Why textbooks matter

I've spent the last four years or so looking at music textbooks published from the middle of the nineteenth century up to recent times.  I get strange looks in cafes, on the tram or train, or just about anywhere someone is curious about what I'm reading and the cover turns up something obscure, like Ebenzer Prout's Harmony: its Theory and Practice.  If you look at the list of recent reading in the sidebar, you'll see the odd archaic music treatise pop up from time to time.

I admit to being a second hand bookshop tragic.  I also admit to a boundless interest in how people hear music, and what they think they're listening to.  This connects up to my wider habit of watching how people relate to one another, and in observing how they connect up with the institutions in which they find themselves, be they the corporate world, government departments, universities and schools or churches (the latter can be very fascinating, so long as you are out of the firing zone!).  So this is what sits behind my interest in reading dusty old volumes about disciplines such as harmony, counterpoint, canon and fugue and so on.  They are documents not only of teaching methods (a relationship-based business, if ever there was one) but they also deal with the cognitive furniture of what the authors thought their readers should pay attention to, and how it is to be understood.

I think the big change in textbooks during the last 200 years or so is the shift from treating of harmony in an applied sense -- such as realising figured basses and working with cantus firmus exercises -- to harmony in a more complicated, as Taruskin would suggest, literate sense.  Thus, with books such as C.P.E. Bach's Essay on the True Art of the Clavier and Rameau's Traite de l'Harmony, we get a more descriptive approach: to make an effective modulation, it is widely accepted to do this, to build up a fantasia, great artists do the following, and so on.  Of course, this isn't the whole picture of these treatises, but rather, just a simplified outline of the outcomes they were pursuing.

By the time we get to the 1870s, there's more concern for dealing with music as a literary art.  So we get the odd quote from symphonies by Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn, or the occasional suggestion that the pupil might go off and look at a song by Schubert.  This is at the peak of the Musikwissenschaft movement, which brought us the vast selection of monumental editions that are so indispensable for a music student these days; indeed, we're on a new trope of that movement with the shift of so many of these editions to the web via the Sibley Library and IMSLP/Petrucci library.  German textbooks show this influence quite early, where we find quotes of substantial slabs of music from Bach to Beethoven in authors such as Ludwig Bussler.

For me, the key figure in English textbooks is Ebenezer Prout (1835-1909).  We know his name more from his edition of Handel's Messiah (which almost certainly helped to keep Novello afloat for a century or more), and that rather unfortunate rhyme attributed to Hubert Parry, and to be sung to the words of Bach's great g-minor organ fugue [BWV 541]:

Old Ebenzer Prout
Is a very clever man
But he can't write fugues
Like John Sebastian

But he can't write fugues
Like John Sebastian

Prout's reputation as a teacher has been eclipsed by the subsequent turn against anything to do with Victorianism during the Edwardian and early Georgian periods; fair enough, given the monumental quality of Victorian culture.  Prout's music is almost completely forgotten, and his reputation as a composer is difficult to gauge from what is accessible to scholars at present.  His compositional activities probably didn't win him a place as one of the leading lights of the English musical renaissance, although his work as a critic was certainly influential in defining the movement.

Yet Prout's industriousness as an author of textbooks is difficult to ignore, play down and dismiss.  It is all the more remarkable given that his father was actively opposed to Prout taking up a musical career.  Prout's studies were almost entirely self-directed, in an age that still had space to admire the auto-didact (contrast to these days, where a Ph.D. has almost become de rigeur for entry into some parts of the workforce).  Over little more than a remarkable decade, starting in 1889, Prout published no fewer than seven important textbooks, beginning with Harmony.  What makes these books stand out is the sheer quantity of music quoted in score, a veritable encyclopedia of musical techniques demonstrated in application, and drawing on music that could reasonably be expected to be encountered in his readers' personal music-making and concert-going.  Prout quotes from Palestrina to Parry; his textbooks were absolutely up-to-date.

Of course, there were concerns over what Prout's ideas about harmony meant.  Being based on a hybrid of theories put forward by Alfred Day and Herman von Helmholtz, Prout ultimately argued that composers choose the intervals that allow them to make beautiful sounds.  The aesthetical principle, as Prout termed it, ultimately overruled the science of acoustics when it comes to the creative process.  Creativity in music, be it composing on paper or improvising in a disciplined way, involves a certain level of cognition, but it can't be boiled down to the application of an algorithm.  The upshot for Prout's use of compound chords as the basis of his overtone system was that some imperfectly tuned intervals had to be allowed in, because they aren't perceived as out of tune in the practical application of harmony.  In a revised edition of Harmony, Prout ultimately jettisoned the scientific basis of his harmony theory and admitted that the aesthetical principle was all that really matters.

Moreover, Prout only gave figured bass exercises for his pupil-reader to use for learning about harmony.  Fair enough; to have done something else would have left his books without a market.  Figured bass was such an engrained feature of English music teaching that it would have been foolhardy not to include it.

So this is a nutshell thought of why I think music textbooks are important as historical documents, and why Ebenezer Prout is a figure of considerable fascination to me.  It's all about how we think about music, where the ideas have come from, and where they may yet take us.  As Prout himself put it:

Truth is many sided; and no writer on harmony is justified in saying that his views are the only correct ones, and that all others are wrong.