Notes from the Staff

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Conversations about music pedagogy, music theory, ear training, and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education.

  1. Teaching Intonation

    11/22/2024

    Teaching Intonation

    Leah Sheldon shares tips for teaching intonation, even when working with beginning students. Chapters: 00:00 Introduction to Notes From the Staff In this opening chapter, Leah Sheldon and Greg Ristow introduce the podcast and its focus on music theory, ear training, and music technology. They invite listeners to engage with the show by sending comments and episode suggestions. 01:06 Leah’s Background in Music Education Leah shares her journey in music education, detailing her experience from teaching elementary general music to her current role in middle school instrumental music. She emphasizes the importance of teaching intonation at various educational levels. 02:01 Introducing Intonation The discussion turns to the timing of introducing intonation when teaching beginners, with Leah explaining her approach to teaching it as early as possible. She highlights the need for students to produce a clear tone before focusing on intonation. 03:00 Tuner vs. Ear Leah discusses the pros and cons of using tuners versus relying on the ear for intonation. She explains how both methods can be beneficial but emphasizes the importance of developing students’ listening skills. 04:57 The Importance of Ear Training Leah outlines her sequence for teaching students to tune themselves in an ensemble, starting with ear training. She discusses the gradual progression from simple pitch recognition to more advanced tuning techniques. 06:47 Exercises for Intonation Practice Leah shares specific exercises to help students practice intonation, including the classic ‘F around the room’ exercise. She explains how this exercise helps students develop listening skills and blend their sounds. 10:00 The Role of Tone in Tuning The conversation shifts to the significance of tone quality in achieving good intonation. Leah explains how a clear tone is essential for blending sounds effectively within an ensemble. 12:25 Using Drones for Tuning Leah introduces the concept of using drones in tuning exercises, emphasizing the importance of singing before playing. She explains how this technique helps students internalize pitch and improve their intonation. 16:56 Waterfall Tuning Technique Leah describes the waterfall tuning exercise, where students join in one by one to create a blended sound. This method encourages students to listen closely to their neighbors and adjust their pitches accordingly. 18:55 Chaos to Calm Exercise Leah shares the ‘chaos to calm’ exercise, where students start by playing any note and then transition to a designated pitch. This fun exercise helps students practice tuning while also fostering ensemble cohesion. 22:02 Engaging the Whole Group Leah introduces the ‘Who’s in Tune’ exercise, which engages the entire group in assessing intonation. This interactive activity encourages students to listen and respond to their peers’ tuning. 25:04 Understanding Tuning Tendencies Leah discusses the importance of recognizing individual tuning tendencies and how to address them. She suggests using tuning tendency charts to help students become aware of their specific intonation challenges. 30:41 Advanced Tuning Techniques Leah shares advanced exercises for experienced players, including building chords during the ‘F around the room’ exercise. She emphasizes the importance of practicing intonation within a musical context. Transcript Theme Song These are the notes from the staff where we talk about our point of view, and we share the things we're gonna do. And we hope you're learning something new, because the path to mastering theory begins with you. Greg Ristow Welcome to Notes From the Staff, a podcast from the creators of You uTheory, where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training, and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education. Leah Sheldon Hi. I'm Leah Sheldon, head of teacher engagement for uTheory. Greg Ristow And hi. I'm Greg Ristow, founder of uTheory and associate professor of conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory. Leah Sheldon Thank you, listeners, for your comments and episode suggestions. We love to read them, so send them our way by email at notes atutheory. com. And remember to like us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Greg Ristow Today, our topic is teaching intonation and leading us through this is our very own Leah Sheldon who is quite an expert herself in teaching intonation. Leah, for our listeners who may mostly know you, from uTheory, tell us about the other part of your life. Leah Sheldon Sure. So I also teach middle school instrumental music. I started out over 10 years ago teaching elementary general music, kindergarten through 4th grade. I did that for 6 years before I moved into the world of instrumental music. And now my current position is 4th through 8th grade instrumental music, large and small group lessons and one ensemble. Greg Ristow Awesome. Can you teach intonation at such an early age and level? Leah Sheldon You can always teach or fix intonation. There can there's always something that can be done, but, yeah, it looks different at different levels. That kinda leads me into the first thing I wanted to talk about, you know, do you teach intonation right from the very beginning or do you wait and introduce it a little bit later? And how do you decide that? There's a case to be made for both sides. In my experience, I try to introduce it as early as I can. With instrumental music, your students do have to be able to produce a clear tone before you can really start working on intonation. So there are some cases where maybe I wait a little bit longer to get into that. But as soon as the students are playing characteristic sounds, we start talking about it. We start addressing it right away. Greg Ristow That's great. You know, I think this will be a this is such a good follow-up to our last episode where we talked about, tuning systems and these subtle differences between, say, equal temperament and just intonation and various other tuning systems, and I'm really excited to hear, how you, lead your students to be able to hear these things and and I may pop in and share some of my thoughts from the choral world as well. Leah Sheldon Leah. That sounds great. The other piece that comes up early on in intonation is, do you use a tuner or do you teach your students to rely on their ear? And I think there's great cases to be made either way here. When you start out using tuners right off the bat, your students have a visual. They can see if they are sharp, if they are flat. They can see how sharp or how flat and that in some ways helps them develop their Leah. But they may start to rely on the tuner and maybe not use their ear as much as they could be. Tuning by ear at first takes more time. The students need to practice it to develop that skill and get good at it. But in the long run, they'll have more independence and they will be more accurate at identifying whether they're sharp or flat and how to adjust their pitch. Greg Ristow So way back when I was in band, which, you know, is in the 19 nineties, at the time we had one big tuner in the front of the room and that was kind of how that worked. It doesn't really look like that anymore. No. Leah Sheldon It does not and I recommend if you are going to have your students use tuners, get a clip on tuner or like some sort of clip device that plugs into a tuner. I know Korg makes makes these or there's even like a a Peterson clip that can plug into a tuner and, Snark is another popular brand. But having the tuner clip right onto the instrument, will help the accuracy of what the tuner is hearing and showing the students. Greg Ristow And and then can they see even when they're playing at the same time how their own intonation is? Leah Sheldon Yes. Exactly. That's how that works. And then there's probably a case for, you know, unplugging then at certain times and to be able to hear the intonation of others. But, yeah, that that gives you a lot more flexibility if you're going to use tuners. Greg Ristow Mhmm. Oh, that's great. Leah Sheldon Yeah. But before we even get to the the tuner piece of that, you have to start with ear training. So this is kind of my my sequence for how I I get to the point of students being able to tune themselves in an ensemble. You have to start with the ear training piece. And when you're teaching beginners, I'm talking 4th graders, sometimes that's just as simple as, is this higher, is it lower, and making it really obvious. Right? Playing on a piano, playing on an instrument, giving the students opportunities to to hear and answer out loud. This is higher, this is lower. Right? Just same or different. Then you have to teach the students how to adjust their voice or their instrument or what it is they need to be able to do. They're not gonna be able to tune until they can bring the pitch up or bring the pitch down. Once they can do that, I move on to this is where I start really letting them gain their independence. So putting on a drone and letting them tune themselves to a drone. Then from there, we we work on group tuning, and that's just like tuning with the people right around you, right next to you, tuning with your neighbors, then tuning with your section, and then finally tuning across the ensemble. So that's that's kind of my layout and that does not happen overnight. This is over the course of years. Greg Ristow No. I can I can imagine? Right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just the the control of of embouchure or I I or whatever the mechanism is on the instrument to, to make fine adjustments to to pitch that takes some time to learn. Leah Sheldon Absolutely. And I I'm not gonna go into the details of what that is for every instrument. There are lots of wonderful podcasts out there that do that just for the band directors who wanna hear that. But that that is essentially Leah students nee

