May 8, 2017 | by Joshua Drake

The department of music at Harvard University recently revised its curriculum. Music theory and counterpoint—once the bedrock of the degree—are now optional.

The reasons for this change by Harvard are not complicated, and not surprising. The faculty of music at Harvard feels it can no longer justify the priority long given to traditional Western music theory and history. The change is part of a process now common in departments of music in universities around the country. They adopt new classes like “pop music history” or “rock and roll compositional methods,” and then become uncomfortable with the implications—social, racial, and aesthetic—that come when these new classes are treated as optional while traditional theory and history are required.

The college where I teach has a mission statement that binds faculty to “avoid … educational philosophies that emphasize contemporary perspectives to the neglect of what has proven itself across the ages to be of value for human life.” Because of this, I will probably be spared the obvious complications that come from a curriculum like the one Harvard has adopted. I think, nevertheless, that those complications are worth observing before they arrive. And they are legion.

Read more at The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College