Notes from the Staff

Music Fundamentals Games with Stefanie Dickinson

Dr. Stefanie Dickinson joins us to share some of the music fundamentals games that she uses in her music theory classroom.   Links Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy Dr. Stefanie Dickinson’s page at UCA The Power of Play with Jed Dearybury (Notes from the Staff Episode) Dalcroze Solfege Games with Greg Ristow (Notes from the Staff Episode) uTheory.com   Show Notes 0:00:21.2 Introductions   0:02:27.1 Value of play in teaching and learning   0:06:02.4 Key Words - for key signatures   0:08:47.0 360 Degrees - for scale degrees   0:10:30.4 Balance Beam - for rhythmic values and notation conventions   0:13:38.2 Meter Cards - for identifying time signatures   0:16:44.8 Notation Bloopers   0:20:15.0 Triad Bingo (can be extended to other topics)   0:23:01.6 How do you help students who are struggling to get beyond the despair factor?   0:25:18.0 Interval Train   0:26:57.5 Value of competitive games in teaching fundamentals   0:32:43.1 Phone Numbers Game (aural skills, scale degrees/solfege)   0:38:32.1 Extending games for other topics   0:40:04.6 Wrap-up Transcript [music] - These are the notes from the staff where we talk about our point of view, and we share the things we're going to do, `cause the path to mastering theory begins with you.   0:00:21.2 Greg Ristow: Welcome to Notes from the Staff, a podcast from the creators of uTheory, where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training, and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education.   0:00:33.4 David Newman: Hi, I'm David Newman, and I teach voice and music theory at James Madison University, and write code and create content for uTheory.   0:00:42.9 GR: Hi, I'm Greg Ristow, I conduct the choirs at the Oberlin Conservatory, and I'm the founder of uTheory.   0:00:49.0 DN: Thank you listeners for your comments and episode suggestions. We love to read them. Send them our way by email at notes@utheory.com, and remember to like us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.   0:01:01.6 GR: Our topic for today is music fundamentals games, and joining us to share some of her favorite games is Dr. Stefanie Dickinson. Dr. Dickinson is associate professor of music theory at the University of Central Arkansas. Her primary areas of research include the music of Liszt's late experimental period, issues in analysis and performance, and music theory pedagogy. She has presented her work at regional and national meetings of the Society for Music Theory and College Music Society, the International Conference on Music and Gesture, and others. And her articles can be found in Gamut, College Music Symposium, the Festschrift Liszt 2000, and most recently in the Rutledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy, where she's written about games for teaching music fundamentals, which is what we're going to talk about today. Stefanie, welcome.   0:01:49.4 Stefanie Dickinson: Thank you so much. It's a pleasure and honor to be here, and I appreciate the opportunity.   0:01:54.4 GR: We're thrilled to have you. So you're teaching at University of Central Arkansas. What all do you teach there?    0:02:00.0 SD: I teach only music theory. I have two sophomore theory and two sophomore aural skills classes in the fall, and then spring I go on to teach some upper level electives. I teach the form class. We have an introduction to linear analysis, and then in the summer I teach music theory pedagogy class.   0:02:19.5 GR: Well, I loved your chapter, so I'm so excited to talk about games, and especially music fundamentals games.   0:02:27.1 DN: So a theme we've come back to several times on this podcast is the value of play in teaching and learning. Listeners may remember our episode with Jed Dearybury, author of The Playful Classroom, or the episodes where Greg and I talked about Dalcroze solfege games and about music theory songs. So we've talked a lot about this, but before we dive into specific games, I wonder if you could talk about the value of games in teaching and how you came to use them in your own pedagogy.   0:02:52.5 SD: Sure. I think that games are very, very valuable, potentially at every level of instruction, but specifically for fundamentals. And I think it's just due to our competitive natures and our desire to succeed and our desire to win that really heightens our awareness for learning. And games are such a fun environment where we can really push ourselves, but we do not have the risk that we do when we take exams. So I think this resonates with students, and we've all been playing games since we were tiny children. The fact that the games speed up our thought processes really mirrors the way that students will use these fundamentals in the real world. And I found that students, when they first come into a fundamentals class, they think that they just need to be able to master the concept. They don't realize that they actually need to master it and have, in fact, instant recall, because a lot of our students are music education majors. And they're not thinking into their future when they're standing in front of their band sight reading a piece, and they don't realize that they don't have five minutes to count the flats and to look at the next to last one to determine the key signature.   0:04:11.6 SD: So games are just a great way to build up that speed and just build up the real world skills that they're going to need. And also, these games particularly came to me when I was trying to think of a different modality for drill and practice, because we know that drill and practice is absolutely essential to mastering fundamentals. And of course we can do drill and practice exercises in class, and then we can give our students written homework. We can send them to an online website or use a computer app, but games are just fun and interactive and competitive. And one thing that I was very enthusiastic about was having my students see how their classmates perform in this situation. So some of the students who would be struggling would be able to see the students who had already mastered the concept, and they might realize, "Hey, my classmate has mastered this, so I can do it too." So I was interested in that aspect.   0:05:13.8 GR: I love that. That's great. That's great. Leigh VanHandel's new book, The Rutledge Companion to Music Theory, I've been finding absolutely delightful as I've been working my way through the various chapters. We had the chance to speak recently with Melissa Hoag about her chapter on putting the music in music fundamentals. I absolutely loved your chapter on these music theory games, and I thought it might be fun if you took us and the listeners through some of these games. And maybe for the ones that aren't too visual, David and I could go head to head on a question or two and see who wins. [laughter]   0:05:44.4 DN: You just want to show how good you are.   0:05:46.9 GR: Don't you? [laughter]   0:05:50.6 SD: Well, most of these games are visual based, but I'll see if I can think of a few questions.   0:05:55.3 GR: Sounds great. Sounds great.   0:05:56.6 SD: That will allow a little competition here on the podcast. [laughter]   0:06:00.5 GR: Excellent.   0:06:02.4 SD: I tried to think of games for quite a few different aspects of fundamentals, and I'll tell you about my Key Words. Each has a little kitschy kind of title, each game does. And one I'd like to call Key Words, and it just involves identifying key signatures. And there are three rounds for this game. The students are given 15 cards, and each card has a unique key signature. And for the first round, the students are just given a word. So I like to start with a very simple word, maybe like beg, B-E-G, or fad, F-A-D. And the students who are usually working in teams shift through their cards, and then they just place one key signature for each letter. So they might, for example, have F major, A major, D major for fad, F-A-D. Of course, I don't really specify whether they should use A major or A flat major for the A, their choice. Of course, some of our words have two letters, so that then the complimentary key signatures can be used for those. But it's really a simple kind of game.   0:07:13.5 SD: And then we go to round two, where I will say a sentence, and only one word in the sentence is actually a word that you can spell with key signatures because obviously we're limited on letters. So I'll give you a few sentences.   0:07:29.1 GR: Nice.   0:07:30.8 SD: And see if you can tell me which word that you would be able to spell with the cards.   0:07:34.0 DN: Okay.   0:07:35.2 GR: Okay.   0:07:35.6 SD: And so this is just to add another dimension, so it kind of creates a bit of a riddle. All right. My sister just earned her first scout badge.   0:07:46.4 GR: Badge.   0:07:47.3 DN: There you go.   0:07:50.0 SD: Great, great. And then you would have practice with five different major key signatures, or I could specify minor key signatures.   0:07:56.1 GR: Oh, so then once they get the word, do they have to write out the key signatures or find their key signature cards for those?    0:08:02.5 SD: Yes, they find the key signature cards and they'll have one card for each letter in the word.   0:08:09.3 GR: Got it.   0:08:10.3 DN: Yep.   0:08:10.4 SD: But we usually play this at a table and they'll line up the cards on a table.   