Forgive me lord for I have sinned. I started discourse.
A few days ago, Ethan Hein, a recent Ph.D. graduate in music education from NYU, tweeted this:
For reasons that will become apparent in this essay, I took significant issue with the way Ethan is framing his discussion of music theory. I responded to Ethan on Twitter, but like a fire in the jungle, things spread faster than I could handle. Here is my response thread which also links to the general discourse around the tweet (https://twitter.com/vcmusictheory/status/1664273869862227972). The Twitter discourse has gotten too far out of hand for me to fully collect and express my thoughts, whereas the long form medium better allows for a more centered and focused statement. This essay thus serves as a more detailed and nuanced response to Ethan than Twitter allows. In this essay, I will specifically explain why I think Ethan’s definitions of what music theory classes are designed to teach, misunderstands the basic point of a musical theoretical education. Due to his poor framing, I argue that while Ethan is obviously well-intentioned, his lack of nuance becomes problematic in his appraisal of the current state of the field.
To begin, I think we should discuss who Ethan is. As mentioned above, he has a PhD from NYU in music ed, but that doesn’t probe the issue deep enough. Ethan, from what I understand (and I have never talked to Ethan personally, but have interacted with him multiple times on Twitter), is a blues/jazz/pop guitarist who went back to graduate school sometime in his 30s for music tech. Like many music programs, he had to take some courses on music theory and history. The NYU programs on history and theory focused heavily on Western Art music, in a manner that, fairly, annoyed Ethan. Ethan is correct in his critique, the oversaturation of Western Art music in music departments is an obvious shortcoming. However, it is a shortcoming for two reasons, and I don’t feel confident that Ethan properly understands this multiplicity. First, musicians should be well-rounded, they should know things about multiple genres of music. I think this is an obvious statement that doesn’t require much justification. Second, every genre of music comes with epistemic and ontological assumptions (consider the differences between the work concept in classical music versus jazz), and learning about new musics and music cultures helps alleviate developing large blind spots due to these assumptions. Although points one and two are deeply intertwined there are some subtle, but important, differences between the two. While I believe Ethan would accept this statement, I don’t think his appraisal of the field of music theory fully accounts for the ways that music theory helps deal with the second rationale.
Ethan handled his frustration by choosing to switch fields from music tech (a generally more STEM-like field) to Music Education (a much more humanistic discipline), with a strong resentment for the European centric view of music pedagogy (again, good). Much of his research focuses on ways to integrate forms of Black popular music (jazz, blues, funk) into music education. Ethan, again correctly, believes that Black musics should be placed on par with music of the Western canon.
Ethan is a prominent tweeter, he has lots of followers and has tweeted over one hundred thousand times (this is not a critique, as any such critique would be the pot calling the kettle black). Ethan’s relationship to other members on music theory twitter (especially theory professors and graduate students) can be dicey at best. Often, Ethan will make sweeping claims about the state of theory, and numerous theorists will respond “that’s not a good description of the goals or state of the field.” Ethan will often retort back, but seems to have not convinced any of his critics (myself included) that he has actually understood their rebuttals or why they feel his critiques don’t do what he thinks they do. Ethan tends to add gasoline to the fire because despite his misunderstandings of the field, he also tends to antagonize theory pedagogues by suggesting they do a poor job of teaching. These interactions repeat ad infinitum until every party gets bored. I think this is a prime example of why Twitter is not a good medium to engage with Ethan, but longform posts are. I would like to spend the rest of this essay exploring one such point of Ethan’s dismals of the field, specifically his frustrations with Stephen Laitz’s The Complete Musician.
Given Ethan’s frustrations with the pedagogic plan of the theory department at NYU, it makes sense that the field of music theory would draw Ethan’s ire. While at NYU, the faculty used Stephen Laitz’s The Complete Musician, a theory textbook that focuses nearly exclusively on Western Tonal music, as the basis for their theory curriculum. Ethan rightly points out that Laitz’s title contradicts the scope of his work (a complete musician would know much more than just Western tonal music), and bases his critique of music theory pedagogy on this paradox. To Ethan, music theory as an academic discipline with its rather large stranglehold on the undergraduate curriculum at many schools (most schools require at least 4, if not more, theory classes to graduate for all majors) is a failure because it presumes a universalness of Western art music.