    40 min
  2. Tuning Systems

    01/15/2024

    Tuning Systems

    In this episode we explore the difference between just intonation and equal temperament, and take a field trip to learn about an organ with 15 keys per octave (instead of the usual 12), that makes it possible to play purely tuned chords in almost all of the keys. Links: Tuning systems synthesizer: https://utheory.com/experiments/tuning-systems Organ demo field trip video: https://youtu.be/A9Enpt8hREg Chrome Music Lab: https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/ Intonation/Tuning System "Puzzle Pieces": https://casfaculty.case.edu/ross-duffin/just-intonation-in-renaissance-theory-practice/benedettis-puzzles/   Show Notes: 0:00:20.9 - Introduction 0:01:03.5 - Topic Introduction: Tuning Systems Greg Ristow explains the complexity of tuning systems and opens the discussion on various aspects related to them. 0:01:58.4 - Just Intervals and Singing in Choirs Discussion on how choirs tend to move towards just intervals in their performances. 0:02:43.2 - Historical Context of Tuning Systems We delve into the historical variations of the A note’s frequency and introduces the concept of just intonation tuning. 0:03:22.2 - The Law of Superposition and Sound Waves Exploration of how sound waves interact and affect what we hear, using sine waves as an example. 0:07:00.8 - Beating in Sound Waves and Tuning Demonstration of how close frequencies can create a beating effect in sound, relevant to tuning and intonation. 0:11:25.7 - Constructing Scales with Tuning Systems Examining how scales can be formed using different intervals, like perfect fifths, and the issues that arise in tuning systems like Pythagorean tuning. 0:21:16.4 - Assigning frequencies to notes A practical approach to assigning frequencies to piano notes, highlighting the challenges in tuning. 0:24:00.8 - The Pythagorean Tuning System and the Wolf Fifth Understanding the Pythagorean tuning system, its implications, and the infamous 'wolf fifth.' 0:27:24.5 - Equal Temperament Tuning System Discussion on equal temperament tuning, its compromises, and comparison with just intonation. 0:28:27.3 - Comparison of Major and Minor Thirds in Different Tuning Systems Exploring how major and minor thirds differ in various tuning systems, including just intonation and equal temperament. 0:31:04.3 - Just Intonation and Chord Tuning Demonstration of how chords are tuned in just intonation, contrasting with equal temperament. 0:35:56.5 - Field Trip to Oberlin's Brombaugh Organ Greg Ristow and David Kazimir discuss the unique features of the Brombaugh Organ at Oberlin, demonstrating quarter-comma meantone tuning. 0:41:12.1 - Split Black Keys and Specialized Tuning on the Brombaugh Organ Exploration of the organ's split black keys and how they impact tuning and playability. 0:47:08.4 - Musical Composition and Tuning Systems Discussion on how composers historically wrote music with specific tuning systems in mind, affecting the musical expression. 0:49:00.3 - Wrapping Up We preview the next episode's topic, focusing on teaching intonation, and Leah Sheldon's experience in this area. Transcript: [music] 0:00:20.9 Greg Ristow: Welcome to Notes From the Staff, a podcast from the creators of uTheory, where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training, and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education. 0:00:35.4 David Newman: Hi, I'm David Newman. I teach voice and music theory at James Madison University, and I write code and create content for uTheory. 0:00:42.4 Leah Sheldon: I'm Leah Sheldon. I'm head of teacher engagement for uTheory. 0:00:45.7 GR: And I'm Greg Ristow. I'm the founder of uTheory, and I direct the choirs at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. 0:00:51.9 DN: Thank you listeners for your comments and episode suggestions. We love to read them. Send them our way by email at notes@uTheory.com. And remember to like us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 0:01:03.5 GR: So, today our topic is tuning systems, and this one has taken us a while to put together, partly because we wanted to build some tools to show them off. It's a concept that I think a lot of us have heard little bits about, but maybe one that not all of us know mathematically and musically in a really deep way. So, I'm excited to talk about this one. Maybe to kick it off, what kinds of things come to mind when you think of tuning systems, Leah and David?  0:01:32.2 DN: Oh, man. I let the harpsichordists decide what tuning system we're using. [laughter] 0:01:37.7 GR: That's right, 'cause you worked so much in the early music world, yeah. 0:01:40.7 DN: I trust that whatever I'm hearing is the one that we're supposed to be using. But I think definitely when we're singing in choirs, and I think this is probably true no matter what choir you're singing in, that you find yourself moving towards just intervals for reasons that may become apparent soon. 0:01:58.4 GR: Which of course, brings up this concept of just intervals. And that's something we'll have to unpack for sure. Yeah. How about you, Leah?  0:02:05.5 LS: I know that there are different tuning systems, but what are the differences and when do you use which?  0:02:11.4 GR: And so, maybe we should just talk about what we mean when we say tuning systems first off. Actually, we're deciding what frequencies to assign to our 12 notes on the piano. We can call A440, but we don't have to, right. We know that A has moved throughout history and locations. In northern Germany in the Baroque era it was probably somewhere pretty close to 415. A little bit earlier than that, down in Italy, it was probably somewhere closer to 465. 0:02:43.2 GR: So, what we think of as very much being a fixed thing today hasn't always been a fixed thing at all. And I think a lot of us, as David mentioned, right, have heard when singing in ensembles or playing in ensembles that we should strive for using more of a just intonation tuning. And that's a whole thing to unpack as well. So, shall we dive into some of this? I want to apologize in advance, listeners. This is going to be a little bit of a math-heavy episode, but hopefully in a fun, nerdy kind of way, so. 0:03:22.2 DN: But too, I think even us, definitely as singers, because we don't have a fingering system for our voices. A lot of what we do is, is literally by ear and not mathematical or necessarily carefully considered except for singing it until it sounds right. And I mean you have some plans to show us why that is. [laughter] 0:03:46.7 GR: Yeah, yeah. So to start off, I thought for all of this to make sense, there's one central principle of physics that we have to understand. And this is called the law of superposition. Have you guys heard of this?  0:04:03.4 DN: I am not familiar with this. 0:04:05.3 LS: Me either. 0:04:06.2 GR: Okay. 0:04:06.7 DN: I feel like I should be. 0:04:08.1 GR: So the law of superposition has to do with what happens when you add two waveforms to each other. So, for instance, imagine that we were graphing a sine wave, right. And the sine wave starts from zero and goes up, then comes back down to zero, goes under, and then comes back up to zero, right. That's sort of the cyclical nature of a sine wave. Now, imagine if you took that same sine wave and shifted it over half of its cycle, which is to say that now the shifted version starts at zero but goes down and then comes up. So these two graphs are now mirrored. 0:04:47.9 DN: Right. 0:04:48.0 GR: What was up is now down and vice versa. 0:04:50.9 DN: Yes. 0:04:51.3 GR: Can you sort of picture that?  0:04:52.5 DN: We're moving at exactly half a cycle?  0:04:54.6 GR: Yeah. And so, picture a sine wave and its mirror image upside down. 0:05:02.8 DN: And this is how we used to remove lead vocals from recorded audio tracks. 0:05:08.7 GR: Good, David. Hold that thought. [laughter] Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Exactly, exactly right. So now if at any point in that graph we added the two graphs together, where we would have a positive number in the first graph, we'd have the same negative number in the second graph, and they'd add up to be zero. 0:05:25.5 DN: Yeah. 0:05:28.3 GR: Right. And so this is called the law of superposition, that to add waves together, you sum up the waves, and you get a composite wave. Now, how this works in sound is, sound is actually air pressure waves. It's air pressure traveling through the air, hitting our eardrum being translated into cycles. And if we were listening to a sine wave, and we mirrored it, and added exactly that same sine wave, as you said, David. This would cancel out the sine wave and subtract it from the sound. And this is, as you said, how we used to subtract lead vocals from recordings to make karaoke tracks. That's more usually done with machine learning these days. 0:06:19.6 DN: Right. 0:06:20.3 GR: It's also as David points to his earphones, go ahead. 0:06:22.9 DN: It's also how, how noise canceling earphones work. 0:06:26.9 GR: Exactly. By creating the negative image of the sound wave coming to your ear and adding that to... And then playing that negative image to cancel out what's coming to your ear. So yeah, so That's the law of superposition. It's how waves interact with each other. Imagine, for instance, I've got a little simple synthesizer I made up where I can play different frequencies. I'm gonna play just a 440 for us. Here it is. Easy enough. Right?  0:07:00.8 DN: Mm-Hmm. 0:07:00.9 GR: Now imagine if we had a slightly out of tune version of that with it. Instead of 440 cycles per second, we had 441 cycles per second. Here's a 441, just listen to it by itself. And here's a 440. Almost imperceptibly different. Right?  0:07:21.0 DN: Yeah. 0:07:21.8 GR: Now if we play them together, they're gonna sort of line up. They're gonna be, they're gonna start, they're gonna be going up from zero and coming down from zero together. But basically, each second or so,

