Are you a descriptivist or a prescriptivist when it comes to music literacy?
I’m firmly in the descriptivist camp, both as in the linguistic world where it originates and when it comes to music theory.
Descriptivism “is the work of objectively analyzing and describing how language is actually used (or how it was used in the past) by a speech community.” (Wikipedia)
Prescriptivism, by comparison, asserts that there are objectively “correct” rules and we must adhere to them. (Think of your fourth grade teacher hearing the question “Can I go to the bathroom?” and responding, “I don’t know, can you?”)
I like the freedom of descriptivism, and specifically the recognition that language usage changes and evolves over time, and we must adapt to it. It’s only a question of if the language facilitates the desired communication.
And I think that the same should be true of how we use music theory to describe music. As a teacher of theory, and especially with my interest in jazz theory, I think the right tools aren’t necessarily what have been passed down, but rather the tools that help us to understand, work with, and create music. If that’s Roman Numeral analysis, fine. If it’s jazz chords or the Nashville Number System or tab, that’s good too. It’s about what facilitates the musical work.
Here’s the problem, though. Descriptivism can easily become Prescriptivism. Shakespeare playfully invented language (descriptivist) and now we declare it to be the “right way” to speak (prescriptivist). Bach perfected chorale-style harmony and part-writing, then early theorists developed a framework to describe it (descriptivist); now thousands of college freshmen suffer through following rules (prescriptivist).
Use the best tools to describe what’s happening. Share those rules. But never, never say that your framework is the only right way to describe what’s happening.