I've always regarded music as something that is always surrounding us. On this windy day the trees were alive with music and therefore alive with literacy. In the musical world this is a controversial subject and many composers have put out a tape recorder to record people talking, the wind blowing, the ac unit running and looped it in specific ways to make a form that they call a piece of music. For me, this is not music, but if it is for somebody else, more power to them. I will teach the subject of 'chance music' and the way that technology made its way into the musical realm through Reich's, 'Its Gonna Rain,' but I will let my students decide on whether or not they want to deem the topic as music. Music is a subject that has thousands of rules to follow. If a student is 'illiterate' on a rule they risk the possibility of not being able to learn thereafter the rest of the rules. The truly frustrating part about music however is that with all these rules... YOU CAN BREAK THEM AND DO WHATEVER YOU WANT!!! It's frustrating for a student to learn all the rules and to then have to just forget about them and realize that the past years of learning and studying music theory really can just be boiled down to a few simple concepts and the rest they can do however they want. To me literacy in music can also be at the composer's discretion. They get to choose how they write and what they write, if they want to follow the rules or not. On the windy day I took this picture I thought of Reich and how he decided to go against all the rules and created a whole new area of literacy in music.
To listen to "It's Gonna Rain" visit the link below and go to the time 2:39 It will give a lot more background on what I'm talking about plus get to listen to the piece of music.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0DQRfm0uL8
Your post makes me think about the idea that you have to know the rules before you can break them--at least intentionally break them. Think of e.e. cummings. I doubt he would be as critically received if he didn't know full well that he was flouting the rules of grammar and punctuation (among other rules) when he wrote poetry. Some random writer who never even knew the standard rules of writing English would have much less substance, less to say, in an unconventionally written poem--how can you be unconventional if you don't know the conventions to begin with?
ReplyDeleteThis is all to say that I understand your frustration, but also your awareness of the necessity of learning the rules of music. I wonder if it's necessary to learn them all, though, before deciding to break with them? Also, your post makes me wonder again about the discipline-specific literacies of music. What do you pay attention to, as a musician, when you read or listen to "texts"? Are you listening to see which rules are followed and broken? And how does your answer to this question influence the way you're thinking about what your future students will need to know to read the world of music?