At 11:43 PM -0500 5/15/07, Randolph Peters wrote:
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.)
The mindset seems to be that you have to know all the rules before
you can be allowed to compose, or maybe before you can be allowed to
break them! A more practical reason is that when you hit the job
market, every music department needs theory teachers, and nobody can
earn a living as a composer without selling out and writing music
people actually like!!
Susie was an (undergrad) composition major in the late '60s and '70s.
Tom Beversdorf was her mentor, and she worked with Orego-Salas,
Bernard Heiden, and thankfully never with John Eaton. Her
compositions are tonal (but expanded) and she writes melodies, very
nice, singable ones. Which of course put her at odds with the rest
of the comp majors, all boys, all wildly experimental.
I learned my theory from my mother, who got her terminology from
Murphy and Stringham at Columbia Teachers College in the '40s. My
undergrad theory was a joke, but I wasn't allowed to test out of it.
And I aced the grad entrance exam in theory. Consequently I've never
studied 20th century theory, and don't miss it at all!! (But I'm an
arranger, not a composer.)
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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