Music education and artistic freedom

I primarily engaged with three kinds of musical things at Berklee- composition, electronic music, and jazz. I always aimed to develop a personal voice, but remained loyal to the idea of getting the fundamentals right, no matter how impersonal it seemed to me. In my earlier semesters, the strict training in fundamentals outweighed exercising my individual expression, and then it flipped over as I approached my later semesters. But when I was eventually given the freedom to make whatever I wanted, I felt mildly disoriented, because I was too used to having instructions which told me exactly what to do.

When I took the last counterpoint requirement for my degree early on in my Berklee journey, I realized that all my counterpoint classes were taught in a very rigid and organized manner and made me produce my most uncontroversial and predictable music. The rules and expectations were very clear- they gave me the instructions, and I ate them and digested them with ease. I didn’t have to think very hard, and there was no soul-searching, so to speak.

I contrasted this experience to how I felt in my advanced composition, jazz, and electronic music courses, which felt very ambiguous. It was even tempting to believe that there was no clear methodology behind the teaching, and although I acquired a lot of knowledge and was left armed with many techniques, figuring out how to apply them to my own craft was left up to me- I had to do a lot of soul-searching by myself.

Ageism as an initial argument

I realized that the kind of counterpoint I was learning about was really old- hundreds of years old. The tonal counterpoint Berklee students learn about goes back to the Baroque era- that’s music from the 1700s. But then I thought of the electronic music I was making in my electronic music courses- that felt very 21st century, or even present-day in many ways. Eventually I realized that the jazz music I liked the most was basically from the 1960s. I started making a mental timeline of all of these different kinds of music to give myself some perspective. Naturally, it follows that the ages of the educational practices surrounding these musical genres would vary too- older genres of music that have remained alive across the centuries use well-established teaching methods, as opposed to newer ones, which may use methods that are in flux even right now.

A common way of teaching counterpoint is to use the species counterpoint method, something that is attributed to 17th/18th century Austrian pedagogue Johann Joseph Fux. I believe composers as ancient as Mozart and Beethoven used the same method to learn counterpoint as Berklee students today. Even though the Berklee textbook on counterpoint was written by a Berklee Composition faculty member, Rick Applin, the book nonetheless used this ancient species counterpoint method. And in a way, the method felt like a foolproof way to learn about counterpoint. I think one reason for that is academia has had hundreds of years to improve it, adjust it to an institution’s as well as its students’ needs, discard what is irrelevant, etc.

So, any educational practice can be birthed by an individual/group of individuals. An institution sees the value of it and decides to pilot it in their educational program. Upon receiving positive feedback from both students and professors, the practice sticks and becomes well integrated at the institution in due course. Eventually, other institutions follow suit and adopt it. Other educational figures may contribute to the development of the educational practice, leading to improvements over time. Hundreds of years later, it remains in use, and emerges as the most dominant, mature, and successful educational practice of its time, which produces consistent and predictable results from students.

wooohoooo!!! love this stuff. cancelling my Prime Video subscription.

Only a hundred years old

Electronic music courses don’t have the same privilege. Education surrounding this music hasn’t existed for hundreds of years, because the music itself is barely a hundred years old; indeed, some of the technologies being taught may literally be less than a year old. In that regard, it is hard to compare something like species counterpoint education to many things in e-music education.

Similar things can be said about traditional jazz and traditional jazz education. While teaching something like traditional jazz harmony is probably nearly as organized as teaching tonal harmony– maybe because it inherits a lot of concepts from it, and thus doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel– there were many other concepts within jazz education that I found somewhat vague and indirect. One that comes to mind is learning how to improvise with chord scales.

good for harmony, probably not for improv...

It is frustrating to see friendly, well-meaning, and expert improvisors talk about how they improvise sometimes. They may start improvising fluidly, and tell the novice student, “look! G Lydian”. They say this because that’s what they heard in jazz school. I also want to say they were too competent from the beginning and never had to learn anything from scratch, and so they never had to critically examine whether “look! G Lydian” was good advice. In reality, as someone who showed up to jazz relatively later in my late teens/early 20s, I think you learn improvisation by learning small (usually transcribed) chunks of musical information in a deliberate fashion, till you can integrate them, and eventually intuit them, in your musical vocabulary- no one taught me this during my novice period. It is incomplete advice to merely mention a scale, which is what a lot of instructors seem to do. They may never even mention voice leading, common melodic patterns, or perhaps the greatest asset to demonstrating a cantabile melodic language- rhythmic vocabulary. Learning about those chord scales, while useful for understanding harmony, proved to be unhelpful for improving my improvisational vocabulary during those initial months. (Side note: By far the best resource I found on learning jazz improv in my early days was Jazz Advice).

