A Common Practice Elliot Cole (2011) In 1935, Leonid Sabaneev, music critic and early champion of Scriabin, lamented, > “Unfortunately, it has to be admitted that the methods of teaching composition to-day are quite abnormal. Owing to the rupture between theory and practice, so characteristic of our own times, the situation of a teacher who wants to approach the problem of a course in composition thoughtfully and with due consideration is really tragic. Generally, he extricates himself by adopting the methods consecrated by long use and tradition, although their suitability for vital creative work was doubted more than a century ago. He deliberately closes his eyes to the fact that the real musical life strangely and at every turn contradicts all his assertions. And the student, after absorbing all this wisdom, is graciously given the right to forget all about it and compose in his own way (Musical Times, October 1935)” How little the situation has changed in 75 years\! For although curricula have dutifully sprouted appendices on the most handily-summarized highlights of 20th century thinking, and traditional techniques are thoroughly historicized with no pretense at all of universality, the cognitive dissonance for the modern composition student is the same. The traditional tools taught in theory class are unused, even taboo, in private composition lessons, even when they are taught, as often happens, by the same teacher. This disjunction represents a significant loss of opportunity, both for those eager to demonstrate the relevance of the canon and for those moving beyond it. Re-designing the educational environment to re-link these two threads could significantly invigorate a composer’s education. The importance of the traditional tools is sensible and defensible. Tuition must begin with the simple before attempting the complicated. Common-practice harmony is grounded in behaviors of consonance and dissonance that are cognitively real. Most music today is only superficially different from the model music of the past. General compositional principles can be learned from great music in any style. Literacy requires literature. Continuity of tradition is a good in itself. But the common attitude toward private composition is colored by a competing set of values. The contemporary situation – postmodern, globalizing, multicultural – seems to offer only one really reasonable position: artistic pursuits are subjective, style is relative, and value judgments suspect. From the start, students are encouraged to develop an ‘individual voice.’ The unarguable geniality of this sentiment masks the subtleties of what that could actually mean; it contains the semi-mystical implication, for example, of some absolute singularity of personhood from which a personal truth can emerge through the practice of artistic actualization. Conversely, it insinuates that stylistic resemblance to others, use of established tools, or a plurality of personal styles, reveal an artist who ‘does not know who he is’. Even when teachers insist that it is possible to develop objective craft independent of style, this ideal of individuality looms as the ultimate yardstick of achievement. And students, eager to achieve, set out to prove their uniqueness, thinking: ‘I must force myself – to be myself.’ Alan Watts’ 1966 ‘Vedanta pillow-book’ *The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are* unpacks the ludicrousness of that endeavor. The more one self-consciously strains to be ‘authentic’ the more one appears contrived and adolescent. In essence, a community’s “demand for spontaneous behavior” stipulates, as a membership requirement, freedom from membership, putting members in “a double-bind… a game doomed to perpetual self-frustration” (Watts 73). The overt trumpeting of freedom and individuality, has, embedded in it, a covert undertow toward conformity. Anecdotal evidence supports this. Many composition students I have known report experiencing stifling tacit expectations, often steering them to write music they don’t really like (or to be embarrassed when they write music they do); confusingly, however, they often are unable to locate the source of these pressures. My quarrel is not with freedom and individuality. Freedom to explore a personal direction is indispensable to an artist’s development, especially as they mature. Rather, it is with the idea of freedom *when it tacitly constrains*. And this, I think, is an especially present danger during the first few years of an undergraduate’s education, when the primacy of individuality interferes with the student’s acquisition of skills – the constant encouragement that a student shouldn’t (‘have to’) sound like anyone else is constant pressure to learn nothing from anyone. One key element of this shadow-conformity is the academic tendency to objectify the musical work as a text, an artifact, minimizing the social dimension of music-making. David J. Elliott, in his introduction to *Praxial Music Education*, warns that this “risks the possibility of producing a narrow and implausible concept of music” (Elliott 8). In this view, the value of a piece of music depends entirely on its content; the ways it is actually valued by any community are irrelevant. It pretends that the concert-hall, expert performer, and Composer’s Concert form a transparent pedestal for the exhibitions of these objects, when of course it is a complex sociocultural space, carving deep channels in the values, expectations, and *possibilities* of what passes through it. Too often, this idealized front trivializes the music inside it, cutting it off from communal contexts that could give it meaning, and diminishing the audience’s availability to surprise. The tacit conforming pressure young composers feel may not need to come from the mouths of their teachers; the Composer’s Concert – as they experience it – is enough. Considering this, students’ artistic diversity and independence would be better promoted by legitimizing a diversity of music-making contexts. Concerts for lay audiences, for children, concerts in unusual places, collaborations with musicians in other traditions, music for community functions, a range of more and less formal environments – each social context of music-making puts different constraints on the composer, and give them different freedoms. Tackling Baroque idioms earnestly, for example, might be scoffed at in a Composer’s Concert, but deeply appreciated by a lay