Together with Adam Bell, I’m planning some in-depth writing about the phenomenon of pop musicians (like me) teaching in formal, classically-oriented institutional settings. This post is a loosely organized collection of relevant thoughts.
What even is “pop music?”
As far as the music academy is concerned, all music except classical or folk is “popular.” People who make bluegrass or death metal or underground hip-hop might be surprised to learn that their wildly unpopular music is referred to this way. In the past few decades, jazz has moved out of the “popular” column and into the “art” column. I myself have made a small amount of actual pop music, but for the past few years have mostly been involved in the production of artsy electronica.
How classical musicians learn: an absurd oversimplification
Classical musicians learn The Western Canon by performing and analyzing scores. The defining instrument of this music is the piano. All vocalists and instrumentalists are expected to be able to think in pianistic terms. Students are part of a pyramid-shaped hierarchical structure with long-dead composers at the top, followed by long-dead music theorists, followed by living music theorists and conductors and academics, and so on down to the individual section player. There is a contingent of living composers whose role in the hierarchy is confused at the moment. Most student composers are expected to operate within a tightly bounded tradition, whether that’s common-practice tonality or one of the various schools of modernism. The analysis of large-scale structure happens only at the very advanced level, if ever. Recordings are something of an afterthought.
Jeanne Bamberger divides musical concepts into three levels of complexity:
Classical people start at the bottom and work their way up. Pop musicians, as we’ll see, start in the middle and work their way up, and only sometimes down.
How pop musicians learn: an equally absurd oversimplification
Pop musicians learn from the vast, amorphous ocean of songs from many eras and genres. They learn this music by ear from recordings, in informal peer-to-peer settings, or from dubiously accurate tablature on the internet. While there are plenty of pop keyboardists, the music was guitar-centric from the sixties until about the nineties. Guitarists start by learning chords, but not their functions. They then learn the pentatonic scale and/or the blues scale. If they go on to learn other scales, they do it by adding notes to the pentatonic box. While keyboardists do tend to read music, guitarists and singers tend not to. They only learn the full scope of chord-scale theory, functional harmony and voice leading if they are very advanced, or if they pursue jazz or classical. At that point, they usually enter into formal training.
In the past few decades, the guitar has been pushed out of its central place in pop music by the computer, the sampler (which is also a computer), and the DJ deck (which increasingly is just a control surface for the computer.) Electronic musicians know even less formal music theory than guitarists, and are usually operating one hundred percent by ear, by trial and error, and through study of recordings. The importance of recordings in contemporary pop can not be overstated. Most of the music exists in no other meaningful form. Electronic musicians use recordings as a major source of raw material, from samples of individual snare drum hits up to remixes of entire albums.
Pop is notoriously simplistic and formulaic in its harmonic and melodic content. Hip-hop often has no harmonic content at all. Pop rhythms are Afrocentric and syncopation-heavy, but extremely repetitive. Most of the creativity in pop lies in the manipulation of timbre and space.
Naturally, the widely different conceptions of music held by the classical and pop worlds leads to widely differing pedagogical philosophies. Entering into grad school, these are the things I would have expected any music major at such a high level to know:
- The major scale and its accompanying common chord progressions and modes. Same for the various minor scales, pentatonics, and blues. Common combinations of the above: e.g. major plus blues.
- Rhythms: rock, folk, country, dance, funk, hip-hop, Afro-Cuban.
- Songwriting: conventions of the above styles.
- Improvisation: freeform/textural; rhythmic; melodic; basic jazz.
- Music tech: recording, MIDI, use of loops and samples.
Instead, these are the things that NYU expects their graduate level music majors to know:
- Common-practice tonal theory, voice leading, and figured bass, in excruciating detail. Four-voice chorales, basic counterpoint, and very simple phrases and structures.
- The ability to hear and sing the above musical concepts.
- The history of Western European aristocratic art music from the 1500s to the present; twentieth century avant-garde and academic experimental music; maybe Duke Ellington and a few token jazz musicians.
I would treat all of the above as requirements only for classical performance, composition, and theory majors; they would be elective for everyone else. The harmonic preferences of upper-class Austrians in the 1700s are quite different from the harmonic preferences of the bulk of Americans in the 2000s. We still like diatonic harmony, but not to the exclusion of all else. We’ve incorporated a massive body of African harmonic practice known as the blues, as well as ideas from every other corner of the earth. Pop musicians tend to come away from academic music theory feeling baffled by its seeming irrelevance; I was no exception.
What this particular pop musician brings to the table
I have spent a lot of time performing, which is great preparation for teaching. If you can hold the attention of a bunch of drunken strangers in a bar, then you can hold the attention of a bunch of groggy undergrads in a classroom. Since I myself was a relentlessly skeptical and anti-authoritarian music student, I expect the same attitude from my students. I expect to have to be interesting and relevant, and use the height of my students’ eyelids as a gauge to see how well I’m doing at it.
Electronic music production has also been spectacularly good training to run a music classroom. It has instilled in me a fervent belief in the power of the remix. I can best critique and inspire student work by remixing it; and I can foster a genuine community of practice among my students by having them remix each other. The remix raises difficult and essential questions about authorship, ownership, and originality, questions that are germane to any form of music. There’s a political side to the remix as well. I believe that musicians in 2014 have not only a right, but a positive obligation, to make active use of the artifacts of our culture. I believe that there is no meaningful musical expression that doesn’t acknowledge the ocean of media we’re all immersed in. I realize that copyright law is an obstacle to the remix-centric approach to music-making. Widespread civil disobedience by musicians is the best solution to that problem.
