Anyone who has studied music history knows that musicians have been theorizing about music for millennia. However, that theory has notalways 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” models what chord progressions are stylistic to Common Practice music. It also categorizes chords by their cadential function: Predominant, Dominant, or Tonic.
“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 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.
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 trainingin 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 —
Explains staff notation and music fundamentals (e.g., meter, rhythm, intervals, scales, chords)
Describes what is normative to a specific repertoire, with an emphasis on harmony
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 . . .
How do you know you’ve found “a really beautiful and worthwhile musical idea”
How do balance the “courage to commit to an idea that might be good” vs. “enough awareness” to abandon an idea that “just isn’t great”?
I’d separate out the two parts.
“Beautiful ideas” consist of (1) beautiful (or compelling) sounds (2) made into meaningful ideas.
Compelling Sounds . . .
Finding beautiful or compelling sounds isn’t that hard.
They often come as the result of free play or instinct.
Besides the conventionally beautiful (e.g., major seventh chords, well-placed suspensions, etc.), beautiful sounds elicit an obvious, gut-level reaction.
When you find yourself suddenly enticed by a sound — and when that captivation holds for more than a few days — it’s probably beautiful.
Find Compelling Sounds—Today
When have you noticed this in your own composing? That sudden sense of “Wow! That’s cool!” or “Oh, my goodness! That was stunning!”? That feeling is a major clue that you’re onto something good.
Sometimes composers wait to take action until they feel that feeling.
This is a big mistake.
The fastest way to find compelling new musical sounds is by making lots of new musical sounds.
👉 So start today by deciding what kind of sound you want (a melody? a harmony? a texture?). Then, make a dozen simple prototypes.
As you do so, pay attention to your gut: where is it being drawn? This is your hint that you've found an idea worth pursuing.
. . . Made into Meaningful Ideas
Though finding beautiful sounds may be easy, developing beautiful sounds into meaningful ideas IS often hard.
By “hard,” I mean “takes a deliberate, sustained, and thoughtful effort.”
Long-term (i.e., years and decades), composers develop a sense for what is meaningful generally through curiosity about life and people and specifically through years of analyzing and performing lots of other music. There is no shortcut for this never-ending work.
Short-term (i.e., weeks and months), composers develop self-compassion for their half-baked ideas through two simple maxims:
The full meaning of an idea is *never* clear in the first draft.
Inspiration is an ongoing revelation, not a one-and-done event.
Composers who believe and trust these facts experience far less self-doubt.
Instead, they just revise. A lot.
In this revision process, they trust that their long-term understanding will reward their short-term persistence with insight about how to hone the meaningfulness of their beautiful sounds.
Make Your Meaningful Ideas—Today
👉 They key to “finding” meaningful ideas is developing the meaning of your current ideas through revision.
These blog posts will help you better understand the revision process and what concrete steps you can take for it:
This week I’ve been thinking a lot about texture — the layers of activity in a passage of music and the relationships between these layers.
Composers spend a lot of time obsessing over harmony . . .
Here’s the thing . . .
As powerful and transcendent as harmony is, it’s hard.
It’s hard for musicians to learn. (Hello! It takes years!)
It’s hard for listeners to articulate what they’re hearing. (Even pros without perfect pitch struggle to follow modulations!)
Texture, on the other hand, . . .
Texture is both easy to learn and easy to perceive, for composers and listeners alike.
Perhaps that’s why this is why texture is the best compositional secret that music school doesn’t tell you.
But if you want a powerful tool that you can apply fast that makes a BIG IMPACT on listeners’ perceptions, texture is your go-to.
As part of the Wizarding School for Composers, I’ve put together a handy cheat sheet that has all the basic concepts and variables on ONE page.
Fill out the form below to get your copy . . .
The Secret Music Schools Don't Tell You
Is your music missing that extra “something”? Texture is the best-kept secret at music schools. It's how you can take your ideas and make them pop and sparkle. I cover all the essential concepts in this free, one-page cheat sheet. Enjoy!
Tonality is a musicological debate about style disguised as a theoretical debate about pitch organization.
Whether it's Schenker's arrogant, narrow nationalism or Tymoczko's generous, imaginative catholicism, the debate around what defines “tonality” is, at its core, a question of repertoire.
No one would argue that the music of Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms is not tonal. But what about William Byrd? Or Bull? Or, to go the other direction, Barber? Or Britten? To say nothing of Charlie Byrd or the Beatles?
Whether the music of these latter figures is tonal depends on who you ask. But whether it exhibits pitch organization is indisputable.
Hence, tonality is fundamentally a question about style, not pitch organization.
Style is a red herring for composers
Learning to distinguish “tonal” from “atonal,” “post-tonal,” “pre-tonal,” or “extended tonal” music carries about the same relevance as distinguishing between sub-genres of death metal. It’s not useless—but it doesn't describe really how the music works. It mostly just identifies its stylistic markers.