audience, and the student would be well-served by an opportunity to explore that dimension of their craft. That these two forces, the conservative preservation of the canon (loosely, ‘the theory’) and the faux-radical freedom-that-conforms (‘the practice’), exist in one institution is no surprise. It is a natural artifact of the academy’s awkward embrace of modernism, an attempt to fold a *rupture* of tradition into tradition itself. This gap is widened by the piecemeal structure of the rest of the standard curriculum. Each theory class creates, for the duration of a semester, a small zone of practice in a narrow territory: a student will dabble in Bach-style chorales, or Palestrina-modeled vocal writing, or proper fugue. These practices are stylistically and historically circumscribed, and therefore of only marginal (and mostly totemic) utility to the aspiring individualist. Little incentive exists for a student composer to sustain these practices past the end of the semester. Success in the class is adequate; mastery is shrugged off, because student and teacher share the tacit understanding that they’ll never really need to write a proper fugue anyway. A broad view of literature could do much to reveal how practices exist on a continuum, rather than just in specific, highly-refined stylistic contexts, yet it is done in history classes which develop scholarly competencies in lieu of compositional ones. Theory and history tracks are firmly divorced from the development of musicianship. Ear-training is usually taught with abstract materials, avoiding the complexities of real music, and away from the students’ instruments. Instrumental study focuses on the performance of canonical works, missing an opportunity to elucidate and embody theory and analysis, and improvising – for many composers the bedrock of their compositional practice – is often ignored entirely. These divisions are understandable considering the exigencies of university and conservatory structure. Performers and composers, with different backgrounds and divergent goals, must be accommodated in the same classes. Students take different courses at different times, requiring that each class be to some extent self-contained. Faculty tend to be highly specialized, and curricula bounded by tradition and practicality. This can be partially attributed to forces endemic to higher education. The critique is familiar: built on a prestige structure that rewards specialization, buttressed by bureaucracy that insulates and ossifies, the university’s natural momentum is toward fragmentation. It is perhaps inherent in the practice of scholarship itself, which balkanizes as it generates, for every topic, an ever more specific language. Many universities recognize this as a problem, and are pursuing initiatives to integrate courses across disciplines. Team-teaching, interdisciplinary freshman and capstone core seminars, clustered and linked courses, formal student cohorts, and other integration strategies “appear across all types of institutions today” (Klein 2005). While perhaps better suited to the humanities, certainly some of these ideas are worth considering in music education. But for a more radical re-integration of musical theory and practice, we need to begin with a more radical understanding of learning. Current trends in organizational psychology illuminate some of these issues, offering a fresh perspective on the process of learning, and the project of education. Like Sabaneev, Brown and Duguid (1991) identify a rupture in theory and practice, though they define it instead as a rupture between working, learning and innovating. They argue that these three ideas are interrelated and complimentary, existing in a continuum of actual practice, but “are conventionally thought to be in conflict with each other,” which tends to “separate learning from working and, more significantly, learners from workers” (Brown and Duguid 1991). The split between these three activities, they argue, arises from an inaccurate model of learning that dominates traditional education, and has significant material consequences for the structure and efficacy of organizations. The traditional model conceptualizes learning as a “cognitive process involving a selective transmission of comparatively abstract, codified bodies of knowledge” from teacher to student (Contu and Willmott 2003). The weaknesses of this ‘transfer’ model have been long evident to scholars (Garrick 1998), and, increasingly, educators, for which a trend has been to re-define their goals for their students in terms of skills, rather than bodies of knowledge. This recognition, however, is often nominal at best, and the transfer model still permeates important premises of education. Lave and Wenger, in their book *Situated Learning*, presented an alternative conceptualization of learning that has become increasingly influential (Contu and Willmott 2003). Broadening the scope from the binary student-teacher relationship, they considered learning within the complex network of social relationships. Learning, they argue, is concomitant with enculturation, “situated” in everyday work practices. The first step is to grant a novice *legitimate peripheral participation* in the community, a position from which they can observe and incrementally begin to contribute. Brown and Duguid (1991) describe the process of moving from the periphery towards the center – i.e., increasing in knowledge and expertise – as having two elements: narration and collaboration. Narration disseminates knowledge; when the community exhibits a rich informal exchange of stories, flow from the core to the periphery is efficient. Collaboration creates knowledge; problems beyond the ability of any individual member prompt groups to synthesize their complimentary expertises. In this context, knowledge itself is viewed broadly, encompassing, along with the abstractions of pedagogy, a body of skills, habits, ‘tricks’ and “workarounds’, ‘war stories’, interpretations and attitudes, and a vernacular that are often “not explicit or explicable, developed and framed in a crucially communal context” (Brown and Duguid 1991). The project of learning in such a context – what they call a “community-of-practice” – then, is about “becoming a practitioner, not learning about practice” (Brown and Duguid 1991). Traditional and situated learning are not neatly divisible – their sites overlap and methods interpenetrate – but Contu and Willmott (2003) make a few general distinctions that help frame these ideas in terms of our question about theory and practice. In the traditional model, learning is cognitive, knowledge is theoretical/abstract/canonical, transmission is vertical (from teacher to student) and the outcome is an acquisition of information about a skill. In situated learning, learning is participative, knowledge is practical/embedded, transmission is horizontal (between peers) and the outcome is both mastery of a skill and formation of an identity within the community. It is too simple to say that traditional learning only produces theory and situated learning only produces practice, and too simple again to say that the classroom only fosters traditional learning and the informal community only fosters situated learning. An even greater error would be to say that an education could be complete without a mixture of both. But even if we cannot sort out exactly what happens where, we are at least left with the hunch that if theory and practice can be re-linked, in an immediate, practical way that vitalizes and transforms both, the locus of that transformation will be a robust community-of-practice. Certainly, the music school can be described as a community-of-practice. Setting aside performers, who have, in concertizing, a vital and ongoing community of narration and collaboration in work deeply connected to their daily practice – composition students do form a community in which members learn from each other. The importance of this community does not escape faculty, who typically try to cultivate exchange in a forum type class. (And certainly official encouragement is not necessary – communities of practice arise informally, distinct from, and sometimes at odds with, the formal structures that nominally demarcate them.) These communities tend to circulate technical knowledge (for example, about score preparation or extended techniques), fashionable opinions and anecdotes, awareness of a common canon, and, beneath everything else, a stream of data related to prestige and model behavior. They learn from each other, in other words, skills for navigating their institutional world. But, with regard to the actual work of composing, these communities are fundamentally impoverished. The work of composition is done in private. Students do not observe their teachers or their peers working. There is no common project to observe from a periphery, and gradually contribute to (or, the common project is to distance oneself from the common project as I describe above). Attempts to narrate compositional process and problems tend to either fly too high, into revisional intellectualizations that reveal little about the pragmatics of work, or too low, making much of the convenient and obvious. The meat of an artist’s work is regarded as too mysterious, consecrated by its incommunicability; and, while certainly some of it may be, the power relation embedded in this posture is of such advantage to the artist that it merits our suspicion. While music-making is deeply collaborative, including composition in other traditions, there are no models, and deep institutional disincentives, for collaboration between composers in the academic environment. If, as the situated learning model suggests, practical knowledge is generated and disseminated through a culture of narration and collaboration, we see that the student composer is excluded from a crucial ground of learning. The relationship between student and teacher in private composition lessons deserves mention here, because it is both the exception to this generalization as well as its confirmation. While there is a shortage of literature probing the beliefs and practices that inform these relationships (Barrett 2006), Margaret Barrett’s research suggests that to understand it as a collaboration is a strong point of departure. Observing a series of private lessons, she identifies twelve strategies employed by the teacher; they are all essentially strategies of narration. This supports the idea that composition as a practice is already learned in something resembling the situated learning model, but with the community-of-practice writ small. I believe that expanding this community has the potential to vitalize composition training and transform the relationship between theory and practice. What would such an education look like? I have already intimated its key features. (1) It would de-emphasize individuality – at least for the first few years when its emphasis is most counterproductive. (2) It would legitimize a diversity of music-making activities, performance contexts, and modes of collaborative authorship. (3) It would present an integrated curriculum, linking theory, history, musicianship, and composition. (4) And the work of composition would be reframed in such a way that students felt they were engaged in a common practice, and empowered to share and create knowledge as a community. Moving backwards through this list, I will present out a few suggestions for each. (4) At first glance, it is preposterous to propose returning to ‘a common practice’. The term is loaded for musicians, who may feel some nostalgia for a shared musical language but would never actually choose to return there. I am thinking of something more prosaic. The practice would have to be abstract enough to be a ground for any musical direction, but concrete enough to hold a community of students in orbit. It would therefore have to be very simple. I propose that students keep a notebook for to pursue two tasks: transcription and transformation. Transcription becomes the point of entry for the literature. Over the course of the program, each student would construct a personal library of musical matter – from large excerpts to fragments, copied from scores, recordings, and their own improvisations. Teachers would guide or require students to transcribe certain pieces or passages, and construct courses around these projects, but students would increasingly include their own personal discoveries and treasures in their library. Transcription is far more than the rote busy-work it appears to be. It gives the composer experience and comfort in the psychophysical realities of practice. On the level of practice, development is not only a function of imagination but also of stamina. Scale and rate of change are functions of patience. Unity is a function of restraint. Patterns emerge when units of work fall into a rhythm. These