April 28, 2008
Music is best studied in the context of history and sociology, says Howard Meltzer.
Howard Meltzer loves the music of Mozart and Beethoven. But the last thing he wants is to impose his tastes on anyone else.
Meltzer, who is deputy chair for music in BMCC’s department of music and art, is best known for creating the survey course Music and Western Civilization, as a reaction to traditional music appreciation and “masterpiece” courses offered at most colleges and universities.
Looking beyond masterpieces
“I remember taking a course called ‘masterpieces of western music’ as an undergraduate at Columbia,” says Meltzer, who first arrived at BMCC as an adjunct lecturer in 1992. (He later left for a seven-year teaching sojourn in Texas and Pennsylvania, returning to BMCC in 2003.) “The implication was that only so-called ‘masterpieces’ were worthy of being studied – but that approach didn’t acknowledge how students actually responded to music or what they felt,” he says. “As a teacher, I can enumerate all the reasons why a Beethoven or Mozart symphony is a great work of art and discuss its underlying structure. But in the end, the only thing that’s relevant to the student is whether he or she liked it.”
In contrast, Meltzer designed a survey course that eliminates the idea of teaching students to appreciate music and instead places music in a historical and sociological context. “I prefer to talk about how people have thought about music and used it over the centuries, from the Middle Ages to the present,” he says. “Ideally, students come away with the idea that a piece of music doesn’t have to be complex to be good.” A Brahms symphony may take 40 minutes to perform and embody far more complexity than a three-minute rock song, he says. “But that doesn’t mean the song is bad music.”
Arousal vs. creative expression
A dominant theme in Meltzer’s course is the distinction between “people who believe the purpose of music is to arouse emotion and those who say music should express emotion.” Meltzer clearly takes the latter view, noting its origins in the 18th century enlightenment. “The origins of arousal theory can be traced back to Plato and even further to the Old Testament,” he says. “If you feel music can arouse strong feelings and that certain music can be offensive to specific cultural or religious groups or inappropriate for children, then the next step might be to argue for regulating and censoring it – and stifling it as a means of expression.”
These are issues that can best be discussed and dissected in the context of the history of music, “and that’s how the Music and Western Civilization course is set up,” Meltzer says. “My intention isn’t to teach students to appreciate music or what music to appreciate, but to let draw their own conclusions and form their own ideas.”
