Modern Band Music Theory

I wrote a high school theory curriculum for MusicFirst

I met Dr Jim Frankel, the founder of MusicFirst, back when I was a grad student. We have been mutual admirers in a passive way since then. It was a pleasant surprise when, over the summer, he asked me to contribute to their new Modern Band curriculum, specifically, the music theory component. It's now being used in schools across the US. Read more about it here.

If you are not involved in American music education, you may be wondering what "modern band" is. To answer that, you need some background. There are three kinds of traditional school ensembles: band, choir and orchestra. In this context, "band" does not mean a band like the Beatles, it means an instrumental ensemble playing from sheet music with a conductor. This might sound like an orchestra, but band and orchestra have different origins. Orchestra has a "highbrow" connotation; it's associated with the Western European canon. Band is more "lowbrow"; it comes from the military, and is associated with patriotic, popular and vernacular music. Think of the marching band at a parade or football game: they might play some light classical, but mostly they are playing Sousa marches, pop songs, folk songs, movie themes and the like.

The wind band used to be a common format for amateur music making in the US; every Rotary club and fire department had one. But now you really only ever encounter band in official or institutional settings. Popular music has undergone a lot of change in the past 75 years, while band has remained essentially the same, give or take a few synthesizers. It is fine if orchestra doesn't evolve; it's supposed to be canonical and traditional. But band is supposed to be for everyday music. There are institutional reasons for schools to want to continue to have band programs, but they are understandably having a hard time getting kids interested in playing those Sousa marches.

The modern band movement is an effort to reconfigure the school band to bring it more in line with the music that students are familiar with: rock, R&B, country, and related pop styles. It doesn't just represent a change in repertoire; modern band also uses different instruments (more guitars) and different teaching methods (more chord charts and learning by ear.) The big challenge with modern band is that music teachers overwhelmingly come from a classical music background, so while they might enjoy rock or pop, they rarely have experience creating or performing it. Music Will is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting modern band programs, both with equipment and with professional development. University music education programs are beginning to do more pop music pedagogy as well. This is what I wrote my doctoral dissertation about.

So why does a modern band program need its own music theory curriculum? There are a few reasons.

• A substantial amount of Anglo-American pop harmony and melody descends from the blues, which does not operate according to the conventions of Western tonal theory.

• Even when pop songs do use European-descended harmony and voice leading, they don't use it the same way that the European canon does. Pop songs tend not to have the same structures of tension and resolution, and the chords tend not to progress.

• The diatonic modes are rarely used in canonical works, but they are everywhere in pop.

• Western music theory has not concerned itself much with rhythm, but pop music uses musical time as a more important structuring element than harmony or melody.

• Pop uses loop structures rather than linear structures. When those loops are sampled from existing recordings, it opens up complicated issues around copyright, ownership and intertextuality. Is this a music theory topic? I think so, and MusicFirst agrees.

This has been an exciting couple of years in my music teaching life. I have gone from being a weirdo on the fringe to feeling, if not exactly secure in my professional existence, at least finding new doors opening up to me. I spent a lot of years figuring out blues-based and groove-oriented music on my own, scrounging around the academic literature, writing on this blog, getting into discussions and arguments online, connecting up with pop scholars, hip-hop educators and activists. Starting in 2020, Philip Ewell and other progressive voices in music theory got institutions to start questioning their assumptions about pedagogy. Change happens slowly at the university level, but it happens.

NYU had a very traditional tonal theory sequence when I was a grad student, but now it offers a pop sequence and a non-Western sequence as well. This means that I am now employable as a theory professor. That, in turn, has given me the institutional credibility to become a curriculum developer. Rather than having to argue that James Brown and Missy Elliott belong in theory class, I face the much happier problem of how best to teach their music. If something like a modern band program had existed when I was in high school, my musical life would have gotten off to a much faster and easier start. I'm happy to get to build these things for the kids in school now.