    51 min
  3. Interval Ear Training

    03/15/2023

    Interval Ear Training

    In this episode, Greg Ristow and David Newman talk about the value and role of intervallic ear training, why it's time to move beyond Here comes the bride, and ways of teaching intervallic hearing that build fundamental skills for sight singing and dictation. Links: Karpinski, Gary. "A Cognitive Basis for Choosing a Solmization System," Music Theory Online, Vol. 27, No. 2. June 2021. https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.21.27.2/mto.21.27.2.karpinski.html   Transcript [music] 0:00:21.2 Gregory Ristow: Welcome to Notes from the Staff, a podcast from the Creators of uTheory, where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training, and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education. 0:00:35.5 David Newman: Hi, I'm David Newman, and I teach voice and music theory at James Madison University. And I write code and create content for uTheory. 0:00:43.4 GR: Hi, I'm Greg Ristow. I conduct the choirs at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and I'm the founder of uTheory. 0:00:49.9 DN: Thank you listeners for your comments and episode suggestions. We love to read them, send them our way by email at notes@uTheory.com, and remember to like us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 0:01:01.7 GR: So today we'll be talking about interval ear training. And interval ear training is central to many teachers' and textbooks' approaches to sight singing and dictation. But the title of this episode is maybe a little bit misleading because research in music cognition suggests that for most common aural skills, ear training tasks we process notes by their relationship to a tonic or by their position in a scale rather than by actually hearing adjacent note to note intervallic relationships. So in our conversation today, we'll look at this research on how we hear and the role that intervals play in that hearing. We'll talk about why classic techniques we're teaching intervals can actually undermine students' reading skills. And we'll look at ways of teaching intervals that instead compliment and strengthen students' aural skills. It's a lot to get through in the course of an hour. [chuckle] 0:02:03.2 DN: It is. 0:02:04.5 GR: But David and I have agreed to play particular roles on this. So I'm going to, I'm gonna be sort of the the playback, keep us on track role and David's gonna be the the color commentary, [chuckle] role. 0:02:14.0 DN: Playing to our strengths. 0:02:15.4 GR: Playing to our strengths for sure, for sure. It is hard to talk about or even to think about how we hear, so much of how we hear music is really innate, that we don't, especially for someone with a well-developed ear, "how do I know how I know what I'm hearing?" is a hard question to answer. 0:02:40.1 DN: Yeah. 0:02:40.8 GR: And fortunately we have scientists and researchers who've been looking at exactly this question for a little, I don't know little over 40 years now. And what they have pretty consistently found is that when someone who is experienced in a particular musical culture, and so let's say broadly Western music, music that exists within the notes on a Western piano. 0:03:17.7 DN: An equal tempered scale. 0:03:19.2 GR: Yeah. A tempered major-y minor-y or rotation of its scale as opposed to for instance, some of the Turkish collections that have more notes in the scale than we have and notes that don't exist on our piano. So when someone is encultured in a musical system, when first they start hearing notes, the primary thing that their brain does is seek to determine a central pitch, what we would call a tonic and that's known in music cognition as the primacy hypothesis. The idea being that David, if I throw a few notes at you, before you're going to do anything with those notes, your mind is going to say, "what could potentially be tonic given these notes?" And we're gonna hold onto them. 0:04:20.8 DN: We contextualize it. 0:04:22.5 GR: Exactly. We seek to find the context in which that's occurring and will tend to hold onto our belief of that central note as long as we reasonably can even through the first few notes that contradict it. 0:04:39.1 DN: Yeah. I even think this is central to so much of why we enjoy music. And so if you enjoy music, you probably do this. 0:04:47.8 GR: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And it should be said we're saying this and let's just imagine that if I'm someone with really strong absolute pitch. And even in those cases although yes, someone with absolute pitch will know immediately, yes I'm hearing these particular letter names. They are also still working to contextualize them within some sort of tonal framework. If that's something that you're interested in reading about, one of my favorite articles on this is by Gary Karpinski and it's his, it just came out a couple of years ago in Music Theory Online. We'll put the link in the show notes, but this is freely accessible online and it's "A Cognitive Basis for Choosing a Solmization System." And in the first, I don't know, 15 or so paragraphs of it Karpinski goes through and just summarizes all of the research that has occurred over the past 40 years to this. 0:05:53.0 GR: And the big conclusion that he lists there is, and I'm gonna quote here, "These studies and observations lead to the conclusion that while attending to the pitches of tonal music, the first and most fundamental process listeners carry out is tonic inference. And from that, we can conclude that the single most immediately knowable tonal characteristic is the tonic." Now, what does all this have to do with intervallic ear training? What it really comes down to is this question of how do we actually hear music? And we really hear music based on how the notes relate to a sense of tonic. And we don't actually hear music based on the pitch relationship of immediately adjacent notes or even of vertical notes sounding together. 0:06:45.6 DN: And in fact, I know even for myself that if I'm singing a tonal melody I probably could very easily tell you what generic intervals I'm singing at any given time, but I would have to stop and think about what specific intervals. And when I say generic intervals, I just mean, I could tell you that I'm singing a 5th. I could tell you that I'm singing a 6th, but 6th especially, I would've to stop and think for a second to tell you what quality of 6th that was that I was singing, because I'm just going between notes in the scale. 0:07:24.5 GR: That's right. 0:07:24.9 DN: That's the simple thing. And to add intervals to that would be an additional step for me. 0:07:31.3 GR: A really great example of this is to even, to ask someone who believes they're sight singing by intervals, to take a song they know and to sing that song on the specific intervals of the song. Sing the Star Spangled Banner on specific intervals. And you get. First note, obviously, Unison. 'Cause you have nothing before. So unison, minor 3rd, major 3rd, major 3rd, minor 3rd, perfect 4th. 0:08:02.7 DN: Major 3rd, major 2nd, major 2nd. Oh gosh. Yeah, that would be a minor 6th. [chuckle] Oh, whole step, half step. 0:08:21.4 GR: Yeah. It is not how we hear. On the other hand, as you said, I think totally, yeah, very often we're we're of, oh yeah, I'm singing a 3rd, I'm singing another 3rd. Those two thirds were different, right? But, to us... 0:08:40.2 DN: They were thirds in the key. 0:08:42.3 GR: They were thirds in the key. Yeah. And as we've talked about on a number of previous episodes, our musical notation system reflects this. Our staff system with its use of key signatures is designed to show us very quickly, generic intervals, interval distance within a key and not specific interval distance or chord quality. It's really... It makes primary, this idea of our seven note key collections. 0:09:11.8 DN: Yeah. It was designed for tonal music. 0:09:15.6 GR: Because that's what it reflects. 0:09:16.6 DN: That's what music was. [laughter] 0:09:18.8 GR: Yeah. And largely still is. 0:09:21.5 DN: Yeah. 0:09:22.5 GR: And what we're getting to here is two approaches to learning and thinking about intervals. Intervals in the context of a key, which throughout this episode we'll refer to as contextual interval hearing and intervals as pure relationships between any two notes or what we'll call acontextual interval training. And if we look at the classic way intervals are taught, which I've started to call the naive approach to teaching intervals. It blends these two, it blends contextual and acontextual interval hearing without being explicit about which is which, which can lead to some real problems. 0:10:08.2 DN: Yeah. 0:10:09.9 GR: So what I mean by the classic or naive approach is the approach of saying, okay, a perfect 4th is "Here Comes The Bride." And of course, "Here Comes the Bride" comes along with context. Because it's 5, 1, 1, 1. And there are six perfect 4ths within our diatonic collection, and they don't all feel like 5, 1 and they can feel very different than that. 0:10:33.5 DN: I have a song about that. [laughter] 0:10:34.9 GR: Yeah. [laughter] 0:10:35.4 DN: We should... Yeah. That should go in the show notes too. There's an interval song as specifically about 4ths actually. 0:10:44.7 GR: That's... 0:10:45.0 DN: Some say that ascending 4th sound like, "Here Comes the Bride," but change the context and that perfect 4th may not sound the same and your song won't help as planned [laughter] 0:10:56.9 GR: Shall we just take a moment and pause and listen to it?  0:11:00.0 DN: Oh sure. [music] [laughter] 0:12:18.0 GR: Yeah. And that's exactly it. That they... That these 4ths are very different. And so let's now carry that out to its dangers with dictation. So if I'm trying to do dictation and I come across a leap and I'm like, "Okay, does that sound like here comes the bride?" If it was from five to one it sure does, but if it was one of those other 4ths, it does not. And frankly,

