Saturday, 1:15 am–2:45 pm
Monroe 216
Practical Post-Tonal Aural Skills for Practicing Musicians
Formal aural-skills study walks a fine line between developing practical skills musicians can actually use and providing reinforcement for concepts learned in so-called written theory. Aural skills for post-tonal music can tend very much toward the latter. For instance, Michael Friedmann’s book (1990) devotes a great deal of space to hearing concepts taught under the aegis of pitch-class (pc) set theory. Questions about the perceptibility of pc sets aside, I daresay most practicing musicians have neither the time nor the inclination to become fluent with pc set theory. Friedmann himself recommends the performance, repetition, and memorization of large quantities of twentieth-century music as preliminary “calisthenics.” He posits that the student should begin intuitively and “find his or her own path (that is, structuring devices)” before undertaking to perceive music via pc sets.
This paper concerns itself with this so-called intuitive approach. As an alternative to abandoning students to boot-strap themselves, it presents a three-pronged approach to post-tonal aural skills. The three prongs—anchor pitches, pattern recognition, and intervals—have proven useful in performing, listening to, and memorizing post-tonal music. They have the advantages of (1) being less abstract—more immediately accessible—than pc sets and (2) building on skills and habits already acquired through study of tonal music. Thus, they require less intellectualization to employ and are easier to learn and apply than pc sets. While they could be viewed as preliminary to the study of perception through pc sets, in fact they are sufficient unto themselves to produce accurate sight-reading and dictation of post-tonal music.
Teaching Improvisation: The Creative Application of Theory in Performance
In the study of performing or composing music there needs to be a healthy balance between three components: creativity, analysis, and technique, representing respectively the spiritual, intellectual, and physical aspects of music-making. Developing the imagination through improvisation and developing analytical skills through understanding music from a composer’s perspective complement one another. My point of departure in connecting improvisation and theory is that an important part of the study of theory is to understand music from a composer’s point of view, in order to gain a better appreciation of it.
Inspired partly by eighteenth-century pedagogy, in this paper I will introduce several ways of teaching improvisation as complementary to the teaching of theory and analysis: (1) elaborate a typical opening progression; (2) two-part counterpoint with a standard bass line, such as the “rule of the octave”; (3) variation technique; (4) fantasy on a figured bass, following C. P. E. Bach’s model; (5) improvisation on the harmonic and voice-leading reduction of an actual piece; (6) creating a double to a baroque suite movement; and (7) fugal improvisation on a given bass. Together with the application of theory, the focus in these exercises is on melodic elaboration, texture, surface rhythm, and pacing—elements that shape the musical surface and create atmosphere but are easily marginalized in structural analysis. I hope that this presentation will encourage theory teachers to consider improvisation an important subject that deserves to be taught and explored more widely.