0:08:14.7 GR: Nice. Yeah.   0:08:16.2 SD: Yeah. But one of the catches is each team only has one attempt, you have to be sure that you're accurate. So another sentence might be, do you drink decaf coffee?    0:08:23.9 DN: Decaf.   0:08:26.5 GR: Oh, good for you.   0:08:30.4 SD: Great. Yeah. And that would give you practice with another five key signatures.   0:08:36.8 DN: Coffee comes close.   0:08:36.9 GR: Yeah. I was trying coffee. [laughter]   0:08:37.8 SD: It does. I'll give you one more so we can break the tie. My friend's favorite movie is Dead Poets Society.   0:08:46.4 GR: Dead.   0:08:46.5 DN: Dead.   0:08:47.0 SD: Oh, that's a draw. [laughter] I think it's time to go on to another game. [laughter] So there's one that I call 360 degrees and the emphasis here is scale degrees. So I'll have students divided into teams and you can have, I suppose, two to four teams just depending on the board space available in your class. And this is a good way to get students out of their desks and I'll have each team line up. I'll have one person go to the board at a time, but before they go to the board, I'll call out three pieces of information; a clef, a key, and a scale degree. A clef, a key, and a scale degree. And then I'll let students think about that for a minute. And then I'll say go. And the first person on each team closer to the board will run to the board and write the clef, the key, and then the scale degree of that specific key. So unfortunately we can't play that one on the air.   [laughter]   0:09:58.2 GR: Yeah, it doesn't work too well aurally. So in other words, you would say something like bass clef G major 6.   0:10:05.3 SD: Exactly.   0:10:05.4 GR: And so someone would draw the bass clef, draw one sharp, and would write the note E on that staff.   0:10:13.1 SD: And so, of course, treble and bass clefs are relatively easy. You could throw in some C clefs. [chuckle] That would be a lot of fun, I'll tell it to them.   0:10:23.5 GR: Yeah, writing key signatures in C clefs can be fun too because they have a different shape depending on the C clef.   0:10:30.4 SD: Absolutely, absolutely. And this is also practice, of course, for writing key signatures and having the correct placement and the correct order. Another component of that game. One of my favorites I call Balance Beam. So I'll have one student from each team go to the board and write on a horizontal plane numbers 1-14. Actually, it could be any number that work, but the game that I like to start with has 14 different rhythmic values. And then I'll call out a rhythmic value for each number and my students will write that rhythmic value, no beams. So, for example, let's say numbers 1-3 each have eighth notes. Number 4 is a quarter note. Number 5 is an eighth note. Number 6 is a dotted quarter. 7, 8, 9 are all eighth notes. 10 is a quarter note. 11-14 are eighth notes. So they're just looking at what might seem to be just a random assignment of note values.   0:11:40.2 GR: And at this point not beamed at all...   0:11:43.4 SD: Not beamed at all.   0:11:45.0 GR: Just individual notes.   0:11:46.6 SD: No, because that's part of the competition. So I have five rounds. I really can get a lot, a lot of competition out of this one visual. So round one, I asked the teams to beam the rhythm in 6/8 and of course include bar lines. So, and again, I give each team only one chance. So they have to really think it through and check themselves. So for round two, I have the teams beam the same notes correctly in 3/4 and, of course, check on the bars. Round three, I asked the teams to beam the same rhythmic pattern in 9/8. And, of course, this time they have to move the bar lines. And then round four, I asked the students in 9/8 to replace each rhythmic note value with a rest value. And then for the last round, I asked them to do rhythmic transposition. So I'll have them change the rest values from 9/8 to 9/4.   0:12:50.8 GR: Change all of the values from 9/8 to 9/4.   0:12:52.9 SD: Right.   0:12:53.7 GR: Got it.   0:12:55.3 SD: Exactly. But I specifically work with rest values at first because I think it might be a little tougher than the actual note values. Although that's certainly a possibility.   0:13:03.3 GR: Yeah. That's great. And I can see all sorts of ways you could extend this as well, depending on which notes you changed to rests, it might be that in some meters you would normally combine those rests to form a longer value. Whereas in other meters, you'd want to keep them separate to reflect the metric structure.   0:13:23.8 SD: Right, and that's certainly a very important point, yes. And in addition to teaching beaming, we can also teach the proper combination of rests. Absolutely. Then I go on to Meter Cards. Each team receives two sets of cards, and on one card, there is a rhythmic value that's the equivalent of one beat. So for example, in 4/4, this could be a single quarter note. It could be two eighths. It could be an eighth and two sixteenths. It could be a dotted eighth and a single sixteenth. It's just the value of a single beat. And then I have another stack of cards with the numbers two, three, and four. Now, of course, these refer to meters or beats per measure. Usually I just start with the more common two, three, four, though you could certainly add others. And then the students basically have to figure out what the meter is when I combine one card with a rhythmic pattern with another card with a number.   0:14:30.4 GR: Can you give us an example of that?    0:14:33.3 SD: So perhaps we can do a little competition here.   0:14:35.8 DN: Yeah, I'm still trying to envision this.   0:14:38.3 SD: Okay, so I would like for you to tell me the meter or the time signature for your first card, which is a quarter and an eighth, the equivalent of a beat.   0:14:52.0 DN: Gotcha.   0:14:53.5 SD: And then the other card, which tells you that there are four of these per measure.   0:14:57.5 DN: So 12/8.   0:14:58.4 GR: So 12/8.   0:15:00.5 SD: Exactly, exactly.   0:15:00.6 GR: Four compound beats, yeah.   0:15:02.2 SD: Now, of course, simple meters are pretty easy to do, but then when I choose a compound meter, then there's a extra step of students having to think about how the time signature reflects not the beats per measure, but the divisions per measure.   0:15:24.5 DN: Great. Okay. Yeah, the part that I hadn't grokked at first was that there would be compound meter beats. Yeah, and it always seems like it's a difficult thing to explain in fundamentals why a compound meter is what it is.   0:15:42.8 SD: It really is. It's always a challenge. And I think it sometimes helps for students to see a single beat isolated on a card as opposed to just looking at example thinking that the divisions are the equivalent of beats.   0:15:58.2 GR: Yeah. And I think also it's nice, right, because so often we say in 6/8, 9/8, 12/8, the dotted quarter gets the beat. But of course, all sorts of other things can form a beat. And so, I like that idea of getting them to think about the rhythm words as being beats within those compound meters. And, of course, you could make some really hard ones. You could do a dotted 16th, 32nd, 16th, right, at which point we're in, and the number three, at which point we're in 9/16 time, where you can get some really crazy ones in there. Yeah.   0:16:36.6 SD: Right, right. And usually that's the process. You start with the easier ones and then work your way to the ones that are more challenging. I think perhaps my favorite is the Notation Bloopers Game. [laughter] And this is just to reinforce conventional notation, which I think a lot of our students are just not aware of. They take conventional notation for granted. So I'll give my students a slip of paper that has just a short melody on it, and I'll ask them to identify the mistake. And it's just really fun to come up with these mistakes. They might be as subtle as a bass clef with the dots in the wrong place. So instead of surrounding the F line, they might surround the D line. And usually that takes a while for students to identify that. And this is a fun game to play with teams because you've got the interaction of the team members as they look for the mistake. Another favorite of mine, see if you can identify this mistake. So picture this, I've got a bass clef with dots in the proper position, right? And then next you see 4/4. After that you see two flats; B flat, E flat. And then for simplicity's sake, let's say that you see four quarter notes, a bar line, and a whole note. What's the mistake?    0:18:19.6 GR: I'm cheating a bit because I've seen it in your book, and I have to say I had to read the answer. [laughter] And then I was like, oh, of course. [chuckle]   0:18:30.0 SD: So a bass clef, time signature of 4/4, two flats, B flat, E flat, followed by four quarter notes, a bar, and a whole note, with a, let's say, a double bar.   0:18:42.5 DN: You've transposed the time signature and the key signature.   0:18:47.8 SD: Exactly. [chuckle]   0:18:48.0 GR: Excellent, David.   0:18:51.3 SD: Exactly.   