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Over on the Adam Neely video comment thread on the Music Teachers FB group, have once again re-entered the debate about whether the blues and its many descendants should be part of the "core" "Western" music theory curriculum.
For me, this is a simple issue. The blues is a Western music, originating in the US. Its absence from the core curriculum (especially in the US) is the clearest evidence for music theory's white racial frame per @philewell.
Arguments against my position: Western tonal theory does encompass and explain the blues. This argument does not withstand even passing familiarity with the music. Moving along.
Another argument: the blues is not a "Western" music, it's a hybrid of African music and European music. The African influences on the blues are certainly present. But the blues is not African. It's American.
The idea, I guess, is that African-Americans are not "Western"? There's a widely-used music appreciation text that puts negro spirituals in one of its "non-Western" sidebar sections along with gamelan music, raga etc.
The argument implicit there is that "Western" means "white European." Is that the position we're going to be taking as a field? If so... oooookay. If not, there is no excuse for leaving the blues out of any class or text that purports to call itself "Western music theory."
The same arguments apply to the non-European aspects of jazz, rock, funk, rap, and techno. Are those "Western" musics or not? If not, why not? And if so, what is the excuse for not addressing them?
I guess you could make the case that rap is too "new", too "recent," and that the theory core should be looking at the historical basis. That is pretty weak sauce though; rap is fifty years old now and is not going anywhere.
I would love to see a good-faith argument for systematic neglect of the blues in Western music theory that doesn't boil down to lingering white supremacy. I have yet to see such an argument and I sincerely doubt that such an argument could exist.
I've seen stuff about how, well, we can't do everything, there's only so many weeks in a semester. Uh huh. I can point at vast swaths of any existing Theory I curriculum that are less fundamental to present Western music than the blues.
Over on the threads there are all these earnest music teachers debating about whether and how to include Chinese or Hindustani or Arabic music theory, and I'm like, that's a worthwhile discussion, but maybe Western theory could start by addressing Western music.
I've said this many times on here but will repeat it. I came to formal music theory study after many years of self-teaching rock, country, jazz, funk etc. All those musics treat the blues as the root of the tree.
So it was shocking to get to grad school and see just how completely the blues is exnominated. My first grad school advisor had a PhD in composition from a very fancy school and had never *heard of* the blues scale until I happened to bring it up in conversation.
Like, I knew there was going to be a classical bias, but I wasn't prepared for its totality. NYU is more Schenkerian than a lot of places, but still. The grad theory core uses Steven Laitz's The Complete Musician. That's a pretty bold title for a book that's 100% white music.
This problem isn't limited to music theory obvs. The music historians at least feel obligated to tack Duke Ellington or Charlie Parker onto the end of the sequence, but they have a ways to go too. But even music tech was ridiculously white.
In the music tech masters program there was a required composition/history seminar, and the text was Electric Sound by Joel Chadabe. I think he mentions Herbie Hancock in one sentence, and there might possibly be one other sentence that mentions someone black. That's it.
I didn't need the whole book to be about Jimi Hendrix or Grandmaster Flash, but oh man is it terrible. And of course the prof forbade us from using beats in our compositions (a restriction that most of us ignored.)
And this is NYU, which is pretty woke as universities go. It's getting better, slowly (so, so slowly) but we will have to pry Schenker out of their cold dead hands.
You can see why music theory has such a bad reputation among "pop" musicians. I have now met many practicing music theorists (many of them here on Twitter) and I know the descriptivist breadth of their work. But you'd never guess that from Music Theory I.
Is it unfair to judge the whole field based on the misery of having to learn (and then promptly forget) figured bass and such? Maybe not! But for most musicians like me, that's their only contact with formal music theory. You can see why it dissuades them from looking any deeper.
Music Theory I sets the tone. Front-loading it with white nonsense hurts all those songwriters and producers who would benefit from knowing how to put a chord progression together systematically, and it hurts music theorists too, by choking off engagement with the real stuff.
While I have some eyeballs, here are some concrete suggestions for fixing Music Theory 1.
1) Most important, remove all prescriptivist language. Use only descriptivist language. No "correct" or "incorrect." Only "conventional," "usual," "generally preferred." Always put those statements in stylistic context. A thing might be unusual in Mozart but usual in the blues.
2) Anything that's specific to Europe in previous centuries belongs in a more advanced class. No one needs figured bass in Theory 1. Save it for the specialists. Use chord symbols.
3) Present the diatonic scale and its associated chords, but don't conflate that material with "the basics." The real basics are the sounds on the radio, in film scores, video games etc. Major is basic, but so is Mixolydian mode and the blues.
4) Are all your music examples white men? Not okay.
5) Are the students writing short tunes in their preferred styles? If not, why not?
6) Music theory is not (only) harmony theory. Talk about rhythm, too. Swing is a fundamental concept for the past hundred years of Western music. So is tresillo.
7) Is your music theory class really a music history class? Music history is a valuable and important field of study. But that's not what you're teaching.
8) How essential is it that students be able to read and write notation proficiently at the intro level? Can you teach and test concepts in the piano roll, aurally, on the fretboard, with chord symbols? If not, why not?
9) Does Music Theory 1 have anything useful to say about, for example, "Get Ur Freak On" by Missy Elliott? If not, why not?
10) Last thing: What are you trying to prepare students to do? Take more music theory courses? Go forth and write songs, make beats, play jazz solos, etc? These things shouldn't be mutually exclusive, but, well, sometimes they become so.
