Artigo How Critical is Music Theory

How critical is music theory?

Christine Lucia

ISSN 0256-004/Online 1992-6049 pp. 166–18921 (1) 2007 © Unisa PressDOI: 10.1080/02560040701398871 166

Christine Lucia is Professor and Chair of Music at the University of the Witwatersrand, editor of SAMUS: Journal of the Musicological Society of South Africa, and editor of The World of South African Music: A Reader (2005).

AbstractIn this article I address the problem of locating ‘music theory’ within contemporary critical theories in the social sciences and humanities. I show how two kinds of music theory can be distinguished: music theory as an interpretative and ‘critical’ set of theories used mainly in music analysis, and theory of music as an ‘uncritical’ set of practical tools for both composi-tion and analysis. I trace the origins of such theories and the separation between the two, and argue that theory of music as a prerequisite for practice comes from a notion of theory inculcated by music pedagogy in the nineteenth century, entrenched through the external examinations of London-based conservatoires. I show how the ethos of such examinations became lodged in the musical consciousness of South Africans as one of many colonial traces, but I argue that, unlike other aspects of colonialism, theory of music did not become adapted in the process of colonization, but has remained something of an anomaly in music teaching and practice. Especially, it has remained a different kind of ‘theory’ in critical dis-course in the social sciences and humanities. Music theory in South Africa, too, has not un-dergone the kind of transforming process as other ‘critical’ theories have although it has far more possibilities for critique, but has remained a somewhat limited tool for music analysis in South African scholarship.

Keywords: Music theory, theory of music, music analysis, critical theory, interpretation, com-position, conservatoire, university, music pedagogy, grade exam, Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music.

Introduction and definitionsContemporary theory in the social sciences and humanities – ‘a vast body of ideas, inherently unmasterable’, as Jonathan Culler puts it (1994, 13) – has at base the notion that theory (from the Aristotelian notion theoria) is different from practice


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(praktike),1 and that the two operate in parallel spheres, relating to and supporting each other but developing distinct modes of discourse and application. It offers critical tools for the interpretation of empirical data and ideas, and in this essay I attempt to show what ‘music theory’ offers, using the South African context to propose an idea of what it is and how it operates in comparison to other social or cultural theory. I relate ‘music theory’ to practice, and reveal some of the difficulties in maintaining a distinction between the two. I argue that there are two different understandings of what ‘music theory’ is, in current usage. The one, broadly speaking, is an activity of analysis and commentary, often equated to ‘music analysis’. The other I define as a more pedagogically driven body of hegemonic knowledge covering music’s sounds, concepts and terminology, and I call it ‘theory of music’. The sense of defining component parts inherent in the latter is used both in relation to the sphere of composition (music as creative practice) and – and this is where confusion around terminology enters – in the sphere of music analysis. In countries where a large intellectual project around ‘music theory’ exists, such as the United Kingdom and the United States the terms ‘music theory’ and ‘music analysis’ imply slightly different things: in the UK they are almost synonymous, while in the US ‘music theory’ includes both music analysis and also what I am here calling ‘theory of music.’

I consider in this essay the historical development of these two kinds of theory as I have articulated them, and show how each has developed norms and assumptions, some of which, I suggest, are more ‘critical’ than others, and some more critical to a certain way of seeing music than of it.2 My aim is also to show how critical theories in the broad sense of a collection of theories in the social sciences and humanities can critique theory in relation to music. The fundamental questions I ask are, how actively critical to the interpretation of music and ideas, or how subject to critical examination, is theory in the discipline of music; and what are its ideological origins in relation to a South African context?

Music as a discipline, and two definitionsThe discipline of music has several branches of practical and speculative study. The largely practical ones are performance (music making), composition (music writing), music education, music psychology, and music therapy. The speculative ones and the disciplines they have traditionally related to are musicology (history and literary criticism), ethnomusicology (anthropology and linguistics), popular music studies (sociology and cultural criticism), and music aesthetics (philosophy).

I locate what I call ‘theory of music’ in the practical sphere, as something concerned with music writing, with music as grammar, syntax, and vocabulary; in short, as pre-compositional activity or set of tools, as I explain in more detail below. But precisely because it is seen as foundational, as something that Western musicians are trained into whether they later pursue the more practical or speculative branch of music, as something necessary to the act of being a musician in the Western sense, this kind of

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theory of music (and I now drop the scare quotes) has acquired a huge belief in its necessity, a belief that, I suggest here, is underpinned by a set of assumptions whose ideological basis, I further suggest, rewards some critical examination.

‘Music theory’ I locate in the speculative sphere, where it concerns the analysis and interpretation of music already composed rather than the activity of its creation. But it too has a practical aspect, because the very ‘thing’ theory is applied to is not a body of literature or historical evidence, or a set of ideas, but something performed, something performative and elusive: ‘music’. The issue of where and how music exists is not the subject of this essay, but it is important to mention the way it can be seen and problematised both as ‘text’ (a notated score) and as performance of that text. Analysis itself, as Nicholas Cook has argued (1999) can be ‘performed’. The assumption of music as ‘work’, as a universalised and autonomous concept, has also been deeply questioned (see for example Goehr 1992 and Strohm 2000).

One can argue, then, that music not only has theory (compositional tools or theory of music) and uses theory (analysis or music theory), but that it also exists only ‘in theory’. This in turn seems to contradict the notion that music exists when it is performed, i.e. in practice. To clarify again then, since there are not only different ways of regarding theory in relation to music but also of regarding music itself: for the purposes of this essay, when I talk about theory of music I use it to mean a body of knowledge that is seen as a prerequisite for both practice and speculation; and when I use the term music theory it is synonymous with the critical activity of music analysis.

Theory in music and other disciplinesHowever, before I trace the history of some of the differences between music theory and theory of music in order to examine their critical qualities, I consider what both are being compared to in this essay, critical theory/theories. One could define critical theory as a fluid, culturally determined and historically contingent set of theories, common to human and social science disciplines worldwide. It has a philosophical orientation and from the late nineteenth century onwards also a social, political, or psychological one. The pull towards philosophy was also once true of both theory of music and music theory in their early mediaeval history, as Thomas Christensen (2002) has shown. But they drifted apart, and when the 11th century monk Guido D’Arezzo ascribed the term ‘music theorist’ to those who knew music philosophically and speculated about it as ‘musicus’ rather than those who learnt it and sang it as ‘cantors’ (ibid., 3; Christensen’s emphasis), this was symptomatic of the beginning of a distinction between practical and critical theory. Because the main sphere of Western composed music’s operation at that time was the Church, and the Church’s main concern was making practice in worship hegemonic, the prestige of music theory as philosophy declined during the Renaissance (ibid., 5). Theory of music then began to occupy centre stage,3 ‘its principles [gradually] reconfigured so as to


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accommodate the domain of musica instrumentalis’ (ibid.) as well as vocal music, drawing on notions derived from acoustics, physics, and mathematical ratio in order to accommodate debate about the exigencies of instrument building, and, partly as a result of this, embracing new theories of tone combination: intervallic consonance and dissonance. As this kind of theory drew away from aesthetics closer to praxis, it also began to accommodate the need to pass on the increasingly complex body of musical knowledge it was becoming, from generation to generation.

