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#LongThread alert: There’s some justifiable worry that #musictheory’s current outrage is just words and not substance, and that focusing on the identities of the people we talk about in our curriculum/scholarship but not the concepts themselves will still leave us with
2/x white supremacist infrastructure (i.e. if we swap a Schubert piece for a piece by a woman and/or POC that we can teach the same way as that original Schubert piece, we retain the curriculum’s original architecture).
3/x With the caveat that a twitter thread is a terrible place for this and that I am a flawed actor in all this who is constantly learning more about my own biases (and that this might suck the anonymity out of the review process for a piece I’m working on), here's a few thoughts
4/16 We need to carve space out in our curricula and journals for music that isn’t Western European art music written between 1650 and 1900. There’s some great work going on with this: see @theorymeg @meganlavengood @Komaniecki_R @alyssa_barna but so many others;
5/16 this is the “clearing a path” that @philewell talks about in his MTO article
6/16 But after we shrink the focus on WAM, we can’t just teach and write about the same concepts, only quicker. Our understanding of the important concepts in this time period comes from the classical canon that was solidified in the early 20th century...
7/16 we teach concepts that work well in the Beethoven symphonies, etc.. But there was a lot of music written in this time period and geography, and it doesn’t all rely on Beethovenian sonata form and augmented sixths.
8/16 In fact, some of the concepts we spend gobs of time on are boutique techniques that really only describe the inherited canon. Consider the prevalence of the augmented sixth, something we spend plenty of time on:
9/16 And contrast that with the use of the minor dominant, something we usually spend no time on:
10/16 This is all to say, the concepts we use are NOT about Western Art Music 1650-1900, but about a small sliver of that rep...
11/16 So, when we are trying to re-imagine our classroom or scholarly approaches, we need to check ourselves when we worry, “But my students need to know [sonata form, German augmented sixths, Neapolitans, etc.]! It’s crucial to understanding this repertoire!” ....
12/16 ... because that’s probably not be true. Our students play and sing such a wide variety of music – Telemann, Holst, Joplin, Burleigh, de La Guerre – and we currently act as if the limited slate of harmonic concepts and formal archetypes that we teach them explains it all.
13/16 And this, then, implies that if –when– a students runs into music that isn’t explainable by their theory notes, that that music is off-center, or deviant, or breaking the rules. But it’s not: there’s no "center" to "Tonality."
14/16 We need to imagine ourselves as preparing students to engage in diverse and multifaceted music, rather than baptizing them into a priesthood in which you need to know XYZ composer and ABC concept in order to even be at the table.
15/16 This is @philewell's idea that there shouldn’t be “key[s] to defining music theory.”
16/16 And if that means we don’t get to teach augmented sixths… that’s fine. <Rant over>