0:18:51.4 DN: I had to look... I had to visualize it. [chuckle]   0:18:54.6 SD: Mm-hmm. It's a lot of fun. And you could do other things like using wrong stem direction, incorrect beaming. And another one of my favorites is a mistake that my students make very often, which they'll have a melody with an upbeat, but then in the last measure, they'll have note values for the complete value of the measure. So they've forgotten to compensate for the upbeat. That usually takes a minute too.   0:19:23.0 DN: Although I... Yeah. I get to some of these things and I think, well, I've seen professional scores that feature this or feature... And, of course, I do a lot of early music, so I've seen the F clef on different lines.   0:19:40.3 GR: Everywhere. True.   0:19:41.1 DN: But I've seen the G clef on different lines.   0:19:44.5 SD: That's a great point. That's a great point. And that's a good conversation to have with students, that this, what we call conventional notation is not universal. I just had a discussion today with my sophomore students about using a Dorian key signature in a Bach chorale. So the key of G minor was notated with just one flat.   0:20:07.2 DN: And Bach does this...   0:20:08.0 GR: All the time.   0:20:08.5 DN: All the time.   0:20:11.1 SD: Right, right. So many Baroque composers. And then another game we play is Triad Bingo. So I just made these bingo cards. Let's see. With intervals, I usually do B-I-N-G-O. For triads, sometimes bing or just sometimes bingo, but... And instead of a traditional bingo card layout, you would just have single chords, just a row of single chords under each letter. And then I'll call out a letter and then a chord quality, and the students will have to find that chord quality. Usually, we just circle them. And, honestly, I only make one version of the card for each class. So everyone's looking at the same card, because it's just chaos running around looking at different cards and reconfiguring your brain.   0:21:06.9 DN: Oh, yeah.   0:21:09.9 GR: Okay. So it has been a while since I've played bingo. So just to be sure I'm picturing this correctly. So at the top are these five columns, B-I-N-G-O, and then underneath them you said qualities or letters or both?    0:21:30.1 SD: Qualities.   0:21:30.2 GR: Okay.   0:21:30.3 SD: Qualities. So, for example, under... Let's say, under B, I might have an F major triad. Maybe a D minor triad. A C augmented triad. And then a B diminished triad.   0:21:43.9 GR: Got it. And so you would call something like B augmented, and...   0:21:47.9 SD: Exactly. Exactly.   0:21:49.8 GR: And then they would put a chip on the one augmented card in that row.   0:21:53.0 SD: Correct. Yes.   0:21:55.4 GR: Okay.   0:21:57.1 DN: And so if you're all using the same card then, there's a definitive point at which someone should have won.   0:22:04.4 SD: Yes.   [laughter]   0:22:06.8 DN: I'm wondering if I could do this with aural skills, except that I fear I would get premature victories.   [laughter]   0:22:15.0 SD: Oh, you do. You do.   [laughter]   0:22:16.7 GR: I'm sure. Yeah.   0:22:18.4 SD: But once you declare a premature victory, you are out of the game.   [chuckle]   0:22:23.9 GR: And you could easily turn that game... Is that what you were saying, David, that you could turn that game to an aural skills game by calling column B and then playing a diminished chord?    0:22:33.5 SD: Absolutely.   0:22:34.5 DN: Yeah.   0:22:35.2 GR: Uh-huh. Yeah.   0:22:37.9 SD: I use the same format on intervals, on triads, on seventh chords. There's so much you can do with it. And also, you could add that aural component to the triads and seventh chords.   0:22:46.8 GR: Mm-hmm. Nice.   0:22:49.5 SD: Yes. But you really need to state up front that premature declarations of victory...   0:22:55.8 GR: Eliminate you from...   0:22:57.7 SD: Will result in elimination from the game.   [laughter]   0:23:01.6 DN: I love the fact that you mentioned that, of course, it lets some of the students see that other students are doing well, that they understand it, and, therefore, that it is understandable. I have seen some students react to this with despair that their colleagues just know these things and they don't. And I wonder how you handle the despair factor.   0:23:37.2 SD: [laughter] The despair factor is definitely present, whether it's written theory or aural skills, definitely. It's uncanny. I had this talk today with my students. In my sophomore aural skills, we do an error detection exercise every day in class, and I have some students who are just not passing them. And so, we had to have a little chat about everybody has their weaknesses, and there's some things that you can do now very well, but you were not able to do them at some point before. So none of my students were born reading treble and bass clef. They had to learn those. And I think it's important to tell students, as I'm sure you all know, that sometimes people are more comfortable with the written side of theory. Sometimes they're more comfortable with the aural side of theory. And they're all important. And it's just a matter of developing skills. And sometimes you even have to ask for help. And, of course, we as functioning adults in the real world, we call people for help all the time. We have physicians and mental health professionals and electricians and plumbers and people with professions that we just cannot live without them.   0:24:58.4 SD: So it's really difficult sometimes for my students to ask for help. They think they should just naturally be good at a skill, but that's why we do skill building. And it's just so valuable to know your weaknesses, to know where to focus your time and your effort. I have one more I'd like to share with you. I call it interval train. And this actually is not original. I think we did something like this when I was an undergrad a long time ago. [chuckle] And this is also a game that could have an aural component, but I'll focus on the written, the visual right now. So I'll have each team at the board, at a board, and I'll give them the starting note. And then I'll tell them the name of an interval and a direction. So let's say ascending minor second, and then they'll write the next note, and then I'll just go through a series of 5-12 intervals. And whoever gets to the correct final note first is the winner.   0:26:08.6 GR: I love it.   0:26:10.8 DN: It's a very modus novus...   [laughter]   0:26:15.4 SD: Yes, it is. And then, of course, you can sing... You could try to sing the melody that you created. And, of course, you could play those aural skills by playing the intervals. That'd be a great way for them to reinforce the written with the aural, which is always important, of course.   0:26:35.1 GR: And you could make it a name the tune then as well by... If you pick... Give the intervals for some tune, say...   0:26:42.5 SD: Absolutely.   0:26:44.0 GR: F sharp, perfect unison, ascending minor second, ascending major second, descending major second, and we're off to Ode to Joy.   [laughter]   0:26:51.7 SD: Great. It's great. Great addition.   0:26:57.5 DN: I wonder... And I... It's really cool to me how you've... Sort of all of these games leverage a competitive spirit to especially get out that, as you said, that immediate recall that... And I know... One of my colleagues instituted time tests on all of her fundamentals classes and Theory 1, and they would just have time tests every day. And the students kinda hated them, but at least it... Time test does not leave you time to count up the letters and figure out... Of course we know you can do that. That's not the issue. The issue is that you'd be able to see it and immediately recognize it. And so, you've leveraged this competitive spirit. I wonder, and maybe this is... I just wonder if you have games that are less competitive. Are there collaborative games? Do we have ways of... Or is that less useful? [chuckle]   0:28:11.1 SD: I'm sure there's a place for that. Certainly. There's some times when you, as a professional musician, you want to take time. You want to enjoy the discovery maybe of analyzing a piece, and when taking time is appropriate. But with these games, as you mentioned, my primary concern is that students just go beyond understanding, that they actually have an opportunity to, essentially, prepare for the real world where you don't have time to think about what the F sharp major scale looks like. [chuckle]   0:28:54.6 DN: And I've had some students, I think, who don't always understand that right away. I definitely had a conversation with one the other day who said, "Well, when you make me do it so fast, I can't... When I do the homework, I have plenty of time. So I don't understand why I didn't do well on this test." "Well, you... It's 'cause the homework... You're obviously doing it very slowly. But you can't do it slowly." [chuckle]   0:29:21.9 SD: Right. Well, I'll reveal a secret here. It seems like sometimes the students think that the primary purpose is to win the game. And I usually offer some kind of interesting reward. It might be if we have a games day, then the team who wins has their lowest homework replaced by an A. So that's something that everybody, everybody is interested in. So they think that the primary objective is to get that homework grade replaced. So that's really what they're focused on. And they're gonna just try to get through each of these exercises as quickly as possible and pull their resources together, when actually my primary goal is for them to build up their speed and recall.   