Johann Georg Sulzer (1720-79)4 appropriated ‘music theory’ as a portmanteau term denoting part of the abstracted foundation of a mathematical science from which axioms were deduced as a ‘general process of reasoning by which the empirical and metaphysical components of a science were systematically itemized and coordinated’ (ibid., 9).5 Thus music theory became theory of music almost by a sleight of hand, not only embracing practice but also increasingly subordinate to it. From the late 18th century it was concerned primarily with how musical sounds were made, and it also took on from this time a more prescriptive approach to how composers should make them – more theory of music than music theory, in terms of my opening distinction. The issues around what music is and what it means continued as a cluster of critical approaches variously called music criticism, aesthetics, philosophy, or hermeneutics, which could not collectively be called ‘music theory’ because the latter’s use had now become co-opted and designated as a term describing the theory of practical music.

Johann Forkel (1749-1818) consolidated the split between practical and speculative theory and the apparent subsuming of the former under the latter, by proposing ‘a systematic program of study called “Theorie der Musik”’, defining theory here as ‘a broad pedagogical discipline of musical study’ in five parts (physics, mathematics, grammar, rhetoric, criticism) where parts 3 and 4 covered the traditional functions of musica practica and poetics: ‘systems of scales, keys, harmony, and meter, as well as their application by composers in terms of phrasing, genre, and rhetoric [and] critical analysis’ (ibid.). As Christensen observes

Forkel’s program constitutes an extraordinary change in the meaning of music theory by radically expanding its domain in relation to practical pedagogy and criticism. No longer was music theory a preliminary or metaphysical foundation to practice. On the contrary, it was practical pedagogy that was now a subset of theory (ibid.).

What Forkel’s project also did was affirm the umbrella use of the term ‘theory’, but what it allowed for, I suggest, was an expansion of the prescriptive notion of ‘theory of music’ as I am trying to distinguish it. By the time of Beethoven the critical speculative ‘theory’ had not disappeared, but the Romantic historicising of composers and composition created the possibility for a prescription for practice, a body of knowledge necessarily acquired by music composers and performers in their training, to become significantly foregrounded. The prescriptive quality underlying practical theory of music was able to gain enormous ground in nineteenth century

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Europe because of the rapid development of music conservatoires (to which I refer in more detail later), and also because of musical language’s strong attachment to a closed system of key relationships called tonality, a compositional Western European language shared by all composers in the field of Western art music at that time (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin), and considered ‘international’. Once this shared tonal language broke down in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century into a number of much more disparate post-tonal languages (Debussy, Scriabin, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók, Ives) and further dissolved in the latter half of the twentieth century into a plethora of idiosyncratic and sometimes technology-driven styles, it could – theoretically – no longer be upheld as a ‘universalising’ system. As I shall argue later, however, in terms of pedagogical practice, it has been, to the present day; the hegemony of its system entrenched in the South African context, I suggest, by an aspect of colonialism.

Early twentieth century critical theory, meanwhile, pursued a path that was analytical and empiricist, and as Craig Calhoun (1995, 5) has shown, its application was local rather than universal: local to specific objects or situations, its role largely that of conceiving and applying abstract methods to the study of something concrete (for example literature, or society). Note the difference: critical theory was a set of ideas applied as analytical tools to specific empirical data in order to interpret it, whereas theory of music as theory continued for the most part to mean either a set of principles underlying music composition applied in order to describe or prescribe its sounds, or it continued as a more speculative activity (music theory) concerned with analysing and understanding music’s work although also drawing on some of the tools used in theory-of-music in order to describe its workings, such as scales, harmonic structures, melodic phrasings, cadences.

Theory as applied to music has difficulty in being applied in the same way or to the same extent as an interpretive tool, as theory in other disciplines. That said the case of Adorno present what seems to be a contradiction. Music’s ‘essence’ (its material composition) has, in Adornian and post-Adornian writing, been interpreted theoretically – and critically – as an expression of the social order at any given moment in history. Chris Ballantine has argued that ‘in various ways and with varying degrees of critical awareness, the musical microcosm replicates the social macrocosm’ (1984, 5), and there is a growing body of evidence to support the notion that music not only reflects or parallels social and individual praxis, but also articulates, embodies, and ‘affords’ it (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000, and DeNora 2000), or articulates critique of itself and its meanings (Chua 1995 & 1999). In terms of the distinction I am making here, however, such critique of sound and structure is extrinsic rather than intrinsic; it could not do its work without critical theories drawn from history, sociology, linguistics, or psychology, for example, theories that are not themselves endemic to, or reliant on, music as a field of study.

Calhoun (1995) characterised two uses of theory in the early part of the twentieth century: the first, as ‘orderly system of tested propositions’ that ‘provides repositories


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and syntheses of empirical knowledge’; the second, as ‘logically integrated causal explanation [that] provides orienting perspectives’ (5). The first seems to apply to theory of music as a system of tonal and metrical propositions, ‘observable’ and empirical in the sense Calhoun suggests, and also ‘tested’ through their use in composition. Regarding the second use: causes in music can (as I have just shown) be ascribed both to internal musical workings – sonatas sound this way because of their use of key centres – and external social workings – sonatas sound this way because they exemplify a class struggle. Theory as causal explanation, I suggest, has more in common with the speculative activity of music theory as music analysis than with the creative activity of music composition.6 In terms of Calhoun’s claim that it ‘provides methods for thinking up new explanations, provides orienting perspectives’, it can explain music’s internal relationships (tonal or melodic, for example); but it can also explain music’s causal relationships to society, and the paradigms these involve (Lüdemann 1993).

The third and most recent use of theory, Calhoun suggests (after Robert Merton) is theory that not only questions underlying assumptions but also proposes ‘rhetorical orientations or perspectives … approaches to solving problems and developing explanations rather than the solutions and explanations themselves’ (ibid., 6; my emphasis). Approaches to the explanation of musical works and analysis of the notion of ‘the musical work’ itself (rather than analysis of the work), characterise an increasing number of activities within the discipline of musicology as I indicated above (Goehr 1992 and Talbot 2000). The reach of this more recent kind of critical theory for Calhoun, is far bolder than previous applications of theory; far ‘higher’, and in the latter twentieth century applied also in an interdisciplinary way, creating what Jonathan Culler has called an ‘open-ended corpus of writings which have an impact on domains other than those to which they ostensibly belong’ (1994, 16). Moreover, from the mid-twentieth century, Calhoun continues, ‘the empirical-analytical view of the role of [critical] theory changed’. It was ‘was replaced by a less comfortable one: that the point of theoretical enquiry was to bring out methodological assumptions which otherwise would escape scrutiny’ (1995, 15), including assumptions of ideology.

