Notes from the the tone-deaf

When I was a freshman in college, I took "Intro to Music and Music Theory" with Professor Waples. A girl on my freshman hall, an accomplished violinist I later discovered, told me the class was basic but informative and I would learn some basics of music theory. So I took the class. I got a C-, my lowest grade by far and one that would keep me from graduating magna cum laude years later. I'm still a little bitter about it.

Looking back, although I didn't retain squat about music or music theory, I learned a lot about what it means to have "an ear" for something-- or not to have an ear, as it were.

Initially, the weekly tests in music theory consisted of the professor playing a basic scale and we had to name the notes. I read the text book and listened to the practice tapes, but outside that context, I could not name the difference between a C sharp or a B flat-- I could hear that it was a different sound, but I could not define it to save my life. I would freeze up and laboriously guess while my fellow students would jot down the answer and wait for the next note. Later in the semester, we were given 10 CDs of classical music-- Brahms, Bach, Chopin, etc.-- and during tests the professor played excerpts of their pieces, from both major and minor works. We had to "name the tune," the composer, and the year. I remember knowing Beethoven's 5th with some confidence. The rest sounded the same to me under the pressure of the test, even though I must have listened to those damn CDs 200 times. "This class is easy! Why can't you just listen to the music, Katie?" my classmates would say. But for the most part, they were music people and they had grown up listening to classical music and composing their own riffs for fun. I had no practice, no context, no interest, and no ear for it.

I can't draw a perfect parallel here, but when I think of students who struggle with grammar, I think of my C- in music theory. I have an ear for language. You have an ear for language. Williams has an ear for language. So when we, language lovers and knowers, distort the rules of the language or break the rules intentionally or unintentionally, who really cares? It's one thing to know language and mistakenly or jokingly botch a sentence, but it is another thing to have no ear for language, and I am not sure we, as language buffs, can completely understand what this is like. Seems like most of our errors are V+R-. When the great Orwell breaks a rule (and I think his errors in Williams' piece were very intentionally broken), is it even worth pointing out? I think Williams and I agree that we can't compare the Orwellian passive voice to the repetitive, unrelenting boring passive voice of Fred the Freshman. V+R+ man, V+R+. If I have a budding little Orwell in class, he can use the passive voice to his liking.

There are a 100 differences between the errors Williams inserts in this journal article and many of the errors we will see next year. Most notably, Williams knows he's breaking the rules. If my students want to split an infinitive for emphasis or style (oh, "to boldly go..."), they should go for it. BUT, I think I would rather have them know the rule and break it than never know the rule at all. Williams mentions the converse theory at the end of his article, "It simply feels more authentic when we condemn error and enforce a rule. And after all, what good is learning a rule if all we can do is obey it?" Seems to me that we have more flexibility with language if we know the rules and bend them than if we aren't aware of them at all. Many linguistic constructs like pun, metaphor, and poetry, rely on knowing language by sight and sound and ear.

But this is where I struggle. I think my grammar understanding is mostly by ear. I don't always know why a specific construct is wrong, but like Potter Stewart, I know it when I see it. I know from the torture of music theory that it is difficult to develop "an ear" at the age of 18+. Maybe even impossible. For the V+R+ students, we can hand out grammar books and ask them to memorize rote rules, but these devices will not replace an ear for language.

Williams' little game at the end of his piece is similar to what I remember of Beethoven's Fifth. The maestro inserts some sour chords, but clearly he has an ear for composition so we don't care about the rules he breaks. Then there is me, pounding out error-filled Chopsticks on a poorly tuned piano, hoping for a C-.

I pity the tone-deaf grammarians, and I hope I can help them or at least understand them.