What is music? Conversations with faculty in the IU Music Theory Department yield suggestive responses:

“More precise than words, music is an electrocardiogram of our emotional lives and experiences.”

“It is a window to other things, to a kind of expressivity that takes you places.”

Speculations on the question “What is music?” are nothing new. They go back at least 2,500 years to the philosophers of ancient Greece. Pythagoras was among the first known to make such inquiries. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, music was one of the subjects that formed the basis of a classical education.

Professor Robert Hatten explores a musical score with student Min-Jung Koh

“Music theory” is what we now call the field devoted to understanding the building blocks and structures of music—its chords, keys, melodic ideas, formal processes, and rhythmic patterns—and interpreting what they mean.

Yet, despite its illustrious past, Jacobs School of Music (JSoM) Associate Professor Frank Samarotto confesses, “I often get blank stares when I tell people I’m a music theorist.”

Not surprising, perhaps. Even within the academic world, music theory has not previously had a high profile. In the U.S., it formally established itself as a separate discipline just 30 years ago. As Mary Wennerstrom, associate dean for instruction at the Jacobs School explains, in its more modern history, since the 19th century, it has been considered an offshoot of musicology. It was not until 1977, with the creation of the Society for Music Theory, that music theory gained a professional identity distinct from that of musicology, with its own goals and ideas, its own academic integrity.

Music theory has advanced, however, since those days 30 years ago, as well. Before then, says Wennerstrom, many music theory classes consisted mainly of analyzing Bach chorales. “You did part-writing and filled in chords. You looked at abstract concepts applied to short passages isolated from the pieces they were taken from and their historical context.” Music theory has blossomed since the 60s and 70s to encompass a wide range of
periods and musical genres, including jazz, non-Western, and popular music, the comprehensive study of whole pieces, and a variety of new methodologies and innovative approaches to music.

The JSoM music theory department has been at the forefront of this emerging identity from the earliest days. It had one of the first music theory Ph.D. programs in the country and was among the first to make innovations in the curriculum away from the Bach chorale model that were of lasting influence in the field. Its first Ph.D. student graduated in 1951. Nearly 150 have followed since. Wennerstrom, who joined the faculty in 1964 and chaired the department for over 20 years before becoming associate dean, herself played a major role in shaping music theory pedagogy at IU and in the U.S. generally. It is a role for which she was recognized in 2006 with the Gail Boyd de Stwolinski Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Music Theory Teaching and Scholarship.

All 10 of its current faculty members are involved in the department’s expansive teaching mission: to build the foundations of music literacy for the Jacobs School’s 750 undergraduates and cultivate more advanced skills in the 900 performers, composers, music educators, historians, and theorists in its graduate programs.

Professor Eric Isaacson, Chair of Music Theory

The IU program is unique in its breadth and depth. As department chair Eric Isaacson explains, “We have an equal commitment to both undergraduate and graduate students. I suspect that ours is a more rigorous program for undergraduates than any other school in terms of the number of courses and the amount of material covered. And our graduate program is among the top programs in the country.”

More than many, the IU Music Theory Department demands that each faculty member has a wide range of musical, theoretical, and pedagogical skills. “It’s a challenge when we hire people,” says Wenner-strom. “They have to be good teachers, performers, and researchers, with all the practical ear-training and sight-singing skills. Many of us are performers, and we connect with performance.”

Cultivating Music Literacy

Professor Robert Hatten

“To make the sound of music and the sight of music one and the same,” is how Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Gary Potter neatly describes the purpose of the basic skills he teaches undergraduates. Isaacson elaborates on the idea of basic music literacy. Theory, he suggests, gives musicians “the ability to think and listen critically to music and a vocabulary to talk about it in a way that will make students more professionally versatile, flexible, and broadly knowledgeable musicians.”

From the basics of naming what you hear, to the more elaborate tools, methods, and techniques for interpreting music, theory cultivates music literacy from the ground up. As Samarotto explains, its purpose is “to open up the interpretive possibilities, enable us to hear more deeply into a piece, change the way we listen, and change our experience of the music.”

Or as Professor Robert Hatten suggests, “We’re constantly increasing our own competencies in musical language. Working in a dialectic that spirals upward, between studying the music and working on theory, you begin to notice more and more about a piece. Even the most subtle gestures can have the richest meaning, and the music comes alive.” In various ways, each faculty member expands our capacity to hear and understand the language and syntax of music.

Rhythm, Repetition, and Rap

Gretchen Horlacher puts a spotlight on music and temporality. “Theory,” she notes “has often been more concerned with pitch. But in the past 20 to 30 years there have been efforts to build up the temporal portion, to explain that it’s not just about what pitches are sounding, but when and how.”

Professor Gretchen Horlacher

Her work centers on the early 20th century when “as patterns of pitch are breaking down, so are patterns of counting.” By looking at Stravinsky’s compositional methods, the topic of her book-in-progress, she asks questions about this process. “How can we account for strong feelings to count when musical patterns are not regular anymore? How much can our counting be interrupted before it is no longer valid?” she asks.