Most disciplines have thus at the present time (2006) developed their own sets of critical-theoretical sets of interpretations and assumptions and histories – hence art-historical theory, theory of history, sociological theory. These in turn are used to challenge critical thinking across disciplines (Culler 1994, 13). What such critical theories seem to have in common, despite such very different usages and underlying imperatives such as class, race, or gender, for example, is that they are all applied very broadly, to any kind of text, object, or set of ideas. Despite the work of music criticism and especially musicology in uncovering the social and political work music does – and perhaps because of it (for such criticism is offset by claims for music’s formal and autonomous status) – in the realm of music studies ‘theory’

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hovers between notions of description and prescription, practice and speculation, composition and analysis.

From within the uncomfortable space I have imperfectly sketched, we now have to consider the possibility for ‘music theory’ to be a critical discourse like that of literary theory or sociological theory. I argue in this essay that the work of criticism in music theory per se (I am not speaking here of musicology in general) is especially strong in the area of music analysis, but I also argue that this has yet to be felt in the South African context. The domain of ‘theory of music’ on the other hand, occupied through centuries of change around the constitution of music, as a practical language for composers, performers, instrument builders, for instance, is not this kind of domain of criticism. It concerns theory as a body of knowable facts, a set of tools for application in a range of practical music spheres, and a lore for passing on from generation to generation; but – except where its components are used in formal analysis – not a critique as such.

Music analysis as critiqueThe contemporary branch of music called music analysis is articulated principally (though not exclusively) through studies of the Western historical art-music canon and the contemporary music repertoire, through a wide-ranging literature produced mainly in the United States and Europe where new approaches are formulated all the time. This activity, corresponding to what Calhoun describes as the most recent phase of critical theory, has often exposed methodological or ideological assumptions. As music analysis and musicology journals have shown since the 1980s, music theory as analysis has been one of the sites of conflict in musicology debates: Kerman (1980) and Agawu (2004) in a sense frame one of the major debates, the latter providing both a sense of closure and a continuation. The conflict extended far beyond music analysis, of course, but insofar as it challenged claims of music’s autonomy as an aesthetic object and its claims to be analysed in and for itself rather than for its political or social meanings, analysis was a ‘critical’ component in this conversation.

In South Africa there is only one accredited music research journal (SAMUS: South African Journal of Musicology) and within its pages analysis has been largely descriptive. As former Editor Beverly Parker notes, ‘[s]ubmissions to SAMUS during recent years [1980s and ’90s] show that at least some holders of postgraduate degrees regard descriptive stylistic or structural analysis as a taken-for-granted methodology that is an end in itself – not merely a means to the exploration of some other, wider, topic’ (2001, 43). In terms of lack of critique this ‘end-in-itself’ methodology to a large extent parallels literary New Criticism of the 1960s. Only 13% of music theses and dissertations produced in South Africa between 1900 and 1999, Parker goes on, even concern music analysis, and some do not ‘suggest particular methods of analysis or say what features of the music will be analysed’, as if analysis were a ‘self-evident activity’ requiring ‘neither justification nor explanation’ ibid). In 1998


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what was an early attempt to question analytical norms in relation to South African composer Kevin Volans was taken by a group of students from Rhodes University, who under the guidance of lecturer Michael Blake began to explore reflexively the tools required to analyse one of the most iconic pieces of South African art music: White Man Sleeps. In his introduction to parts of their work republished in 2005, Blake writes that post-structural analysis was in 1998 South Africa ‘still largely shunned in favour of structural (motivic or harmonic) analysis’ (quoted in Lucia 2005, 258).

The situation has begun to change: see for example South African music analysed for its cultural or political meaning by Carol Muller, Stephanus Muller, Christine Lucia, and Grant Olwage (reproduced in Lucia 2005, 286-88, 291-97; 299-302; 311-19); but it does not compete with the body of analysis offered in journals overseas, with its wide range of approaches and contexts, themselves sometimes interrogated. These approaches employ sociological or cultural theory, psychology, and ethnographic theory, for example, to explain musical structure and meaning. Such analyses are expounded in journals that cut across the musicology / ethnomusicology / popular music studies /music education divides, and include Music Analysis, Journal of Music Theory, Perspectives of New Music, Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, Popular Music, Ethnomusicology, Journal of the Royal Musical Association (and many more).

Some South African university music departments do teach set-theory, motivic, or Schenkerian analysis at an advanced level in BMus, Hons or MMus degrees, but from Parker’s analysis it is clear that what is mostly not taught, even at tertiary level, is an approach that would give such analysis a more critical dimension. Within the rather restricted space allowed, moreover, Western parameters such as harmony (triads and 4-part chords) and melody (pitch relations) are invariably privileged, bringing this kind of ‘music theory’ analysis very close to that envisaged by Forkel in the early 18th century.7 It is important, indeed often necessary, for musical parameters to be used within a critical analysis (engagement with material, with ‘the music itself’ is a major part of the work of analysis overseas); but it is lack of engagement with such parameters, using them as an end in themselves – Parker’s ‘self-evident activity requiring neither justification nor explanation’ – that I question here. Engagement with the merits of one approach to form or one set of parameters over another, or the epistemology and relevance of such parameters in the South African context, aspects of a critical musicology overseas and owing a great deal to a broader concept of critical theory is very limited. Music theory in this sense in South Africa is not ‘critical’, nor therefore can it be seen as ‘critically important’ in the way critical theories are seen in the social sciences and humanities.

What does formalist analysis do, then? For one thing, it exposes component parts, and in this sense is as valuable as the purpose of such close reading will allow – as is the process of practical criticism in literature. For another, it validates works under consideration; it deems them worthy of explanation and in so doing creates a canon;

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in turn, works commonly analysed are those that are canonic. In early twentieth century Europe the analytical canon included Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms. In late twentieth – and early 21st century South African writing it is mostly Arnold van Wyk, Hubert du Plessis, Stefans Grové. Analysis as canon-formation is in some measure the work of Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker, who in the early twentieth century (while music’s languages were changing all around him) revealed organic unity in ‘masterworks’ of Western classical music.8 In so doing, he prolonged a Romantic notion of musical autonomy and tonal integrity that was already in his own time dissipating amid experimentation by composers with the atonal, modal and jazz idioms of Modernity. This was the period, then (1920s and ’30s), when both music analytical studies and theory of music textbooks began to go seriously out of sync with contemporary compositional method and aesthetics.