Some stories from the trenches
There’s an NYU professor who I like and admire. She has a PhD in music and conducts cutting-edge research on it. In the course of a discussion with her, it emerged that she had never heard of the blues scale. I named the pitches, and she played on the little keyboard she had in her office. She thought it was neat. I was horrified that it was the first time she had ever encountered it.
An advanced electronic music production student at Montclair State was working on a remix of a Marvin Gaye song. He wrote a synth string part, and was dissatisfied with it. We opened it up in the sequencer, and figured out the problem: he was using correct voice leading. His harmonization would have sounded great with real strings, but on the synth it sounded non-idiomatic and awkward. We replaced the chords with a bunch of droning parallel fourths and fifths and it sounded way better.
My intro to music tech students at Montclair were highly resistant to the idea of producing their own pop tracks at first. They were reluctant to play their work in progress for me, and even more so to play it for the rest of the class. This was in spite of the fact that their tracks ranged in quality from pretty good to incredibly good. It makes sense, they’re all musicians, they have good instincts. But they either had no experience coming up with their own ideas, or they were used to being relentlessly criticized by their composition teachers. (The conspicuous exceptions were a rock musician and a jazz musician.) The class quickly warmed up to the assignment, and by the end of the semester I was having to chase them out of the room at the end of class. But their anxiety and self-doubt was heartbreaking.
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great post.
I’m classically trained (I do recognize a blues progression when i hear it though) so i would like to hear more of your insights into the forms, styles and methods of pop music — your observation that “most of the creativity in pop lies in the manipulation of timbre and space”, for example, was very interesting.
To me the compositional technique of most pop and esp. rock/blues seems to based on noodling on a guitar and is directly the result of the tuning of the instrument and the ease with which a beginner can learn a few chords. The fact that many popular songs have been written by teams (mostly duos) of songwriters to me seems to corroborate my noodling theory — but I am very interested to learn if there are common practices, disciplines, methods, etc that have been used and transferred over time.
I have to add that I’m a little surprised to hear that pop musicians are baffled by the relevance of “academic” music theory to their music. If you wanted to teach a pop musician about the theory of his craft, what would you teach other than what is offered in any freshman theory course? (all right, you can skip the figured bass and species counterpoint).
In classical music, melody is the crucial avenue for expression, and everything else is there to support it. In pop, rhythm, timbre, and space are the crucial avenues for expression. Melody and harmony are mostly there to signpost where you are in the beat, if they’re present at all. There are plenty of hip-hop songs with no melody and little to no harmony. Classical music thinks about timbre in certain ways — through orchestration and expressive articulation. But fundamentally, an oboe is going to sound like an oboe. In pop, you have complete freedom over the sonic content of every instrument. You can make a synth sound like literally anything, and through studio technique you can make anything sound like anything else, in any imaginary spatial environment. With all of this timbral and spatial possibility, you need to keep other elements simple and predictable or the listener will be totally overwhelmed. This is why the most sonically adventurous music (hip-hop and EDM) is the most repetitive and formally constrained.
There are as many compositional techniques in rock and pop as there are songwriters. That said, your picture of the beginner guitarist permuting the easy-to-play chords is dated, and hasn’t been the dominant songwriting method in many decades. The recording medium itself has been the major songwriting tool since the 1980s. You come up with a beat and then record improvisation over it, either with audio or MIDI or both. Then you edit your improvisation into a shape, improvise against that, edit some more, and so on. There is no “writing” happening most of the time — the improvisation, recording and editing are all the same act, and the recording is the only meaningful form that the song ever takes. Hip-hop and EDM artists pioneered this method, but at this point it’s quite ordinary for pop songwriters to arrive in the recording studio with no material prepared at all.
Euroclassical music theory is missing a lot of key information that a pop musician needs to function in the world. The biggest hole is traditional theory’s disregard for the musical norms of the African diaspora. Black music is a much more salient influence on pop than European music. Afrocentric music does not revolve around the cadence; you can go a long time listening to pop and never hear a V-I. (If you listen to hip-hop stations, you can go a long time without hearing harmonic movement at all.) Voice leading is unimportant, and in some stylistic situations, positively wrong — parallel fourths and fifths are essential not just to rock, but to a lot of other pop styles. Tritones don’t have to resolve. In fact, it’s usually better if they don’t. The flat seventh is used in major-tonality melodies more frequently than the leading tone, even on top of V7 chords. The major/minor binary frequently doesn’t even apply; blues-based music freely mixes major and minor or eschews thirds altogether. While some pop music uses strict diatonicism and functional harmony, it’s usually the lamer, more vanilla styles, like Disney musicals. And even there, the blues pops up fairly regularly. Furthermore, Africa isn’t the only stream feeding into global pop; the modes and drones of Asia and India are major influences too.
It isn’t just the music theory that’s irrelevant to pop musicians, though. It’s an entire musical value system. Classical musicians usually can’t improvise. Pop musicians have to be able to. Classical musicians read notation. Pop musicians generally don’t, and often can’t. Classical musicians study recordings infrequently. For pop musicians, recordings are the first, last and usually only learning resource. Classical music is systematic and rule-driven; pop is made by informally trained or totally naive musicians operating by trial and error. Classical music is linear; pop is cyclical. Classical is meant to be the expression of a lone genius; pop emerges out of a giant shared memepool. The list goes on.
I learned very little in music school that was of direct value to me as a musician. (Though it has been useful as an academic.) My mission as an educator is to fill some of the yawning gaps in the standard curriculum.
That section on how each group learns is brilliant and so true.