    1h 6m
  4. Teaching Intervals

    03/02/2023

    Teaching Intervals

    David Newman and Greg Ristow chat about four ways to teach intervals in music theory, as well as how to overcome some of the challenges of teaching intervals.   Transcript [music] 0:00:20.8 Greg Ristow: Welcome to Notes from the Staff, a podcast from the Creators of uTheory, where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training, and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education. 0:00:33.4 David Newman: Hi, I'm David Newman, and I teach voice and music theory at James Madison University and I create content and code for uTheory. 0:00:42.0 Greg Ristow: Hi, I'm Greg Ristow, founder of uTheory and Associate Professor of conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory. 0:00:47.8 DN: Thank you listeners for your comments and episode suggestions. We love to read them, send them our way by email at notes@utheory.com and remember to like us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 0:01:00.1 GR: Today we'll be talking about teaching intervals, teaching reading and writing intervals more so than teaching the oral side of intervals, which we'll save for another episode and this David, I find to be one of the most challenging things to teach in fundamentals of theory. 0:01:17.0 DN: There's certainly a lot of approaches to use and picking one is hard. 0:01:22.5 GR: Yeah. 0:01:23.1 DN: And doing them all is also hard. [chuckle] 0:01:24.8 GR: Yeah, for sure. For sure. And there's just a lot involved too, right? I mean, it's like you've got the generic interval size. You've got the specific size or quality, you've got the inversions, you have the compound intervals, consonance and dissonance. It just adds up and it's one of those concepts that it seems like, I often forget to budget enough time for because there's almost always a next step. 0:01:56.0 DN: And it's one of those foundational concepts that if you are struggling with it, you're gonna struggle with everything else. 0:02:02.7 GR: Yeah, for sure. For sure. And I find it's also one that can be hard to motivate students to learn, because if you're not careful, it feels really like a terrible set of math problems. 0:02:13.2 DN: Yeah. Also, it's really easy to do if you have plenty of time but it's, you need to know it better than that. You need to know it so well that it doesn't take you time. 0:02:26.2 GR: Yeah and I think for a lot of us who are teaching it there's also that challenge that both Leigh VanHandel and Melissa Hoag talked about of we already know it so well, it's really hard to conceive of what it's like not to know it. 0:02:40.2 DN: Yeah. And there's all these extra concepts involved, the letter names and... 0:02:46.2 GR: So I guess one of the things that I think about a lot is this challenge of how do we keep the teaching of intervals musical, right?  [laughter] 0:02:55.6 GR: I think I'm gonna be really honest here and say, I think the first 15 times I taught intervals it was the dullest thing. I remember saying to classes, I'm sorry, this is gonna seem really boring, but it's really critical. As like a motivator, and I guess it's an okay motivator but there may be better ways the more I've taught it recently I've focused a lot on ways to keep it musical and make it musically relevant. 0:03:25.3 DN: Yeah. Yeah. And of course we've also had... We've talked to people this just recently about other ways of making it fun, but making it fun is not necessarily the same thing as making it musical. And making it musical is certainly more compelling. 0:03:40.4 GR: Yeah. Yeah. And if you can do both, all the better, right? Yeah. 0:03:44.5 DN: Right. 0:03:45.2 GR: Yeah. So I guess I don't know. I'd be curious your take on this. For me, I spend a lot more time teaching when I teach intervals now than I used to talking about consonance and dissonance really early on and talking about intervals as a way to get into how notes work together or work against each other. 0:04:06.3 DN: Ooh. I think that's fabulous. Yeah. And I think we we're... We said, we're just gonna talk about the written theory of things today, but the intervals that are most fundamental to our physical world are those early low notes in the Harmonic series. So the octave and the fifth and the fourth. Well arguably not well. Yeah. But the fourth. [laughter] 0:04:36.4 GR: Yeah, certainly before the third on the Overton series. 0:04:38.9 DN: Right. And those intervals are those Pythagorean, those things that are closest to the Pythagorean ideal. 0:04:49.6 GR: I feel like we should unpack some of these things, right? Like, so... 0:04:53.1 DN: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. 0:04:54.0 GR: So when we say the Pythagorean ideal, we're talking about the, that these intervals come from ratios of frequencies or ratios of length of strings. 0:05:02.3 DN: And so when you have the, especially those notes that are close, those simplest ratios, so one to two. 0:05:08.9 GR: Which is the octave. 0:05:09.7 DN: And two to three. 0:05:11.2 GR: Which is the fifth. 0:05:12.3 DN: And three to four. 0:05:13.8 GR: Which is the fourth. 0:05:14.8 DN: Those are the ones that we're going to perceive most readily when they're perfectly in tune. And those are sounds that the, that we gravitate to. And if we can build everything else from that. And of course, when you tune a harps accord, you tune it by fifths because that's the interval that you can hear. [chuckle] 0:05:39.7 GR: I mean, to be fair, you have to adjust some of those fifths along the way. 0:05:44.3 DN: Yes you have to adjust. 0:05:45.4 GR: Exactly. 0:05:45.7 DN: Whether you put all of that mess in one of the fifths or spread it out among four or more. Yeah. Yeah. We should do an episode on tuning systems. That would definitely be worth doing. We should add that to our list. In any case you were saying, although we said we're gonna talk about this from a written concept, we can't fully separate it out from the oral concept. And I'm getting this right in that those early intervals, which are effectively the perfect intervals on the Harmonic series have a particular sound and when we connect to that, it starts to make a lot more sense. 0:06:25.8 DN: And to some level, not in all cases. But to some level, when we're talking about consonance and dissonance, we're talking about resolution back to one of those simpler ratios. 0:06:40.1 GR: Yeah. It's interesting, right? Because of course, the third is... And especially when we talk about if we're resolving, say to a major chord versus a minor chord, and of course that minor chord, we don't get on the overtone series. 0:06:57.0 DN: Right... 0:06:57.3 GR: And it's still... 0:07:00.0 DN: Not very low down. [laughter] 0:07:00.8 GR: Yeah, 'cause it's not early on, yeah. Not as a collection of the first in notes on the series. Yeah. 0:07:07.1 DN: Although I'm discovering through some other methods that Riemann was on to something when he was making up SAP harmonics. 0:07:19.0 GR: The undertones?  0:07:21.1 DN: The undertones. [laughter] 0:07:21.7 GR: Yeah. And that, we should also save for another episode. [laughter] 0:07:28.1 DN: This feels like a teaser for a whole other season. 0:07:30.9 GR: Right. Doesn't it? Yeah, it's always good to have ideas for our coming episodes. Maybe we just dive into the ways that we teach this because, I know for myself, when I was first starting to teach fundamentals of theory, I taught this like I had learned it, and like I'd always taught it, and I remember observing another teacher teaching intervals completely differently, and thinking, oh, that's totally wrong, the right way to do it is this, right? And I think... [laughter] 0:08:03.9 GR: Like everything else, the more I've done it, I'm like, oh, there are, maybe right elements to all the different ways that we can teach this, so... 0:08:12.5 DN: Right, and there are some philosophical things to consider, 'cause you need to know about intervals early... 0:08:21.4 GR: For sure. 0:08:21.5 DN: But you also don't want to learn to build your entire schema around intervals. 0:08:28.7 GR: Yeah, this is a great question. At what point do we start teaching intervals?  0:08:35.1 DN: And of course, in most curriculum, we start teaching them very early. 0:08:40.1 GR: Usually immediately after scales, typically... 0:08:42.4 DN: Yeah. 0:08:43.3 GR: Or key signatures. The typical arrangement is, you learn your letter names, you learn things on the piano, you learn half steps and whole steps, scales, maybe major key signatures or perhaps interval since it's a classic fundamental structure. 0:09:01.7 DN: And there's a lot of chicken and the egg here. How do you start, because you need some knowledge to talk about the other things?  0:09:09.7 GR: Right. And we don't get to introduce scales without first talking about half and whole steps. Right? So we've already touched intervals. 0:09:19.3 DN: So I don't... If I still have not solved the problem for myself, except that I think the idea of spiraling your curriculum so that you keep revisiting subjects in more depth is the only solution I've come up with. [laughter] 0:09:33.6 GR: Yeah. Which is hard to do, especially if you're in a one semester kind of fundamental sequence. 0:09:41.7 DN: Right, and yeah, when you only get control over one little tiny part of the education. [laughter] 0:09:51.2 GR: Yeah. I've experimented. I've moved it around actually. I have experimented with teaching intervals after triads. The good thing about doing it that way is triads are pretty inherently musical things, and there are so many ways you can connect the teaching of triads to real music and to music that students are listening to, from your very first day teaching triads, and if you teach intervals after triads, then you can talk about the intervals as growing out of triads. Oh look, we already know our perfect fifths. We already know our major and minor thirds. I'm not