It may not be unreasonable then to suggest that one factor for the perceived shortcomings surrounding the education in new music fields could be how young these musical fields are. Indeed, you can often find pretentious people like me, usually with a glass of ginger ale in our hand (not the silly green can but a nice glass), “electronic music sips ginger ale is in its infancy”. Maybe because of said infancy, which electronic music education, and jazz and subsequently jazz education too, can be thought to possess, there is a lot of work to be done in these educational domains, and it may be unrealistic to expect them to have the same kind of 'maturity' as good old counterpoint theory. All of this may impact a student's learning experience, because their confidence and ability to progress is influenced partly by how reliable and trustworthy they think the education they are receiving is.

Originality though

And yet, despite criticizing e-music and jazz education for not having assimilated more organization and stability, I think the music I made in those courses was more personal, unique, and true to me and my tastes, compared to the work I made in my traditional counterpoint courses. With the stringent rules of species and tonal counterpoint, you can at best sound like Bach. The implementation of a narrowly and strictly defined set of instructions, alongside an unambiguous end goal in the form of a canon/invention/fugue, basically inhibits an excess of personality and individualized input.

A lot of Baroque musicians from the Baroque era sound very similar. Even musicians may sometimes have trouble distinguishing between Handel and Telemann. There could be many reasons for this- individuality wasn’t necessarily considered a priority for musicians in that particular cultural/temporal context. They were primarily hired by aristocrats or churches to make music for events or ambient music for their large reverberant spaces.

Music school in those days was probably like a tradesman-type facility, not dissimilar to engineering/economics universities today which produce many competent- but not necessarily very unique- workers who meet certain basic requirements. They were probably just expected to get the job done. In today’s world, a school like Berklee is actually similar- a lot of Berklee students prioritize success in ‘the industry’. It is safe to say most students at the college are probably not prioritizing some kind of extremely personal self-expression but are enlisting in courses that develop skills that may get them hired instead (and that’s totally fair and cool! Friendliness is hard to convey when you are writing hehe. Look, I pursued self-expression instead of industry skills and now I am a blogger!).

The rigidity of the educational philosophies implemented in those courses then, depends on the malleability of the end goal. If you want to train the student to ‘get things right’, and avoid any kind of controversial musical output, then a rigid educational philosophy that is strict and ensures a reliable musical outcome may be appropriate. Counterpoint rules are rigid, because the main goal is seemingly only to expose students to fundamental concepts such as voice-leading, types of motion, voicing harmony satisfactorily despite having fewer voices, handling more sophisticated textures, etc. The goal is not to create your personal contrapuntal idiom, but to learn foundational skills that will be useful in professional contexts. It is probably true that musical textures such as canons/inventions/fugues allow for sophisticated personal expression, but that is usually a superlative goal for most students in counterpoint courses- the basic goal remains to get it right, rather than to be unnecessarily ambitious and reinvent the wheel.

However, if the goal is to promote the student’s own intrinsic creativity, and provide an environment that facilitates self-expression, then a rigid teaching style may not help very much. This is what I hadn’t realized about my later jazz/e-music courses when I accused them of being unorganized- I had conflated disorganization with an openness in the teaching style, the latter of which I was supposed to exploit for my own artistic growth.

my music, and my rules. 😎

I was wrong! Nooooooooo

Believing that jazz and e-music education was, although chock-full of facts and techniques, ultimately unorganized, was a pessimistic way to look at it. In practice, the lack of exacting instructions allowed me to think harder about what I really wanted to make, and the soul-searching that came along with it was integral to my own development. If I was coding in Max/MSP or Csound for instance, then the framework itself was a blank canvas which allowed for more personal expression and accommodated my own quirks. In some sense, I had to make my own rules, because the end musical goal I desired could not have come out of someone else’s strict set of rules imposed upon me. The same can apply to production courses. An instructor could show you various well-established techniques- but in the end you have to accommodate them to your own craft as you see fit.

