Wendelin Bitzan

Wendelin Bitzan

Musician・Researcher・Digital Content Creator

Music Theory Lecture Scripts

Dear peers and colleagues, I have devised lecture notes for my music theory classes during the past semester, addressed to undergraduate students in the musicology minor at Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf. If you are interested, you can download the scripts here as PDF files (in German language)—both were supplemented by a Moodle course with audio examples and sheet music. I’d be delighted to have your comments and suggestions on these teaching materials so as to improve them for future use. Thanks in advance!

– Elementary music theory: Compendia
– Musical Form: Compendia

Farewell, Lehrauftrag

Closing a chapter today: Just taught my last two classes as an adjunct lecturer at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Despite the ridiculously low income associated with teaching undergraduate music theory modules as a minor subject, it’s been a pleasure helping those students (most of which were focused, dedicated, and really smart in conversation) develop their abilities in reading and listening to music. Yet I am more than happy that I’ll never require to work as a freelance lecturer again. The concept of Lehrauftrag (teaching assignment) is one of the most corrupted and exploitative constructions in German academia, and even though the hourly rates at Berlin’s universities will rise to a €35 minimum in the near future, there is very little hope that conditions for adjunct staff will significantly improve.

The Pitfalls of Harmonic Functions

It continues to amaze me how German functional analysis is still used and taught in an idiosyncratic way, seemingly in disregard of critical approaches and enhancements of the past decades, and sometimes leading to apparent inconsistensies. Have a look at the following passage, taken from a harmony script which is currently used at a German music university. The self-referentiality and dogmatism of functional theory becomes already apparent in the title of the chapter (»The subdominant fifth-sixth chord in root position«). Your thoughts are appreciated.

»Just like the dominant, the subdominant harmony employs a characteristic dissonance: the sixth above the bass, which is also used in the S6 [= ii6] chord where it functions as a consonance. […] The added sixth [marked ›sixte ajoutée‹ in misattribution of Rameau’s concept of the same name] causes the fifth, despite being consonant to the bass, to become a dissonant note which must be correctly resolved.« (Manfred Dings, Harmonielehre I. Skript zur Übung im Wintersemester 2017/18, Hochschule für Musik Saar 2017, p. 40; see also: Wilhelm Maler, Beitrag zur Harmonielehre, Leipzig 1931, p. 15).

Chopin’s Barcarolle

Just completed the engraver’s copy and critical commentary of my first scholarly sheet music edition, due for publication during next year at Bärenreiter Verlag. It is one of Frédéric Chopin‘s most beautiful piano pieces, the F-sharp major Barcarolle, Op. 60, of 1846. The source material is complex and partly confusing: there are two autographs, three parallel first editions, and two annotated copies of Chopin’s pupils which I had to check for discrepancies and possible contradictions, as well as a number of newer editions. Looking forward to proofreading the new engraving, to which Hardy Rittner will contribute fingerings and remarks on performance.

Perpetrators in Tailcoats: Srsly?

I have recently been engaged with VG Musikedition, the German collecting society for music publishing, in a discussion on their recent publication on copying musical scores (which is largely based on an older brochure by the same author Thomas Tietze, titled »Perpetrators in Tailcoats«). The subliminally threatening tone of this publication tends to criminalise musicians as »sheet music pirates«, and behaviour due to lack of juridical knowledge is marked as »illegal action«. Using the hashtag #keinenotenkopieohnelizenz, VG Musikedition stereotypically claims that all music copying needs to be licensed regardless of the age of the composer and edition—which is a purely propagandistic view, considering that large portions of the repertoire are in the public domain. My correspondence with director Christian Krauß (at least I believe it’s him) is available through the screenshots below.