Poorly designed, inadequately contrived, and underpowered tools are useless for the skilled craftsman. Why would he use a fork when a shovel would suffice? In a pragmatic world the above statement is so obvious that it isn’t necessary for it to be said. When eating spaghetti, use a fork, and when digging a hole, use a shovel. But in the abstract world of musical academia, it’s rare to find a situation where the tooling being used can be analyzed in such stark terms. Which musical epiphanes are the most essential for our students, and which musical tools are the most impactful on their future success as musical practitioners? The metaphor of physical tools to musical tools is an apt one. Musical tools give you leverage over the domain of music. And in the same way that one could mistakenly attempt to dig a hole with a fork, so too can a musical tool be misused. Using the wrong tool is one thing, but using a tool that is altogether poorly contrived, is another. Experienced musicians, who should know better, continue to pass down inadequate musical models and tools without sufficient criticality. What are the criteria for deciding which tools and models should be taught? Why aren’t today’s musical institutions adjusting their curriculum after decades of abject failure? Is it possible that we have developed a case of learned helplessness? Have we become content little frogs who are in denial about being boiled? Is it our goal to teach the curriculum by rote as passed down to us or is it our goal to enrich the musical lives of our students to the greatest extent possible?

What’s Wrong with The Curriculum?

A good curriculum should empower the average student to become a proficient musical practitioner. The current curriculum fails all but the most excellent students, most of whom would have figured it out on their own anyway. Can any teacher today truly say that any of their average students are proficient? If we define proficiency in terms of being able to do basic formal analysis and basic harmonic analysis on a given piece of music, it seems to me that less than five percent of students could meet that exceptionally low bar. An adequate definition of musical proficiency would drop that five percent figure to absolute zero. Even among the excellent students, almost none of them can be described as being musically proficient. Do they know figured bass? Do they understand counterpoint? Can they hear functional harmony? The answer to these and many more questions is, sadly, no. One of the reasons for this lack of skill is that the curriculum is overtly hostile to the student’s ability to develop musical proficiency. Large swathes of the curriculum are unabashedly incorrect, and other segments are teaching things that are completely irrelevant to musical proficiency. The three fundamentals of music are dissonance, cadence, and appoggiatura. Not only do modern sources fail to place the proper emphasis on the three most important elements of music, but they define all three of them them incorrectly! A common theme that runs through these inaccuracies in the curriculum is the curse of verticality. Vertical chords are incorrectly emphasized when counterpoint should dominate the discussion. There is an impedance mismatch between the inherent contrapuntal quality of common practice music and our attempt to analyze it vertically. This abundance of musical variety can be reduced to simple principles instead of having to memorize every possible variant by rote.

When Did It Go Wrong?

Interestingly enough, there are numerous older resources that are completely correct, or at least they are very close to being correct. The first obvious example of this is the thoroughbass portion of the CPE Bach’s Essay on the True Art of Keyboard Playing. We know that CPE’s book is correct because he says he had no other teacher except for his father J.S. Bach. And we know that many great composers were highly influenced either by CPE Bach directly or through CPE’s book. His book covers dissonances and appoggiaturas extremely thoroughly and the principles derived from his book can bear most of the weight of our musical curriculum. Walter Piston in the third edition of his harmony textbook correctly defines appoggiatura as an unprepared dissonance that resolves. But Piston’s harmony text fails to give the proper emphasis to the appoggiatura as a contrapuntal entity that can be elaborated. In my opinion, Arnold Schoenberg is the biggest offender when it comes to misdefining dissonance. Instead of defining the dissonance as a contrapuntal entity that exists in musical time between two musical lines. He and many others after him mistakenly define dissonance as some innate property of an interval itself and that dissonance has some basis in nature. The philosophizing of Schoenberg really doesn’t matter all that much, you can think about it however you want, but the main problem is that by his definition, dissonance loses its basis as a musical fact and becomes a mere suggestion. When students today are asked to define what dissonance is, they start waiving their hands about gradations of tension or something like that. This has nothing to do with musical reality. When two musical lines are sounding together on the beat and they constitute a dissonant interval, then one of those lines contains a dissonant note at that moment. The figures in figured bass correspond to dissonances. If there are no figures all of the harmonies are consonant. When studying figured bass you are learning all of the different kinds of dissonances that can be applied to a simple bass movement.

Putting It Together

If you know where to look, and who to trust, you can reconstruct musical practice as described by CPE Bach. All that is required is to drop the current definitions of dissonance, cadence, and appoggiatura, and redefine them correctly as contrapuntal entities. After the renaissance, cadences no longer occur pair-wise where multiple pairs of voices cadence either separately or together. The renaissance approach to cadences loses prominence because music became more instrumental and less vocal as time went on. And the natural pairing of text and cadences eventually loses favor to the modern version of cadence assumed to be between outer voices only. If we take this modernized version of the renaissance cadences we can then recombine them with what we learned from CPE Bach and have a fully reconstructed musical practice. All that is required after understanding these three elements of music is to add first species counterpoint between the soprano and bass and fill in the remaining notes according to whatever figure you choose. You can then freely add elaborations in the same manner as J.S. Bach when he adds passing notes and other flourishes to his chorales. Successfully understanding Bach’s musical model and harmonizing a Bach chorale in accordance with the above principles can rightly be called an adequate demonstration of musical proficiency.