“If irregularity only threw you off,” she observes, “it would be annoying. But we can also enjoy this process of being played with. It’s an aesthetic experience where events you don’t expect can be interesting and important and that as we encounter the chaos, we can take pleasure in getting back on track and carrying on. We keep trying to find our place. And that’s the kind of game that’s being played.”

“It’s a huge joke,” she concludes, “especially when you consider that Stravinsky was writing primarily for dancers. How is it that he plays the game well enough that we don’t just give up?” Stravinsky’s pieces, she suggests, are put together in such a way that they are repetitive and predictable, while also being surprising and dramatic: “They suggest moving forward and staying in the same place at the same time.”

Professor Roman Ivanovitch

According to Roman Ivanovitch, a similar tension between repetition and forward movement was played out two centuries earlier in Mozart. In variations, he explains, “which go over the same stretch of music many times in different ways, the impulse to do something again and again interacts with an impulse that simply wants to get from ‘a’ to ‘b.’”

At stake in Ivanovitch’s work is “the relationship between art and craft. A lot of spots in a work,” he explains, “are merely functional. If you look at the retransitions, for example, which set up the return in a sonata form, this was part of the workaday thing for 18th-century composers. There was a mercantile, everyday aspect to this. Yet, how is it that Mozart can take the same feature, dress it up, and make it the most gorgeous thing you’ve ever heard?”
Nevertheless, to develop a theory around such acts of display and virtuosity, the task Ivanovitch has undertaken, presents a unique challenge.

Associate Professor Kyle Adams

Fast forward to Eminem, rewind to Palestrina. Kyle Adams, the newest member of the department, pushes the limits of mainstream theory by studying music traditionally outside its scope. “From an analytical point of view, we know what things to look for in Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven, and there are universally accepted methods for understanding them. But for music of the 16th and 17th centuries there really aren’t. It’s the same with pop music.”

The challenge in 16th- and 17th-century music is “to take the music on its own terms rather than apply concepts we use today. In this way, you learn to hear the music a little differently.”

When it comes to rap, Adams notes that while much has been written on the topic, most of it focuses on the lyrics, the culture, and socio-economic status of rappers, rather than on the music itself. In his own work and the undergraduate elective course he is teaching, he is determined to “address rap as more than a sociological phenomenon. If you look at songs by classical composers, you ask certain questions: How does the music support the text? How does the music fit together melodically, rhythmically? How is it designed?”

To those who question the legitimacy of scholarly inquiry into popular music, Adams says, “I’m convinced that you can’t talk about quality in terms of an entire genre of music. I don’t think there’s an entire genre that’s not good, and I try to be open to that fact—whether in rap, country, jazz, R&B, or classical.”

Geometric Configurations

Associate Professor Frank Samarotto

And yet, according to Samarotto, you might want to get the disco version of Beethoven’s 5th out of your head, if you want to understand that symphony. “And if you can,” he contends, “you can say it’s an amazing experiment in kind, the kind of stop and start of the turbulence of rapid motion and moments of peace that are in conflict with each other. There are ways to get at some-thing inside the piece….”

To get at that “something,” Samarotto adopts a Schenkerian approach, the method of the German theorist, Heinrich Schenker, living in late 19th - and early 20th-century Vienna, roughly around the time of Freud. Like Freud, he explains, Schenker sought to “uncover a structure beneath the surface of things. He saw the masterworks of tonal music as living organisms that evolve organically. Pieces develop from simple principles and grow into ever deeper structures that we hear in all their details.”

Schenkerian interpretations take the form of musical notation which draws on the notes in a piece and reworks them to say something about what the music is doing. It’s a method that enables you, Samarotto suggests, “to get at the score, to get at something inside the piece and divest yourself of associations that may or may not be intrinsic to the piece.”

Associate Professor Julian Hook

If Samarotto sees interpretation as a movement from the outside in, Hatten’s semiotic approach traces the contours of the surface itself, “the irreducible significance of the surface, the deep structure of the surface,” as he calls it. And rather than divesting a piece of its associations, he seeks to draw out that larger context of associations embedded in a piece.

Like many others in the department, among them Horlacher, Julian Hook, Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, Wennerstrom, and Adams, Hatten began his musical career as a pianist. “I was so curious,” he recalls, “about so many things that had to do with interpretation that were discussed in the studio, but not in the classroom because we didn’t have theories to go with that level of interpretation. Most of my theories come from questions I have about the music—how we understand this or have these emotional responses.”

His belief that expressive matters “are not purely subjective but part of a larger context” is what he has devoted his career as a theorist to understanding. It led him to the study of style in Beethoven in his first book and to a theory of musical gesture in his second. As he explains it, “gesture would include not only pitch and rhythmic structures, but also such features as articulation, timing, pacing, tempo, and dynamics, that are sometimes considered expressive add-ons to structure.”

