[mmcclimon]

I'm not sure what your dissent is, so I'm not sure how to respond to it. I think you're saying that you had a good experience in your music theory classes, which used Bach chorales, and you wouldn't want to discard that experience in favor of a shallower, broader curriculum.

If so: that's not really what I'm saying at all! Even in courses that focus primarily on, say, Western common-practice harmony (as many basic undergrad theory courses do), you're likely to find a much broader variety of music being taught than just the Bach chorales. That's partly because the field as a whole has been moving away from strict adherence to the traditional canon, but also more basically it's just good pedagogy. That is: most music that students play isn't going to be four-part homophony, and so learning to do harmonic analysis of string quintets or saxophone quartets or lead sheets provides a much stronger grounding about how harmony works in real music -- even if you circumscribe harmony quite strictly as "harmony as deployed in Western common-practice music betwen 1700 and 1850."

Disclaimer: I left the field and have been employed full-time as a software developer for more than 5 years, and pedagogy isn't an area of the field I follow closely. A good recent example is the open-access textbook Open Music Theory (https://viva.pressbooks.pub/openmusictheory/); perusing the examples there I think will be a good demonstration of the breadth of both styles and composers that's pretty representative of current pedagogy, even without radically altering the aims of the undergraduate music theory curriculum (which is also happening).

[impendia]

It seems I perhaps misunderstood you and was dissenting against a strawman! Certainly, your second sentence accurately characterizes my point of view.

I remember that our textbook (Kostka and Payne's Total Harmony) had a lot of examples other than Bach chorales, and if I recall correctly the homework exercises did too. The composition exercise I remembered 20 years later was something vaguely similar to a Bach invention. That said, chorales were used quite heavily -- perhaps because they were the simplest interesting examples that illustrated the theory.

My professor wrote out music at the chalkboard during class; he even had a special chalk holder that held ten pieces of chalk, to produce a grand staff. I suspect that other types of music might be less well suited to chalkboard lectures, but that seems to be a trend in academia anyway. I'm a math professor, and we seem to be among the few holdouts in that regard.

Anyway, thanks for the textbook link, I will have a look!