cwasims wrote: ↑Wed Feb 09, 2022 6:19 pm
Thanks to Alex and John for the comments on my post – I think it’s useful to try and figure out the best ways to ask about music theory. To be clear, I don’t think this tossup is too “unthemed”: drawing all the clues from music theory certainly makes it thematically coherent (unlike if, say, it decided to also clue some pieces in A major or something). Although I would agree that the clues here are pyramidal, I would still maintain that all of them except the neo-Riemannian theory first line are really pretty easy: from the RCM Music Theory syllabus, inversions of dominant seventh chords are taught contemporaneously with Grade 7 piano (which many people would take at roughly Grade 7 age), Neapolitan chords are tougher (ARCT level) but pretty commonly encountered before then, and then everything else is lower than Grade 7. In other words, this tossup is primarily on material that music pupils, at least in Canada, would be expected to learn in elementary school, which hardly seems ideal for a tournament like ACF Regionals. Furthermore, in my experience, these sorts of clues are extremely common in music theory common links (which are probably also the most common type of theory question), meaning it is in practice a subcategory that draws on material that is substantially easier than probably any other subcategory.
Perhaps no one in all of quizbowl could have more empathy for where this argument is coming from than I do. Indeed, the rationale for my career as a “music mafioso” was basically as you’ve stated: The musical concepts that quizbowl considers forebodingly technical are things that people in the classical music worlds that I inhabit (and that you apparently inhabit too) learned in elementary school. For the longest time, it was considered reasonable to expect that (e.g.) a science editor at a regional or national tournament could speak the language of an upper-level undergraduate, but unreasonable to expect that a music editor at the same tournament could speak the language that my colleagues and I learned when we were twelve years old. It seemed to me that if collegiate quizbowl took the “collegiate” part seriously, questions in each category would draw from each academic subject at the same level of depth, as measured by something like the stage of education at which concepts are taught.
Ultimately, though, I think this reasoning is misguided. Difficulty is, of course, a social property. Once that is acknowledged, one has to decide which social group to use to measure difficulty. By general consensus, the best group to use is the actual population of quizbowlers, not an ideal population in which expertise is evenly spread among categories. When we speak of a tossup’s capacity to produce a pyramidal distribution of buzzes or to fairly gradate among levels of knowledge, or when we speak of aiming for a particular conversion distribution when writing a bonus, we are assessing difficulty relative to a tournament’s intended audience, the actual field of players.
It may be tough to overcome the culture shock of finding graduate-level topics in one subject treated as equivalently difficult to something you learned as a pre-adolescent in music. But conversion data and anecdotal experience suggest that the clues that you are finding too basic are nonetheless serving their function well. Only a change in the demographics of quizbowl players could make higher-level music theory pragmatically useful for cluing. And frankly, the kinds of demographic changes quizbowl is likely to pursue (and should pursue) will probably make classical music theory, if anything, even less accessible.
I should defer to John when it comes to the significance of Neo-Riemannian theory – my claim was based primarily on the fact that I have literally never heard anyone mention it outside of QB (including in the music analysis videos I watch sometimes). Aside from its academic importance, though, it seems to come up with very high frequency in the first lines of music theory tossups in my personal experience, which is probably not ideal and to some extent reinforces some of my concerns with the kinds of clues used in many music theory questions.
It’s possible that it’s overrepresented in quizbowl because the transformations lend themselves to tossup-friendly “computation” (as Alex has called it) in a way that many other music theory concepts do not. (For example, it is considerably more difficult in a tossup to test a player’s ability to permute and transpose a tone row form, even if that is perhaps more widely taught in upper-level theory.)