Means, Not an End

Not long ago I came up against a standard French textbook on figured harmony. The book is typically French in that it is thorough, exhaustive, and probably just a wee bit anal-retentive. It's a good text insofar as it goes. However, it has the unfortunate habit of departing from the standard figured harmony symbols, being a representative of a so-called "French system" of figured harmony. That's not good. Figured harmony—i.e., those little numbers below the bass line in Baroque and Classical compositions—is an international tablature, a lingua franca that was used throughout the musical world during its heyday of the 17th and 18th centuries. To be sure, variants abound, inevitable given the lack of a Council of Trent to hammer out the precise boundaries. Still, for the most part, figured harmony is the same whether you're reading from Corelli or Bach or Handel or Vivaldi.

To come up with one's own variants of those symbols creates a walled-off garden in which a particular set of symbols applies only to music that is at least conversant with the rules of said walled-off garden. It's xenophobic, exclusivist, and snobbish. But more to the point, it elevates the means to an end over the end itself.

That problem crops up in a lot of different areas, and not just French music textbooks.To be sure, advanced French solfège books are classics of means-heavy overkill: constant clef changes and ridiculously different intervals and rhythms, all in the interest of honing the ear. While I have no doubt that mastering some of the thorniest of those books might have some trifling value, it all seems rather pointless. Once one's solfège chops are developed enough to be reasonably reliable, it makes little to no sense to keep on honing them. It's like taking meticulous care of a knife, constantly cleaning and polishing and whetting it, but never actually using it. A real knife isn't some picture-perfect thing, glittering and sparkling and unmarked. A knife is something you cut stuff with, stuff like meat and vegetables and bread and putty and paper and cardboard and rope. Once the knife works well enough to cut what needs cutting, then ix-nay with all the whetting and cut the stuff. In regards to solfège, drop the stupid sightsinging books and start using solfège to learn real music.

I've seen the same tendency amongst devotées of musical analysis who read book after book after book and know every variant of every theory from every academic in academia, but who never actually sit down and do analysis of their own. They know all about what Eminent Professor X says about Arcane Technique Y, but they have no original ideas of their own, no real base of experience from which to work. Armchair analysis, in other words, instead of the real thing. There's really only one way to become an insightful and adept musical analyst, and that's to do a lot of analysis. That is, do it yourself, using your own mind and ear and experience and facing your own limitations and lack of understanding as best you can. Once you have the basic techniques down, leave the damn textbooks in the library or the bookstore.

The real teachers are guys named Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Haydn, Handel, and all the rest. Because when all is said and done, there is only one point to studying harmony & counterpoint, only one point to learning to realize figured harmony, only one point to becoming an adept score-reader, only one point to studying Schenkerian analysis or any other kind of analysis. That one point is to explore music, to make music, to delve and dig into music and sail the wine-dark seas of artistic growth.

My teaching profession is particularly pestered with folks who elevate the means over the end. Those are the educator-squirrels who emit polysyllabic mumbo-jumbo while they draw up curricular charts and speak ever so learnedly about learning assessment and syllabic goals and other such crap. What a teacher actually does is quite simple: the teacher has mastered (or least gotten a solid handle on) some subject or discipline, and the teacher then passes that on to others via example or speaking or showing or guiding. Of course one can become a better teacher, but any veteran teacher knows that the real secret lies in the comfort level and confidence that comes only from long experience. All the planned curricula and pie charts documenting reams of assessment data disintegrate to dust in the face of honest-to-God teaching ability, that ever-so voodoo-ish transmission of master to apprentice.

So there's a line somewhere out there in the sand. At what point does technique become a hindrance? Perhaps when the search for more technique has blinded one to the reason for acquiring that technique in the first place.

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