On Thinking By Ear: isaacgreene.com
@isaacgreene I always spent fifteen minutes of class getting my public speaking students to think about Jean-Luc Nancy’s maxim, “Sonority is time and meaning.”
I think everything you’re saying is part of a broader pedagogical divorce between “rote memorization” and “critical thinking”: the two are wholly unrelated; the former is bad, the latter is good. Memorization is viewed as useless given our quick information access. But knowledge of the real world is essential to critical thinking, and that must be retained in memory. Sitting in four years of Cambridge academic seminars showed over and again how the two are of a piece. After hearing someone’s argument, no one ever pointed out some logical fallacy. It was almost always that someone would bring up another piece of historical evidence that might throw a wrench into the works. For example, I remember three senior scholars having something like the following exchange:
James: How does your view fit with the Soreg Inscription that speaks of a dedication by “those who were formerly Jews”?
Mark (the presenter): Yes, I’m familiar with the inscription—I don’t think I have very formed thoughts on it.
Simon: Isn’t the Greek hoi pote Ioudaioi?
(and off they go)
It is the sort of conversation that cannot happen unless people know the text of some (to me, rather obscure) historical material. You can’t evaluate arguments through a half-dozen “critical thinking” principles. And you cannot simply Google for the sort of information that throws a wrench in the works without knowing that information. I think Neil Postman argues that every subject should be taught as history—which kind of gets at this as well (most subjects anyway).
@JudsonGreene I think there are two factors here: data collection (info holdings) and mode of analysis. I’m proposing the main form of data gathering in music should be by listening to it, and it’s the primary mode of analysis as well (after a thorough acquaintance with the sound of a piece, the score can be a useful visual for organizing it).
Trying to analyze a score without aural understanding of the piece might be a lot like showing up to a seminar without having done the reading. You won’t be much help to the discussion.
James Lang (in Small Teaching) points out that a common misunderstanding of blooms taxonomy is that data gathering is a beginner stage of learning that should be moved past, which is why a lot of educational models basically skip it. What it really is is the foundation of higher levels of thought and they cannot happen without it. More facts = more thinking.
@isaacgreene That makes sense. There can even be the same misunderstanding from a pop level schema of classical Ed. As though you stopped memorizing after Grammar (though I don’t think that’s usually done in practice).
I think your point about how written scores vindicates Music in the face of STEM is really interesting/correct. Sight in Western philosophy is often viewed as the highest of the senses (starting with Plato, frequent encomiums to sight in Greco-Roman philosophy). Hearing took second place and other senses were lower down. (Coleridge would later argue for touch as the primary sense, which I tend toward). Our knowledge words tend to revolve around sight (“looking into it,” “insightful,” “visionary”). No one has an “ear for detail.” I definitely felt in music theory that the “real” analysis is done on the page.