0:30:13.8 DN: It's nice to think about motivation in this sense too, because I do find it frustrating sometimes that our students come to us increasingly motivated by grades and less motivated by the desire to learn. It feels like that's happening anyway. And, of course, this doesn't necessarily encourage motivation to learn, but it does provide motivation that is not grade-based, necessarily.   0:30:49.3 SD: Motivation to win can also...   0:30:50.1 DN: Motivation to win.   0:30:50.8 SD: Double as motivation to learn when you don't realize you're learning. And I agree with you that sometimes it seems like their motivation is more about getting the grade that they want, which is kind of sad. And I think sometimes it's just our place to remind students to think about why it is that they're studying music. Why do you want this music degree? Do you really want to get an A, or do you actually wanna learn the material? And not to say that in a harsh way, but just to be the voice of reason, the person who reminds them that this amazing thing that we study, that we all love, music, is a wonderful and complex area. And I often make the analogy with my students between their relationship to music and, say, their relationship to maybe a significant other. When you first meet someone and fall in love, of course there's that period when you want to know everything you possibly can learn about them in a brief period of time, because you really cherish that person. And if they love music, then they really need to have an attitude of wanting to learn as much as they possibly can. They might not like everything, but just like you don't like everything about another person, don't like everything about a friend. But it's just checking their perspective, I think, is part of teaching, especially music majors.   0:32:33.9 GR: Great. I thought it might be fun, reading your games, I thought, we should share more games just with each other 'cause I think...   0:32:43.1 SD: I would love to hear some of your games.   0:32:43.1 GR: Yeah. I was thinking, too, just as as students, the younger we are, the more learning tends to have games in it. And as we go through the grades and into college, there tend to be fewer and fewer games. But, boy, the second I hear, "Let's play a game," I'm there. [chuckle] So, anyway, a game I thought would be fun to share, I do this game with a lot of my students, but especially with any time I'm teaching aural skills. And I usually teach using scale degrees, and... But you can do it with solfège just as well. And so the basic idea is if you map the numbers one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and zero onto a scale, you can get like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and then you can have nine as a high two, and you can have zero as a low seven. And of course, you could do the same thing in solfège. And so then... I love this game because it involves students' cell phones. And how many times in class do we find ourselves thinking, Oh, I wish that student weren't on their cell phone or saying, Hey, would you put away that cell phone? And how rarely do we get to say in class, All right, everyone, take out your cell phone?    0:34:06.7 SD: Oh, that's a thrill right there. That's a thrill for a student.   0:34:09.8 GR: So I ask students to take out their cell phone, and they convert their telephone number to scale degrees using this system. And then I ask for volunteers to sing their number...   0:34:27.7 SD: Oh, wow.   0:34:28.5 GR: Not on the numbers or solfège, but on a neutral syllable, la, la, la, etc. And the first person to successfully make their cell phone ring wins the round.   [laughter]   0:34:47.5 SD: Oh, that's fantastic. Oh, wow.   0:34:53.1 GR: And we practice... Before we do this, I say, now, it's very possible you're going to dial a wrong number. And if someone picks up, you're not allowed to just hang up on them. You have to say, "Oh, I'm so sorry, I misheard a number," before you hang up.   [laughter]   0:35:15.2 SD: Wow, that's fantastic. I love that game.   0:35:18.6 GR: Yeah. I have way too much fun with it.   0:35:22.1 DN: It has great potential for embarrassment.   [laughter]   0:35:23.7 SD: It does, it does. And that's the way I've memorized my credit card numbers, by converting them to scale degrees.   0:35:30.4 DN: Oh, this is how we've memorized... Greg and I have both memorized Pi this way.   [vocalization]   0:35:41.6 SD: Awesome. That's fantastic.   0:35:44.1 DN: We've got different rhythms 'cause...   0:35:45.9 GR: We do. And I actually... I wrote a fugue on Pi. Maybe I got... Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. Musical nerdiness.   0:35:51.6 SD: When there's that element of humiliation, then it really heightens your hearing.   [laughter]   0:35:58.0 GR: Right? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Another version of this I like to do is... It's harder to do now because it's hard to find the yellow pages, but I'll hand out a different page, I'll cut out pages from the yellow pages, and I'll hand each student their own page from the yellow pages. And they're to pick a company listed on the yellow pages and to write a jingle with the company's phone number. And depending on the level of the class, they might also... They might set it to a rhythm and meter or they might also add harmony and accompaniment and create a... Kind of create a thing about it. And the best jingles are ones that don't say the name of the company, but that they give you some hint about what the company does. And then the students like... And I'll usually give that as a homework assignment, then the next class, students will perform their jingles for the other students, and they'll try and figure out what the company might be.   0:37:00.8 SD: How fun.   0:37:03.2 GR: Anyway. So some of my... Couple of my favorite games.   0:37:06.1 SD: That's very creative. That's very creative.   0:37:09.4 DN: I haven't really done competitive games in my classroom. I'm feeling embarrassed that I haven't. But I've done, I guess, collaborative things where we have a challenge, and I'll let people form groups and work with their group to pass the challenge, like executing a good four against three or five against four or four against five. And the... That's proved useful, especially if you have somewhat diverse groups of students go off together, because then the ones who can do it will... They'll get peer learning. But I guess that doesn't really count as a game. [chuckle] Unless you let them come back and have a competition.   0:38:11.0 SD: Well, it's a fun activity outside of lecture time or structured time. Those are always fun.   0:38:19.2 GR: Yeah. These are really great, Stefanie. Thank you so much for sharing them with us.   0:38:23.9 SD: Thank you so much for having me. It was lovely meeting you both. And I enjoyed hearing your ideas too. I'll have to put some of those to use. I enjoyed that.   0:38:32.1 GR: Yeah. I can't I can't wait to use some of these as well. And I think we... David and I, when we did our episode on Dalcroze Solfège games, we were talking how any game there... Any game is like a seed that can be developed into so many other versions of that game, depending on...   0:38:50.9 SD: Absolutely.   0:38:51.6 GR: What you're working on. I could see these being extended, say, to Roman numerals, for instance, or to various other things, so...   0:39:00.8 SD: Definitely, definitely adaptable.   0:39:03.6 GR: Yeah, yeah. Right. And a question for you. I know you mentioned in your chapter in the Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy that you tend to do a games day, like it'll just be like we used to have field day in school where we just play games outside. Is it like that kind of a feeling?    0:39:21.7 SD: Sometimes, I'll have a fundamentalympics.   [laughter]   0:39:30.4 SD: And I find that those are good for review, your test time. Also, if I'm away at a conference, it's a great lesson plan for a substitute to come in and do. But also, of course, the games are modular. So it's always good to review a previous topic each class, so by just having a quick game, that be a wonderful way to reinforce a topic that you've already covered but your students are still working on that mastery.   0:40:03.9 DN: Great. Fantastic.   0:40:04.6 GR: Yeah. Awesome. Oh, this is... Yeah, I'm just really delighted that you've shared these with us and that we'll share them with a broader audience, and, yeah, hopefully, we'll have a whole bunch of Key Word and Notation Blooper and Triad Bingo contestants out there in the world.   0:40:25.3 SD: That will be great. And I'm so glad that that you find these helpful, and I hope... Certainly hope that your listeners will too.   0:40:32.2 GR: Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Stefanie.   0:40:33.8 DN: Thanks so much.   0:40:34.6 SD: Thank you.   [music]   0:40:39.8 Speaker 4: Notes from the Staff is produced by utheory.com.   0:40:42.8 GR: UTheory is the most advanced online learning platform for music theory.   0:40:47.4 S4: With video lessons, individualized practice and proficiency testing, uTheory has helped more than 100,000 students around the world master the fundamentals of music theory, rhythm and ear training.   0:40:58.2 GR: Create your own free teacher account at utheory.com/teach.  

