I’m nonplussed by the thought, but there it is: shortly I will tie a ribbon around my twenty-third year teaching an introductory course in Western music to freshmen at UC Berkeley. Year 24 is already in the chute and will no doubt emerge forth on schedule, barring the unforeseen. Before long I’m going to hit the quarter-century mark at Cal. That’s a long time to have taught a one-semester course every fall, a course that covers more or less the same material every time with only those changes mandated by an updated textbook or tweaking and twiddling on my part.
And yet it hasn’t grown old for me. Nor, I doubt, will it ever. Introducing bright young people to the glories of the Western musical tradition is a privilege and a pleasure. My oddball career as a blue-collar working-stiff pianist who jumped the fence and became a Sunday musicologist and music commentator—despite never having acquired a degree in musicology—puts me in a unique position. My hands-on approach to music departs from that of the bulk of musicologists, who tend to be readers and listeners first. But I play the stuff, maybe not all that often any more, but enough to keep my hat in the ring and, what’s more important, enough that I never lose sight of that elemental, and critical, aspect of a life in music: making sound for others to hear. I’m not likely to retreat into a cloistered or academic mindset. No matter how firmly I become identified as a teacher of theory or music literature or as a writer on music or as an evangelizing public music commentator, I will always have plenty of musical dirt under my fingernails.
My trench-level view results in exams that focus mostly on hearing and recognizing the music, rather than regurgitating facts and figures from the textbook. A student in my class who has nailed the listening portion is almost certain to achieve a high mark, provided that the textbook and lecture materials have been adequately absorbed, while facts and figures to the detriment of the listening is likely to be catastrophic. These being UC Berkeley students, the facts and figures part is rarely a problem. Those kids are good at pulling stuff out of books and off lecture slides and depositing same into their noggins. I rarely worry that they’re going to muddle the distinctions between troubadour and trouvère, exposition and recapitulation, sonata and rondo form, solo concerto or concerto grosso, Wagner or Verdi, and the like. I can ask them to list Bach’s primary places of employment from Arnstadt onwards with the confidence that they will be able to do so—Arnstadt, Mühlhausen, Weimar, Cöthen, Leipzig. List the sections of the polyphonic mass, in order: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei. Bach’s dates? Handel’s dates? Mozart’s dates? What was Mozart’s father’s first name? Who was the English composer who mentored Mozart during his childhood? What’s the general name for the highly ornamented, entertaining, singer-oriented Italian opera genre popular in the early to mid-19th century? What is the name for the short tunes and figures that serve as unifying elements in Wagner’s music dramas? Who, what, where, how, when? Easy-peasy, all of it.
But most of that stuff is trivia. Much more important is the music itself. I make that abundantly clear to them and exhort, urge, and cheerlead them into spending the lion’s share of their prep time in active and engaged listening. Since we are a one-semester class I can hardly expect my students to develop a personal synthesis and philosophy of music based on long experience. I’m just happy with basic recognition, given that by doing so, these students are already miles ahead of the general population. I’m not sure I would even be comfortable asking most conservatory-level sophomores to recognize any part of the Beethoven 5th Symphony beyond those opening four notes, for example, for the simple reason that most of them would not be able to do so. But my Cal kids can; all four movements on the Beethoven 5th were on a recent listening quiz and, what’s more, I even asked them to tell me which theme or themes of both first and last movement they were hearing—primary? secondary? bridge? closing? Given that the class median score on the exam was somewhere around 93%, and that 98.5% appeared to be the grade of choice of discriminating students, it’s a safe bet that they got the message and, what’s more important, they got the music.
Naysayers: OK, so they can recognize Beethoven’s 5th or the Brahms Violin Concerto or Act III, Scene I from Rigoletto. But what to they know about those? More than you might think, I answer. They’re reasonably well read up on the Napoleonic era and post-Congress-of-Vienna Europe, on sonata form, double variation form, scherzos and their relation to minuet & trio form, rondo form. They know about the spectrum between conservative Viennese Classicists and avant-gardists during the 19th century and where Brahms falls (pretty far rightwards) on that spectrum. They’ve got an elementary but clear enough grasp of major trends in 19th-century opera, and how Verdi differs from Wagner and how they both differ from Rossini. But more to the point, they know by heart some Beethoven, Brahms, Verdi, Wagner, Rossini, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Puccini, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, and Mahler—just as they have also previously committed to memory works by Josquin, Palestrina, Dufay, Monteverdi, Purcell, Handel, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and others. They can place Hildegard of Bingen historically, but more to the point, they have absorbed Columba aspexit well enough to distinguish such freeflowing monophony from austere Gregorian plainchant. I doubt there’s a person in that class who will ever forget Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 with its flamboyant first-movement cadenza, or the Mozart G Minor Symphony, or Dido’s Lament from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Those works have become familiar friends to them, when just four months ago they were most likely terra incognita.
Back in my early days teaching the course, occasionally I consulted the teacher’s resource manual that the textbook publisher graciously provides to instructors. I remember how taken aback I was by the strident tone taken by the manual’s author in regards to teaching 20th century music. The gist of it was: it’s the Second Viennese School and its offshoots that are the most important threads of the century, so focus on that. You might be tempted to sugar-coat it by giving your students more Ravel or Gershwin or Rachmaninoff, or engage them with Shostakovich or the like. But don’t do it. Teach them Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, et al., because that’s the mainline. That’s what’s really important. Even back then I thought it was pompous twaddle. For one thing, I don’t agree that the Second Viennese School and its offshoots were the mainline of 20th century artistic development, even allowing the silliness of a “mainline” of development. As far as I’m concerned, all that stuff turned out to be a sideshow and, what’s worse, a dead-end street.
But more to the point, the author’s advice sacrificed the students’ enthusiasm on a dubious altar of academic political correctness. After the glow that results from the 19th century, with all those fascinating composers writing all those wonderful works, the 20th century can seem like a sad comedown. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, focusing more on Ravel and Gershwin and Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich and Britten and the like (I throw in a full-length lecture on film music as well) helps to ensure that your students will not slam their mental doors on music after 1900. So we do Debussy, we do Stravinsky (not only Le Sacre, but I throw in the first movement of the Symphony of Psalms as well), and so far everything is good—folks dig those works. Then I give a brief coverage of Schoenberg, of 12-tonalism, and of the post-War serialist movement. Very brief. I give them a whiff of 1950s avant-garde: Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna and a John Cage prepared piano piece, that last kookily entertaining if otherwise lightweight fluff. But for the most part I try to make sure that they don’t wind up alienated. If that means more time spent on Rachmaninoff than Schoenberg, then so be it. These days I end the term with a selection from John Adams’ El Niño; it’s compelling music and I can also relate some of my stories to the class about my days as one of John’s students. I can also point out to them that he lives right there in Berkeley. So after having begun with composers so ancient their very names are lost to history, we end with a neighbor and one of the professor’s professors.
Because it’s all about the music. Not the theories, not the historical trends, not the commentary and the analysis and the pontificating and the philosophizing. Just the music. Should any of my students wish to pursue music literature further, then they can take more courses and read and listen and study and all that. But I refuse to produce a student who can tell you everything about Beethoven’s relationship to his nephew Karl but who wouldn’t know the Eroica if it reared up and bit him on the fanny. No. Music first, front, and center.