Ethan’s claim is true, but does require some qualification. Even in the preface of The Complete Musician, Laitz readily admits that his musical scope is rather limited to tonal music written before 1910. He states “The same simple processes underlie all tonal music. However, they are fleshed out in wondrously diverse ways. Contemporary music— works written after c. 1910 to the present— share very few consistent underlying principles, but rather must be approached on a piece- by- piece basis.” (xxvii) Admittedly, I think Laitz’s framing of the issue is poor. After all, plenty of musicians wrote tonal music after 1910, and many of those musics do not operate under the rules and guidelines that Laitz describes (I think Ethan would agree with me on this). Similarly, there are syntaxes in “contemporary” musics, both in popular and art that are systematic in ways that are repeatable and to some degree every work of music treats tonality in a unique manner. Every work of music is both derivative and unique. Laitz’s theory text is insufficient at best at engaging with this paradox.
Having also used The Complete Musician during my undergraduate theory sequence, I also shared Ethan’s frustrations with the book. Past its singular reference to “Giant Steps,” I, the young and opinionated jazz major, was unconvinced about what learning counterpoint had to do with my musical upbringing. I didn’t give a damn about Bach, and while I knew Milt Jackson loved JSB, I didn’t see the need to study him. This was not me being a close minded jazz musician. I wasn’t only listening to jazz, I was listening to all sorts of musics, none of which seemed amenable to the rules and regulations that Laitz put forward in his textbook. Ethan and I’s critiques of the book were nearly identical: Laitz’s focus on the Western canon blinds him to being useful towards my education as a musician.
However, I don’t think that Laitz would necessarily agree with my framing of his pedagogic goal nor do I agree with it now that I’m a decade older (and probably wiser). This is beyond the fact that I like Bach now. While to some degree, I don’t think Laitz will ever beat the charge that his textbook is only good if one wants to study Western Art music, the final paragraph in the “Underlying Goals” section of his preface (where you would find my earlier quote) suggests something much grander and less specific than my or Ethan’s critique would suggest. In closing this section, Laitz’s states that:
“The book’s user-friendly and multitiered analytical approach stresses the distinction between description (i.e., labeling a given sonority according to its scale degree relation to the tonic using roman numerals and figured bass) and interpretive analysis (i.e., exploring the metric- rhythmic placement, spacing, voicing, duration, texture and possible motivic context of a sonority in order to determine its function). Interpretive analysis draws heavily on the students’ musical instincts and experiences. Students should be given significant responsibility to discover that successfully negotiating an exercise depends more on a series of well- supported musical decisions than on “yes” or “no” answers. The students’ roles as active participants— whose opinions matter— are central to the spirit of this text.” (xxviii)
For all the talk about parallel 5ths, the T-PD-D-T phrase model, or misidentified medial caesuras (a.k.a. the commonly chided “rules” of Western music theory), it doesn’t seem like Laitz really cares about students having a firm grasp on those subjects. Obviously, he does want students to learn the norms of Western Art music. However, I think the deeper underlying goal is focused on developing student’s abilities to create a concrete vocabulary to describe the phenomenological experience of listening to music. When I teach theory classes, I tell students that the goal of music theory is to communicate what you are hearing to other people and the study of music theory is about learning habits that facilitate the development of said vocabulary. This definition requires some nuance. It involves discussions of enculturation, or repetition, of philosophy, of semiotics, of politics, of millions of things.
These are the epistemic and ontological considerations one must take into account when they describe a piece of music. And to be clear, I don’t think Laitz has a monopoly on this, I think nearly every theorist in America would say the exact same thing. My goal for when students leave my class is not that they have skills x, y, and z, but rather that they have a methodological approach for how they could accumulate skills x, y, and z. I would teach them how to fish, but I’m a vegetarian.
Consider a cadential six-four chord. There is an obvious tension between the fact that the first part of the measure contains all of the notes of the tonic chord, but that they (usually) fall to the notes of the dominant chord. Plenty of ink has been shed on arguing to label the chord as a I chord or a V chord. I have no desire to actually consider which label is better, but I do want to spend this space to consider what perceptions factor into such decisions. When debating these two choices, students have to confront musical properties such as the normative succession of pitches, the expectations that come from being encultured into functionally tonal music, the fact that the cadential six-four almost always falls on a metrically accented beat, the fact that the tonic and dominant serve as fundamental polls for tonality (and the way that reflects the Enlightenment culture in which modern tonality formed/the Romantic desire to overcome said culture), the feeling of downard propulsion in a suspension, the relationship between counterpoint and harmony, the way it feels to play these chords on a piano versus singing them in a choir, what theorists of the time thought of these chords, and plenty of other considerations.
Likely some readers took a journey in the preceding paragraph. The opening sentence suggests a simple descriptive label (a cadential six-four), however, lurking in the background of that concept was actually a deep, probing, interpretive question. Does Laitz really care about knowing how to label a six-four chord? To some degree, yes. But his pedagogical goal is for students to develop trust in their capacities to comprehend the much deeper issues that arise when deciding “is this a I or a V chord?”