In other words, “tonality” is an elaborately justified label.
For composers who want to know how music works, such stylistic labels are a red herring. Style can tell you what combination of features will produce a particular “sound,” but they don’t actually show you how it works. As Charles Ives quipped, “What has sound got to do with music?”
Milton Babbitt affirmed Ives’s quip when he asserted, “Nothing gets old faster than a new sound.”
Lest you think this bias against “sound” is some avant-garde fetish: First, remember how much avant-garde composers focused on sonic innovation. Second, put Babbitt’s words in the mouth of any pop music agent or producer, and you’ll notice that they fit right at home there, too.
Like cars and smartphones, the value of unique “sounds” quickly depreciates.
Style tells you little about musical excellence. Instead, it is a proxy for cultural power and relevance. Again, this is not a useless consideration—but it is, at best, tangential to the question of pitch organization.
Musicians can organize pitch in a lot of ways
In truth, “tonality” comprises a detailed collection of pitch strategies that musicians have used in various combinations and emphases. Many of these strategies carry over into music that exists at the edges or beyond the boundaries of what scholars consider “tonal.”
Among other concepts and approaches, they include assumptions about
octave equivalence
tuning and enharmonic equivalence
structural hierarchies
distinctions between consonance and dissonance
the qualities, spellings, and inversions of different intervals and chords
the functional equivalence of chord inversions
harmonic consistency
harmonic syntax via scale-degree function or hypermetrical placement
harmonic and voice-leading schemata
the usage of different scales
the prevalence of stepwise motion generally in melodic lines and strongly in harmonic voice leading
melodic shape via step progressions, rhythmic permutations, or hypermetrical placement
melodic structure via rhythmic motives, pitch motives, and pitch contours
the harmonic implications of all melodic lines
the functional distinction between the bass line and upper voices
degrees of formal articulation indicated by coordinated of harmonic and melodic gestures (i.e., cadences and pitch centricity)
Despite being almost 20 items long, this list is hardly an exhaustive catalog of pitch organization concepts and approaches. What distinguishes different styles is how they remix these principles.
Some pieces use many of these strategies. Others use only a subset of them. Still other pieces use different pitch strategies entirely.
Though many pieces contain all of these strategies, no single piece can be said to exemplify all of them.
Focus on the effect and interaction of choices, not their labels: What does Debussy’s music do to create its unique states of being?
Focus on the effect, not the label
Furthermore, none of these strategies or their applications is intrinsically “excellent” or “superior.” But noticing them allows musicians to hone their discernment about how specific pieces create the musical effects they do.
For instance:
How can Debussy get away with writing parallel fifths?
How does Beethoven write an hour-long symphony that isn’t boring?
How does Rachel Portman write an hour-long soundtrack that isn’t boring?
Why does Byrd’s counterpoint feel different than Bach’s and different again from Bartók’s?
How does Mahler give you goosebumps?
How does John Coltrane create the luminous sheen in his solos?
These questions do tell you something about style—but when you go beyond merely labeling these features to describing their relationships to key moments in a specific piece, that’s when you really start to understand how music works.
That’s when you can discern not just why Debussy’s style is different than Clara Schumann’s (for instance), but what the music is doing to create its unique states of being.
Thus, the most pertinent analytical question for composers is not “What style is this piece and why?” or even “What specific choices did x composer make?” but “What is the effect of these choices?”
Every orchestration textbook will tell you that the lower limit of the violin (scordatura aside), is a G3 (G below middle C).
But even with a normally tuned violin, composers don’t always obey that limit. Here are two examples (plus a bonus one in viola) that show why a composer might write beyond that written limit.
To Preserve a Melodic Line
In Richard Strauss’s Sinfonia Domestica he writes (at reh. 74) this:
As Ernest Toch points out in The Shaping Forces of Music, “It is the pitch-line, its curve or curves, its shape, its profile, its ascensions and descensions which determine the character, the gesture of the melody. . . . Richard Strauss, in his ‘Sinfonia domestica’, draws the last consequence of this consideration by entrusting the violins with a note which is even below the range of the instrument and therefore cannot be produced. The passage is reinforced by the violas and horns and its sounding is thus assured. It would be intolerable, even to the composer’s eye to replace the low f# with its higher octave. He wants the line at least to be understood — playable or not” (67).
If I were writing that passage today, I might parenthesize the note to make it clear to the players that I don’t expect them to play it. Regardless, this is a valid, albeit rare, reason to write below the range of an instrument.
To Preserve the Tonal Meaning
A far more common reason to write below the written limit is to clarify the tonal meaning of a pitch. In this case, composers aren’t actually writing an unplayable note; they’re simply spelling it in an unusual manner.