The Schenkerian metaphysical universe was one of validation as critique, concerned with ‘transcendental certainty and meaning’ as Susan McClary and others have shown (McClary 1985, 151);9 and it has itself been interrogated, partly for an essentialism that eradicates the idiosyncrasies of individual pieces, and partly for championing ‘old masters’ at the expense of new ones – even though Schenker himself was also a composer. Schoenberg particularly suffered from this traditionalist view, ‘writing back’ in 1922 to some of the critique of his work by Schenker, that the source of Schenker’s ‘errors’ was ‘that tacit but fundamental assumption of school historians that the “golden age” of music is past’ which led Schenker ‘into unbecoming vigorous polemics against modern artists’ (1983, 318). A year later in his essay ‘Those Who Complain About the Decline’ (1923) Schoenberg’s vitriol points to some of the ideological basis of some of this critique against new music by Schenker and others:

[T]heir self-preservation instinct triumphs, everyone else can decline, so long as it helps them get to the top and stay there … [T]hese are the only ones still to have ideas, to possess creative gifts, even – the only geniuses, then! … The Fatherland extends to these false prophets an incomprehensible amount of credit … Fiasco follows fiasco, on the largest scale, yet the words written by these men, who can do less than anybody, stay in business, in the same old way, alongside works whose value they have contested (1975, 203; my emphasis).

The idea that a certain kind of ‘music theory’ nurtures careers while it nurtures a certain heritage, originates in the 18th century, as I shall show later. What is also implied in the quote is the way new music threatens and analysis counters that threat, takes away the music’s power. Schenker made astonishing yet well supported claims about music’s psychological inner connections, and thus the possible inner workings of composers’ minds, but he did so at the expense of making all seem inevitable. The equally interesting lapses that make a musical work unique, make texture and gesture meaningful, are largely absent in Schenker’s worldview. Yet slippages are often the most decisive creative moments, where the workings of ‘theory of


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musical structure’ suddenly show through, as Freudian slips show the working of the unconscious. Working in the sphere of music as performance rather than music as score, Kofi Agawu, for example, relates how this study of slippage can be very useful in studying African music. ‘Errors made during rehearsal or performance’, he says, ‘and the ways in which they are immediately corrected constitute rich sites for the study of aesthetic norms, [and] conventions of grammar and syntax’ (Agawu 2003, 108).

Theory of music as toolboxTheory of music, as distinct from music theory-as-analysis, is understood in South Africa (and probably elsewhere) as a set of sonic principles or a body of knowledge underlying musical material. It is sometimes referred to as the ‘nuts and bolts’ or ‘building blocks’ of music. Author Stephen King uses the metaphor of the toolbox (On Writing, 2001) to promote understanding of creative writing in literature. King describes the three-level expanding toolbox his uncle used when he was a child (21-55), on the top level of which is vocabulary and grammar – in music’s terms this would be pitches, durations, notes, rests, keys, scales, metres, groupings of notes, various symbols and signs – a collection of rudiments (as they are often called) associated with Western staff notation and the history of art music. The top level is ideally absorbed very young so that by high school the tools are simply ‘there’ in an individual’s background, ready to grab and use. The second tier in King’s toolbox is writing style and structure – in music this would be melody writing, phrasing, harmonic and contrapuntal exercises, analysis of form. At the lowest, deepest level – only to be used by those who have mastered the first two – is the act of writing itself, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraphs, chapters, writing drafts, rewriting. The latter is not something learned but something practised. The parallel with music composition here is obvious; indeed at this level, literary writing is often also called ‘composition’.

Yet there is something equally obvious missing in this metaphor, for music. Stephen King uses it to remind us of what the tools of writing and language are and how they can be used. He does not imply that learning how to use the tools makes you into a writer. Far from it. King only comes to the toolbox after stressing the necessity of knowing literature, from having read it extensively, over many years. If there is no repertoire of such imagined sounds for musicians to draw on, the box of tools will remain just that: a box, a collection of objects. It is the boundedness of this box, insufficiently related to buildings, let alone contemporary or African ones, that limits the usefulness of the music tools within it; and this is where, I suggest, theory of music most fails at the critical level. The tools are not in themselves critical but are only theoretical components of a larger system of writing – composition or analysis. Moreover, these tools, that I am collectively calling theory of music, cannot theorise in the sense of being aware or reflexive, themselves. In terms of Calhoun’s’

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three kinds of theory referred to earlier – ‘system of tested propositions’, ‘integrated causal explanation’, or ‘approach to solving problems and developing explanations’ (1995, 5; 6), theory of music as toolbox is none of these. It thus fails, I suggest, to allow suitable parallels with what the work of critical theory does. It is an inert group of objects in much the same way as letters, words and sentences are useful: tools to those who know how to combine them in a language and literature imbibed from childhood, but in themselves not inherently critical.

Why do composers or analysts use them, then? Because, perhaps, in the most obvious sense, they are ‘there’. But as my earlier historical sketch shows, they have not always been universally there or always there in the same way. They have cultural origins applicable to a particular cultural history: the history of Western Europe. As Beverly Parker shows, analysts in South Africa often treat them as found objects, self evident, self-explanatory; yet this is not the case (for the most part) overseas. How did this situation come about and remain so hegemonic, in the South African intellectual curriculum? I suggest that the sphere of pedagogy that has held sway (as we have seen) over the development of this notion of ‘theory of music’ as prescription for practice, since the eighteenth century, should now be called to account. I further suggest a source for embedding such a prescription in the (post)colonial consciousness: the ‘external’ grade examinations system of London conservatoires, which have held South African music teachers, composers, and performers in thrall since the 1890s. The curriculum these exams inculcate(d) have ensured, I argue, that it terms of the discourse of music in South Africa, ‘theory’ usually signifies the uncritical – but not unimportant – toolbox; its lexicon of rules, terminologies and concepts imbibed not for critique, not necessarily for composition or analysis even. These grade exams are there so that music learners can be assessed for examination in the curriculum they cover: in short, they can exist purely as ends in themselves.

An ideology behind theory of musicThe ‘grade exams’ offer a path into Western academic music (as opposed to paths found in other cultural spaces), from elementary to advanced level in eleven steps.10 These steps provide a worldwide curriculum, taken by distance learning, through conservatoires such Trinity College, the Associated Board of the Royal School of Music, and the Guildhall College of Music and Drama. They are centrally organised from London and a fee is charged to write exams, held ‘locally’ all over the world, including South Africa.11 The University of South Africa, based in Pretoria, has indigenised them in South Africa since 1948.