Putting Music in ”Music Fundamentals” with Melissa Hoag

Dr. Melissa Hoag joins us to talk about ways we can make the teaching of music fundamentals musical, fun and effective. She shares tips from her chapter in The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy, and takes us through her list of six best practices for teaching music theory fundamentals. Links Melissa Hoag's faculty page at Oakland University The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy, ed. Leigh VanHandel: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Music-Theory-Pedagogy/VanHandel/p/book/9781032174136 Lana Lubany "Sold" (Harmonic minor scale at beginning): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIGxMtWXjS0 Renaissance Composer Maddalena Casulana: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maddalena_Casulana Bruce Haynes: Performing Pitch: The History of "A": https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780810841857/A-History-of-Performing-Pitch-The-Story-of-A uTheory: Online Music Theory and Ear Training Show Notes 00:01:04 - Guest Introduction: Dr. Melissa Hoag, Oakland University   00:02:01 - Why is teaching music fundamentals hard?   00:03:18 - Can you talk about your own experience teaching music theory fundamentals?   00:05:14 - What topics do you include in music fundamentals?   00:06:37 - What do we get wrong about teaching fundamentals?   00:09:18 - How do you put actual music in your music fundamentals classes?   00:14:31 - Do you still have time for drill & practice if you're spending so much time with real music?   00:15:35 - Importance of letting yourself be fallible in front of students   00:17:21 - What are ways you connect fundamentals to sound?   00:18:30 - Composition exercises in fundamentals & engaging students creatively   00:23:47 - How do you approach teaching a topic that you know so well, that you can't remember what it was like to know the topic?   00:27:06 - The value of the piano keyboard in teaching & learning music fundamentals   00:30:10 - Six Best Practices for teaching music fundamentals   00:30:30 - #1: Repetition Counts   00:35:20 - #2: Consistency and Rigor Matter   00:38:20 - #3: More Assessment Opportunities are Better than Fewer   00:39:27 - #4: Prompt Feedback and Specific Grading Are Import for Learning   00:41:02 - #5: Involve Students in Finding Examples   00:43:31 - #6: Have Fun!   00:45:36 - Final thoughts? We should acknowledge that we're talking about Western, tonal music fundamentals, and that there is much more to the world, and we value that and are curious about that.   00:46:58 - Wrap-up Transcript 0:00:21.2 David Newman: Welcome to Notes from the Staff, a podcast from the creators of uTheory, where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training, and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education.   0:00:34.3 Greg Ristow: Hi, I'm Greg Ristow, founder of uTheory and associate professor of conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory.   0:00:40.7 DN: Hi, I'm David Newman and I teach voice and music theory at James Madison University and write code and create content for uTheory.   0:00:48.4 GR: Welcome to our second season of Notes from the Staff, and a quick thanks to all of our listeners for your comments and episode suggestions. We love to read them, so send them our way by email at notes@utheory.com, and remember to like us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.   0:01:04.3 DN: Our guest today for the first episode of our second season is Dr. Melissa Hoag who is Associate Professor and Coordinator of music theory at Oakland University. Dr. Hoag's writings have appeared in the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, Music Theory Online, Music Theory Pedagogy Online, College Music Symposium Notes and others. She is a scholar who thinks deeply both about music theory and how to teach it in relevant ways, from her 2013 article on strategies for success in the first year music theory classroom to her 2018 article on relevance and repertoire in the 18th century counterpoint classroom, to her recent chapter in the Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy, which we'll be discussing today on Putting the Music in Music Fundamentals. Melissa, welcome.   0:01:53.3 Melissa Hoag: Hi, thank you so much for having me.   0:01:55.3 DN: We're so glad to have you here.   0:01:56.8 GR: Melissa, I have to say, I absolutely loved your chapter on putting the music in music fundamentals, that's in the Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy. This is a book that we're gonna be coming back to a number of times throughout the season. Its structure is just delightful, it's like a whole bunch of lesson plans or ideas from teaching from a bunch of different authors. One of the things that you said in your chapter that I think is absolutely true is that teaching music theory fundamentals is really hard. Why is it so hard?   0:02:27.3 MH: First, I completely agree with you that the Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy that Leigh VanHandel edited is just really wonderful, and I've already used a lot of the ideas from that book myself, so I'm glad that you'll be talking about it some more this season. I think teaching music Fundamentals is hard because most of us who teach this material just think of it as part of who we are as musicians, we don't remember not knowing those things in many cases, and we find it hard, I think, to take the time to recapture what it felt like not to know things like scales or key signatures, or what a tonic is, and I think that's really the hard thing, and then I think some people also maybe consider it not as interesting as teaching analysis. I think some people might feel that it's dry or just something they have to get through to get to the good stuff.   0:03:27.5 GR: And can you tell us a little bit about your own experience teaching music fundamentals you... What classes do you teach there at Oakland?   0:03:34.4 MH: So right now I teach and have taught for a long time, Music Theory 1, which does include fundamentals. We have a separate fundamentals class for students who really have absolutely no background in music, like maybe they sing well, but they don't have any background with note reading or anything, but everyone gets a very thorough introduction to fundamentals and Music Theory 1. And then of course, I teach a bunch of upper level classes and graduate classes, but the fundamentals part of Music Theory 1 goes for the first 10 weeks, so it's most of the semester and of course, before that, before I came to Oakland, I also taught fundamentals at Indiana University, Purdue University at Indianapolis, otherwise known as IUPUI.   0:04:28.2 MH: So I taught it then as well, and that was to non-majors, and so that was a different kind of approach, but I really use a lot of the same techniques for teaching college level music majors, some of whom are music minors, and teaching those non-majors, I don't see them as particularly that different in terms of trying to engage them, the level of rigor might be a bit different, I don't wanna let things go very much when I'm teaching college majors just because they're gonna have so much more theory following it, whereas a non-major taking music fundamentals, you wanna give them a broad overview and some experience, but I really adopt the same general idea as far as how to engage them in the topic.   0:05:14.8 GR: For you all, what's included within music fundamentals? What do you cover in that first, say, 10 weeks of the first semester.   0:05:21.9 MH: So for us right now, it is very western tonal-focused. That's a topic I'll talk a little bit more about later. We're in the process of trying to find ways to broaden that a little bit, or at least acknowledge that that is the focus instead of calling it music fundamentals and acting like it's all music. You know what I'm saying? So for now, because that is the focus of our major, it is a western tonal music focus in our major, we start with, of course, note reading, we do that very quickly, because most of them don't know the other clefs alto and tenor. We do do those because it's a college level fundamentals class, and then major and minor scales, and we do quickly acknowledge the different modes and stuff like that, but we don't require them to know them just because it's enough for them to know major and minor, and they'll get to the modes later on, and then we do intervals, a very basic introduction to meter, and then we do triads and seventh chords, and that's pretty much what comprises our fundamentals unit for that first year of Music Theory.   0:06:40.2 DN: What do we get wrong about teaching music theory fundamentals?   0:06:43.4 MH: Well, I think we get... I think many people can get it wrong by teaching it in a dry way, like just showing scales, just making students write scales, just drilling things, which obviously you do have to do some drill, of course, there's just no way out of it, but having students just do these really dry exercises without making them sing... I should say inviting them to sing without engaging their musicianship and even in a class of non-majors, some of those students probably took the class because they had choir in high school, or they sing in their church choir and they wanted to take this music class or they play in a community band or a rock band, and they just wanted to know more. So they've got some musicianship, most people do, and just finding ways to plug that in, and then of course, applying it to musical examples. I try to include just as much diversity of repertoire as I can, I use like band music, I just... I think the mistake really goes back to looking at it as something we just have to get through to get to the good stuff, and then not applying it to real music and not inviting students to engage their own musicianship. So that's kind of... That's kind of been my experience.   