In jazz too, I don’t think the end goal is to sound like Charlie Parker. Any educational philosophy that produces cookie-cutter sounding jazz would be antagonistic to the spirit of personal expression one expects to find in this amazing, improvised music, at least in my view. In the few advanced jazz courses I was enrolled in, I found that there was a sense of freedom granted to me. I often showed promise of developing a personal voice, and this was always encouraged by my professors, as well as my peers. No one said what I was doing was ‘incorrect’. I made my own stuff up (while meeting course requirements), and that was kind of nice! Because I think I would like to try to develop my own voice rather than regurgitate someone else’s.

In retrospect, not all jazz/e-music courses are open. Many introductory courses are perhaps just as rigid as counterpoint courses, because the goal is to expose the novice student to these concepts in a relatively unadventurous manner so that the student’s fundamentals are strong. An apt analogy might be to compare this to learning what to do with an onion- you might as well learn how to chop, dice, and slice it, before you try to do anything too personal to it. You can try being creative with an onion from the very start, but the preliminary exposure to these basic techniques that everyone knows (and is expected to know) is very helpful. And so, rigid courses, like counterpoint, work well as precursors to more open-ended courses. I remember reading in a book once that suggested that setting tougher constraints on beginners may help them develop quicker.

Apples and Oranges

Comparing counterpoint to jazz and e-music courses was a mistake, because I didn’t consider the nature of all of these musical genres. Older classical styles, jazz, and electronic music are not the same. Much classical music of the past sounds as if a unanimous consensus about aesthetics and musical values was reached, and musicians seemed to agree on what was worth writing- a polite way of saying, “it all sounds the same man”. But electronic music and jazz, being modern and prone to innovation, are in a state of constant development and flux. Additionally, they are very fragmented, and prize individuality too, and so there really isn’t as unanimous of a consensus about what is ‘appropriate’ in these genres- I suppose most students entering these courses already have some kind of edgy opinion by themselves too, which the teacher usually supports.

Both genres also arguably developed more rapidly than classical music did in its own ‘youth’, wherever you perceive that to be. Mozart and Brahms died a hundred years apart, and yet you could arguably find more diversity in Miles Davis’s own work across a 20-year time span. The reasons could be extramusical, such as culture’s role on the affirmation of people’s individuality, the role of music in society, technology, etc., but in any case, in today’s time, it is hard to expect either electronic music or jazz to stagnate.

22-day-old curriculum: the gamepad object in Max was released on 17 Jan 2024. I had an assignment that used this that was due on 8 Feb 2024!

In the case of electronic music, accelerated developments in technology also result in a constantly updating curriculum. I remember an assignment where we used a Max object that was only a few weeks old. That felt pretty cool in a way. In jazz too, you can transcribe and learn from players who are alive and well, and create new things all the time. But the same isn't true if you are writing a tonal canon/invention/fugue, because those practices seem mostly done and dusted as far as what is expected and what can be done.

As much as I enjoyed learning about species/tonal counterpoint and the music associated with it, the practice of writing canons/inventions/fugues is an obscure practice, and it is largely an academic pursuit these days. I remember watching a YouTube tutorial series on counterpoint long ago, and a discouraged Italian man began episode number one with, “I think the artform is dying”. In some ways then, most of what can and will be said about strict tonal counterpoint, has probably already been said, by virtue of both the age and relevance of the art form. Although these courses will no doubt continue to inspire and aid many students in their musical journey, I would not bet on any major updates to counterpoint, or tonal harmony, or even orchestration courses.

What about contemporary classical music?

OOPS! I forgot about my composition major. The composition curriculum at Berklee comprises of two phases- you firstly learn traditional music techniques (species counterpoint belongs here), and then you embark on a contemporary classical music journey. I felt like my education for contemporary music suffered from the exact same criticisms I perceived in e-music and jazz- it wasn’t as organized and direct my counterpoint courses. And the reasons for it are basically the same too- the age of contemporary classical music (let's just say for the sake of argument that it began with Schoenberg) is similar to that of e-music/jazz, and so it is also too young to have produced a mature educational philosophy behind it. But, like jazz and electronic music, and other alive and creative art forms, it is also fragmented enough to a point where a rote set of instructions may be counterintuitive to the constantly evolving and open-ended nature of the music.

phase number 1: traditional music techniques: do what you are told.

