The role of music theory in professional music education, a historic overview [Snapshot from dev system - 2022-12-06 14:40]
In the 19th century, we can observe a growing gap between what we call now music theoretical books and the development of music. As Robert Wason writes in his overview of “Musica practica: music theory as pedagogy”: “These [19th century harmony] books are symptomatic of the dearth of new ideas, and the irrelevance that pedagogical theory was falling into: (…) neither a theory nor a pedagogy of ‘Nineteenth -Century Harmony’ ever really seemed to get under way.” In this research, I try to unravel possible aspects that have a relation to this problem. One of these aspects has to do with the fact that a lot of what we call music theory origins from a compositional practice. Therefore, at the end of this research, I also made a start to describe music theoretical training that has no origin in this compositional practice. This exposition is still in progress.
Author: Patrick van Deurzen