    55 min
  5. Pedagogy of Accidentals with Paula Telesco

    02/01/2023

    Pedagogy of Accidentals with Paula Telesco

    Dr. Paula Telesco walks us through some of the "gotchas" that come up when teaching accidentals, and shares some great musical examples for explaining concepts like enharmonic spelling, double accidentals, and cautionary accidentals.   Transcript  [music] 0:00:21.0 Gregory Ristow: Welcome to Notes from the Staff, a podcast from the creators of uTheory, where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education. 0:00:35.4 Leah Sheldon: Hi, I'm Leah Sheldon, head of teacher engagement for uTheory. 0:00:39.7 GR: And I'm Gregory Ristow, founder of uTheory and Associate Professor of conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory. 0:00:46.5 LS: Thank you listeners for your comments and your episode suggestions, we'd love to read them, so please send them our way by email at notes@uTheory.com. And remember to like us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 0:01:00.5 GR: We'll be taking a deep dive into the topic of teaching accidentals today, and we're delighted to have Dr. Paula Telesco with us for this. Dr. Telesco is a professor of music theory at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Her research interests include music theory and oral skills, pedagogy, analysis of classical and romantic era music, the omnibus progression and her monism and musical cognition. Her writing has appeared in The Journal of music theory pedagogy, the Journal of musicology and music theory spectrum, among others. Most recently, her chapter on the pedagogy of accidental was released in the Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy, edited by Leigh VanHandel, who we just spoke with in December. Paula, thanks for joining us. 0:01:44.4 Paula Telesco: Well, thank you, it's great to be here. Thank you for inviting me. 0:01:48.8 GR: Yeah, we're delighted to have you. Tell us a little bit about yourself. You've been teaching at UMass Lowell for some time now. What all do you teach there?  0:01:58.8 PT: Well, I've taught many things. Currently, I'm teaching a basic music theory. I also teach the non-major music history course. The basic theory I'm teaching right now is for non-majors. Well, they're non-majors, they're also music miners or people who want to get into the Music program, but they're not quite ready. 0:02:29.1 GR: Yeah. So, what we often call Fundamentals of Music, sorts of things?  0:02:32.8 PT: Exactly. Yes. 0:02:33.9 GR: Yeah. Excellent, excellent. And I've to say, I really enjoyed your chapter in Leigh VanHandel Routledge Companion on teaching accidental. It reminded me of some things about accidents that frankly, I myself had forgotten. 0:02:47.8 PT: Well, thank you. Yeah, there's a lot more to know, certainly than students are aware of. The students who come into my class have mostly some background, and so they already think they kinda know accidental, but they don't. They know the basic things about them, but there are all these other things, the niceties of them that they're not aware of, so I wanted to make sure that they... I tell them, "This is the best theory deal in town." And I'm trying to give them as much information as I can. [laughter] 0:03:27.2 GR: That's great. I think, one of the things I have experienced, I'm sure you've experienced as well, and Leah certainly in your teaching with the elementary, middle and high school students, I know we've talked about this, is that accidentals can be a really hard topic for students to first grasp. What are some of the things that students struggle with when learning accidental?  0:03:50.7 PT: Well, for my students, the basic concept is not that difficult, it immediately starts getting difficult when you add an E sharp or E flat, something like that. And I tell them throughout the semester, we're gonna see why those kinds of notes are necessary. We're not just doing it just for the sake of putting a sharp next to the note E. So the black notes are always the easiest to understand, it could be this, it could be that, and we'll see why. And I tell them, I have lots of silly little analogies that I use. And so I always pick someone sitting in the front row and I say, "Do you have sisters? Do you have brothers? Do you have parents? Do you have cousins? And so on. And I say okay, so to their parents, this is their son. To their brother, this is a brother. To their cousin. So this person has different names depending on their relationship to other people. And in the same way, this black note has different names, depending on the context, it's relationship to the other notes and what key it's in and so on. 0:05:09.1 PT: So I start off with that kind of an explanation. One of the other problems is in the notation, and that's just to constantly reinforce that the accidental have to go on the same line or space as the notes, they can't be flying off into outer space because they often are being notated way, somewhere not close to the note, so that's always an issue that comes up and you have to make them aware that an... Another thing I tell them too, throughout the semester, is that the purpose of notation, or at least one of the important purposes, is to make music as easy as possible for the performer. If you have to learn a different system every time you play a piece of music, you're never gonna get very good at it, so it has to be very consistent. When someone is reading music, they have to know this is how it looks, and when I see this, this is what I play. I need to know if there's an accidental in front of the snow or I probably am not gonna play the right notes. 0:06:25.0 GR: Yeah. Leah, you and I were talking, was that just yesterday, we were chatting about [chuckle] true beginner students when they first see accidental, and can you just say a little bit what you were saying to me yesterday? 'cause I thought he was so wonderful. 0:06:40.5 LS: Yes, so I have the opportunity to teach beginning instrumentalists, and sometimes their very first, their mix-up just comes even between, identifying between is this a sharp or is this a flat, and accidentally calling an F-sharp and F flat. Just some of the very basic terminology or for example, the sharp F, since they see the sharp sign first or flat B, just getting that down can be a challenge, especially for beginners or younger musicians. I also have some students who are older instrumentalists and have played for a couple of years, but started on a non-piano instrument, and they don't have the keyboard to reference. So sharps and flat, they don't have that visualization of the black keys, and it doesn't really mean anything to them, unless we are intentionally explaining to them that G-sharp is a half step higher than the note G, so some of those very basic things that maybe sometimes we take for granted as musicians is really abstract to them. 0:07:56.0 PT: Yeah, I know that not all my students have access to a piano, there's pianos in the building, and some of them do go and use them, but I always keep pulled up in my bazillion tabs in my browser, 'cause I'm always projecting a MIDI keyboard and I post links for them, and I say, "You really wanna be using this keyboard," and so throughout the semester, I'm always flipping to the keyboard so they can see whatever it is we're talking about, the sharps and the flats and the half steps and whole steps and everything, and that is really very helpful. And what you were saying, Leah, about what comes first? I know that if a student comes in with... If they've... Some of my students are playing in the marching band, so they're used to looking at music, but not everyone is, and so again, I just stress that if the accidental comes after the note, you're gonna play the white note before you realize you were supposed to play an accidental, so we read from left to right. We have to see the accidental first if we wanna have a fighting chance of playing the right note. 0:09:15.4 LS: Absolutely. 0:09:16.9 GR: That's great. That's great. 0:09:18.7 LS: And I find in most cases, the students know what to do, it's just, it's more about that they've memorized what to do rather than actually understanding the theory behind it or the relationships between the notes. So I'm always a proponent for using the keyboard and referencing the keyboard. Some of my students I inherited without having heard that, so it's been fun to go back and re-introduce that. 0:09:41.3 PT: Yeah, yeah. 0:09:42.1 LS: Yeah, definitely. I think we probably all come across students for whom F-sharp means a particular fingering and not necessarily relationship to notes around it. 0:09:51.8 PT: Right, right. And now the keyboard is really invaluable for learning all kinds of things. 0:10:00.0 LS: So, along the same lines, even those of us with experience, we can find that accidental have delight Fledge cases. So what are some of the things that even knowledgeable or more advanced musicians get wrong when writing accidentals?  0:10:19.1 PT: Well, one of the fossil things is certainly an older practice. If you are going from a double sharp to a single sharp, you would put the natural sign first and then the sharp. I realize in a lot of contemporary music that that's no longer the case. So if a person plays lots of contemporary music, they might not be aware that an older music, it had been done that way. Flats, you just go from a double flat to a single flat, you don't put the natural before it. I will say, even though they're not advanced musicians, probably without knowing which accidental goes where. If you have a cord and you're having to write accidentals, a very common problem at least with my students, is I have to keep reminding them, "You can't put accidentals on top of each other because you're not gonna be able to clearly see which one is which." So the lowest note that accidental is gonna go furthest to the left. If you've just got two notes, and obviously the othe