The notion of ‘steps’ is not new. Theorist and composer Johann Joseph Fux’s Steps to Parnassus (1725) is probably the earliest example. Ian Bent has shown how this book, subtitled Guide to Musical Composition by the Rules, using a New and Sure Method, never before published in so Methodical and Arrangement, became a ‘tabula by-no-means rasa on which [generations of] theorists and pedagogues


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have written’ (2002, 554). Bent identifies three principles on which the book it based. ‘First, it is occupied largely with practical music, and only very slightly with speculative. Second, it does not rely on model compositions [but on abstractions]. Third, designed for easy mastery by beginners, it is based on the elementary reading pedagogy of the day’ (ibid., 556). The steps in Fux’s model speed up progress towards a certain concept of musical maturity; but by not using models or examples from actual compositions Fux can present idealised solutions to problems irrelevant to contemporary composition of 1725. These solutions included the writing of notes against a cantus firmus in an outmoded a capella (unaccompanied) church vocal style. His progressive steps carefully laid down rules about part-writing and the treatment of consonance and dissonance, becoming the ground plan for ‘species counterpoint’ as it is called and as it is still taught today, as well as for harmony teaching, and hence, more generally for the teaching of theory of music (ibid., 557).

The gap between old theory and new music present in Fux’s model has irrevocably widened (as mentioned earlier). The tradition of Western art music on which such a notion of theory rests and from which it derives, is also very unevenly known, in South Africa. One particular gap exposes the ideology of Western theory of music, and this is the gap between Western theory and theories derived from other musical practices of indigenous South African musicians including (and primarily) African choral composers, whose theoretical premises are partly based on traditional modes (scales) and chords (see Mngoma 1981) or indigenous notions of ‘melody’ and ‘harmony’ (see Mthethwa 1988). African choral music is, indeed, composed by musicians largely untutored in the higher steps of theory of music. Yet they compose prolifically, successfully breaking abstract rules inherited from the late eighteenth century, of which in many cases they are not even aware.12

The hegemony of theory of music’s influence in South Africa relies on the power of the (colonial) system behind it and on that system’s wide dissemination through hundreds of textbooks and workbooks. The latter are overwhelmingly important (as important as, and similar to, bibles and catechisms), presenting a body of knowable facts in various ways and testing that knowledge through exercises.13 Such texts are almost all from north America and Britain (there are few indigenous examples) and for decades they have found their way to South Africa, the most pervasive early examples emanating from the English publisher Novello whose Music Primers and Educational Series had 56 titles by 1878 (see Pauer 1878, back cover). An example of the modernised post-War format of these kinds of books, tailor-made to steps of examination, is William Cole’s (1953) series of books produced for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, This series ‘answers’ – information about clefs, key signatures, time signatures, groupings, terms, signs, intervals, triads; this is voice-leading and chord spacing; these are the four cadences; this is four-part harmony; this is how counterpoint works – to questions that are raised as ‘what to know’. Cole’s books are subtitled ‘questions and exercises’ (1953), but the questions are rhetorical.14 That such a system has remained critically unchallenged within an

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educational culture imposed by decades of colonialism and apartheid is perhaps not surprising (although other hegemonic systems, such as Christianity and the English language, have). What is more surprising, and evidence of the success of the system, is that in post-apartheid South Africa the ideological basis of theory of music in the school and university curriculum remains unquestioned, when Outcomes Based Education has challenged most other spheres of educational philosophy.15

The curriculum of scales, key signatures, times signatures, intervals, and other fragmented abstractions of music (the ‘toolbox’) is the prevailing model for music education in South Africa – along with, and supporting, performance practice. More advanced theory of music as it developed from the practices of performers and composers during the eighteenth century, especially as concerned with vertical structure (harmony), and horizontal movement (counterpoint) is what is taught in universities. This curriculum uses the same complex set of signs and symbols called staff notation that compositions do (just as authors use the same alphabet and words that literary critics do), but it employs them differently – inculcating ‘correct’ choices of syntax all along the line, without developing critical awareness of where such choices come from, or awareness of the larger musical language of past and contemporary South Africa.

Such theory of music is not a sub-discipline of musicology, but a body of knowledge usable within any of music’s sub-disciplines. It functions mainly in relation to music history, composition, performance, or indeed analysis, thus cannot be ‘critical’ in the dialogic sense meant by Calhoun; it can only be used critically. If the methodological and ideological assumptions underlying it are not taught at the same time, moreover, it remains not so much a body of knowledge as a set of rules. It fails to keep pace with living traditions of composition, especially in Africa, among composers not necessarily familiar with all its rules yet familiar with their own cultural sonic norms. Aspects of it can be used productively within music analysis, within what I have been calling ‘music theory’, but theory of music is not a body of ideas, not even an inherently unmasterable one (as Culler called contemporary theory in the social sciences and humanities). Indeed, far from it: it is eminently masterable, as the history of the grade exams has shown. For this reason it is also eminently transportable through textbooks and external examinations, and eminently suited to processes of colonisation; moreover, it does not any more rely on understanding of any one culture’s language, despite the fact that its origins lie in a certain period of Western art music history. It is seen as universal (far more so, indeed, I suggest, than the English language or Christianity). Critical discourses in music theory, on the other hand, although they can be large and far ranging, ask questions through precise examples, engage with limited issues of structure and meaning, and are thus capable of asking fundamental questions about the role of theory itself (see for example Ballantine 1984, McClary 1991, and Leppert & McClary 1987).

There has been a perception that a ‘Western’ mode of analysis is problematic in ethnomusicology, but Martin Scherzinger (2001) and Agawu (2003) have contested


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this. In his analysis of the Zimbabwean mbira tune ‘Nyamaropa’ Scherzinger shows the critical applicability of some of the tools to African music, arguing for the interrelatedness of ‘formalist’ and ‘cultural’ analysis and showing how the context-sensitive analysis of ethnomusicology has its own ‘formalist tendencies’ (11). Agawu puts forward compelling claims (173-97) for the ‘purely musical’ analysis of African music on the grounds of correcting the inequality of perception between African and Western musics, and enhancing African music’s visibility, especially as a body of ‘works’.

How has theory of music maintained its ideological grip then, in South Africa? In tracing its origins I return to the colonial centre and examine the genesis of the grade exams.

Theory of music and the conservatoiresTwo of the most famous conservatoires in the world are in London. The Royal Academy of Music, founded in 1822 (Rainbow 1989, 170), leant heavily on the privilege and power accorded it by royal patronage. Similar conservatoires sprang up all over Europe at this time, and for some their conserve-atism was innate. Liszt dubbed the Paris Conservatoire ‘reactionary’ (Rainbow 1989, 227), and Wagner declared in 1865 that the Leipzig Konservatorium was ‘nothing more than “a musical Temperance Society”’ (Wagner, cited in Rainbow, ibid.).

