Theory (Conservatory Style)
I have been teaching straight European-style theoretical subjects - harmony, counterpoint, analysis -- for a number of years. Because a few of my students are, at any given time, preparing for Royal Conservatory theory exams (or end up taking them at some point), some of what I teach is addressed to that curriculum. At the RCM, the harmony-etc stuff (after the rudiments level) is broken down into levels 3, 4, & 5, the implication being that it will take three years to finish it.
My direct experience with the RCM system shows that it leaves much to be desired. Without going into detail, my sense is that a lot of what goes on at the RCM and similar schools is entirely too directed towards the short-term preparation of students to pass exams,and not nearly enough towards producing people who are excited about music in general, or who have a sense of what it might mean, in a general way, just to be a musician, period. In my view, the exam business constitutes one of the biggest pedagogical traps in the book. When a teacher's focus is such that exam preparation becomes the sole or principle goal of the lessons, the quality of the training can easily drop through the floor. Yes, it is a two way street: if silly little grades are what the student really cares about, then I guess they just get what they deserve. But why not take up baseball? For the rest of us, just a little something to keep in mind when you are checking out prospective teachers: whenever the topic of exams comes up, proceed with caution. And if it comes up in the first couple of lessons, I advise you to run, and fast.
In 1993-1994, I was asked to teach an introductory harmony course at the RCM, to a class of kids who were enrolled in what was then called the “Pre-College Professional Program” (PCPP for short). What I found was that the students, although they all held the appropriate prerequisite certification, had not been adequately prepared, either in terms of their ears, or in terms of their understanding of basic concepts such as the cycle of fifths, to deal with the subject. It was an alarming situation, since the class was supposedly geared towards an RCM Grade III Harmony exam. In response, I thought long and hard about what they most needed to know, threw some junk overboard, and gradually assembled things into a book format.
Over the intervening years I have continued to use this book, (originally “Basic Harmony -- a survival guide for music students”, now “Basic Harmony: in both private and classroom situations. In its present form (twelve years later, as of this 2005 writing), I am using it during the first five weeks of a harmony course I teach at York University here. I follow it up with Clough & Conley’s “Basic Harmonic Progressions” (Norton) -- a programmed text which suits the circumstances at York much better than the door-stopper megatomes by Aldwell & Schachter, Gauldin, and others.
The main thing that separates my book from most of the harmony texts I have seen is that it is more realistic about where most students are. For one thing, voice-leading and chord progressions, traditionally at the very centre of things, are not introduced until about forty-odd pages in. Up to that point, we are dealing only with the cycle of fifths and an advanced sort of “music rudiments” involving spelling chords, either in the traditional Roman numeral method (which is too abstract to help the ear much) or after the manner of pop music, according to the sound of the chord, as in “D major seventh” (which system addresses the ear more directly).
Currently, this book is about sixty pages long. I’m tinkering with it all the time, but I promise to keep it as short and to the point as possible. For your interest, I have included the table of contents below. I’ve had several requests for this material over the past few years, so I’m relieved that the whole thing is finally available for download. If you are interested in talking about this part of the music theory world, please contact me.
