[Smt-talk] Keyboards for theory classes?

[David K Feurzeig]

I used to feel like Stephen. 20 years of students (including guitarists) who can't fluently spell, sing, or ID triads by ear convinced me otherwise. 

For my students, moving away from the keyboard as a reference point, even for the admirable free-thinking reasons Stephen suggests, would be a sort of reverse snobbery that would not serve the students well.

David Feurzeig
University of Vermont

On May 5, 2014, at 9:35 AM, Stephen Soderberg <hyperchord at me.com> wrote:

> While I fully understand this was brought up as a pedagogical practices issue, I can't help but point out that there is an important (but apparently unexamined) underlying issue here.
> 
> Why would anyone want to make Freshman theory ++more++ explicitly piano-centered?? At the college/university level, why would one want to focus ever more on the "usual diatonic" as a sine qua non model and reference point for a student's future creative efforts and studies in music? (Certainly the answer isn't "We've always done it that way.") I assume that undergrad music programs still have a "keyboard requirement" - but even if not, is a theory course, which ideally ought to be fully "branchable" as in Freshman physics, the place to require it? 
> 
> This appears to be a praxis-theoria rock-and-a-hard-place problem with no easy solution. On the one hand, I certainly recognize the pragmatic/survival need for most of my colleagues and their students to make theory relevant to the "real world." On the other hand, to continue to maintain the "usual keyboard" in its various guises as the center of music's pedagogic universe is circular and has, to me, the odor of bias about it.
> 
> Stephen Soderberg
> Keswick, VA