The Royal College of Music began life in 1873 as the National Training School for Music (Rainbow and Kemp 2000, 160). The Royal Academy (RAM) barely survived the establishment of this and other rival schools, but nonetheless refused to merge with the National Training School when the chance came in 1878, so the latter became the new Royal College of Music (RCM), also under royal patronage, in 1882 (Rainbow 1989, 232-33). By this time a number of conservatories were offering diplomas, which led to ‘an almost pointless race to collect their sometimes valueless awards’ as Bernarr Rainbow puts it (ibid., 234). He also suggests that the rivalry between RAM and RCM was part of their failure to achieve a common musical diploma (ibid.), but it was surely also attributable to the climate of a capitalist, free-market economy in late Victorian Britain. Whatever the case, both institutions normalised a view of music and music training that privileged the socially privileged, and the high culture of Western classical music.

Meanwhile Sir Frederick Gore Ouseley, Professor of Music at Oxford, had instituted major curriculum reform in 1855 that set the tone for the next 150 years, introducing exams in ‘Harmony and Counterpoint, Fugue, Canon, Formal Analysis, and Musical History, in addition to the submission of written composition of prescribed nature’ (ibid., 239), a ‘pattern generally adopted’ by other universities (ibid., 241). There was another quite different parallel development, however. The (London) Sacred Philharmonic Society had been formed in 1832 to promote choral practice, and was soon ‘transformed into a symbol of religious dissent as a [huge]

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coalition of nonconformist choirs’ (Ehrlich et al 2000, 139). This choral music used a resurrected form of medieval tonic solfa notation, rather than staff notation. In 1835 the British Committee of Council on Education recommended tonic solfa notation and class singing as a method of instruction for state schools (Rainbow 1986, 28-31), a move further consolidated by the founding of the (London) Tonic Sol-fa College as early as 1869, which issued external certificates ahead of the other London-based conservatoires – and soon included South African candidates, black and white, in its sway. The non-conformist solfa-ists certainly had numbers on their side. By 1890, for example, ‘more than 39,000 copies of the Tonic Sol-fa edition of Handel’s Messiah had been sold’ (Rainbow 2000, 606). Rivalry between the publishing houses of Curwen and Novello ensured that thousands of items were disseminated throughout Britain and its colonies, including not only sheet music, histories of music, primers on singing and other modes of performance, but also, and especially, textbooks on what were called rudiments and theory of music.

The scene was set in late Victorian London for an ideological war between the non-conformist working-class choral solfa-ists and the Establishment middle-class conservatory- or university-trained musicians, including ‘eminent Victorians’ and Oxbridge men such as Charles Stanford, Hubert Parry, John Stainer, George Grove, Alexander Mackenzie, and Arthur Sullivan. Most of these were composers and all of them proponents of Britain’s expanding role in European classical music, anxious to eradicate the notion that Britain was ‘Das Land ohne Musik’ (a land without music), colonised by Germans. The war came to a head in a bizarre ‘notation march’ down Whitehall in 1897, where, as Grant Olwage has shown, Parry and others delivered a memorandum to the Education department deploring the widespread use of tonic solfa and choral music in schools (2002, 35). This was not so much an anti-German as an anti-working class move, pro-Establishment, concerned with the perpetuation of high standards of taste in British musical life.

The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of MusicShortly before this, the Royal Academy and Royal College had decided, perhaps not surprisingly, to bury their differences and work together on a new project that would ensure not only their own raison d’être but also the future of an instrumental (rather than vocal) high art tradition in staff notation, to which rudiments and theory of music were crucial. A conversation between Dr. Alexander Mackenzie, Principal of the Royal Academy of Music, and Sir George Grove, Director of the Royal College of Music in 1888 ([Associated Board n.d.], 8), led to the formation of a small ‘joint subcommittee’ of the two institutions, which met on the 17th of June 1889, and on 18th July a ‘draft agreement’ was reached to conduct joint Local Examinations in Music ‘throughout the United Kingdom’ ([Associated Board] Agreement, 24 October 1889).


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The first examinations of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in 1890 were not the first of their kind (similar external exams had been held by Trinity College of Music since 1876 (see Paxinos 1984, 10), but they quickly outgrew their rivals. The first practical exams – in piano, organ, and violin – were held in March and April 1890, in forty-six ‘local centres’ throughout the UK (mostly municipal buildings such as city halls). An integral part of the move to control standards throughout the country was the prescription that no candidates could take the joint Board’s exams until they had passed a Preliminary Examination a month prior to this, in Rudiments of Music. This qualifying exam tested knowledge of scales, intervals, note values, grouping of notes, time signatures, and triads – theory of music. An even stiffer Preparatory Examination followed, in March, alongside the practical exams, and this comprised ‘Counterpoint, Harmony, Analysis and Form’, offered at two levels, Junior and Senior.

The high a priori standard of theory of music demanded here was a major obstacle for many candidates, as the Associated Board’s first annual Report of 1890-91 shows. Although most people managed the rudiments paper, the Report says, ‘of the 904 Candidates who presented themselves [for the Preparatory Exam], 431 were successful and 473 failed, the percentage of passes in the Junior Grade being 54 as against nearly 45 in the Senior’ Associated Board 1890-91, 3). The two levels – Junior and Senior – were therefore soon expanded downwards to cater for low standard of theory of music knowledge (the failures), and then all levels expanded in both directions in both theory of music and practical music, until within a very few years they had stretched across eight Grades: the origin, then, of the Associated Board’s ‘grade exams’.

Another result of the shockingly high percentage of failures in theory of music was that the Board perceived this as a lapse in school music education, and decided to begin examinations in schools as well as local centres from 1891 (ibid., 4-5). Their annual Report makes the agenda clear. The Board intended

not only to encourage younger and less advanced students to persevere towards the attainment of a higher knowledge of Music by affording them the opportunity of testing by means of an Examination the degree of proficiency at which they have arrived, but also to exercise a beneficial influence on the elementary teaching of the Arts, which at present is too often of a kind but little calculated to further the development of sound musical culture (ibid., 5).

