Creating my course sequence
I wanted to start by looking at a variety of music theory textbooks to decide how to order my lessons. I worked with Mr. Meyer (my faculty advisor) to look through different music theory textbooks’ table of contents and approaches to lessons. He explained the strengths and weaknesses of each book’s approach so that I could try to incorporate different aspects of different books into my own course. One of the hardest things about music theory is that everything is filled with circular definitions—you need to know one thing to know the next thing, but you also kind of need to know the next thing to do the first thing. My challenge was to take in all of these different approaches to teaching a music theory course along with my own experience and opinions about what makes the most sense to create my own sequence. My other key consideration was that most books teach from the standpoint of understanding written classical music (and possibly applying that to contemporary popular genres) whereas my course is hoping to teach a method that applies directly to jazz and other American improvisatory styles. I combined all of those things to create my own sequence.
Where my course is different
The fundamental difference between my course and other courses comes from my background as a musician. As a pianist who has learned almost everything from ear training (as opposed to reading), I think the key to understanding jazz and contemporary American music is understanding it by ear, then transferring it to the staff as opposed to learning what it looks like before you learn what it sounds like. I also think that the keyboard is a significantly more important visual than the staff, and that basic keyboard skills are one of the most important tools for understanding music theory. My course is not to teach people to be pianists, but I think having a mental picture of a piano in your head is one of the best ways to understand music theory and apply it in real-world settings on the bandstand.
The first place I hoped to differentiate myself from other books was rhythm. Rhythm is usually taught in the “fundamentals of music theory”—right at the beginning along with how to read music. However, in my opinion, rhythm is the most important element of music, and it’s also the most intuitive. Our system of writing music is in my opinion terrible for notating rhythm. As music has progressed—particularly in the United States—rhythmic notation has gotten increasingly insufficient for representing how music is supposed to sound. I believe students should understand rhythm as a feel that comes from listening to music as opposed to an overly-academic concept that takes the musicality out of it. Ultimately, the academic side of rhythm is still important, and all students should be able to read rhythm, so I have placed it later in the course, after my focus on harmony, in the later sections that focus more deeply on application of music theory in improvised music.
I have made several other less shocking decisions in how to differ from more standard music theory courses (such as focusing on modes as parallels rather than relatives, or removing inversion notation), but I don’t think it’s worth getting into all that in this post. The general idea is, every decision I made in designing this course was a deliberate and well-thought-out decision about how to learn music theory in a contemporary American context.
Challenges
I’ve run into several obstacles as I’ve worked through creating these lessons.
For one, I’ve realized that some aspects of my course sequence couldn’t hold. Sometimes what I originally thought was a good idea ended up not working because I got to creating a lesson and realized the student would need to understand more concepts first before I could teach that one.
Another obstacle has been creating practice problems. For the fundamentals, musictheory.net has been a great resource for practice problems. They have it set up perfectly for randomly generating new practice problems within the constraints that the user sets. However, musictheory.net only goes through the fundamentals and quickly became not enough. I’ve had a hard time figuring out a solution for creating my own practice problems. I don’t want to do only worksheets, because worksheets are not infinite. Ideally, students should be able to continuously work through new problems until they feel comfortable with the content. I’m still trying to figure out a solution. In some cases, I can use my python skills to create python programs to give infinite practice problems, but that only works for simple problems that involve typing note names (as opposed to visualizations of a staff or a keyboard). I may end up having to use worksheets anyway, even though it’s less than ideal.
The most obvious obstacle is time. Each lesson takes a lot of time to make, and some of it is just formatting my slides. I created slide templates, so it goes faster than it used to, and I’m not doing anything super complicated looking (it’s a keyboard on the top half and concise explanatory text on the bottom). However, manually highlighting the notes I want to highlight takes time. In general, by choosing to make these self-guided slides, it’s more work than just writing a textbook. I have to figure out how to divide information into small chunks to make each slide an incremental progression of the last, and I have to annotate the keyboard on each slide to demonstrate the concepts that I am describing (while choosing the best possible examples for what to display). I’ve found that one method that seems to work well is to explain the general concept in text (with a specific example in parentheses) and then highlight the specific example on the keyboard.
As opposed to a more typical independent study that focuses on research for the vast majority and culminates with a final product, I’ve spent my whole semester developing my final product, discovering solutions and encountering roadblocks.
Where I am
I started with a very ambitious course structure (working all the way from not being able to read music or find notes on a piano to understanding very advanced jazz harmony and being able to apply it in real-world situations).
As of me writing this post, I have made it through the fundamentals into what would likely be considered a beginner to intermediate theory class at a jazz workshop. I am very proud of how far I’ve gotten, and I’ve had several friends work their way through my lessons (all though it takes even longer to learn these lessons than it does to create them, once you factor in all the time it takes to do practice exercises and understand the concepts). The results seem to be great. They seem to find what they’ve gotten through very intuitive and helpful (and accomplishing the goal I hoped—a course that doesn’t skip crucial information). However, it will take months and months before I will have student feedback on even what I’ve gotten through now. In all likelihood, I will not make it to the end of my ambitious course by the end of this semester. I’m hoping to continue working through creating these lessons and have a course that would put people at a strong understanding of nuances of jazz theory.