While in high school I had a teacher named Mr. C, who loved to teach more than any other teacher I had ever had. This was a tall order considering the wonderful teachers I have had in life. I took his AP Music Theory class, traditionally one of the most difficult to grasp at a mastery level. He went above and beyond to reach each student. Music Theory is a creative math that has an abundance of rules, complex structures, and common practices. Despite the strict rules, it also has the capacity to break almost all of them while still producing a wonderful musical outcome. Due to the contrast of mathematical structure and creative fluidity, many students had a hard time combining two methods of thought.
Mr. C. was incredibly intuitive, and studied each student’s learning style. For the students who felt that music was math and should not be diluted by side trips into crazy creativity, he introduced the class to Debussy, whose beautiful “Claire de Lune” astonished the musical community of the time by breaking many rules that were considered unbreakable. For the students who felt that the rules were only hindrances to their creativity, he asked us all to write pieces and bring them in. Then we analyzed our pieces and found that our “purely creative” works, did in fact follow almost all rules, but were beautiful nonetheless.
He created amazing projects that drew his students out of their shells to see information in new ways. One such project was to develop a new method for music notation, which could not use any symbols or structures of our standard musical notation. We then brought in hand-made instruments, and asked our classmates to help us perform our written piece. Because our musical notation was foreign, our pieces at first sounded completely different than we had expected in our heads, but after teaching our classmates our notation method, we were able to perform music much closer to the intended outcome. This project taught us in many different ways:
- It demonstrated the extreme difficulty early musicians had in preserving their work;
- It brought appreciation for the creative minds that invented our incredibly accurate standard method of notation;
- It illuminated the similarities between music and written language; and
- It helped us to see the parallels in music notation and music development through history.
Mr. C explained complex topics of structure and method in many different ways, so that when some explanations did not make sense, another would ring true. He never left a student confused, but rather, if a topic was not mastered, he would have us each invent a way to explain it that was different from the ways he or the book had given. This reinforced our understanding and brought others into mastery of the topic. Our class grew not only as individuals, but as a group.
Lastly, he taught us that life, and the people in life, are like music:
There are an abundance of rules, complex structures, and common practices. People consist of both structure and creative fluidity.
Despite this, we all also have the capacity to go in brand new directions, sometimes breaking almost all of the known rules while still producing a wonderful musical, harmonic outcome.