The Associated Board a coloniser of South African theory of musicThus, the Associated Board effectively became a school as well as community-based music examining body driven by an ideology of a ‘higher’ kind of music (i.e. Western art music), and guardian of that music’s performance standards and critical norms. It recognised that an enormous demand had been created that then

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had to be satisfied (ibid., 2), reflected in the telegraphic address it had from 1889 to 1898: ‘Augmentation’ – a play on the word associated with a rhythmic prolongation in counterpoint but also one of the facets of an expansionist policy. And indeed augmentation was soon to be far greater, perhaps, than Mackenzie and Grove ever imagined. In 1891 – in what was only the second year of running Associated Board external exams – a Memorandum from music teachers in the Western Cape was presented to the University of the Cape of Good Hope (UCGH), requesting the University to establish the Board’s examinations in South Africa (Le Roux 1982, 216).16 The Board entered into an agreement with the University, and the first Associated Board of the Royals Schools of Music exams in theory, piano, harmony, violin, singing, and organ were held in Cape Town, Graaff Reinet, Grahamstown, and Kimberley in 1894.17 After requests from several other colonial outposts in the late 1890s that finally turned a conversation between two Victorian gentleman into an imperial enterprise, the Board changed its name in 1902 to The Associated Board of the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music of London, England, for Local Examinations in Music in the British Empire … 18 The expansion of the Associated Board’s exams continued throughout the twentieth century, not only to countries of the former Commonwealth but also the far East and the United States. Its position now is that of the largest and most influential external examining body in the world and its whole history an example of the progression from mercantile through monopoly to transnational capitalism second to none.

The Associated Board is run as a Charity while the very profitable Music Publishing Department, opened in1920 ([Associated Board, n.d.], 15) is run as a business. In the financial year February 1997 to January 1998 the Charity accrued an annual surplus of almost £3 million.19 Exam entry fees, although low in terms of British currency, are high when translated into South African Rands and measured against the very low average earnings of candidates – or in the case of most schoolchildren or university students, absence of earnings. South African entries to Board exams are fairly small, however, compared to entries for Unisa grade exams. They constitute a fraction of the Board’s income. As Associate Board CEO Richard Morris told me in a meeting in March 2002, the Board’s 6 000 entries a year from South Africa ‘doesn’t cover our [administration] costs: it’s a charitable activity’ (personal communication 12/03/02). I have not yet been able to establish the economics of pass and fail rates, especially as they affect black candidates, because the Associated Board does not keep racial breakdowns of candidates and they are wary of giving statistics because this ‘might be beneficial to their competitors’ (ibid.). They stopped making figures public some years ago because, as I was told by an AB employee, ‘there might be some countries where out of 500 entries, 400 fail, and it would be very disheartening for these countries to see the statistics’ (Rob Pitkethly, personal communication 21/03/02).

The Associated Board exams have provided a model based on unquestioned assumptions about the ideology of certain kinds of music and musical knowledge. Their hegemonic power draws on other aspects, such as the volunteer system by


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which exams are administered world-wide. The first Local Representatives who ram exams in the 1890s had their names ‘approved by HRH the President’ (the Prince of Wales) ([First Annual] Report, 2), which was their payment and probably regarded as sufficient reward, along with the knowledge that they were doing what the Board called ‘important national work’ (ibid., 6). Local Representatives are still the mainstay of the organisation, and still unpaid, placing them in a very unequal power relations with the metropolitan centre of control. A gender analysis reveals another kind of power discourse. Lists of candidates’ names given until the Second World War show the overwhelming number was female (2000 in 1891 versus 29 male); the majority of examiners and local representatives however (representing the power of a centralised form of control) were male. Only in 1914 did the number of women suddenly increase, presumably because of conscription in the First World War. The Board itself was entirely male from 1890 until well into the twentieth century. Even the examiners sent out from the UK to assess candidates all over the world, receive fairly low fees; their services are seen as a subvention from the full-time teaching posts they mostly occupy (see the complaint about this in Long 1980, 8-9). These and other statistics obviously repay much more critical attention.

ConclusionThe case of the Associated Board and similar external examining bodies in South Africa is an extreme example, I suggest, of what the Comaroffs have shown as the colonisation of consciousness in South Africa, a continuing manifestation of the ‘signs and practices, the axioms and aesthetics, of an alien culture’ as it once operated in the ‘colonial, and later post-colonial state’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1989, 267, 268). It was from the first a collaboration, however, rather than an imposition, arising out of a desire to promulgate the values of Western culture – through in this case the vehicle of theory of music – in an alien world, and thus complicating the colonising process, in much the same way that the imposition of Christian precepts and the English language were negotiations as much as impositions. The grade exam system has become so successful that its approach has become a yardstick for measuring university entrance requirements in music, just as English is a yardstick. I would argue, however, that while English has become an effective medium for the expression of an indigenous literature, the same couldn’t necessarily be said of theory of music and indigenous composition. There is a strong tradition of choral music as I have pointed out, and also of orally transmitted music, that has little affinity with the axioms of Western harmony and counterpoint.

Indeed, the conditioning effect of the attitude towards musical mastery that some aspects of theory of music impose has done some disservice to a reading of the long indigenous choral tradition, which is not yet recognised as serious composition either by the academy or by the music education establishment, because its syntax does not conform to expectations.20 But increasingly, music students – whose consciousness

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universities are also trying to colonise – don’t come to study music at university with this conditioning, because of the so-called disadvantaged schooling they have received; in this case, perhaps, advantaged. Many have not already absorbed certain assumptions of value or systems of control through theory of music. Thus, employing its hegemonic norms uncritically is not only problematic but increasingly anachronistic.

What are the constraints on our thinking to remove before we can affect further critique of theory of music? First, because the corpus of rudiments, harmony, and counterpoint has been in existence longer than critical theory it seems epistemologically a priori and therefore foundational. Second, its epistemology has emerged from a very different space from that of critique (from an eighteenth century practice of composition rather than late nineteenth and early twentieth century practices of social science and philosophy), and its basic premise – an assumption of value in the rules of Western music composition of 200 years ago – is no longer relevant. Third, the mastery of hierarchies and rules no longer determine successful performance or composition. The process of deconstructing its system-bound modes of musical thinking thus holds many possibilities. In addition, we cannot do without some of its useful components; we cannot throw the baby out with the bath water. Harmonic thinking, for example, is a strong element in much of South Africa’s traditional and popular music, as is rhythmic polyphony.

Casting off some components of theory of music and retaining, maybe adapting others is threatening, however. For it is nothing less than abandoning, after 300 years, the traditional carrier of Western classical music conventions, dismantling an even older system in which apprentices are perpetually initiated into the ‘basics’, or nuts and bolts, so that masters higher up the hierarchy can continually control them as they move up until they become masters themselves. It is abandoning the Romantic paradigm (also revealed by the Comaroffs) of student recipients waiting for ‘the word’, and abandoning a body of knowledge comfortably residing in ready-to-wear textbooks. How critical music theory as theory-of-music is, then, is not a matter of its intellectual importance so much as its ideological necessity. To debate it, to explore the truly critical role (music) theory could play in South Africa, to deconstruct the ideology behind it and reassign the uses of its component parts, would be a brave and extraordinary move. It would however mean that last major outpost of the nineteenth century conservatoire system inherent in university music departments in South Africa would also be dismantled. Not the least of the benefits of this, in turn, are that composition might become, in Jacques Attali’s liberating words, the de-mystifying process of ‘making a piece’ ‘removed from the rigid institutions of specialised musical training’, (McClary 1985, 156). On the down side, some of us (myself included) might be out of a job.


