Expertise, Difficulty, and Recognizing Chords in “More Complicated” Contexts
Harmonic Analysis as a Pedagogical Bottleneck
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15763/issn.2994-7073.2026.39.109-152Keywords:
Music, Music Theory PedagogyAbstract
This article draws on the literature on expertise to interrogate the pedagogical challenge of equipping students with the skills needed to recognize harmonic phenomena in any analytical context (as opposed to in the curated textbook examples that we often use to introduce such concepts). I argue that navigating this pedagogical challenge requires us to: (1) guide students towards developing deeper, more connected, understandings of harmony concepts and (2) draw attention to the ways that harmony interacts with other features of the surrounding tonal rhetoric. Through this discussion, this article interrogates what it means to understand a harmony concept, scrutinizes the ways that we engage with repertoire in our classrooms, and questions how we structure and present music theory concepts in our courses.
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