0:08:20.3 GR: That really resonates with me. My first real teaching job was at a community college on the north side of Houston, and I taught pretty much every semester a music fundamentals class, and the first time I taught it, I taught it as though I was preparing those students as quickly as possible to go into say theory one at a major conservatory and I wasn't too concerned about doing anything musical. It was like, we are going to master these music theory fundamentals. And it didn't go so well, I have to say, and that was a real learning experience for me. And gradually over the five years that I was teaching there, I introduced more and more activities of making music, of approaching music that students are actually listening to as opposed to say the things that I had studied in my own undergraduate and graduate training and... Yeah, it brings us really nicely, I think back to the subject of your article, which is putting the music in music fundamentals. So maybe you can go in that direction a bit. What are some of the ways that you do that in your own teaching?   0:09:24.7 MH: So for me, one thing I started doing a few years ago is just their first assignment on the LMS, the learning management system, for us it's Moodle. So I will put an assignment module on Moodle and ask students a series of questions, and those include things like their preferred name, 'cause sometimes the registered name is not how they prefer to be addressed, and what their pronouns are and who their studio teacher is in case I ever need to get in touch with that person about their progress, but then I also ask them their three favorite pieces they're listening to right now. And it can be any music, there's... And I say that in the question like, there's no guilty pleasure type of judgment implied here, it can be a video game music, it can be film music, it can be a pop song, it can be something you're playing in lessons or something you've studied in band, anything. And so then as soon as I have that, I slot those things into the various topics, 'cause I have playlists for all my topics on Spotify, and that way we can either start class by listening to one of their songs or one of their examples, and I'll just have them think like, well, what meter is this? Let's conduct it. Does this fall into one of the meter types we've studied?   0:10:45.5 MH: Or what kind of scale are they singing at the beginning of that example or... Just a lot of different techniques and approaches like that, and like you said, using music that the students are listening to is a really good way to engage them. And it's impossible to overstate how much they love it when you play one of their favorite songs, it just... They're so happy. Like I have the super quiet girl who is a trumpet major, and she is... Especially for a trumpet player. She is just so quiet in class, she does not ever speak unless I call on her, and if I call on her, like if I can tell it looks like she knows the answer, then her face gets red but she'll answer and she knows the answer. So anyway, I was playing her this piece that she's working on in her lessons, this trumpet piece, and she was just so happy that we were playing that piece, and I just asked a couple of basic questions like, what harmony is arpeggiated there at the beginning? Is it at triad or at seventh chord, is it major or minor? And it just took like five minutes out of class, but it really helps the students feel engaged and it helps them feel like you care about what they're interested in. And it's also a really easy way to diversify what you're teaching, because at least I cannot keep up with what the young ones are listening to.   0:12:16.6 MH: I don't really listen to that stuff. It's not that I don't appreciate it, I just can't keep up. So it helps me stay more current as well with pop music and film music and stuff like that. And then sometimes I'll just do a quick search too on Spotify, people have all kinds of playlists and they're of various quality, like if they say it's like compound triple meter, it may or may not really be. Or if they say it's a... You have to definitely vet them, but I found some really good examples. Like this Palestinian American singer, Lana Lubany, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing her name correctly, but there's this song Sold, and it has a harmonic minor scale right off the bat, and it's this really cool... It has like... She's plugged into her Middle Eastern roots, but it's a pop song and it's in English, and so it was really a beautiful example of a harmonic minor scale. And so I played that and then I had students kind of echo it after I played it a couple of times at the beginning, and then we figured out together what kind of scale it is, and then I had them notate it and sing it on solfege, which I just kind of, guess sort of fold in organically, even though it's not, I don't give them aural skills exams in fundamentals, but I still fold in solfege because I believe in solfege.   0:13:45.4 DN: For which those of us who teach aural skills are grateful for it.   [laughter]   0:13:51.1 MH: Well, yes, 'cause they are learning it also in aural skills in that class, but even when I taught it to non-majors, I still had them sing just some basic solfege because it's just so helpful. So that's just kind of an example. And then I try to also include, if I don't get these from students, I also include like... Of course, I include works by Western classical composers as well. I try to always have an example by a woman and an artist of color... Or composer, artist of color. I just try to be as broad as I possibly can within the confines of, yes, we're still talking about major and minor tonality as the focus of what we do, just having them sing as much as they can too as I already mentioned.   0:14:33.7 GR: Can I ask a devil's advocate kind of question, which is, if I do it... If I take this time to bring real music into the curriculum, will there still be enough time for them to actually do the drill and practice they need to master these topics?   0:14:47.7 MH: Oh, yeah. [chuckle] See, that's what I do. It actually doesn't take a ton of time to do the student's favorite examples, and to me, I view that as such a valuable use of time because students are applying that knowledge and they're viewing it as contextualized, which I think helps them learn it better and retain it longer because they see it as more relevant. And then of course, my students always have an assignment due the next class period, and it's not graded necessarily, they only have one graded homework per week, but they always have something due, and I call on people just... And I said, look, we're all gonna make mistakes. If you don't know the answer, it's fine, but if you don't know it because you didn't do the homework, that's different, then you should be embarrassed, but you have to try to at least make an attempt.   0:15:47.0 MH: And if you don't know it, that's fine. And I always make sure if I make an error, I own it. During the first week of class, I messed up writing the circle of fifths or something. And I said, I have a PhD in music theory, and I just messed up the circle of fifths, and none of you need to be embarrassed about any errors. I said, it's just something that is going to happen, and it's just music theory it's not... We're not learning to do open heart surgery, no one will die if we make a mistake, it is important to learn music theory, but we can all take some of that pressure of perfection off of ourselves. I don't know if it sinks in or not.   0:16:30.5 DN: I find that so valuable to lead by example and... Yes. To show my fallibility.   [laughter]   0:16:39.4 MH: For sure, of course. It's so different from at least my undergraduate experience, it's so different. I mean, everybody was afraid of my theory teacher. I loved her, but most of the students did not love her. They were terrified of her.   0:16:57.6 DN: Well, and it's incredibly daunting if you see someone who just seems to be impossibly good at something, and then how do you envision yourself being able to grow into that if you know that this is someone who didn't used to be able to do this, and they learned to do this.   0:17:15.9 MH: Exactly. So it's important to make it seem attainable, I guess.   0:17:20.4 DN: Yeah.   0:17:20.7 GR: You mentioned you have the students sing a lot on solfege, and one of the things that you talked about in your chapter in the Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy, was that importance of connecting the ideas to sound can you talk about various ways that you do that? Obviously we've talked about using musical examples, they already know, so they have a good sonic image and singing as well. Are there other ways that we might do that in our teaching?   0:17:45.9 MH: For me it really... It's all about singing. I've also had students do different things with rhythms and stuff like that, even like in Aural Skills 1, when we do rhythms, just like a dry rhythm exercise. Sometimes I'll do things like if they do it well as a group, then I'll have them count off one, two, three, four, and they'll just go measure by measure, which definitely makes it more challenging. And so that's always a fun thing to do, just as far as connecting it to sound, I've had students like when we've done compositions and stuff like that, which we tend to get to a little later. Although when I taught it for non-majors, I did have them do some little composition assignments, which is an interesting thing, like just write a little jingle in major, and it doesn't have to be perfect 'cause they really know enough about chords yet to match them to the melody. But that was kind of an interesting little experiment and then just... I played some of those and had us sing some of them, and again, they kind of muddle through, some of them I've never sang.   0:18:56.0 MH: And that's okay, I'm like, "Just do your best." But like little composition assignments, if it really is just in fundamentals and especially if it's for non-majors, I think it's really fun to have them take some risks like that. In our fundamentals unit, we just don't have time to do that. 'Cause we are going to get to that by the end of the semester, they'll be writing a phrase. And then in the second semester, a period structure. And I think we're gonna have them write a little pop song verse or something like that this year, for the first time in theory 2. But if you're teaching non-majors and you have a whole semester especially, or even majors and you have a whole semester dedicated to fundamentals, I think that would be a great thing to connect it with composition. And especially if you have the keyboard skill yourself to kind of make whatever it is sound really good, [laughter] to support it. And I don't mean that in a negative way, but if you can take their idea and be like, "I see what you're going for." And give it a progression.   