    1h 1m
  6. Memory, Learning and Theory Pedagogy with Leigh VanHandel

    12/01/2022

    Memory, Learning and Theory Pedagogy with Leigh VanHandel

    Dr. Leigh VanHandel joins us to talk about the science of memory and learning, and how it can help us better structure our teaching. We also chat about her new book, the Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy, which recently received an Outstanding Multi-Authored Collection award from the Society for Music Theory, and about the Workshops in Music Theory Pedagogy series she coordinates.   Links: Leigh VanHandel's faculty page at the University of British Columbia The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy:  Workshops in Music Theory Pedagogy Ask Dr. Van uTheory Chapters: 00:00:20 Introductions 00:01:45 Editing the Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy 00:07:56 How math pedagogy research can inform our teaching of music theory 00:12:34 Long term, short term and working memory. 00:15:24 The relationship of working memory and visuo-spatial skills 00:19:00 How learning happens, neurologically. (Schema forming) 00:21:21 The implications of schemas for how we teach 00:24:13 The curse of expertise, and working memory 00:32:30 The value of memorization vs. deriving concepts 00:34:30 Using schema to teach for fluency 00:44:58 Strategies for identifying and helping students with working memory limitations 00:50:20 Reducing cognitive load to help students focus on what they're learning 00:55:31 Workshops in Music Theory Pedagogy series 00:59:50 What else are you up to, now that the book is out? 1:00:00 Where can we follow you? 1:03:18 Wrap-up   Transcript: [music] 0:00:21.2 David Newman: Welcome to Notes from the Staff, a podcast from the creators of uTheory, where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education. 0:00:34.5 Gregory Ristow: Hi, I'm Greg Ristow, founder of uTheory and associate professor of conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory. 0:00:40.3 DN: And I'm David Newman. I teach Voice and Music Theory at James Madison University and I write code and create content for uTheory. 0:00:48.7 GR: Thank you, listeners, for your comments and episode suggestions. We love to read them. Send them our way by email at notes@utheory.com and remember to like us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 0:01:00.1 DN: Our topic for today is music theory and working memory and joining us to talk about this as well as her new book, The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy, is Dr. Leigh VanHandel. Dr. VanHandel is associate professor and chair of the Division of Music Theory at the University of British Columbia. Her primary research areas are music theory pedagogy, music cognition, and the relationship between music and language. Her research is published in Music Perception, the Journal of New Music Research and the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy. She is co-director with Gary Karpinski of the Workshops in Music Theory Pedagogy program, a week-long summer intensive where teachers can learn from six experts in the teaching of music theory. Leigh, it's an honor to have you join us. 0:01:46.2 Leigh VanHandel: It's an honor to be here. Thank you so much. 0:01:48.6 DN: And especially right after you won this award at SMT for, what is the... The award was for?  0:01:54.7 LV: Outstanding Multi-Author Collection. 0:02:00.5 DN: Fantastic. 0:02:00.6 LV: Yeah. So The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy had an insane number, 68 authors and contributors. And so I think that qualifies as multi-author. [laughter] 0:02:17.6 GR: It's a delightful book, I have to say. We had a chance to speak with Melissa Hoag a couple of weeks ago and Stefanie Dickinson just about a week ago. And I have been just really loving going through the articles in it. It's a really... I think so many pedagogy textbooks come from one author's perspective and I've just been delighted by the variety of perspectives offered. Could you maybe talk a little bit about the origins of the book?  0:02:50.7 LV: Yeah, sure. So I'd been approached by Routledge about putting together some essay collection and the Norton Music Theory Pedagogy book was in its final stages. We knew what the format was gonna be, we knew who the authors were gonna be. And I had that moment where I went, "Well, why do we need another one of those? What can I do that's gonna be different?" And it was literally a shower thought, you're in the shower, you're washing your hair and you go, "Well, wait a minute, what if, what if I did this crazy thing where instead of these long essays, we put together a bunch of lesson plans and made something that's practical and useful and immediately relevant to people?" And so I pitched that to Routledge and I don't think they knew what to make of that idea at first, but somehow I managed to convince them to go along with this crazy idea. 0:04:00.0 LV: And I sent an email out, some people I targeted specifically, I also sent emails to the SMT mailing list and things like that and just said, "Send me your best lesson plan. Send me the lesson plan that you look forward to teaching every year that works every time you do it." And people responded. And I wasn't sure what the response was gonna be. I thought maybe I'll get 40 and maybe I can choose 30 of them or something. I got over 220. 0:04:41.1 GR: Oh my gosh. 0:04:41.4 LV: Yeah. [laughter] And so I kept having to go back to Routledge and going, "Okay, so what are the limitations of the print again? What... How many... [laughter] How many pages am I allowed to have?" And there were just so many amazing, amazing lessons and it was so exciting to go through all of them and figure out what to include and it was just... The contributors were amazing, that they were willing to share their best lessons and let people see what they do and then allow people to replicate it also. So it was just... It was an amazingly big project, but it was also really, really rewarding and in a very nerdy way, a lot of fun. 0:05:33.5 GR: And also there are the wonderful companion materials that so many of these lessons have as well, can you talk a bit about that?  0:05:42.8 LV: Yeah. So I think that was another innovation for the book is that, authors, when they talk about assignments that they might give or scores or analyses or whatever, they provided the materials and I created a website where all of these materials are on the website and you can go and say, "Oh, here's the assignment that this person uses after making that... After doing that lesson." And so there's links to recordings and there's all of this material that people can use to make these lessons happen. And that was really the goal was I wanted to make it as easy as possible for someone to read the chapter and implement the lesson in the way that the person was recommending. And there's... I also wanted it to be accessible to specialists in music theory, but there's a lot of non-specialists who are teaching music theory. 0:06:45.3 LV: There's a lot of schools these days that are hiring the bassoon/theory or trumpet/aural skills instructor and having them have these resources and materials was really important for me and having them be able to use them easily and right away. So that was the goal behind the supplemental materials was just making everything available as much as possible for everyone. 0:07:14.5 GR: That's great. We've been saying on the past few episodes, we are just in love with this book, I have to tell you. I'm [laughter] decidedly a fan and really have just been thrilled to, I mean, as you say, to have this window into these really excellent teachers' best lesson plans. It's just delightful. 0:07:35.8 LV: Yeah. Yeah. It's... I'm incredibly proud of the volume and I'm also incredibly grateful that I was allowed to come up with this crazy idea and see it through to completion and even more grateful that it's being recognized because that's just... That means a lot to me. 0:07:56.3 DN: So I have loved talking with you and Betsy Marvin about your work in music cognition. And your chapter in this on music theory and working memory opens by talking about the connection between success in math and music and how math pedagogy research can inform our teaching of music theory. Can you talk about that a bit?  0:08:17.9 LV: Sure. So I wrote an article in, I guess, it was published in 2012 in the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy about what music theory pedagogy can learn from mathematics pedagogy. And I have a really good friend who is a excellent mathematics teacher at the university level and he and I would have conversations about how people learn math and I... And he was also a musician. And so we started seeing relationships between these things. And so I just took it and ran with it. What happens is that the best predictor for how someone is going to do in a freshman level music theory class turns out not to be how good of a performer they are or how good of an ear they have, whether they have absolute pitch or anything like that, it's their score on the math portion of the SAT or ACT, depending on which exam they take. 0:09:21.9 GR: Wow. 0:09:23.0 DN: Wow. 0:09:25.5 LV: Yeah. And there's... I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done on why, but the article basically says, "Look, assuming that there is this relationship between these things, how can we borrow how we understand mathematics is best taught and adapt that into music theory pedagogy?" 'Cause mathematics pedagogy is a very, very well-funded field. Music theory pedagogy is not. So when we can steal research from anywhere, we should, I think. [chuckle] So I did a lot of reading on how people learn mathematics. And in order to make the relationship between fundamentals and math, you have to go back to first principles of mathematics, which is basic principles addition and subtraction and things that. And of course, the problem is most people learn those things when they're very young. 0