skills can be developed best when the burden of artistic inspiration is removed. Transcription also serves other, more obvious purposes – creating intimate experiences with great literature, developing an index of one’s own knowledge, sharpening the ear when transcribing from recordings. Transcription would also provide a constant source of ‘input’ for the second part of this practice, transformation. Each excerpt becomes site of experimentation for the student – a challenge to do *something* to it to produce a new excerpt. The simplest transformation would be simply to rewrite it, focusing on penmanship (I am imagining doing this work by hand, though there are probably few reasons to avoid the computer). From there, students would practice transposing, work on their clefs, perform diminution, augmentation, and other simple tasks. As they master the basics, the range of possible projects widens: transcribing into another representation, such as a lead sheet, partimento, Roman numerals or formal schema. They might turn a phrase into a sequence, abstract voice-leading from figuration or the reverse, develop motives, write new lines through its harmonies, re-harmonize (as Bach chorale, as sax-section homophony), add contrapuntal lines, unravel harmony into melody or the reverse, imitate, graft excerpts together, interpolate material into different harmonic or rhythmic space, warp, shear, blur, pixilate, texturize. By arranging excerpts for their own instrument, they could link this work to their performance and improvisation practice. They would doubtless find affinities with certain types of process, and develop their own personal repertoire of skills and techniques. These new techniques could then be easily shared among peers, unburdened by the isolating mythology of artistic individuality. This work, then, has the potential to be both a vehicle for personal exploration *and* grounds for a robust community-of-practice. Students would then come to original composition with a wide repertoire of skills, ideas, and, I imagine, an enormous sense of power. 3\) This practice would also be the funnel that integrates the curriculum. Theory classes would contribute analytical tools, helping students formalize and extend their operations. They would also contribute the wide range of traditional techniques for harmony and counterpoint. But, because students will be learning to see generalized formal transformations where they used to see style-bound rules, it will be clear that, with a few tweaks (say, interpolating Ravel’s harmonies into Ars Nova isorhythm), any technique can bear unexpected fruit. History classes would contribute examples from the literature. The transcription collection would contribute material for ear-training and instrument study. It would form a particularly meaningful basis for improvisation practice, with the potential to turn a student’s personal library of favorite chords, motives and figurations into a concrete vocabulary of chops. 2\) Dutiful students would produce high volumes of practice-work. Not all of it would be suitable for formal concerts, but it would be to everyone’s advantage to perform as much of it as possible. With the right resources available, a rich informal culture of concerts could emerge, with a spirit of play unknown to traditional departments. As the technical demands would vary widely (as well as the cost/benefit ratio of expensive virtuoso performance), composers at all levels of instrumental competency could find opportunities to perform – a crucial experience that they tend to miss at traditional music schools. The diversity and quantity of these concerts might be an advantage, also, for the school that wants to make inroads with the local community. For students comfortable with working in this way – to develop skills and ideas rather than just a precocious portfolio – the knowledge- and community-building process of collaboration will be natural. Collaborative projects will be the shared work around which novices find that ‘legitimate peripheral participation,’ and older students can develop leadership and teaching skills. Dramatic projects might be particularly fruitful, as they afford ample opportunities for diverse musical styles to sensically coexist. The transformation practice lends itself to dividing up composition projects in novel ways; for example, one student might be responsible for the harmony sequence, the next for its contrapuntal realization, the next for figuration and the last for orchestration. Or students could begin pieces, send them through a circle of classmates who each apply a transformation, and return them to their originator for final revision. The creative invention and execution of these group projects could even develop into a genre on its own – not of music as object, but of music social practice. 1\) By beginning with transcriptions, this approach side-steps the ‘individual voice’ double-bind. Novice students, for whom this is most confusing, could develop a wide body of experience without applying this unrealistic rubric to their output. Nevertheless, this practice, with its emphasis on plain work and gradual exploration, might be an ideal ground for the spontaneous, perhaps inevitable, development of a unique musical personality. In this essay I have tried to clarify some of my own reservations about composition education and culture and imagine an alternative. Clearly, my own experience is in the fore, an experience that is bound to be narrower than I can appreciate. Having only been a student, never a teacher, is a short-sightedness of which I’m all too aware. But while my generalizations are probably unfair to many excellent educations, I suspect that they are accurate enough at least to merit this conversation. To better substantiate my claims, qualitative research, probably interview-based, at a variety of institutions would be necessary. This research is currently absent in the literature. Although, I must admit, I am less interested in describing the current situation than exploring new ones. The music school I propose is, doubtless, idealized and impractical; I want to find out how. A series of workshops, in a retreat setting, for small groups of composers of varying levels of experience would be a good setting to develop and evaluate my approach. Further research in collaborative education, curriculum integration, and traditional music pedagogy would also crucially inform my foundations.