For example, in the first movement of Borodin’s String Quartet no. 2 (bar 55), Borodin writes:
Likewise, in the second movement of his Serenade for Strings, Dvorak writes a low B for the viola (bar 4):
In both cases, the composer is harnessing the notation to tell the performers something about the pitch relationships. Just last week, a fellow evensong choir member of mine identified a similar case in this tenor line in Elgar’s “Great is the Lord”:
“Why did Elgar just not write this as a G?” he asked.
In each of these three cases, the composers wanted the performers to know that these pitches did not have a chromatic relationship, but rather a diatonic one. In other words, they wanted the performers to know that the note they were playing (or singing) was acting as a leading tone to the note that followed it. In an earlier blog post, I referred to this as “structural chromaticism”: “these notes merely represent the overthrow of one diatonic collection (say, CDEFGAB) by a different diatonic collection (say, C#DEF#GAB).”
In the examples above, Borodin and Elgar both write F-double sharp to tonicize G-sharp, and Dvorak writes B-sharp to tonicize C-sharp. Now, you may note that, whereas C-sharp minor is the key of Dvorak’s entire phrase, neither Elgar or Borodin ever establish a key of G-sharp. That difference is immaterial. In tonal music, pitch functions can last as briefly as a single interval. The entire scale never has to be present, nor must the music match the prevailing key signature.
So if these tonicizations are so brief, why do these composers write them with these “strange” spellings? Why write a low F-double sharp for violin or a low B-sharp for viola? Simply put, because the diatonic spelling helps performers understand the musical meaning better than the chromatic one. In each of these three cases, the “simpler” chromatic spelling (G to G-sharp or C to C-sharp) would obscure the diatonic relationships that Borodin, Dvorak, and Elgar want us to hear.
I love the opening swirl of violins in “Jupiter” from Gustav Holst’s The Planets. Who doesn’t?
Take a moment and listen to it:
It’s thrilling!
But what really gets me going as a composer are the details of its composition. This passage is extraordinarily elegant.
Here’s the excerpt from the score:
What makes this passage so elegant?
Motive: The texture is composed of a single, three-note motive: a minor third followed by a major second. Holst presents this motive in two transpositions (starting on E and A) in two octaves (E4/A4 and E5/A5). Elegance is how the passage is composed of such a limited set of materials.
Disposition: Though we hear the first two bars as a two-octave, upward run, it’s actually Holst introducing each transposition separately. The fact that the motive spans only a fourth makes it extraordinarily easy to play on the violin. Elegance is how Holst distributes the pitches in this easy-to-play manner to generate a larger effect.
Rhythm vs. Meter (I): Holst casts his three-sixteenth-note motive into four-sixteenth-note beats. Each entrance initially seems like a four-sixteenth-note motive, but the ensuing music dispels that notion. Instead, we soon hear that Holst has set up a 4 against 3 polyrhythm. That is, the rhythmic placement of the motive relative to the meter keeps shifting in a 4:3 ratio. Elegance is how this simple tension creates excitement and energy.
Rhythm vs. Meter (II): Though the motivic relationship to the meter forms a kind of polyrhythm, the rhythmic relationship of each transposition relative to the others remains constant. For instance, the E4 transposition always sounds A-E-G while the E5 transposition sounds E-G-A. Because each instance of the motive is the same 3 sixteenth-notes long, this 1:1 duration ratio ensures that they remain in the same micro-canonic relationship with each other. Elegance is how Holst composes the texture canonically rather than micromanaging the details.
Orchestration: Coupling instruments in octaves is one of the foundations of common-practice orchestration. Holst does it constantly in The Planets. This passage can also be read as a kind of octave doubling: the canon with entrances on E and A in bar 1 is repeated an octave above in bar 2. The resulting texture’s polyrhythmic and pentatonic wash reinforce the impression that this relationship is an octave doubling of two lines rather than Holst wanting you to hear the four individual lines. The rocking strings that open Thomas Adès’s Tevot fill a similar purpose. As individual lines, they have direction, but as a composite texture, they create a grainy wash rather than discernible counterpoint. Elegance is taking a simple, common idea and presenting it in a fresh, becoming way.
As a composer, I love such elegance in other’s music and I strive for in my own. These kinds of musical ideas captivate me, because they create the kind of shimmering, ambiguous tension like light through a gemstone or waves reflected on the bottom of a pool. They represent one kind of musical depth: patterns whose components can be heard but which do not resolve into an unambiguous impression. The tension that remains creates a space where the soul can live.
Many people say melody — the foreground sequence of pitches — is an essential part of music, but lots of music does just fine without any pitches. Even music that uses notes often doesn’t have melodies. So how does music operate when it does not have melodies?
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 
Many people say melody — the foreground sequence of pitches — is an essential part of music, but 