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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2008
This article begins with a defence of the study of traditional harmony in schools, colleges and universities, despite the welcome and invigorating competition from expanding conceptions of the role and content of music in education, and in society as a whole. But if this study is to retain a place in our curricula it must be taught quickly and effectively. It must limit its demands on teaching time while expanding the techniques for developing facility both in sound and in the symbols used to notate it.
1 Some of the most valuable and imaginative developments based on recognising the latent composer in every child, indeed in every person, have been curiously misunderstood: I meet teachers who assume that ‘new sounds’ in class are intended to replace ‘old sounds’. Perhaps the evangelical fervour has been so vigorous that the complementary role of innovations is obscured. More balanced appraisals, notably those assembled in Music in the Secondary School Curriculum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Paynter, J., 1982)Google Scholar, must surely lay this spectre soon.
2 Schenkerian analysis has become much more accessible to the English-speaking seeker after approaches to musical truth with the publication of Forte, A. and Gilbert, S. E., Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis, (New York: Norton, 1982).Google Scholar
3 A third, London Practical Music, 509, is clearly understood to be half of a ‘double A level’ in the complement to which is a rigorous demand for the manipulation of harmonic and contrapuntal forces.
4 For the purpose of this article, the concept of‘studying harmony’ is to serve as a shorthand for the identification and manipulation of vertical sounds in their horizontal relationships one to the next. This carries much of the implications of ‘counterpoint’ – harmony and counterpoint overlap so much that they share a huge common ground, and the point at which one melts into the other defies precise definition. So, while hymn-tune harmony is not counterpoint and a fugue is not homophonic harmony, each contains the seeds of the other: a sufficiently complex chorale harmonisation becomes contrapuntal, while a figured bass to an orchestral fugue reveals its debt to vertical harmony.
5 Swanwick, K. in A Basis for Music Education (Windsor: NFER, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar coins the useful distinction between unconscious hearing and purposeful and empathetic listening which characterises the ‘auditor’.
6 J. J. Rousseau, Lettre sur la musique française (1722); trans. Strunk, O., Source readings… (New York: Norton, 1950).Google Scholar
7 First performed at, and broadcast from, the Cheltenham Festival in July 1984.
8 This highlights an important distinction which is often not clearly made between original creation and imitation. I have examined and, through CNAA, helped to validate, courses in which ‘composition’ implies required originality at one extreme while, at the other, embracing the entirely different discipline of copying a past style. At Keele University we refer to ‘materials’ for the latter-the analysis and synthesis of the materials which composers have used at various times to create various styles. This frees the word ‘composition’ to describe the work of a ‘composer’ who is, generally, understood to be expanding the art of his own time.
9 For example, the enthusiasm with which children react to first hearings of popular pieces can be a constant source of wonder, even of envy, to those of us for whom over-familiarity has made such music hackneyed.
10 Rameau, J.-P.Traité de l'harmonie (1722); Gossett, P., (New York: Dover, 1971).Google Scholar