Marc Lowenstein is an active conductor, singer, composer, and teacher. He has conducted for the last two years on New York City Opera’s VOX showcase festival leading workshops of his own The Fisher King, Anne LeBaron’s Cresecnt City, and Jenny Johnson’s The Endings.

He conducted the premiere of Anne LeBaron’s WET and was music director for the US premiere of Georges Aperghis’ Sextuor: L’Origine des Espèces and for the premiere of Stephen Oliver’s Peach Blossom Fan at the REDCAT theater. He conducts with Ensemble Green and the Vinny Golia Large Ensemble and conducted the CalArts New Millennium Players with whom he led American premieres of several works by composers such as Gavin Bryars, John Oswald, Henry Brandt, James Tenney, David Rosenboom, Wadada Leo Smith, Kubilay Uner, Mark Menzies, and many others.

As a lyric tenor, he recently sang the lead tenor role of Madeline X in the premiere of Michael Gordon’s What to Wear directed by Richard Foreman at REDCAT and has sung about twenty- five other opera roles including Pelléas, Don José, Oedipus, Tom in A Rake’s Progress and Sandy in To the Lighthouse.

Despite working in opera for so long, he has nonetheless himself written a full-length opera, The Fisher King, based on the screenplay of the same name, and he has begun one based on the short stories of Charles Bukowski and he has written several other large works. He was a founder and director of Berkeley Contemporary Opera with whom he conducted the premiere of Martin Herman’s The Scarlet Letter and performances of several other modern operas. He has recorded on Nine Winds, Innova and Poobah records. He also occasionally plays klezmer clarinet. On the faculty of the California Institute of the Arts, he teaches theory, skills, history, composition, voice, and conducts various ensembles.

Why do I believe there is no such thing? I am dissatisfied with most theory books on the market, and I think it almost impossible to write a good and complete one. And I depsair of finding a good comprehensive one to use in class.

To help illustrate why I think there is no such thing as Music Theory, I went to a university music library, did a search for relatively recent articles with the key words ‘Music Theory’ and this is what I found:

“The figure displays pcsets X= {x1, x2,….xN} and Y = {y1, y2,….yN} that have the same cardinality. Furthermore, the pitches instancing the various pcs of X and Y can be laid out in registral order here so that x1 is below (or the same as) y1, which is (strictly) below x3, and so forth until we reach y(N-1), which is (strictly) below xN, which is below (or the same as) yN. In short, we could say that the normal orderings of the two pcsets ‘dovetail’ (though that is not quite precise to allow for the possibility that any xN might be the same as yN). In these circumstances, the retrograde of Figure 7 will indeed be a formal voice leading, and it will indeed instance the downshift voice leading from Y into X. But the special circumstances are very restrictive.”

‘Ach, seine Theorie!’ Names will be kept secret to protect the guilty. And really, this was the first article I found. I didn’t have to look hard for something ridiculous, and to confirm that this was not atypical, I looked further into the theoretical journals and found much more of the same.

But then again, this is a very easy thing to do, to make fun of theory. Sadly easy, especially after the late twentieth century. It’s a harder thing to be constructive, and why it is harder to be constructive is the essence of what I want to write about here.

(republished from CalArts Music School Theory Wiki)