Further clarification

Michael Monroe has weighed in on a recent post, raising some important issues. In this post I attempt to address them.

First of all — and I should perhaps have been clearer about this all along — while I may come across as a flag-waving radical, crusading for fundamental change in the way we approach music, such an attitude should not be attributed to Westergaard, and it is not really what his work represents. Indeed, I don’t think he would necessarily approve of all of the things I have said on behalf of his theory (in fact I’m sure he wouldn’t endorse — not immediately or automatically, anyway — my application of it to “post-tonal” music). He doesn’t even bother to mention anywhere in ITT that the book happens to overthrow harmonic theory! That’s because his primary purpose in developing his theory, and in writing the book, was not to revolutionize music theory, but was simply to explain the workings of tonal music to college freshmen (and other interested readers). It would probably help if I let Westergaard speak for himself. For the benefit of readers who haven’t yet ordered the book (everyone should get their hands on a copy, if they can find one!), let me quote a passage from the Preface (this passage is addressed to “the theorist who wonders whether this book has anything new to offer him”):

This book owes its greatest debts to Schenker, Fux, and Bernhardt. Its central pedagogical means — species counterpoint — is that developed by Fux in his Gradus ad Parnassum. But the end to which that means is applied is that developed by Schenker in Kontrapunkt. Fux’s goal, the Parnassus he wanted to lead the student to, was the ability to write imitation Palestrina. Schenker’s goal — and mine — was the ability to understand the complex and varied voice-leading patterns of actual eighteenth- and nineteenth- century music in terms of the simpler patterns available under the artificial contraints of species counterpoint. To that end I have

a. adapted the linear operations later developed by Schenker in Der Freie Satz to the rhythmic limitations of species counterpoint (Sections 4.1, 5.4, 5.6) and

b. tried to show how dissonant skips and skips to and from dissonant notes can arise from species situations in much the same way that Bernhardt shows how such departures in seventeenth-century voice leading had their basis in sixteenth-century practice (Sections 6.7 and 6.8).

Thus, most of the book is at least as old as Schenker, and much is as old as Fux or even Bernhardt. The exceptions are:

a. the modification of traditional species just referred to;

b. an attempt to shift from the acoustic to the physiological domain the assignment of certain interval sizes to certain structural functions (Chapters 1,2, and the Appendix); and

c. a theory of tonal rhythm (Section 2.2 and Chapters 7-9).

I offer this quote (with my own added emphasis) by way of suggesting that adopting a Westergaardian approach to musical analysis would hardly require forgetting everything one has learned about music and starting over ex nihilo. It is, in fact, quite a striking feature of Westergaard’s theory that virtually all of the concepts it uses — diatonic collections, passing notes, neighbor notes, tonic triads, anticipation, delay,… — are already in the vocabulary of working musicians trained in the “traditional” manner! (I put “traditional” in quotes here in light of what Westergaard says about the historical origins of his theory.) Michael rightly points out that you don’t have to have studied Westergaardian theory to understand the horn’s premature entrance in the Eroica as an anticipation — but then again you don’t necessarily have to have studied Westergaardian theory to understand a Westergaardian analysis in general!

What musicians may not realize until they read ITT is that this vocabulary (with just a couple of crucial additions, principally the highly intuitive “borrowing” operation, of which “doubling”, “transfer”, and “arpeggiation” can be viewed as special cases) is not only powerful enough to eliminate any need for a concept like “harmony”, but allows one to explicitly discuss certain critically important long-range phenomena that they may previously have thought inaccessible to words.

What I’m really pleading for is not so much theoretical reorientation for its own sake, but better analyses of music. Let’s remember why it is that people invoke harmonic ideas to begin with: it’s a way of explaining notes that they don’t know how to explain otherwise. What is that A doing there? “Well, we’re ‘on’ an F-major chord now, and A is part of the chord.” That’s a bad analysis. Why are we “on” an F-major chord now? “Because the previous chord was a C-major chord, and I-IV is a standard progression.” That’s an even worse analysis. Instead of resorting to these non-explanations, we should just think a little harder about what that note is doing, and what it is we really want to say about it.

An analogy I am fond of using (because it’s both intrinsically apt and familiar from contemporary intellectual life) is with theistic explanations in the sciences. To say that a note is there because it’s “part of the chord” is like saying that dogs have tails because God made them that way: it sounds like an explanation, and it may be temporarily satisfying (especially to the unsophisticated), but it’s really no explanation at all.

That’s the difference between Westergaardian theory and harmonic theory: the former actually makes a serious attempt to address what’s going on in the music. In that light, I was rather surpised that Michael would raise the following point, apparently against my position:

the ultimate point for most of us is the music – theories exist to help us think about how music works, but the theory isn’t usually the point

Perhaps it would be appropriate for me to indulge in some autobiography here: the whole issue with harmonic theory for me was that it got in the way of my own musical understanding. Because I read Piston, I thought that the way one understood music, and thus the goal of ear training, was to be able to identify by ear, at every moment of a piece, “what chord that is”. It never occurred to me that one could “legitimately” attempt to compose music without possessing this ability, because it never occurred to me that such an apparently well-respected book as Piston’s would be less than truthful about what the building-blocks of music were. To be sure, I had my own personal way of understanding notes, but I never dared think of it as a competing “theory”; until I could understand “proper theory” and integrate my own understanding into that system, I considered myself “untrained”. For years, I despaired at my lack of progress at raising my competence to the level of expert musicians, who presumably could listen to a recording of Brahms or Bruckner and rattle off Roman numerals in real time. (Obviously, you had to be able to do that before you could think up your own Roman numeral progressions and know what they would sound like!) Can you imagine the combination of liberatory euphoria and retrospective resentment that I felt when I later discovered that my secret, private, unacknowledged, “untrained” way of thinking about notes had all along existed as a legitimate “proper” music theory written down in a book by a leading composer and theorist? Why hadn’t the music theory community allowed me to discover that book in my middle-school library?

Still, I have an idea of what Michael may be getting at, and this may have to with a fundamental psychological difference between me and other people. Observation of other musicians, past and present, has led me to the inescapable conclusion that many of them never take music theory seriously to begin with. That is, they would never “trust” a book like Piston’s Harmony in the way that I did. It’s as if their actual musical training occurs in some totally separate cognitive sphere, while the conventional verbalizations are learned as a sort of rite of passage that “we all have to go through”. That’s why they don’t seem to care that the theories they have “learned” are bad — it’s not as if they actually use them! (Except maybe for talking, once in a while, or for writing papers in school — but certainly not for the important stuff!)

(There’s no way, for example, that Walter Piston could actually have “meant” what he wrote in his harmony book. I can’t believe for a moment that when he sat down to write one of his pieces (which are invariably of high quality), the musical part of his brain was actually thinking about chord progressions. I daresay this would still hold even if he were writing a fugue in the Baroque style. Obviously, I can’t actually prove a proposition like this — but come on!)

However, I am different. Perhaps I don’t possess this “musical unconscious” that everybody else has. Perhaps I’m just obsessively introspective. Whatever the reason, I consider it an unacceptable situation when discourse does not reflect thought. I don’t demand that it reflect thought perfectly (so it won’t do for Matthew and others to retort that no theory is perfectly accurate), just that it make an honest attempt.

So let’s just try to speak (as well as think) more clearly and precisely about music, shall we? It won’t hurt, and it can only help.