    1h 4m
  7. Music Fundamentals Games with Stefanie Dickinson

    11/15/2022

    Music Fundamentals Games with Stefanie Dickinson

    Dr. Stefanie Dickinson joins us to share some of the music fundamentals games that she uses in her music theory classroom.   Links Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy Dr. Stefanie Dickinson’s page at UCA The Power of Play with Jed Dearybury (Notes from the Staff Episode) Dalcroze Solfege Games with Greg Ristow (Notes from the Staff Episode) uTheory.com   Show Notes 0:00:21.2 Introductions   0:02:27.1 Value of play in teaching and learning   0:06:02.4 Key Words - for key signatures   0:08:47.0 360 Degrees - for scale degrees   0:10:30.4 Balance Beam - for rhythmic values and notation conventions   0:13:38.2 Meter Cards - for identifying time signatures   0:16:44.8 Notation Bloopers   0:20:15.0 Triad Bingo (can be extended to other topics)   0:23:01.6 How do you help students who are struggling to get beyond the despair factor?   0:25:18.0 Interval Train   0:26:57.5 Value of competitive games in teaching fundamentals   0:32:43.1 Phone Numbers Game (aural skills, scale degrees/solfege)   0:38:32.1 Extending games for other topics   0:40:04.6 Wrap-up Transcript [music] - These are the notes from the staff where we talk about our point of view, and we share the things we're going to do, `cause the path to mastering theory begins with you.   0:00:21.2 Greg Ristow: Welcome to Notes from the Staff, a podcast from the creators of uTheory, where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training, and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education.   0:00:33.4 David Newman: Hi, I'm David Newman, and I teach voice and music theory at James Madison University, and write code and create content for uTheory.   0:00:42.9 GR: Hi, I'm Greg Ristow, I conduct the choirs at the Oberlin Conservatory, and I'm the founder of uTheory.   0:00:49.0 DN: Thank you listeners for your comments and episode suggestions. We love to read them. Send them our way by email at notes@utheory.com, and remember to like us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.   0:01:01.6 GR: Our topic for today is music fundamentals games, and joining us to share some of her favorite games is Dr. Stefanie Dickinson. Dr. Dickinson is associate professor of music theory at the University of Central Arkansas. Her primary areas of research include the music of Liszt's late experimental period, issues in analysis and performance, and music theory pedagogy. She has presented her work at regional and national meetings of the Society for Music Theory and College Music Society, the International Conference on Music and Gesture, and others. And her articles can be found in Gamut, College Music Symposium, the Festschrift Liszt 2000, and most recently in the Rutledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy, where she's written about games for teaching music fundamentals, which is what we're going to talk about today. Stefanie, welcome.   0:01:49.4 Stefanie Dickinson: Thank you so much. It's a pleasure and honor to be here, and I appreciate the opportunity.   0:01:54.4 GR: We're thrilled to have you. So you're teaching at University of Central Arkansas. What all do you teach there?    0:02:00.0 SD: I teach only music theory. I have two sophomore theory and two sophomore aural skills classes in the fall, and then spring I go on to teach some upper level electives. I teach the form class. We have an introduction to linear analysis, and then in the summer I teach music theory pedagogy class.   0:02:19.5 GR: Well, I loved your chapter, so I'm so excited to talk about games, and especially music fundamentals games.   0:02:27.1 DN: So a theme we've come back to several times on this podcast is the value of play in teaching and learning. Listeners may remember our episode with Jed Dearybury, author of The Playful Classroom, or the episodes where Greg and I talked about Dalcroze solfege games and about music theory songs. So we've talked a lot about this, but before we dive into specific games, I wonder if you could talk about the value of games in teaching and how you came to use them in your own pedagogy.   0:02:52.5 SD: Sure. I think that games are very, very valuable, potentially at every level of instruction, but specifically for fundamentals. And I think it's just due to our competitive natures and our desire to succeed and our desire to win that really heightens our awareness for learning. And games are such a fun environment where we can really push ourselves, but we do not have the risk that we do when we take exams. So I think this resonates with students, and we've all been playing games since we were tiny children. The fact that the games speed up our thought processes really mirrors the way that students will use these fundamentals in the real world. And I found that students, when they first come into a fundamentals class, they think that they just need to be able to master the concept. They don't realize that they actually need to master it and have, in fact, instant recall, because a lot of our students are music education majors. And they're not thinking into their future when they're standing in front of their band sight reading a piece, and they don't realize that they don't have five minutes to count the flats and to look at the next to last one to determine the key signature.   0:04:11.6 SD: So games are just a great way to build up that speed and just build up the real world skills that they're going to need. And also, these games particularly came to me when I was trying to think of a different modality for drill and practice, because we know that drill and practice is absolutely essential to mastering fundamentals. And of course we can do drill and practice exercises in class, and then we can give our students written homework. We can send them to an online website or use a computer app, but games are just fun and interactive and competitive. And one thing that I was very enthusiastic about was having my students see how their classmates perform in this situation. So some of the students who would be struggling would be able to see the students who had already mastered the concept, and they might realize, "Hey, my classmate has mastered this, so I can do it too." So I was interested in that aspect.   0:05:13.8 GR: I love that. That's great. That's great. Leigh VanHandel's new book, The Rutledge Companion to Music Theory, I've been finding absolutely delightful as I've been working my way through the various chapters. We had the chance to speak recently with Melissa Hoag about her chapter on putting the music in music fundamentals. I absolutely loved your chapter on these music theory games, and I thought it might be fun if you took us and the listeners through some of these games. And maybe for the ones that aren't too visual, David and I could go head to head on a question or two and see who wins. [laughter]   0:05:44.4 DN: You just want to show how good you are.   0:05:46.9 GR: Don't you? [laughter]   0:05:50.6 SD: Well, most of these games are visual based, but I'll see if I can think of a few questions.   0:05:55.3 GR: Sounds great. Sounds great.   0:05:56.6 SD: That will allow a little competition here on the podcast. [laughter]   0:06:00.5 GR: Excellent.   0:06:02.4 SD: I tried to think of games for quite a few different aspects of fundamentals, and I'll tell you about my Key Words. Each has a little kitschy kind of title, each game does. And one I'd like to call Key Words, and it just involves identifying key signatures. And there are three rounds for this game. The students are given 15 cards, and each card has a unique key signature. And for the first round, the students are just given a word. So I like to start with a very simple word, maybe like beg, B-E-G, or fad, F-A-D. And the students who are usually working in teams shift through their cards, and then they just place one key signature for each letter. So they might, for example, have F major, A major, D major for fad, F-A-D. Of course, I don't really specify whether they should use A major or A flat major for the A, their choice. Of course, some of our words have two letters, so that then the complimentary key signatures can be used for those. But it's really a simple kind of game.   0:07:13.5 SD: And then we go to round two, where I will say a sentence, and only one word in the sentence is actually a word that you can spell with key signatures because obviously we're limited on letters. So I'll give you a few sentences.   0:07:29.1 GR: Nice.   0:07:30.8 SD: And see if you can tell me which word that you would be able to spell with the cards.   0:07:34.0 DN: Okay.   0:07:35.2 GR: Okay.   0:07:35.6 SD: And so this is just to add another dimension, so it kind of creates a bit of a riddle. All right. My sister just earned her first scout badge.   0:07:46.4 GR: Badge.   0:07:47.3 DN: There you go.   0:07:50.0 SD: Great, great. And then you would have practice with five different major key signatures, or I could specify minor key signatures.   0:07:56.1 GR: Oh, so then once they get the word, do they have to write out the key signatures or find their key signature cards for those?    0:08:02.5 SD: Yes, they find the key signature cards and they'll have one card for each letter in the word.   0:08:09.3 GR: Got it.   0:08:10.3 DN: Yep.   0:08:10.4 SD: But we usually play this at a table and they'll line up the cards on a table.   0:08:14.7 GR: Nice. Yeah.   0:08:16.2 SD: Yeah. But one of the catches is each team only has one attempt, you have to be sure that you're accurate. So another sentence might be, do you drink decaf coffee?    0:08:23.9 DN: Decaf.   0:08:26.5 GR: Oh, good for you.   0:08:30.4 SD: Great. Yeah. And that would give you practice with another five key signatures.   0:08:36.8 DN: Coffee comes close.   0:08:36.9 GR: Yeah. I was t

