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.