When presented this way, Ethan’s tweet looks rather silly. Ethan claims that: “Something I never heard mentioned in any music theory class is the role that repetition plays in creating musical meaning and harmonic function. Absolutely anything will start sounding good and "correct" if you repeat it over a nice groove.” Is Ethan not asking questions about “exploring the metric- rhythmic placement, spacing, voicing, duration, texture and possible motivic context of a sonority in order to determine its function” in his hypothetical loop (he later clarified that he was talking about a Wu-Tang song)?
While Laitz’s textbook certainly provides no answers for how Ethan would analyze a Wu-Tang song, that fails to understand Laitz’s framing of theory. Consider the terms “solo break” (where the full band will cut out a bar before someone starts their solo so the soloist has room to play a pick-up) versus a caesura fill (where the pause before the secondary theme in a sonata is filled in with a pick-up). Obviously these are similar terms, they describe a pause before the start of a new formal section that features a soloist playing an extended pick-up. If a classical musician who has read Laitz and other parts of classical theory scholarship was dropped into a jazz club tonight, they might even call a “solo break” a “caesura fill.” They would be wrong, but only on the level of descriptive vocabulary. They clearly would be making an interpretative decision about what a solo break does, how its harmonic, metric, rhythmic, thematic, melodic properties engender a certain conclusion about how they listened to it. I would suggest that their interpretive process was good, even if the descriptive conclusion was poor.
But theory classes are fundamentally about interpretative processes more than descriptive results. It’s the same reason math teachers want you to show your work, I want to make sure you are thinking about these issues deeply, more so than you getting the right answer. Laitz explicitly says so, that’s why “The students’ roles as active participants— whose opinions matter— are central to the spirit of this text.” When Laitz describes the process of making an interpretive decision about labeling something a cadential six-four, he does not do so because he just wants a student what a six-four chord is. He does so because he wants students to learn what process can be used to arrive at an analytic conclusion.
In understanding analysis this way, I think I show how the seeds of modern theory pedagogy are better equipped to handle blues harmony than Ethan thinks they are. Ethan seems upset that a wholistic approach to Laitz’s theory would result in the hypothetical classical musician’s bad description, while not acknowledging that Laitz’s methods got them through the hard part. It’s overly dismissive.
Before I continue this argument, this is not to say that reading the Laitz means someone understands the blues, nor does it mean that we should just teach classical music and students will just get the blues, or any similarly ridiculous conservative approach towards music education. It just means that we can take the methodology in Laitz’s text and form a relatively coherent picture of the blues.
Let’s say I transcribe a million 12-bar blues. For the sake of simplicity we will ignore Robert Johnson’s metric complexities, 8, 10, 14, 16 forms of the blues, songs with embedded blues structures, etc. We are just talking about day 1, no frills, meat and potatoes blues. I will likely figure out the AAB structure of the blues. What are some of the interpretive choices that lead me to this AAB conclusion? Well, I think about the meter, that they are generally split into three four bar phrases (something that Laitz thinks we should be concerned with). I will also notice that the first four bars are usually highly similar to the next four bars. So that’s a motivic development (again something Laitz thinks we should be conscious about). I would also observe that there is a stark contrast between the final four bars and the two iterations of the first four bars (creating a sort of syntax that Laitz would want me to observe). I would notice that the fifth bar almost always features a harmony that is a perfect fourth higher than the first harmony (something Laitz asks us to take into consideration when making an interpretive decision) and that the penultimate bar (measure 11) is nearly always the same chord that starts the cycle (more stuff Laitz wants us to observe). I would also probably realize that the melody in the 11th bar usually ends on the root note of the chord that starts the cycle (again something that Laitz would suggest should guide my interpretative act). I would also learn the way that the first two measures of the final four bars create an energy that really leads into the chord in measure 11, creating a sort of drive towards that chord (again, let Laitz cook). I would probably feel some sensation that the whole form revolves around that note (hey, maybe this Laitz guy has some knowledge about music and a complete dismissal of his work oversteps its boundaries).
Is this interpretive process not what Ethan used to when he makes the claim “dominant chords function as tonic in blues?” Is this wildly different from the blues terminology of “statement-restatement-response?” This doesn’t seem that different from learning the blues on its own terms? It sure as hell seems like I can take the raw materials Laitz suggests and come to something resembling blues theory. Obviously, this is not a full account of the blues and there are plenty of other distinctions that can be made, and certainly the social context of the blues as a form of African-American aesthetics is critical, but the formal theoretical insights are not that far off.