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Notes1 According to Aristotle, who regarded theory as a higher form of practice, the point of

practice ‘is change in some object, whereas the end of theoria is knowledge of the object itself’ (Christensen 2002, 2), making a ‘fundamental epistemological distinction drawn between the two as principles of action … theoria is the discipline of final causes (that of why a thing is made) and praktike that of formal causes (that into which a thing is made)’ (ibid., 3).

2 The definition of ‘music’ I use for this essay is one necessarily bounded to Western art music. To make it apply more widely would defeat most of the purpose of the essay, but I am nevertheless aware that this may be seen as a limitation.

3 It is ‘theory of music’ as I have defined it above, although Christensen continues to call it ‘music theory’.

4 The Cambridge History of Music Theory gives several dates. Christensen’s Introduction has 1720-79 (9); in a later chapter they are 1720-89 (668); in another chapter 1771-79 (872); and in the book’s Index 1720-90 (991).

5 Christensen does not give the original German term but the title of Sulzer’s whole intellectual project was Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771-4) (ibid.).

6 And how such analysis explains causes in terms of an idealistic or materialistic paradigm is of as great an interest to musicians as it is to scholars in other disciplines – in the South African context see for example Lüdemann 1993.

7 My knowledge of the South African situation comes from ‘insider’ experience: from teaching at four South African universities over thirty years, acting as external examiner for others, hearing students and colleagues present papers at conferences, serving on various national music education forums, and studying the development of syllabuses and curricula countrywide, and engaging my colleagues in various institutions in debate over the role of ‘music theory’ in the curriculum.

8 Das Meisterwerk in der Musik (1925-30).9 He expressed his ideas most fully in his treatise Der freie Satz [Free Composition]

of 1935.10 The steps are Grade 1 to Grade 8, with a ‘pre-Grade 1’ level (Preparatory) leading

to Grade 1 and a ‘post-Grade 8’ level (Advanced Certificate) providing a stepping stone to Licentiate Diplomas in Teaching or Performing (the latter are on a par with university BMus final year).

11 The Associated Board of the Royal School of Music’s mouthpiece, Libretto, often pays service to the globalising effect of the ABRSM’s work ‘in a range of overseas countries from Europe to Africa to Asia’ (Chief Executive Richard Morris in Libretto 2006: 3, 2), and, one can add, Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.

12 The repertoire most people in South Africa listen to regularly – hymns, gospel, kwaito, hip-hop, other forms of popular music – which abounds in conventions celebrated in the rules of theory of music, paradoxically remains an untapped source for the mastery of such rules. It is, however, important to point out that tools from theory of music can quite successfully be used (and have) to interpret meanings in popular music. See inter alia the work of Richard Middleton, Simon frith, and John Shepherd. On the other hand, there are also scholars who have revealed conceptual systems in southern Africa’s ‘indigenous’ musics: see for example Olivier 1997, and Dargie 1982, 1991, & 1996.

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13 An example from the 1920s or ’30s [n.d.] that reveals a possible relationship between religious and musical evangelism is Minnie Cuthbert’s First Steps in Theory: A Catechism of the Elements of Music for the use of Junior Pupils. Divided into thirty-eight lessons, this ‘catechism’ presents the information in question-and-answer form with ‘Examination Questions supplied throughout [which] are designed as tests of comprehension to be answered by the pupils (without reference to the Catechism)’ (Cuthbert [n.d.], Preface). Rather in the same way that the Christian Catechism was ‘to be learned of every person before he be brought to be confirmed by the Bishop’ (Book of Common Prayer [n.d., 170), theory of music was throughout the 20th century seen as preparation for musical confirmation.

14 Behind these books lies an area of research that it is beyond the scope of this article to explore: the political economy of the grade exams. The ABRSM sold 124 000 copies of Cole’s Questions and Exercises between 1953 and 1963 (handwritten note of 22.10.63 by the Board’s Chairman, Stanley Marchant, AB Archive, orange file ‘M.P.D.’ [Music Publishing Department]), thus making the Board a profit (after printing costs and his £450 © fee) of £8 060 (ibid.) in ten years. His Rudiments and Theory of Music published in 1958, to partner the exercise books, had made the Board £32 324 by 1968 (ibid., agenda item). The Music Publishing Department had separated from the Examinations Department in 1920 (see below).

15 Not only is it unquestioned but also the ‘critical outcomes’ of music in the higher school curricula have themselves recently become linked to the outcomes of grade theory examinations of the Royal Schools of Music and Unisa. Perhaps this in turn is to be expected, since the AB exam system was always intimately linked with school education, from its inception in the 1890s (see the early Minute Books in the AB archive, and issues of the London-based The Music Times in the same period).

16 An unsurprising move, in light of the constant musical traffic between Britain and its southern African colony.

17 These initial exams were not ‘Unisa exams’, as Unisa would have it – see Musicus 22(2), 1994, although several decade later and under the impact of various ideological imperatives not least of which was the rise of Afrikaaner nationalism, there was a split between the Associated Board and the University of South Africa which was administering their exams (Unisa grew out of UCGH), and in 1948 Unisa established its own Grade exam system.

18 Associated Board. 1902-1906. The Associated Board of the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music of London, England, for Local Examinations in Music in the British Empire: Patron: His Majesty The King; President: H.R.H. The Prince of Wales, K.G: Thirteenth [to Seventeenth] Annual Report of the Board to the General Meeting at St. James’s Palace. London: [AB] 14 Hanover Square. [5 paper booklets bound into one volume, called Centre Reports 1902 to 1906.]

19 The figure given was the latest I could find while conducting research into the ABRSM in 2002 and were found on the website of the Charity Commission of England and Wales (www.charity-commission.gov.uk/registeredcharities/showchairoty.asp?remchar=&chyr, 18/03/02). I have not ascertained figures for the profit of the Publications Department over the same period, but I assume they would be much higher.

20 A widely influential textbook for music education in South African schools, The Musical Arts in Africa (Herbst, Nzewi and Agawu, eds, 2003) does not include indigenous


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choral composition in its repertoire of music for classroom use, despite the fact that the vast majority of South African music teachers in South Africa’s hundreds of thousands of schools are in many cases also composers, and choir trainers. One of the main people attempting to counter the trend, to promote choral music as art music, is Mzilikazi Khumalo.

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Artigo How Critical is Music Theory

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