Download Techniques for Teaching the Reading of Atonal Melodies

Techniques for Teaching Atonal Melodies
Dr. Kent Cleland
Professor of Music at the Baldwin Wallace University Conservatory of Music
Berea, Ohio, USA
[email protected]
Presented at the Aural Skills Pedagogy: What is to be done?
Symposium at the Royal Academy of Music, London
7 April 2017
Before I begin, I’d like to thank Dr. Atkinson and the faculty here at the Royal Academy
of Music for organizing this very important symposium, and the selection committee for giving
me the opportunity to speak with you today.
Reading of atonal melodies is a topic that strikes fear in the hearts of many beginning
music students. Unfortunately, it has the same effect on many teachers. So, why do we do it?
The easy answer is because it is in the curriculum, but that response seems unsatisfactory. Drill
down a little bit, and one could say it is because atonal music is in the literature, although it is
becoming quite easy for one to avoid this music in the course of a career. For me, the best
answer is that a musician can never have aural skills that are “good enough,” and the study of
atonal music is a logical extension of the skills that are acquired in a thorough musical
education. We learn to deal with atonal music in part because we may need to perform it
someday, but more importantly because it makes our ears and our musicianship better.
Atonal music is difficult to learn because it is not nearly as intuitive as tonal music—one
cannot simply hear the beginning of a phrase and complete it in a logical and satisfying way like
he or she does with tonal music because there are so many possible sonic landscapes available
in the atonal musical language. In addition, many courses lack an organized and coherent
method or plan for addressing this literature. I recall my final aural skills teacher—a brilliant
musician with an amazing ear—who would simply give us atonal melodies with the instruction,
“Go learn to sing this.” Finally, many of the “survival techniques” that students use with tonal
aural skills simply do not work on atonal music.
So, today I am going to present the curriculum and methods that we use at my
institution to teach the reading of atonal music. These are informed suggestions based on my
experience teaching this content over two decades that attempt to build on skills that a student
has already acquired and to tap into the students’ musical intuition. I will present several
strategies and the way that we sequence the material. Feel free to adopt and adapt any or all of
these as fits your teaching and curriculum needs, and please let me know how it goes. If you
leave here with just one new idea to try in your classes, then my mission here has been a
success.
The way I teach atonal aural skills at the Baldwin Wallace Conservatory is based on the
presentation and mastering of four techniques:
Atonal scales
Intervals
Proximal Pitches
Rapidly-Shifting Tonality
Before I describe these techniques, it will be necessary to establish some context.
The Baldwin Wallace aural skills curriculum is a fairly typical four-semester sequence of
courses (see figure 1).
Figure 1: Overview of the Baldwin Wallace Aural Skills Curriculum
Each course in the sequence has a music theory co-requisite. As you can see, the first
two semesters focus on diatonic material, with semester one focusing on fundamentals and
semester two expanding to greater emphasis on harmonic progression, improvisation, and
dictation skills. These classes meet two days a week with a separate Dalcroze Eurhythmics lab.
Semester three focuses on chromatic and modulating material and meets two days per week.
Baldwin Wallace uses movable number and fixed letter name syllable systems.
Aural Skills IV differs in several ways. First, it occurs later in the curriculum in order to
take advantage of our students’ increased maturity (both musical and personal), and second, it
has two co-requisites: a music theory and a music history course. Delaying the course allows
the music history sequence to “catch up” with the theory curriculum. Within the course, I
divide the material into three tracks: rhythm, which builds on what was studied previously in
Aural Skills 1 through 3; tonally-based content, which also build on previously studied material;
and the material that I am here to talk about today, the atonal content, which starts from
scratch and takes small steps toward developing proficiency with the material (see figure 2).
Figure 2: The Aural Skills 4 Curriculum
Let’s get to the methods.
The first technique that we study involves learning atonal scales. I choose to teach the
whole-tone scale and the whole-half and half-whole octatonic collections, not because they are
more important than other atonal collections, but because I have limited time in a semester
and certain choices need to be made. In this case, I can teach the methodology and allow
students the time to develop proficiency with a relatively small number of scales, rather than
trying to teach them an exhaustive catalog of pitch collections that they would likely perform
poorly. Each of these scales is presented as interlocking segments of major or minor scales that
the student already knows. For example, a whole-tone scale is three interlocking segments of
the first three pitches of a major scale. First, students sing each segment separately, then they
elide them together, and then they sing the entire scale on integer numbers.