I argued earlier in this essay that the more important aspect of a diverse rep is that it forces students into engaging with new epistemic and ontological assumptions. The above vignette of the blues is an example of that. What is not, is a dismissal of the theoretical model Laitz (who is symbolic of music theory generally) puts forward. By studying the blues through Laitz we get something similar to what blues musicians think. There are certainly complications with that statement (especially as it relates to the regressive construction of the academy), but it’s not as off base as Ethan implies it is.
Again, this isn’t saying that we should tell Chuck Berry to roll over and tell B.B. King the news. I am not appointing Dr. Laitz the revival of Robert Johnson’s soul. I’m just suggesting that bass assumptions of Latiz’s theoretical and pedagogical goals are designed to help students understand the blues if they are willing to think critically about the genre. Obviously, the way theory classes have been taught, who they have been taught by, and the greater politics of high art in the academy have complicated this issue, but it does cause Ethan’s critiques of the field to ring hollow. The theory class that he so fundamentally rejected is not asking him to speak French in Russian, it is asking him to think about how he would learn French or how he would learn Russian.
Ethan, perhaps more than anyone else, is forcefully committed to reminding people of the importance of a diverse music theory curriculum, but his misunderstandings and critiques of the field are poorly formed and framed. It seems like Ethan would be happy to have classes that state “in the blues dominant chords can be tonic chords,” a true statement, but one that rings as a hollow descriptor. If a student comes away from Ethan’s theory class understanding the multiplicity of function of dominant chords in various musics (Mozart, Debussy, James Brown) but no insight into the pedagogical justification for why they are able to come to that conclusion, then I’m not convinced they are better prepared to actually deal with the blues in the real world than a student who is fully committed to Laitz’s analytic framework, but has never heard a #9 chord in their life.
For what it’s worth, I think Ethan likely agrees with me, but refuses to acknowledge that music theory classes are designed the way they are to solve this issue. Theory classes, practically, can’t teach everything. In fact, they hardly teach anything. Four classes is nowhere near enough time to teach jazz, pop, the canon, the blues, flamenco, etc. It’s not enough time to teach one of those genres. It is enough time to form good analytic habits though. I think Ethan would do well to acknowledge that aspect of music theory, as it helps explain why the “gotcha” questions he asks aren’t really all that clever, they are methodological considerations that are part of the practical reality of a theory curriculum. If I could teach everything I know about music to students, I would, but I have to teach a system. I think if Ethan understood that, he, and his suggested changes (which I think are mostly good), would be welcomed into the theory field far more than he is, but I do not believe theorists have any responsibility to engage with him if he refuses to interact with music theory as a much more complicated discipline than it is.
Some other notes that I am willing to expand on if people would like/arguments Ethan makes that are bad. I wrote this essay in about three hours, so it is a bit unpublished, I wrote this section even faster, these are not fully fleshed out ideas
Ethan’s critiques of Eurocentricism vs the Blues are underdeveloped/a bit essentializing and/or otherizing. Ethan is fine saying the blues uses dominant chords, I, IV, V harmonies, and is tonal, but somehow those terms aren’t Western???? The fact that Ethan will use Roman numerals to analyze the blues already undermines his contention that Western theory provides no framework towards understanding the Blues on its own terms. There is a real and large gap between Eurocentric theory and Blues theory, but to suggest they have no overlaps, similarities, or joint influences simplifies a very complicated matter. I’m kinda shocked to hear that Ethan wants to understand blues on his own terms but also uses terms that were coined in France and Germany two hundred years before the blues were even a thing.
