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

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 wante