Some thoughts on trying to improve understanding of pitch function in tonal music in undergraduate performers. Dr Christopher Atkinson
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There are lots of variations on this principle of course and many are widely used and in various Aural training text-books, workbooks, and more recently computer software (eg. Karpinski, 2007; Auralia software). The use of a skeleton score like this one is one of my trademarks and helps locate the harmonies we’re talking about in the class situation with minimal confusion. I think it’s important if possible to use a real performance of real music because it immediately relates the exercise to the performing context. One could do it alongside dictation elements (write down the melody and or the bass line) but that can still encourage thinking of notes in absolute pitch terms rather than their function and they could still end up doing an interval-by-interval transcription prior to working out functions. Even so, it’s probably still useful. Just parenthetically at this point, I should mention those students with absolute pitch, of whom we have a good number. I find they are just as guilty on the whole of neglecting the tonal/harmonic context of the music (I know this from having talked to them), as they simply recognise pitch in sight-singing or dictation exercises in relation to their internal absolute pitch set. Even if I make them transpose (which they hate) they tend to recognise each note and transpose it individually rather than relate to context. And in the chord-labelling exercise above, these students too will tend to think ‘that’s a C, an E and a G, therefore it’s a major triad on the tonic root’ rather than simply hearing a tonic major triad which, it might be fair to speculate, is the neurologically more streamlined route towards the potential expressive content of the notes involved. The situation can get worse if there’s dissonance involved which isn’t recognised as such. But I have recently tried a new (for me) exercise which is a kind of vocal figured-bass realisation but made more explicitly or exclusively functional on the various levels by replacing the pitch-specific bass-line with chord labels. In other words, it’s a kind of inverse of chord labelling, in which one sings, for example, the following, using any pitch as I1: I5 1 3 1 IV4 3 3 ii1 3 1 V4 3 I1 23 which translates as: 
Fig. 4 Mozart, Clarinet Quintet K.581, ii) Larghetto (opening) Or, at a more advanced level: I1 2 3 5 3 5 6 5 3 V5 IV3 4 vi3 4 5 ii(i3 viio5) II5 ii(V1 1 1 7 6 5 1 i3 2 1 ) V1 1 1 7 6 iii(V3 5 i1) which translates as: 
Fig. 5 Berlioz, Les Nuits d’Été, i) Villanelle (opening) Again, this extends from various fairly widely used ideas (singing Roman-numerals – Karpinski, 2007), and notation systems (such as movable-‘do’ solfege) although I personally haven’t seen it done precisely like this with figuring, effectively to notate a full melody in functional terms. We have to make slight adaptations to normal chord labelling and figured bass, but it’s hopefully self-evident why we need to use, for example, I1. I’m in the early days of doing these exercises in class and so I’m afraid I can’t yet report as to its efficacy. But the classroom pilot has worked in the sense that students quickly get used to reading and understanding the code and some are already more fluent than I am. You can start by just singing the Roman numerals, then maybe select out the quicker ones in the class to sing the figures while the others sing the numerals; then swap. You can add rhythm by traditional notation once they’ve got the pitch. You could conceivably add a second line or a bass line with another set of parallel figures. But crucially we are now forcing them (even, by their own admission, those with absolute-pitch) to use tonal/harmonic context at the very first hurdle to determine pitch. They have to understand it before they can even hear or sing it. Taking the fifth note of the Mozart melody, they must first relate it from chord IV. Already it starts to acquire some gravity – even the relatively common chord IV in Mozart is a relatively expressive harmony. Then they must work out that this is the dissonant augmented 4th degree above the root of IV, falling and resolving to the 3rd, and the expressive potential of this note is revealed by the time they can actually get to sing it. One might often hear this phrase performed beautifully, with a hushed and burnished, rich sound, perfectly in tune, and yet, for all that, I would also like in an ideal world to hear some apparent awareness or communication of the significance of that fifth note. I’m not saying there’s a ‘right’ way to play it – it doesn’t need to be unsubtly accented – but if we were waltzing to this music, we would take a bigger step on that downbeat and Mozart has chosen to add a gesture to that step which somehow I think a performer needs to make. I’m aware there is perhaps an as yet under-discussed gap between recognition of tonal/harmonic function of a note and a possible understanding of how to express it in performance. But intuitively and from experience, I feel that once I’ve put an analytical label on a note or group of notes I have got ninety percent of the way there. That final step to interpretation and performance is, for now, beyond the scope of this discussion. References Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin, ‘Human memory: A proposed system and its control processes’ in Spence, K. W., & Spence, J. T. The psychology of learning and motivation (Volume 2) (New York: Academic Press 1968) pp. 89–195. As a model of memory processes, this has been criticised and superseded by other models, particularly concerning Working Memory (originally ‘Short-Term Memory’ in the Atkinson-Shiffrin model) and the separation of the Sensory Register. Working Memory and Long Term Memory are now thought to consist of a number of components. The diagram presented above as Fig. 2, however, is an attempt to present a simplified illustration of the principal processes discussed. Alan Baddeley, Working Memory (Oxford OUP 1986) Elvira Brattico, Risto Näätänen, and Mari Tervaniemi, ‘Context Effects on Pitch Perception in Musicians and Nonmusicians: Evidence from Event-Related-Potential Recordings’ Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 19/2 (Winter 2001): pp. 199-222. This article contains a useful review of other related studies. Susan Hallam, Ian Cross, Michael Thaut (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology (Oxford, OUP, 2009) Gary S. Karpinski, Manual for Ear Training and Sight Singing (Norton, 2007) Daniel Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music (paperback edition: London, Atlantic Books 2008) George A. Miller, ‘The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits On Our Capacity for Processing Information’ The Psychological Review 63/2 (March 1956) Gary Potter, ‘Identifying Successful Dictation Strategies’ Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy 4/1 (Spring 1990): pp. 68-69. Paraphrased in Sisley (below) pp.14-15 Dirk-Jan Povel and Erik Jansen, ‘Harmonic Factors in the Perception of Tonal Melodies’ Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 20/1 (Fall 2002), pp. 51-85 Beth Ann Sisley ‘A Comparative Study of Approaches to Teaching Melodic Dictation’ MA thesis, Kent State University, Ohio (2008) John A. Sloboda, B. Hermelin and N. O'Connor, ‘An Exceptional Musical Memory’ Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3/2 (Winter, 1985), pp. 155-169 John A. Sloboda and David H.H. Parker. ‘Immediate Recall of Melodies’ in Peter Howell, Ian Cross, Robert West (Eds.) Musical Structure and Cognition (London, Academic Press 1985) pp.143-67 Bob Snyder, ‘Memory for Music’ in Hallam et al (above) pp. 107-117 Directory: public -> uploads -> documents documents -> The Baseball Project — uploads -> Tobacco Prevention and Control Coalition uploads -> Etisalat Afghanistan gsm 900/1800 uploads -> Choosing Authoring Tools Advanced Distributed Learning (adl) Initiative uploads -> Fazzt® Digital Delivery System uploads -> Information technology uploads -> Curriculum Vitae Gergely Kovasznai documents -> Live from Atlanta Download 438.85 Kb. Share with your friends:
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