I wrote:
At Indiana University they kept drubbing into me "It's a MAY-SURE, not a bar!"
John Howell replied:
Well, I never ran into that at I.U. (in grad school), and neither did my wife (as an undergrad). I suspect that it was one particular professor or A.I. who had that particular bug up his ... well, you know where! That, unfortunately, can happen.
Composition was my doctoral major, but theory was the minor. (I'll never know why they always pair these two subjects. It is a barely concealed secret that they don't get along all that well.)
Anyway, during the 80's the theory department was fairly strict about its terminology. I guess they were trying to build their status in the music theory world. I didn't mind. In fact I was glad to shed all vestiges of the tired, old Royal Toronto Conservatory system that we still have in Canada.
Composers could be just as prickly. I'll never forget my composition professor once exasperating, "That's not a chord! It's a sonority!" (The idea being that "chords" are reserved for major, minor, augmented, diminished and their extensions.)
And I'm pretty sure that when we talked about tonality, we were juxtaposing it against atonality. Anything with a tonal center (or centers) was in the tonal camp. Functional tonality was a subset of that. Atonality stood proudly against such "outdated" ways of making music. (Boulez still talks like that.)
It wasn't until recently, on this list, that Andrew Stiller convinced me that such a nomenclature was absurd.
----Randolph Peters _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