Once students can proficiently sing the scale in isolation, I begin to use canonic call and
response drills over a whole-tone ostinato, increasing the number and size of the leaps as
students become more comfortable with the sonic landscape. Eventually, students will create
their own melodic fragments for call and response exercises.
This technique builds on something that students already know how to do: sing
segments of known scales. It also has the advantage of introducing the basic principle that will
be used in method 4.
The second method that I teach is proficiency with intervals. Again, I am trying to build
on a skill that students have been practicing since Aural Skills 1. I start with a review of isolated
intervals, pushing for speed and accuracy. I then ask students to start to sing chains of intervals
in succession, like what is presented in figure 3 below:
Figure 3: Interval Chain
I allow weaker students to establish the context for each interval, while stronger
students will be expected to sing evenly and quickly through the entire sequence.
When teaching this technique, I emphasize a few important points. First, this is a
“backup” technique—it is not an efficient technique for singing an entire melody, as one
mistake requires a second lucky mistake if a student is going to reacquire the correct pitch
content. Second, I emphasize small intervals, because they will be important in method 3, and
“friendly” intervals, as those can be used to double check the integrity of one’s atonal singing.
Once students begin to achieve some proficiency with interval patterns, this changes into the
study of atonal trichords. We use atonal trichords not because they are more important than
other set collections, but because there are a reasonable number of them to memorize and
they can be used to demonstrate most of the techniques that students are learning regarding
the manipulation of atonal sets in their harmony class.
Method three, proximal pitches, is also a “backup” technique. It is based on the ideas of
a linear basis behind most music, even if it is spread out over long distances by interrupting
pitches (think Schenker), and polymelody: something they have been studying since Aural Skills
1 and 2. In this method, students look for anchor pitches and linear elements that can be used
to construct a melodic scaffolding. The first melodies I give students involve chromatic wedging
(see figure 4).
Figure 4: Preliminary Method 3 melody with analysis.
This melody consists of two converging chromatic lines. Once finding the first interval
(using method 2), I instruct students to locate and sing the two chromatic lines individually,
leaving rests in the places where the other line intervenes. Once that has been accomplished,
then they attempt to sing the two lines together.
This method expands into more complex melodies, like the one presented in figure 5.
Figure 5: More advanced Method 3 melody.
In this melody, the e-natural on beat four of the first measure can be heard from the
first pitch, as can the c-sharp that follows in the following measure and the e-flat that starts the
third measure. Other relationships can be found to find other pitches in the structure.
You might have noticed that the melody in figure 5 utilizes a tone row. I do not point
this out to the students until after they have figured out how to sing it, as my experience has
been that once students know they are dealing with a row, they stop making music and start
trying to do math. This is, however, the vehicle I use to start to introduce twelve-tone serialism
in class.
This brings us to the final and most important method: rapidly shifting tonality. This
method is based on the idea that the human mind is socially and/or biologically programmed to
hear music tonally, and it builds on techniques used in Aural Skills 3 that dealt with modulation.
In my experience, it is the technique that professionals who do not have absolute pitch use to
learn atonal melodies.
This technique requires some quick analytical abilities, so I make it clear that we will not
be sight reading atonal melodies but instead doing short-prep exercises. It requires the student
to be able to see a collection of pitches and to place them in the context of a key. They then
need to be able to shift their tonal centers when they encounter pitches outside of that key, or
when they hear a segment of music more easily using a different tonal center. Figure 6 presents
a melody with one possible realization of the tonal content.
Figure 6: Method 4 melody and analysis
Note that some moments in the melody might be more easily handled using one of the
other methods, such as the first pitch of measure 3, which could be heard using method three
(the repetition of the starting pitch).
Before I conclude, I need to offer a few caveats. First, these techniques are designed for
students with relative pitch. Students with absolute pitch can generally sing the pitches they
see and come reasonably close to an accurate performance of an atonal melody. The value of
these techniques for the absolute pitch students is in understanding how the majority of their
colleagues, students, and audiences will process and understand this literature. If they want to
effectively connect with their students and audiences, they will not have the luxury of simply
asking “why can’t you just hear it?” Second, all of these techniques require time and practice—
something that is in short supply in the 16 weeks that I have them. As a result, I grade students
as much on process—knowing when and how to use the techniques—as I do on product—the
final performance. For some of my weaker students, fluency or proficiency is not a realistic
goal, but I do expect them to continue to practice these techniques, and to let me know when
in their lives and careers they figure out how to draw upon them successfully to solve a musical
problem.
Thank you very much for allowing me to share these ideas with you. I hope they will
serve you well the next time you are teaching your students to read and embrace atonal
literature.