I just read an essay written by Paul Lockhart titled "The Mathematician's Lament", and after doing a little bit of research, found to be quite the famous and well-read text in the math community. Published online in 2002, it even got turned into a book a couple years later.
Lockhart's Lament, as most mathematicians lovingly call this essay, details a central philosophical question about math pedagogy: is math art or a set of instructions to follow? Lockhart argues that schools teach too much in the latter direction, eliminating the reason math exists in the first place: as a way to explain our curiosities about the world, rather than training students to become experts at assembling IKEA furniture, following a step-by-step guide to solve 'problems'. Lockhart further argues that math is being viewed in our culture as something 'rational thinkers' do, as opposed to what 'poetic dreamers' do. He pushes that people (and pedagogues) just don't understand what mathematicians do and therefore categorizes mathematics incorrectly into the 'rational thinkers' genre, when it really should be treated as an art.
Why do I bring his essay up? I think there are certain parallels to draw between his lament and the lament of many music theory pedagogues. Funny enough, there's a wonderful anecdote that Lockhart makes in the introduction of his paper, that compares mathematics to music! I will quote it below; I think it makes quite the compelling argument if we tweak it a little bit to encompass music theory more specifically. Read this with more of a sarcastic tone:
"Music class is where we take out our staff paper, our teacher puts some notes on the board, and we copy them or transpose them into a different key. We have to make sure to get the clefs and key signatures right, and our teacher is very picky about making sure we fill in our quarter-notes completely. One time we had a chromatic scale problem and I did it right, but the teacher gave me no credit because I had the stems pointing the wrong way."
Quite humorous, but is this not the way music theory is taught in schools? Do we not just learn skills that might apply to future forms of analysis and 'theorizing', but never do those activities from the beginning? As a personal anecdote, I have found that the public perception of music theory, and even the perception of music theory from other musicians is one of this 'skills-based, IKEA furniture' style of thinking. How do I spell a D augmented triad? What 'music-theory' do I need to learn to improve my guitar solos? What scale do I play over a Bb major seven chord?
As much as these are valid questions, I would hardly categorize them as music theory questions. They are composition questions, performance questions, and more or less, opinion. Should music theory be taught for students to understand actual music theory that theorists are doing?
Then again, I am not saying that these skills are useless! Of course, as mathematics needs students to understand basic arithmetic, so does music theory need students to understand how to spell chords and conduct roman numeral analysis. But it is the combination of these basic skills and ideas that should be introduced to students at a young age.
Ideas such as 'tonality', which I have found that students, even after studying roman numeral analysis, have no idea why they are providing these numerals to chords. That their tutors that robbed them of the joy and understanding that theorists have thought and defined certain chords having certain functions within a key, which is a key idea to understand all of the common practice!
Along with a knowledge of history, students possess skills, ideas, and facts, about this whole field of music theory! Why, then, do we still teach music theory like cooking class? Why do we take the joy of discovery, the joy of the art of music theory, out of the pedagogy? Teach ideas along with skills in theory class! So many ideas about music that students never get exposed to, ideas about music so prevalent, it's almost unethical for students not to learn about it! Put the music theory back in music theory class!
No comments:
Post a Comment