I am required, in my first semester of grad school, to take the unremarkably titled “DMA Topics 1.” This is, in essence, a music theory class meant to prepare us for our first doctoral exam. At its most basic, it’s a survey of largely tonal analysis to review those facets we may have expunged from our post-teen brains, homogenize methodology and fill in the gaps in our various backgrounds. In short, to encourage our fluency and critical thinking in analysis so that we can more properly use theory in our future dissertations.
I’m doing fine - in fact, I’m doing well - but I also constantly feel that I’m falling short. The score analyses and accompanying essays I have to turn in weekly are always slapdash and largely uninspired, if essentially accurate. They don’t really need to be anything more than this, but I don’t relish authoring the passable work of an intelligent and competent doctoral first year. Even worse than the guilt of giving too little time and attention to a task is the constant, nagging feeling that I’m not capable of anything better. I can’t call myself bad at theory in the way many musicians averse to it do - it’s the subject often akin to math or grammar in the music school set, invoking a visceral allergy and sighing declarations of “Oh, I can’t do theory” - but I fear I’m uninspired, and uninspiring. I don’t feel fluent and generative. As someone who does love grammar, this is a terrible letdown: when thinking and talking about language, I have the enthusiasm and curiosity to synthesize meaningful insight. I see beyond a topical layer of purpose and usage. I’m able to be inventive and malleable, which also makes me a good teacher: I can explain language beyond a series of rules.
There are few things important to me with which I don’t feel the sort of easy comfort that leads to a productive processing, be it the ability to improvise a recipe from having tasted a dish or to make connections in intellectual concepts outside of my field. But while I must be a good musician, I’m loath to admit it, especially to myself. Too many chips have collected on my shoulders over the years, many around the damning fact that I’m a singer, the butt of most conservatory jokes about intelligence and musical competence. Beyond this, it’s always seemed to me that I have a less “organic” or perhaps rounded relationship to music than people around me, that I’ve too often thought of it at a sort of Cartesian remove. I spent my entire undergraduate theory career excelling in harmonic dictations by following the logical rules of chord progressions and voice leading rather than really listening to the examples I was meant to be translating from sound to page. I seesaw between fearing I’m overly myopic - I don’t find sight-reading with piano accompaniment easier, for instance, and I usually do better in the vacuum of the solo solfège I learnt as a little French child - or too broad. I’ve always fretted that I don’t listen deeply enough. (1)
I realize that I’m explaining a series of contradictions. If I was once so comfortable with the rules of tonal and post-tonal theory that I could avoid truly listening to passages I was meant to transcribe, surely my analytical skills aren’t in such a state of shambles. But I contest that this cold adherence is precisely my weakness. Idioms aren’t fluency, and rules without a deeper, meaningful understanding are easily forgotten or overlooked. I can recognize the syntax of music, but it doesn’t seem like a natural extension of myself. (This is also why I’ve never had any desire to compose.) I feel the difference bodily. When I start to read a piece of literature or critical writing, I’m an undulating litter otter; when I take on the analysis of a piece of music, I’m merely a competent swimmer.
“Competent” is the key word here. As I said, I’m doing fine. But is it too much to ask to be staggeringly interesting? (You decide to what degree I’m being ironic here.) I will also mention the disclaimer that, yes, we’re allowed to have different relationships to music. I am aware, for instance, that I have a much deeper and easier connection to words in pieces that have text than many instrumentalists do, and many singers, for that matter. Thanks to a broad knowledge base, I intuitively place music within a larger historical and cultural framework. I sing very well. I realize I’ve got my assets.
These, I remind myself, have been cultivated. Because the thing I mustn’t overlook in my hand-wringing about my inadequacy is that the bulk of genius is interest, practice and experience. There’s a sort of magical alchemy that occurs when someone demonstrates a particularly inspired set of abilities, and that can render their skill mysterious and opaque to the outside. It leads us to think in binary terms: yes you are good at something/no you are not (choose one). But, to return to language, “understanding” the concepts of grammar is generally the result of knowing a huge number of examples. When your data set is small and incomplete, it looks like the behavior of language is ever-changing and confounding. Conversely, when you’ve got a great bulk of information, patterns begin to emerge. Of course, there are obvious limitations to this “simple” solution: we aren’t actually all the same. Even in a purely intellectual subject (is there really such a thing?), physical realities (environment, disability, time...) have a massive impact on learning. So, no, I’m not saying I can practice my way to any goal if I just want it enough. But I certainly have the resources, interest and proclivity to develop a more holistic and inspired approach to musical analysis. If I want.
This was not a deliberate reference to Pauline Oliveros, but then it became not not a deliberate reference to Pauline Oliveros.
Love your writing, Sophie!