Fall 2020.

In contemporary classical music, there are many different aesthetics and movements, so many different techniques you could ‘choose’ from. Perhaps the best you can do, given a limited amount of time, is to expose students to multiple different methods and let them choose what they like best on their own. In the end, like with electronic/jazz musicians, developing a personal voice is the student’s responsibility.

Indeed, an elective course I took, "20th and 21st century counterpoint", was like that. I was presented with a buffet of counterpoint techniques, and in the end, I was supposed to make sense of all of it on my own. There was no singular, unambiguous solution to being a 20th/21st century contrapuntist, and so I was expected to work something out on my own. The end result, unsurprisingly, was something personal.

phase no 2: you are shown what can be done, and asked, "what do you want to do?". Fall 2023.

"CP350 represent💖"!

Shoutout to my professors

In both e-music and jazz courses, whenever I received helpful instruction, which was actually most of the time in my later years, it was thanks to the quirks of my own instructors. They were either motivated enough to organize the material for the students to an exceptional degree, or particularly good at diagnosing my musical problems, or had good taste and thus exposed me to things that eventually influenced me. Like the student seeking to develop a personal and individual voice, the instructor too, in a poetic and symbiotic way, usually had their own personal and individual teaching style.

The way I view those professors is that they were really good maps showed me the general vicinity of things, but it was up to me to explore the territory on my own. In contrast, those rote instructions about species counterpoint felt like a driving instructor telling me exactly where to go, what to do, and how to do it. These instructions were way more precise because they were decided for me, and it's fun for a while. But after you learn enough fundamentals and get jaded with training wheels, it becomes natural to prefer the former type of exploration- get a map and explore things on your own- because it lets you discover many things in a more personal way. Random anecdote from before I had realized this- I once asked my EPD professor what I should compose, to which he responded, "that's like saying, 'suggest a girlfriend 😊 👉👈'".

Those preliminary educational experiences like counterpoint can be thought of as handholding- you are like a baby and enter knowing nothing and require methodical explanations and organized education. Those later, more open-ended educational experiences on the other hand can be thought of as handshakes. You are now something formidable, someone mature, and you just have to put yourself out there, chat with your professors, get what you can from them and their unique expertise, and learn from others keeping your own personal, self-driven goals in mind. You have to find your girlfriend yourself.

umm... close enough analogy I guess

They say never begin a conclusion with "In conclusion,"

I can be criticized for being oblivious to various confounding factors in this post. Firstly, I am assuming that my aptitude for counterpoint, e-music, and jazz music is the same- differences in my ability to succeed in any of these likely vary. And so, I maybe subconsciously deflected the blame onto the education styles rather than my own limits. Secondly, my educational experience in all these three was unequal- jazz music wasn’t my major, so maybe I am oblivious to some things that happen within it. So sorry! Lastly, maybe the kinds of educational philosophies I encountered, and the subsequent opinions I formed about them, were left entirely to chance in some sense because I only worked with a limited number of professors. Maybe it is unreasonable to represent an entire type of music education based on my limited experiences.

But, in conclusion, the rigidity of an educational practice then is likely to be influenced by, alongside its own age and the nature of the music it tries to teach, the nature of the end goal. Is the goal to have the student produce a reliable, predictable product that is unlikely to arouse controversy? To train the student to get comfortable with fundamentals? Then it would be best to give them an organized and rigid set of instructions. On the other hand, if the goal is to have to student embrace their own individuality and develop their personal creativity, then an openness in educational style may feel less constrictive for the student and may be far more conducive in producing unique outcomes.

Developing a personal voice is no doubt a lifelong journey. It often thrives better once you acknowledge history, the environment, your teachers, your friends, etc. My undergraduate experience gives me great satisfaction, because it was the right kind of balance between being an obedient student and learning from tradition, and being an adventurous explorer who obeys only his own compass. Thanks for reading.