Drawing on the field of semiotics, he suggests that music has its own ways of creating meaning, many of which are analogous to language. Topics, for example, are “the types of music—the marches, chorales, waltzes, and so on—that are imported into a piece but are often used in such subtle ways that they take on their own meanings.” Music can also develop its own metaphors, narrative structures, a passive and active voice, a past, present, and future tense, and a sense of irony, through which it can reflect on itself.

Professor Mary Kielian-Gilbert

While Hatten links the meaning of a piece to an external context of musical conventions, Kielian-Gilbert brings music into connection with the cultural context typically considered beyond music altogether. “Matters of musical structure,” she suggests, “are not simply formal but contain all of the things in our history and experience that matter to us, among them identity, gender, sexuality, and the body. And there are ways of bringing these components together into a theory.”

Taking into account the way aspects of identity, culture, and experience shape music itself and the way we hear it has led her to consider “the contingent nature of listening and analytical observation.”

“In some ways,” she suggests, “I see my work very much akin to philosophy, to exploring questions about how theory impacts your musical thought and listening and how these activities impact the ways you shape theory. Interdisciplinary exchange is important. You can learn from film theory, feminist theory, cognitive science, and biology.”
Not to mention mathematics.

“There have been mathematical approaches to music since the ancient Greeks,” says Hook, “but we’re developing new understandings now that have been elusive for a long time.” A mathematician before he became a pianist and a theorist, Hook explores the ways music navigates through different geometric spaces.

And if the practical skills of theory “make the sound of music and the sight of music one and the same,” so does mathematics. In an article in Science magazine, for example, Hook illustrates the way pieces move through musical space with a graph representing a chord progression from Beethoven’s Violin Sonata, Opus 24. “The progression, which doesn’t make sense in traditional terms, turns out to follow a systematic path through this space.”
Mathematical approaches, he explains, “cut across stylistic and repertoire boundaries” in a way that traditional approaches do not. In music that is more chromatic or atonal, for instance, “it’s possible to come up with some coherent geometric progressions even if you can’t put Roman numerals on the chords in them. In that sense, mathematical spaces are more universal.”

Pedagogical Pursuits

Associate Professor Gary Potter, Director of Undergraduate Studies

Theory, suggests Potter, invests students with a literacy that enables them to cross otherwise impassable borders. As he says, “It lets them be portable. Students come into the program with an idea of what they want to do but often end up doing something else—in music education, a studio orchestra, or the music business. The foundations of literacy let them adapt to the needs of the marketplace or to pursue new interests.”

At the graduate level, learning to teach theory also makes students more marketable. And the IU Music Theory Department provides first-rate preparation for future work as teachers. Courses concentrate on curriculum design and ideas about what is most important to get across in the classroom. The department also has a large pool of 44 graduate teaching assistants every semester whose experience in the classroom is accompanied by close mentoring and supervision.

While Isaacson’s scholarly focus has been on music of Webern and the second Viennese school, he is also an avid proponent and designer of innovative technology that can assist in the teaching of music theory. His efforts led to the formation of a new graduate program in music informatics in the IU School of Informatics, whose course offerings complement those of the Jacobs School’s music information technology minor, which he coordinates.

Isaacson was instrumental in the development of the Variations2 digital music library project, which provides electronic access to nearly 14,000 recordings and a growing number of scores in the William and Gayle Cook Music Library, and provides new ways to use them in teaching, research, and private study. One component of Variations2, called the Lesson Editor, allows an instructor to make “slides” containing timelines, annotated scores, and images, drawing on media resources of the library and use them in the classroom. Another program, Music Fundamentals Online, enables incoming freshman to master entry-level skills and avoid taking a remedial course.

“We’ve been at the forefront in developing technology-based solutions to enhance teaching and learning in music,” he notes.

AssociateDean Mary Wennerstrom

But new technology does not, he insists, replace face-to-face contact in the classroom, as is evident in the daily contact between the faculty and students. Nor does it replace the old technology. Anthologies and textbooks in print still abound. And Wennerstrom
has been producing them.

Engaged in the project that began in the 60s and 70s to expand the curriculum across historical periods and musical genres, Wennerstrom has produced a 20th-century anthology, as well as an anthology of style from Gregorian chant to the present.
And yet, she is also wary of textbooks. “Music theorists,” she observes, “have gotten a bad name for trying to pin everything down. I try to emphasize that you have to be open. Though categories are useful, to me it is more profitable to see what a piece does rather than forcing it into a category.”

As the recipient of the de Stowolinski Prize, she was asked to give a lecture at the University of Oklahoma. “I’d like to get people to think about the futility of labels for every piece. I’m hoping we can teach students to get beyond the idea that everything has to fit into a neat pattern. To me, the whole point of music is to deal with things you can’t pin down in words.”

Insofar as music theory is an attempt to articulate that which is “more precise than words,” her concern hints at why the work of these theorists is so compelling in the
first place. •

For more information on the Music Theory Department at Indiana University, please go to theory.music.indiana.edu.

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