People need to learn what an appeal to authority fallacy is. Many people rejected the fact that people with PhDs in music theory told Ethan that just because he has a PhD in music ed, that doesn’t mean he understands music theory. Although the theorists provide evidence for why Ethan’s claims didn’t hold weight, some people claimed that the mentioning of the respective fields of each PhD was an appeal to authority fallacy. That’s not what an appeal to authority fallacy is. Consider these two statements: Donald Trump, who is president, says we don’t need to mask and Anthony Faucci, the leading immunologist in the country, says we should. The second statement is not an appeal to authority because Faucci’s expertise logically implies that he would understand how viruses are transmuted. The reason he has become the leading immunologist is due to the knowledge he has on the subject. However, becoming president requires no knowledge about immunology. By stating Donald Trump understands immunology because he is president is a logical fallacy since the fact he is president does not have anything to do with his knowledge of viruses. When one claims there is an appeal to authority they are suggesting either that a person does not have the credentials required to speak on a subject or that the expertise that they claim as grounding for their argument is not sufficient to speak on the subject. Ethan makes an appeal to authority fallacy when he says “I’m a music ed scholar, so I know what happens in music theory,” when a music theorist says “no I’m a music theorist, you are wrong” that is not the appeal to authority fallacy, it is a justifiable logical statement. This should not be read as me saying that just because someone has a degree in a subject that their word is true, but it does mean you cannot critique their credentials as a sign of intellectual shortcoming. In the later case of “I’m a music theorist,” there is an implicit “and because of my training/research, I know this to not be the case.” Twitter does not allow for much exploration of the latter part of that sentence, but it is something to keep in mind when invoking the “appeal to authority fallacy”
I think Ethan sometimes resorts to “the card says moops” arguments. This is a reference to an episode of Sinfield, where the gang plays Trivial Pursuit, and Jerry is asked “Who invaded Spain.” Jerry responds “The Moors,” but George retorts back “the card says moops.” Suddenly, the argument shifts from what is the right answer (the Moors invaded Spain) to a pedantic discussion that only exists to continue discussion (“the card says moops”). Responding to Ethan is often frustrating because he slips and slides out of arguments like someone who can’t decide what to wear before a night out. He will jump around points in ways that are infinitely frustrating, and it is an argumentative tactic that is very prevalent on the internet and should be avoided. This is why I think Ethan needs a more rigid definition of music theory.
There is a much deeper question about the “look at me, I’m so not racist” aspects of discussing music theory on twitter (and I admit to also being guilty of this). Sometimes the performative aspects of Twitter cause people to really want to show how much they care about things that aren’t in the canon, and while those beliefs are almost always well intentioned, it does seem like folks want the focus to be on the fact that they make that statement far more than they care about the content of that statement. I don’t think Ethan is the only person who does this (nor do I think he is the most egregious example of it), but I do think part of the reason these conversations spiraled out of control was because Ethan wants to protect his “brand.” Ethan has a large audience of non-specialists who often share his frustrations (and in my opinion, his lack of nuance) towards what academic studies of music theory should be. Although these people (randos in our mentions) are mostly well-intentioned, the attention economy around them on matters that are not about personal moral beliefs (you aren’t good for being anti-racist, that’s like when women compliment me on asking if I can kiss them, it is a standard, not an exception), does raise an issue of stolen valor. Do you care about change or do you care about being as seen as the force of change?
Ethan complains that students have misconceptions of music. This isn’t really a complaint, students misunderstand things all the time. Is that really a failure of pedagogues? Lots of professional musicians probably couldn’t correctly spell an Eb half-diminished chord (Eb-Gb-Bbb-Db). While pedagogues deserve some blame, so do students, and so do a whole host of other factors. The fact Ethan seems convinced that random people on Reddit or 20 year old music majors don’t know everything about music theory means that music theory pedagogy is bad is far overstepping its ground and clearly unfair to theory pedagogues. I’m sure Ethan’s students misunderstand plenty of things he says. It’s not because he is a bad teacher, that’s just kinda how education works.
Classical music theory isn’t simple, Ethan has only digested a very simple version of it. In chess there is a famous saying “theory and practice are the same in theory, not in practice.” What this means is that there are general guidelines for how we learn to play music (or chess), there are basic theoretic adages that will hold true (dominant chords will resolve up a fourth), but when you actually go look at what Mozart does, it’s much more complicated than than a simple rule. Really, try and analyze a Haydn development section with Roman numerals, it doesn’t make sense, they’re weird. The blues aren’t simple either. Knowing what BB King does on “The Thrill is Gone” doesn’t really do that much towards explaining Bill Evan’s choices on “All Blues.” To really get in deep into the blues, or Galant music, or serialism, or hyperpop, or Hindustani music requires one to really develop interpretative skills and that’s what Laitz wants. Music is weird, and maybe there’s a pedagogical reason for presenting simplified versions upfront, not because the music is simple, but because it helps students develop good habits.
There have been accusations that Ethan is purposely playing ignorant so that theorists will tweet scholarship at him, because he is apparently writing a theory textbook (I hope he does not write a textbook without seriously engaging with the field in a much deeper manner than he has). I don’t think these allegations are true, but if they are, then good lord.
I would suggest that I think Ethan went into music ed with some hope he would have more say about university level theory curriculums, but it is rather odd for music ed faculty to have much input on the theory side of things expect for some areas (ie the choice of which solfege system to use). In my experience, the two fields, for better or worse, are pretty separated. I think Ethan is somewhat upset about this, but this is all conjecture on my end.