0:20:03.5 GR: Give it a good harmony. Give it a good... Yeah.   0:20:06.0 MH: Exactly. Then that's really fun for them. They really love that, when you can do something like that. Even with Counterpoint class, if you can play their minuet in a really convincing way, even if there's some stuff going on, it helps I think.   0:20:30.6 DN: It reminds me of a project I did with a bunch of middle school kids, where we collaboratively wrote a musical.   0:20:39.0 MH: Oh, cool.   0:20:40.6 DN: And that was obviously a totally different structure because it was a summer camp kind of deal, and we had lots and lots of time, but I got lyrical ideas from them. And then I would get melodic ideas from them, but they didn't have to know... They didn't have to be great at creating melodies because they could give me a melodic idea and I could take it and say, "Oh right, we could do this with that, that would be cool." I hadn't thought of doing that, but that's of course, brilliant that I could, in a fundamentals class, I could still use the same techniques so that they have ownership and that they see the utility of it, which is exactly what you're advocating. That's so awesome.   0:21:28.8 MH: Yeah. I think they really connect with that.   0:21:31.8 GR: And our students are, they're creative people, right? They are musicians, they're artists, or they're taking that class, even if it's a class for non-majors because they have an interest in music. And I love these ideas for engaging that creativity.   0:21:46.6 MH: Yeah. And it's also much more fun for the instructor to... You know what I mean?   0:21:52.8 GR: Yeah.   0:21:54.6 MH: Who wants to just drill scales and... You have do those things, you have to. But making it a challenge to find these creative ways of engaging them. And so Greg, what you were asking, is there time to drill those things? We always have some time at the end of the class to do that. And then like I said, I give them an assignment, and then we go over that the next time. So they do that drill somewhat out of class too. And then with the homework assignments, we have a pretty regular schedule where they're due on... We have Tuesday, Thursday, Friday for freshman theory. So they will hand in an assignment on Tuesday, and I do everything I can to get it graded and handed back by Thursday so that I can collate common errors and address things. And especially if they have a quiz on that Friday, 'cause Fridays are days when we have quizzes five times a semester, so. But that kind of keeps us on track and it... That way you grade it with a quick enough turnaround that they remember doing the assignment, hopefully, and can think back to what they might have done wrong. And that way you're using some of the time outside of class by having those little practice assignments due every class, not for a grade, just I'll call on random people.   0:23:20.7 DN: We are fans of offloading some of that drill work to software. [laughter]   0:23:26.0 MH: Yes, I know. I know you are.   [laughter]   0:23:31.0 MH: That is a wonderful thing.   0:23:32.8 DN: Which of course only works if students do it.   0:23:35.0 MH: Right, I know.   0:23:38.0 DN: Of course, nothing works if students don't engage, that's why engaging students is so important.   0:23:41.4 MH: Yes, they do have to actually do the work. Yes.   0:23:46.5 GR: One of the things you said at the start of our interview was that it's hard to teach music theory fundamentals for a lot of us because they're already so deeply ingrained that we can't remember a time when we didn't know them. As an instructor, how do you approach a topic when you're formulating how you're going to present it given that that stuff is already so deeply ingrained for you?   0:24:08.8 MH: I just try to keep in mind what things look like from their perspective, from some of their perspectives. Some of them have more experience than others, of course. Students who already play the piano have a very different perspective. But I try to imagine what it would be like if you're a voice major and you've never taken piano lessons and you don't have any of that tactile knowledge. I just try to keep that in mind instead of expecting them to immediately import that knowledge, which is impossible to do immediately. And of course, they're taking keyboard at the same time, but it's not... They're not gonna be at the same level as another student who has already had years of piano lessons, for example. So I just try to put myself in their shoes as much as I possibly can, instead of living inside my own head or teaching to the students who are gobbling it all up. And again, I try to use a lot of... That's why I use examples that students give me.   0:25:16.4 MH: And I try to also use, again, especially with voice, some vocal music like the Renaissance composer, Maddalena Casulana. Her stuff is really beautiful, and she was the first woman to call herself a composer and to publish music that we have record of. And so that's an interesting thing. And it's Renaissance choral music, so it's very triadic. So that's a good opportunity, we've analyzed two of her madrigals this semester. And so that's a good way to engage, just making sure that you have music that addresses different performing forces, of course, but especially for those singers who might feel a little bit more behind. Not all of them, but just some of them who come in without that note reading knowledge, they might be very, very good singers and they just... They don't have that knowledge yet to back it up. They've never played a triad, so it's a foreign concept to them. They don't have any kind of tactile embodiment with knowledge of that. So showing stuff like that in different performing forces for those students helps a lot. And also just having them not just arpeggiate them but sing it in groups, make them build the cord as the class, sing it as a class.   0:26:36.9 GR: Each person singing one note of the... Yeah.   0:26:41.4 MH: Yes. And we even do the thing where it's major, augmented, major, minor, diminished. And so the augmented is kind of weird, but at least it's a way to make it more applicable to everybody, 'cause I don't... I also don't teach it in a keyboard lab or anything, I'm just in a regular classroom. So if you're in a keyboard lab, that's helpful, 'cause students can at least see the geography of some of these things.   0:27:06.1 GR: Can you talk a little bit about the value of keyboard instruction a bit more in terms of learning music fundamentals?   0:27:13.5 MH: So for me, it's such a valuable aid because you can see the whole keyboard, you don't have to learn any special fingerings to make a note sound. To play a scale coherently, you do need special fingerings, but to play... It's not like guitar or a bassoon or something where you have to know the fingerings. It's just so valuable for being able to say, "Oh yes, that is a whole step. Between C and D, we skip exactly one pitch." And for that reason, it's just so valuable to have students take keyboard at the same time because it... Of course, it's an important skill because most schools have pianos and pianos are widespread, right? It's a good thing because if students have those skills, they can use that skill in their eventual professions, but it's just such an invaluable support to Music Theory learning. And our keyboard curriculum is similar to our theory curriculum, but a little bit slower because it takes time for students to gain those tactile skills, being able to just feel the geography of a triad, of a second inversion triad, and it's just hard to overstate the importance.   0:28:27.7 GR: As you say, along those lines, I think what you're getting at is something that I see all the time when I'm teaching fundamentals, which is that students naturally tend to assume that the musical staff is an accurate representation, just in terms of the vertical space between notes, of how far apart notes actually are. But because there are whole steps between some letters and half steps between others, that vertical distance on the staff doesn't always reflect the same distance, and that... You see that creep up when students are writing scales, when they're... Any topic for music fundamentals, you have to use some tool to think back to the exact distance and not just the generic distance between letters. And of course, the piano shows us all of those, plus it shows us the letter names because of the arrangement of white and black notes on it, in a way that other instruments don't. The guitar, yeah, you can see all the half steps, but you can't see where the octaves are on the guitar in the same way you can on piano.   0:29:33.3 MH: Yeah, absolutely. And being able to see the difference between B-C and F-G. Perfect example. Yeah, exactly what you're talking about that on the staff they look the same, but they're not the same because on the keyboard, you skip a note between F and G. So for that reason, it's just so important, and whenever I've talked to prospective students, "Try to get some piano lessons before you come to college, wherever you go, it can be a helpful thing."   0:30:08.8 GR: I want to come back to your article in the Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy, because you listed at the end... The thrust of the article is putting the music in music fundamentals. But then at the end, you had this just delightful list of six best practices for teaching music fundamentals. I don't know if you could just talk a little bit about each of them. So the first one you listed was repetition counts.   