[Smt-talk] Keyboards for theory classes?

[Fieldman, Hali]

Colleagues, 

I've been following this discussion with great interest. I'm another of
those -- a large number, apparently -- non-pianists.  I played flute
professionally for many years; I love the piano and its repertoire and
always wanted to play, but for various reasons that didn't happen.  A
great deal of damage later, I can no longer play the flute either.  What I
have done is to find recorded repertoire -- almost all from the art-music
side of things -- and used Garage Band to create a library of hundreds and
hundreds of examples -- timbres, textures, the effect of using different
parts of the range in writing for voice and for winds, various design
features agreeing and not with harmonic boundaries, models of all sorts of
phrases, forms, etc.  I use these in class, for assignments, for extra
practice material. This allows me to approach many topics first by ear,
and working from the music itself allows classes to find the right
terminology for what they're hearing, rather than starting with a
terminology that we then support with examples.

As far as it goes, this seems to work well for my students, and I've seen
increasingly impressive results.  But it also has an enormous drawback,
which is that it is still a physically passive engagement with the
material.  So too is the use of computer software, for instance, and other
means of mechanically producing and manipulating sound without in some
real, embodied way also experiencing the process of production.  It's
perhaps no wonder that musical manifestations of things like strain and
effort, interruption of momentum, working at the edges of possibility,
etc., often seem to bounce off, out of reach not only of audiences but
also of our students.

This last could steer the conversation in a different direction
altogether, and that's not my intent here.  But I will ask -- or at least
wonder "out loud," as it were -- if it might be to some extent the
widespread use of the piano, itself, that contributes to what I'm
describing here as the physical remove from the production of sound.  Not
that pianists don't play!  But it isn't necessarily harder to play a high
note, or an especially low one, on the piano; not an especial challenge to
place that pianissimo G#3 (in tune!) at the end of Barber's Knoxville,
like it is for a flutist.  For me it is hard to imagine that Schumann
could have conveyed even a portion of the grief/anger/bitterness/irony
many of us hear in "Ich grolle nicht" had it not been written to strain
both ends of a good tenor's range.  Usw.

Having said all of that, I would so much rather that students do have to
deal, somehow, with making sound; and if the best practical option for
that is through the keyboard, I'm all for it. Rick Cohn reminded us in a
recent post that imagination is our best instrument, bar none; so
certainly we can find ways to help our students "feel" the things that
composers might mean by the ways they shape sounds.  Getting them to
attach their bodies more immediately to the task of making sound is, I
think, our underlying charge.

Warm regards to all,

*****
Hali Fieldman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Coordinator of Music Theory
Conservatory of Music and Dance
University of Missouri -- Kansas City








On 5/7/14 1:02 AM, "Justin London" <jlondon at carleton.edu> wrote:

>Dear colleagues,
> 
>As one of those guitarists-with-no-keyboard-chops (and one of those
>music-psychology-theorists to boot), there are many things I might say in
>response to the keyboard discussion so far.  But I will limit myself to
>two points, which, while I doubt will change anyone¹s mind about whether
>or not to use keyboards in the theory curriculum (and to what extent), I
>hope will at least get us thinking a bit more broadly.
> 
>The first has to do with the efficacy of keyboard skills/practice for
>aural skills, as it has been claimed that keyboard players have better
>ears.  This may well have been observed‹I trust Donna Doyle on this‹but
>not, perhaps, because it is the piano practice per se.  It is well
>established from studies in musical memory and pitch perception that
>familiarity with particular sounds/timbres enhances our recognition and
>reproduction abilities.  I don¹t have perfect pitch, but I do have very
>good pitch memory for E-A-D-G-B-E when played on a guitar, in the
>requisite octaves (that is, a kind of highly context specific sort of
>perfect pitch). Similarly, performance in musical memory tasks is better
>when one hears a melody played one¹s own instrument; this has been
>documented with various musicians on their primary instruments.  So,
>here¹s the rub for aural skills and the piano: if we give our melodic and
>harmonic dictation tests from the piano (and especially if we play chord
>progressions in characteristic keyboard voicings), then (a) pianists will
>have a natural advantage, as they are far more familiar with the sound of
>the piano and its characteristic harmonies, and (b) any practice a
>non-pianist has at the piano will enhance their aural skills when they
>are assessed in this way.  It would be interesting to see if the piano
>advantage still holds if, for example, one gave all of the melodic
>dictation examples (both drills and tests) for an entire semester on the
>violin. 
> 
>And it may be even more simple than the timbral familiarity of the piano:
>keyboard harmony is a way of getting students to spend (more) time
>learning melodic and harmonic patterns and structures, so they will
>(naturally) tend to do better recognizing those patterns and structures
>in scores and by ear.  Suffice to say, there are numerous ³potential
>confounds² and ³hidden variables² in claims that the various benefits of
>keyboard skills are simply due to the keyboard itself.
> 
>My second point, and here I am in great sympathy with Stephen Soderberg,
>is that the emphasis on keyboard skills, harmonic praxis, and musical
>repertoire gives our students a very skewed understanding of how music
>works.  The piano is a very weird instrument, but because of its
>ubiquity, we don¹t notice that its fixed pitch and temperament,
>characteristic attack and decay, spectral uniformity, and other
>characteristics make it unlike most other instruments and instrumental
>and vocal ensembles.  As a result, broad aspects of our student¹s (and
>perhaps our own) musical understanding (consonance and dissonance, chord
>voicing, voice leading, articulation, etc., etc.) become warped due to
>the very peculiar acoustics and ergonomics of the piano.  The piano is a
>magnificent achievement of 18th and 19th century technology, giving
>musicians a polyphonic instrument with great tonal and dynamic range.
>These days, however, musicians can and do do a lot more, using the full
>range of technologies available to them when they compose, record, and
>perform their music.  Might we also think about bringing some of these
>technologies into our classrooms, and exploit the doors of musical
>understanding that they can open for our students(?)
>
>Best,
>Justin London
>
>*************************************************
>Justin London
>Professor of Music (and other stuff), Carleton College
>Department of Music
>One North College St.
>Northfield, MN 55057 USA
>+1 507-222-4397
>
>Affiliated Researcher, Centre for Music and Science, University of
>Cambridge
>Visiting Professor (2014), University of Jyväskylä, Finland
>jlondon at carleton.edu
>
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