Music Composition: A New Method of Harmony (Classic Reprint)

DuK iNG the past few years we have seen the beginning of a reactionary period in the art creations and in the teaching of, the arts and sciences. At such a time, it is to be expected that there will be extremists such as we see among the creators of some of our futuristic products of art and music; but this upheaval is encouraging to those who have seen the futility of many of our pedagogical methods. Modem psychologists and educators have abandoned the old ways of teaching the method of starting every student, regardless of age and personality with the rudiments of the mechanism of the subject at hand. It has come to be recognized that very few persons are endowed with sufficient enthusiasm to bridge over this irksome, sometimes almost unintelligible, period of study to the time when, somewhat enlightened, they can appreciate and enter into the attractiveness of the subject. One of the most conspicuous examples of the old order in pedagogy is in music composition. For fear that a student would make grammatical errors, the subject has been taught by a series of rules ingeniously made by academicians a series of donts which too often inhibited all spontaneity in the student. Instead of allowing the student to express himself, and guiding him in his self expression, the old method gave the student his set of rules, and woe to him who disobeyed them whether or not, in so doing, the result was artistic. This indirect method of teaching harmony consists of giving the construction of chords and formulating rules according to their grammatically correct progression one to another. Usually a bass part is given and the student writes the chords above the bass. The inevitable result is a mechanical correctness in which the student who is mathematically inclined will be infinitely more successful than the one who is musically inclined. The student writes chain after ch
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)