Swift & Change Able

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    The Song Remains The Same

    01/25/09

    The Song Remains The Same

    Permalink 06:28:09 am, Categories: Announcements [A]
    Yesterday, while watching the movie "Straight No Chaser," Clint Eastwood’s excellent documentary on the life and music of Thelonious Monk, we got curious about Monk’s brief stint as a student at the Juilliard School of Music.

    While reading the wiki entry on Juilliard, we came across this snippet on William Schuman who was President of Juilliard at a turning point in the school’s history and was a student there after Monk’s brief enrollment.

    This sounded uncannily reminiscent of current debates around education: 

    William Schuman graduated from Columbia’s Teachers College (BS-1935, MA-1937) and attended the Juilliard Summer School in 1932, 1933 and 1936.

    While attending Juilliard Summer School, he developed a personal distaste for traditional music theory and ear training curricula, finding little value in counterpoint and dictation. 

    Shortly after being selected as President of The Juilliard School in 1945, William Schuman created a new curriculum called "The Literature and Materials of Music" (L&M) designed to be taught by composers. L&M was Schuman’s reaction against more formal theory and ear training, and as a result did not contain a formal structure. 

    The broad mandate was "to give the student an awareness of the dynamic nature of the materials of music." The quality and depth of each student’s education in harmony, music history or ear training was dependent on how each composer-teacher decided to interpret this mandate. 

    Many questioned the quality of L&M as an approach to teach the fundamentals of music theory, ear training and history.  

    A lack of structure may be just perfect for musical geniuses like Monk and Schuman. But the fact that L & M seems to have, to say the least, faded as an instructional approach may mean that some fundamentals and lot of structure are just what those of us at the sub-genius level need, at least as a foundation for later, more free floating explorations. 
     
    Update:
     
    Ken DeRosa is thinking along the same lines: here.
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