The Devolution of Musical Literacy

In the course of preparing a program note on Dvořák’s “New World” symphony I had occasion to read through the initial spate of reviews and studies that accompanied the work’s 1893 premiere by Anton Seidl and the New York Philharmonic. The day of the premiere was the occasion for an expansive and in-depth analysis by Henry Krehbiel, based on a series of conversations between author and composer, published in a New York daily newspaper—this before the performance, mind you, as a way of preparing the audience for the new work to come. Even more impressive are Krehbiel’s three newspaper articles written over a two-week period in January 1894, on the occasion of the work’s first performance in Boston. He paralleled his coverage of the symphony with an analysis of the “American” quartet, played in Boston during the same period.

Besides their general musical erudition and free use of terminology that would flummox most modern readers, the articles also feature something that has been banished from modern newspaper musical criticism: musical examples. Krehbiel hasn’t the slightest hesitation to quote a theme (or its transformation) by use of examples—six in one article alone. Consider this excerpt:

This melody is an augmentation of the first phrase of the principal subject, extended from two measures to four, as will be seen from the following quotation of the subject in full:

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Here we have again the intervallic characteristic of the first movements of both symphony and quartet; the melody is pentatonic—i.e., built on the diatonic major scale with the fourth and seventh tones rejected.

That wasn’t published in a music journal. It was in a daily Boston newspaper.

Now, we’ll allow that a lot of everyday Bostonians skipped right over this article on their way to the sports or financial pages. Yet there were readers who would find the article interesting and worthwhile; what a contrast to today’s readers, who need help with even slightest technical term and for whom musical examples might as well be written in Sumerian cuneiform. In the Krehbiel article, only pentatonic is deemed necessary of a definition: augmentation, phrase, principal subject, intervallic, and diatonic are treated as though they were dog, cat, house, and mother.

As recently as the 1960s the San Francisco Symphony program book routinely included musical examples in the program notes, together with fairly intensive analysis. Donald Francis Tovey’s magisterial Essays in Musical Analysis were originally program notes, most for the Leeds Festival. Such erudition is banished from a modern program book just as it has disappeared from newspaper criticism. We live in a culture in which basic musical literacy has become uncommon, the provenance of specialists rather than a common coin amongst educated readers.

I daresay the phonograph and radio must shoulder a good portion of the blame here. Once music lovers could begin buying music in recorded form, the days of home music making were numbered. Amateur chamber groups once flourished throughout America; they were the best way for people to enjoy music, given the paucity of local performing groups and the absence of mass-market media such as television or radio. Reading music was as natural as reading prose. Just about everybody had a piano and there was invariably somebody in the house who knew how to play it, however inexpertly. I have no doubt that most of the music making in American parlors was dreadful. But it was music making, and not passive listening, and people had to know how to read music—how to count rhythm, how to decipher performance indications, even know some basic music theory—in order to make that music.

Today’s record collector has no need for any of that. With the finest performers and orchestras available at the push of a button or click of a mouse, there is no need to struggle through years of piano lessons or withstand the cacophony of an enthusiastic but near-incompetent home string quartet. Piano lessons are on the decline throughout America; they just aren’t part of the average kid’s life any more, although for a good long time they were a common childhood ritual. Once “music” became something you bought in the store and played on your phonograph/CD player/cassette player/iPod/network music server, musical literacy’s decline was inevitable. Musical sophistication became the discernment of Toscanini vs. Stokowski, not the ability to read through a late Beethoven quartet.

Sadly, that lowered literacy has reached the professionally-bound population as well. Incoming conservatory-level students display a dismaying lack of musical training. Many have obvious problems forming notation on the page; some of that is due to notation applications such as Sibelius and Finale, but not all. Very simple issues—the proper order of sharps and flats in a key signature or just the drawing of a clear notehead—have become rare accomplishments. Increasingly we conservatory professors are starting out with the most basic of concepts, even with our non-remedial students. Chord spellings, key signatures, intervals, fundamental tonal concepts: none can be taken for granted any more. Our situation is similar to that of collegiate English faculty, who are obliged to cover those aspects of elementary English grammar and composition that should have been wrapped up by middle school at the latest.

I see not the slightest sign of the trend reversing; if anything, the slide into full musical illiteracy seems all but inevitable. Already it is a rare conservatory student who can read a score on the page and hear it internally; in the old days we might have recommended playing same on the piano, but keyboard skill has become yet another rarity. Thus we have no choice but to resort to recordings—increasingly, the only musical medium our students can process. Those of us in the eartraining and theory biz are doing what we can to ameliorate matters, but there’s a good chance that our efforts will be too little and too late.

Yet there is hope. Truly literate musicians are to be found throughout the profession, and today’s literate musicians need make no apologies for our skills compared to those of our forefathers. Perhaps the old guys were quicker on the draw reading multiple C clefs and performing at-sight transpositions—at least the best were—but we’ve got it all over them in spades when it comes to an overall breadth of musical culture. Nor were our ancestors all that godlike; figured bass symbols were developed as a tablature to aid keyboard players who were challenged to read multiple staves and provide an on-the-spot harmonic reduction. Thoroughbass was the 17th-century equivalent of those little guitar chord blocks you see on popular-song sheet music. Its wide spread and rapid adoption indicates that it was badly needed. General musicianship wasn’t all that elevated in the old days, in other words.

But educated people could read music. Nowadays most of them can’t. And that’s a pity. More than that: it’s a crying shame.

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