alves@nunki.usc.edu (William Alves) (03/22/90)
I've been holding off jumping into this debate, despite (or rather because) of the fact that I spent nearly two years on a committee debating some of these issues in connection with a proposed music and technology curriculum here. In many ways the questions were totally new, but more often they were just new forms of issues as old as music education. And, after millenia of en- trenchment, all sides were as vociferous as they were unyielding. Partly as a result of these debates, the curriculum as it was was ultimately rejected and now remains deep in the quagmire of academic bureacracy, a predictable, if tragic state for innovative ideas in a university. The point is well taken that a curriculum (or a life) has only af inite amount of time for education. Personally, I got a great deal out of courses that some consider narrow or mundane (e.g. modal counterpoint). No professor expects that a composer will someday want to write in the style of Palestrina, but teaches a discipline, through a strict set of rules and models, for the combination of musical lines. The assumption is that all composers (at least those studying at a university) are going to be dealing with harmony and/or polyphony somehow. I would consider it a valid argument that a composer might NOT want to take the time to learn about the combination of musical lines, but might instead be interested in another of the world's traditions that have no- thing to do with harmony. I haven't met many such composers, but maybe that's because it's not part of their music education tradition. Likewise, I'm glad I've had a lot of Western music history, but I'm also glad I've learned what a narrow tradition it is. It's possible that some composers may want to come up with a system outside of any tradition, I think that's fundamentally an impossibility, whether if you're dealing with computers or not. Thus I think the learning of some models and a tradition has some value, but we should be aware of how that tradition shapes the way we think as well as the possibilities which lie in other traditions or pedagogical methods. I remember meeting someone from IRCAM who claimed that the hardware and software that they had developed was not predisposed to any particular style. I can also recall a programmer of M or Jam Factory bristling at a person's suggestion that his product was best suited to "minimalist backgrounds," and I know people who have claimed that MIDI is equally suited to any idiom. Bullshit to one and all. Any hardware, software, interface design, etc. contains a multitude of decisions which are all shaped by the builders' personal biases, cultural biases, and historical biases. This principle is especially important when new technology is involved, be- cause, while the context and capabilities of a violin are pretty well set, WE are the ones shaping the future of music technology, and I think it will be tragic if our myopia blinds us to some potential of this extraordinary power. Therefore, I supported a curriculum which exposed the student to as wide a variety of experiences as possible, with the emphasis on learning about new ways of learning and new ways about thinking about music. Among the courses which have now been rejected were "Non-western Cultures as a Resource for Electro-Acoustic Music"; "Media Integration in Music" (whatever that might be, I hoped, perhaps, experimentation into new art forms or genres); and "Electro-Acoustic Music Performance Laboratory." I would also support Roger's suggestion of apprenticeship, or other peda- gogical methods which, as Steve said, could give insight to musical behavior. Perhaps this approach is idealistic, and definitely its implementation would be partly experimental. But such experiments deserve consideration. I do NOT mean to say that traditional Western music is not applicable to such a curriculum, but that now more than ever, we should be exploring new and innovative approaches. The conservatism of the conservatory, and the university in general, tends to make curricular changes and innovations on a glacial time scale, if they come about at all. This might have been satisfactory even a hundred years ago, but today it only serves to limit our experience and vision. Bill Alves USC School of Music / Center for Scholarly Technology