A Mismatch in Music

A large fraction of my life as a professional musician involves teaching at the postsecondary level. I teach courses that examine the logic of harmony and form: how notes come together to form chords, how chords interact to build phrases of music, and how phrases combine to make up larger musical structures. I teach courses in counterpoint, which is the study of the intricate interplay of single lines of music. I also teach individual lessons in music composition, which is the most individually expressive aspect of musical creation.

But one class that I teach—Introduction to Music—is qualitatively different from all the rest. In it, we cover the most basic aspects of notated music: note values, major and minor keys, intervals and their proper labelling, rests and beamed notes and their groupings, time signatures and their implications, and on from there.

Although I work hard to make the subject matter engaging, many students in this class face a degree of frustration that is absent from their other courses. The classical education paradigm is helpful in explaining both why the course is necessary (as the basis for more advanced musical study) and why it is uniquely frustrating for first-year university students.

The classical paradigm wisely divides a child’s learning into three stages, which we label as Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. The genius of the classical model is that the stages of a child’s natural development map convincingly onto these three stages of learning. When children are in the Grammar stage (up until about Grade 4), they are sponges for information and easily absorb facts, such as rules for spelling or elements of the construction of a narrative. When they are in the Logic stage (from about Grade 5 to Grade 8), they begin to think more abstractly, such as questioning the motivation of characters in a story and grasping the rules of formal logic. When they arrive at the Rhetoric stage in their high school years, their natural desire for self-expression can soar because their grasp of basic information (grammar) and the interplay of ideas (logic) gives them the tools they need for forming and communicating their original thinking.

While this model applies to language arts (with its rules of grammar and logic a necessary prerequisite to any creative application) and to other linguistically driven subjects (e.g., history, philosophy, and Bible), it is also true that every discipline has its three stages. Grammar is not just the rules of English but the basic information that must be present in order to dive deeply into any subject. Logic is how the pieces fit together. Rhetoric is making an original contribution to the field—but one that presupposes the prior knowledge of the relevant grammar and logic.

The process of developing a deep understanding of music depends on a similar tripartite pattern of knowledge. The grammar of music means grasping such basic details as keys and scales, rhythms and time signatures, notes and rests, and so on. The logic of music means understanding not merely how chords are formed by combining multiple notes but how those chords behave in a particular musical context. (For example, a cadence is a special progression of two chords that signals the end of a phrase. The chords used are quite limited and follow severely prescribed patterns across a wide variety of musical styles.) Rhetoric in music—which is any form of capable and convincing self-expression within the art—depends on a flawless grasp of musical grammar and personal insight into its logic.

So, the classical tripartite model is as relevant to education in music as it is to education in language. Unfortunately, it is rare that any child studying music has mastered its grammar by Grade 4. Thus, a common source of frustration among those studying music lies in the fact that they are stuck memorizing musical basics at a stage in life when their natural predisposition would prefer to be engaged in studies of logic and rhetoric.

The students in my Introduction to Music course are generally about eighteen years old. Yet the content of the course requires them to memorize facts and rules that children up to the age of about nine learn easily. In the vast majority of their other courses, they can dive into the logic of the discipline almost immediately and often engage productively in rhetorical applications soon thereafter. But in Introduction to Music, they have to endure a course in basic musical grammar.¹. This mismatch of developmental stage and the content of musical education is present even in Canada’s venerable Royal Conservatory of Music curriculum. The RCM has been providing commonly accepted benchmarks in musical education for well over a hundred years. The written components of their graded system are still teaching Grammar (they even call it Rudiments!) up to Grade 8. (A serious music student would typically be working on Grade 8 material in their early teens.)

Bringing the content of musical education into line with our children’s developmental stage would require devoting enormously greater amounts of time and discipline to musical education than we currently do. I do not necessarily advocate for such an increase but recognize that parents who value musical education often send their children for private musical instruction outside of school hours.² Intriguingly, the system of elementary musical education in Hungary often does give music a level of emphasis that strives to match the content of musical education with its appropriate stage in childhood development. The tradition of high standards in Hungarian musical education have been exceptional among European nations for a century or more.

Still, it makes sense for classical Christian music educators to teach the basic grammar of the field with enthusiasm (and without embarrassment), rather than skipping over essentials to jump to an under-resourced “self-expression” lacking in the fundamentals of grammar and logic. We must acknowledge the mismatch of content and developmental stage and do our best to keep instruction in grammar interesting, even if it comes in later grades.

I conclude by acknowledging that every specialist is fond of advocating for the greater importance of his or her own specialty. Guilty as charged. But Christians would do well to remember the prominent place given to music throughout Biblical worship. In an age when so much of our music lacks the logic of the music that has survived since past ages (and when so many prominent popular musicians lack even basic musical grammar), the need for a distinctively classical Christian approach to musical education that serves the Church has never been greater.