    41 min
  8. Putting Music in ”Music Fundamentals” with Melissa Hoag

    11/01/2022

    Putting Music in ”Music Fundamentals” with Melissa Hoag

    Dr. Melissa Hoag joins us to talk about ways we can make the teaching of music fundamentals musical, fun and effective. She shares tips from her chapter in The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy, and takes us through her list of six best practices for teaching music theory fundamentals. Links Melissa Hoag's faculty page at Oakland University The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy, ed. Leigh VanHandel: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Music-Theory-Pedagogy/VanHandel/p/book/9781032174136 Lana Lubany "Sold" (Harmonic minor scale at beginning): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIGxMtWXjS0 Renaissance Composer Maddalena Casulana: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maddalena_Casulana Bruce Haynes: Performing Pitch: The History of "A": https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780810841857/A-History-of-Performing-Pitch-The-Story-of-A uTheory: Online Music Theory and Ear Training Show Notes 00:01:04 - Guest Introduction: Dr. Melissa Hoag, Oakland University   00:02:01 - Why is teaching music fundamentals hard?   00:03:18 - Can you talk about your own experience teaching music theory fundamentals?   00:05:14 - What topics do you include in music fundamentals?   00:06:37 - What do we get wrong about teaching fundamentals?   00:09:18 - How do you put actual music in your music fundamentals classes?   00:14:31 - Do you still have time for drill & practice if you're spending so much time with real music?   00:15:35 - Importance of letting yourself be fallible in front of students   00:17:21 - What are ways you connect fundamentals to sound?   00:18:30 - Composition exercises in fundamentals & engaging students creatively   00:23:47 - How do you approach teaching a topic that you know so well, that you can't remember what it was like to know the topic?   00:27:06 - The value of the piano keyboard in teaching & learning music fundamentals   00:30:10 - Six Best Practices for teaching music fundamentals   00:30:30 - #1: Repetition Counts   00:35:20 - #2: Consistency and Rigor Matter   00:38:20 - #3: More Assessment Opportunities are Better than Fewer   00:39:27 - #4: Prompt Feedback and Specific Grading Are Import for Learning   00:41:02 - #5: Involve Students in Finding Examples   00:43:31 - #6: Have Fun!   00:45:36 - Final thoughts? We should acknowledge that we're talking about Western, tonal music fundamentals, and that there is much more to the world, and we value that and are curious about that.   00:46:58 - Wrap-up Transcript 0:00:21.2 David Newman: Welcome to Notes from the Staff, a podcast from the creators of uTheory, where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training, and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education.   0:00:34.3 Greg Ristow: Hi, I'm Greg Ristow, founder of uTheory and associate professor of conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory.   0:00:40.7 DN: Hi, I'm David Newman and I teach voice and music theory at James Madison University and write code and create content for uTheory.   0:00:48.4 GR: Welcome to our second season of Notes from the Staff, and a quick thanks to all of our listeners for your comments and episode suggestions. We love to read them, so send them our way by email at notes@utheory.com, and remember to like us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.   0:01:04.3 DN: Our guest today for the first episode of our second season is Dr. Melissa Hoag who is Associate Professor and Coordinator of music theory at Oakland University. Dr. Hoag's writings have appeared in the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, Music Theory Online, Music Theory Pedagogy Online, College Music Symposium Notes and others. She is a scholar who thinks deeply both about music theory and how to teach it in relevant ways, from her 2013 article on strategies for success in the first year music theory classroom to her 2018 article on relevance and repertoire in the 18th century counterpoint classroom, to her recent chapter in the Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy, which we'll be discussing today on Putting the Music in Music Fundamentals. Melissa, welcome.   0:01:53.3 Melissa Hoag: Hi, thank you so much for having me.   0:01:55.3 DN: We're so glad to have you here.   0:01:56.8 GR: Melissa, I have to say, I absolutely loved your chapter on putting the music in music fundamentals, that's in the Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy. This is a book that we're gonna be coming back to a number of times throughout the season. Its structure is just delightful, it's like a whole bunch of lesson plans or ideas from teaching from a bunch of different authors. One of the things that you said in your chapter that I think is absolutely true is that teaching music theory fundamentals is really hard. Why is it so hard?   0:02:27.3 MH: First, I completely agree with you that the Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy that Leigh VanHandel edited is just really wonderful, and I've already used a lot of the ideas from that book myself, so I'm glad that you'll be talking about it some more this season. I think teaching music Fundamentals is hard because most of us who teach this material just think of it as part of who we are as musicians, we don't remember not knowing those things in many cases, and we find it hard, I think, to take the time to recapture what it felt like not to know things like scales or key signatures, or what a tonic is, and I think that's really the hard thing, and then I think some people also maybe consider it not as interesting as teaching analysis. I think some people might feel that it's dry or just something they have to get through to get to the good stuff.   0:03:27.5 GR: And can you tell us a little bit about your own experience teaching music fundamentals you... What classes do you teach there at Oakland?   0:03:34.4 MH: So right now I teach and have taught for a long time, Music Theory 1, which does include fundamentals. We have a separate fundamentals class for students who really have absolutely no background in music, like maybe they sing well, but they don't have any background with note reading or anything, but everyone gets a very thorough introduction to fundamentals and Music Theory 1. And then of course, I teach a bunch of upper level classes and graduate classes, but the fundamentals part of Music Theory 1 goes for the first 10 weeks, so it's most of the semester and of course, before that, before I came to Oakland, I also taught fundamentals at Indiana University, Purdue University at Indianapolis, otherwise known as IUPUI.   0:04:28.2 MH: So I taught it then as well, and that was to non-majors, and so that was a different kind of approach, but I really use a lot of the same techniques for teaching college level music majors, some of whom are music minors, and teaching those non-majors, I don't see them as particularly that different in terms of trying to engage them, the level of rigor might be a bit different, I don't wanna let things go very much when I'm teaching college majors just because they're gonna have so much more theory following it, whereas a non-major taking music fundamentals, you wanna give them a broad overview and some experience, but I really adopt the same general idea as far as how to engage them in the topic.   0:05:14.8 GR: For you all, what's included within music fundamentals? What do you cover in that first, say, 10 weeks of the first semester.   0:05:21.9 MH: So for us right now, it is very western tonal-focused. That's a topic I'll talk a little bit more about later. We're in the process of trying to find ways to broaden that a little bit, or at least acknowledge that that is the focus instead of calling it music fundamentals and acting like it's all music. You know what I'm saying? So for now, because that is the focus of our major, it is a western tonal music focus in our major, we start with, of course, note reading, we do that very quickly, because most of them don't know the other clefs alto and tenor. We do do those because it's a college level fundamentals class, and then major and minor scales, and we do quickly acknowledge the different modes and stuff like that, but we don't require them to know them just because it's enough for them to know major and minor, and they'll get to the modes later on, and then we do intervals, a very basic introduction to meter, and then we do triads and seventh chords, and that's pretty much what comprises our fundamentals unit for that first year of Music Theory.   0:06:40.2 DN: What do we get wrong about teaching music theory fundamentals?   0:06:43.4 MH: Well, I think we get... I think many people can get it wrong by teaching it in a dry way, like just showing scales, just making students write scales, just drilling things, which obviously you do have to do some drill, of course, there's just no way out of it, but having students just do these really dry exercises without making them sing... I should say inviting them to sing without engaging their musicianship and even in a class of non-majors, some of those students probably took the class because they had choir in high school, or they sing in their church choir and they wanted to take this music class or they play in a community band or a rock band, and they just wanted to know more. So they've got some musicianship, most people do, and just finding ways to plug that in, and then of course, applying it to musical examples. I try to include just as much diversity of repertoire as I can, I use like band music, I just... I think the mistake really goes back to looking at it as something we just have to get through to get to the good stuff, and then not applying it to real music and not inviting students to engage their own musicianship. So that's kind of... That's kind of been my experience.   0:08:20.3 GR: That really resonates with me. My first real teaching

    49 min
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Conversations about music pedagogy, music theory, ear training, and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education.

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    2022 - 2024
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