0:30:34.1 MH: Oh yeah, I think I remember writing about that. So basically, fundamentals never leave the whole first year of theory. On every assessment, they will have to write some intervals. And they tend to get a little meaner by the end of the year, like some augmented ones in tenor clef and stuff like that. At the beginning we're a little more gentle, but there's just always fundamentals on every assessment. They don't know which ones they'll be for sure, but even after we're finished with the fundamentals unit, they will have scales, intervals, cords, meter questions like, "Here's a rhythm with no meter, provide the meter. Or re-notate this incorrectly notated rhythm to reflect the... " Those kinds of questions. That's one thing, we never stop. And we just always, on the LMS for every quiz or midterm or finals or anything, and fundamentals, that includes everything. So they know that any of those things can come back at any time and... 'Cause when I first came here, some of the upper level students were real foggy on things like intervals, and I thought, "OH, no. This can't be." So that's why ever since then they just know that it's gonna come up forever. [laughter]   0:31:56.7 GR: I love that. And I have to say that... But yes, I have also had the experience of coaching a student who is several years past their first semester of music theory, and just saying, "Hey, what key are we in?" And this look of abject terror comes across their face [laughter] and followed immediately by the same look of terror on my face for a completely different reason. But just... Yeah. I think also about... Probably many people are familiar with Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve, which is this theory, I think it goes back in the 1960s, that the moment you learn something, you have 100% chance of getting it right, and that quickly plummets with time. But each time you're asked that question again, it's a moment of learning that pops you back up to a hundred. And the curve falls at a more shallow rate with each moment of review. So I do love that idea of bringing back those fundamentals at many points throughout that first year, because you do... When you do that, significantly decrease the rate of forgetting, conversely, increase the rate of retention for those topics. That's great.   0:33:07.9 MH: Yeah. And the way I explain it to students is, "We just... We don't want you to be afraid of anything. I don't want you to end up conducting the local high school's Jazz ensemble at 7:00 AM where you have five French horns and an Oboe d'amore and three saxophones, and you have to help them with the transpositions. You know what I mean? You have to be able to deal with these things and not be intimidated because students will smell fear." And that's how I put... I just say... 'Cause we've been doing instrumental transposition this week, which they're always like, "Why? Who allowed this to happen?" There's always these reform ideas. [laughter] Anyway, I always make the joke about the local high school's 7:00 AM Jazz band with some ridiculous smattering of instruments that are all transposing at different intervals or something, but they all wanna take Jazz band, so.   0:34:10.5 GR: I've actually referred students to Bruce Haynes' book, Performing Pitch, The history of "A".   0:34:22.9 DN: Such a great book.   0:34:24.6 GR: Because inevitably, if you start talking about why we wound up with all these different transpositions, the students get super interested in it. And like, "Here, if you want 350 pages on it, go right ahead."   0:34:41.0 MH: Yeah, absolutely. And I'm always like, "Well, the saxophone was the last one, so blame [0:34:45.3] ____ at all sax." Because those are by far the worst... E-flats? Are you kidding me? Was that really necessary? Couldn't you have done something better than that?   0:34:58.4 GR: And for me, I'm just like, "But that's just a bass Clef transposition, right? It was like, I'm just...   0:35:01.9 MH: See, I don't ever think like that.   0:35:04.0 GR: Yeah. I have the old conductor clef training where it's like, I'm reading the E-flat part in treble clef, if I just imagine the base clef then it transposes itself for me.   0:35:11.8 MH: See, I'd rather just think down a major six. I'm self-punishing like that. [laughter]   0:35:19.8 GR: Yeah. So the second one on your list of best practices was consistency and rigor matter.   0:35:24.6 MH: Oh, especially like, yes. And again, this goes back to when I first came and I was so disturbed by students who were gonna be graduating and didn't have a good grasp of any of this stuff, and they knew it, and they were like... They were upset. They didn't wanna feel like that. So starting with the first year then we just were just very specific about the sharp has to be centered on the line. And I'm not a big notation stickler, but it has to be clear, it has to mean what it means. It needs to be on the correct line. And it doesn't have to be a beautiful sharp, but it needs to be like accurate. And just being very consistent, if the rhythm is supposed to be this, that it needs to be that, don't be lackadaisical with those things and really hold them to it and they will meet that.   0:36:32.0 MH: Or if your standards are way up here, students will at least approach that, but if your standards for consistency is mediocre, then they will approach that too. So if you can do that in a fun and inviting and engaging way without... You don't wanna, again, while being fallible yourself and admitting that everyone makes mistakes, but then at the same time, being consistent and holding a reasonable level of rigor for their actual eventual gaining of those skills. At least for me, at my school. [chuckle] It all varies by institution, curriculum, goals, student body and preparation and the kinds of majors, all those things.   0:37:22.3 GR: But I guess maybe a corollary of that would be that if you're not able to have a certain degree of rigor in what you're teaching, maybe teaching fewer subjects with more rigor is better than trying to cover more with less rigor.   0:37:37.4 MH: For sure. Like maybe you don't get to seventh chords. Maybe you just do triads and that's fine. Or maybe no alto and tenor clef. I mean, for a non-major fundamentals course, I would never do alto and tenor clef. I just do that because I'm teaching first year music majors. And I know that they're gonna be looking at orchestral scores and music history and stuff like that, and so they need to know those things, but... And I think it's of course good for things like sight-singing, 'cause it tends to put everybody on a level playing field to read a clef that's really not very familiar to almost anyone. But for a non-major fundamentals class, it'd be very different.   0:38:19.7 GR: Your third best practice, more assessment opportunities are better than fewer.   0:38:24.0 MH: Oh yeah, that's just so that no one assessment activity is like this behemoth, terrifying, do-or-die kind of situation. So as I mentioned, we have graded assignments every week, we have five quizzes, one of which is dropped, so they can have a bad day, or it doesn't have to be this big stressful thing. And then a mid-term and a final. We've tried to make it so they have a lot of chances and that they can improve as the semester goes on. And if something weird happens, we work with a given student, like if they've had a bad run of health or they're in crisis or something like that, of course, we work with them and try to help them find ways to make up some of that work. So we make exceptions, of course, we'll re-give quizzes again or write a new one or whatever.   0:39:29.1 GR: And I guess really related, your next best practices, the prompt grading and specific feedback are important for learning.   0:39:36.1 MH: Yeah, like I said earlier, just I try to turn things around by the next class period, just so that they have time to get the feedback before the next thing is due, or before our... If we're having a quiz that Friday, before the quiz, so that they have time to... We have supplemental instruction which is offered through our Academic Success Center and it's a couple of sessions taught by an upper level student, and it's for Theory 1 and 2. And so SI is offered on Thursday and Friday, which is perfect. So if I give the homeworks back... They hand them in Tuesday, I turn them around and get them back to the students by Thursday morning, then they can take it to SI and get help with it there, or I can address any questions in class that day, and then they're good to go for the next one that's due the following week. But if you hold on to something like that for a week, that kind of... It doesn't happen in time for them to improve, so.   0:40:43.3 GR: Right. I think for me, this is where I often turn to technology as well, because just the ease of students... Am I writing the scale correctly? I don't have to wait two days between when I turn it in and get it back to find out whether I've written that scale correctly.   0:40:56.6 MH: Absolutely, of course. And we really need to explore some of those ideas, I think that that would be a good direction for us to take.   0:41:05.0 GR: You've already talked a bit about your fifth best practice, involve students and finding examples of various techniques. Anything else to say there?   0:41:09.5 MH: Oh yeah. I mean, just that I'm always saying things like, for later in the year, I really need some musical theater examples of ascending five, six sequences, or I don't have enough compound triple minor mode pop music examples. And every now and then, even an upper level student who I haven't had since their first year, will send me an email and be like, "Hey, this video game has... Here's a YouTube video," or this one kid sent me a rap example and was like, "Before you play it in class, make sure you find a clean version." [laughter] He wanted to make sure I didn't just play it without listening more of the way into the track, 'cause I think it's fairly profane. Anyway, I definitely, especially some of them who I know are really into it, I'm like, "Please go find some of these things, or listen for them and send them to me," and it just kinda helps them stay... Keep their theory brain on when they're not in theory.   0:42:23.5 DN: I've been doing the same thing in oral skills with... And we've listened to Childish Gambino twice this semester. We're doing metric modulation, and one of his songs does metric modulation.   0:42:35.7 MH: Oh cool.   0:42:37.3 DN: It's great. And just used the Marvel Studios theme song too this week.   0:42:45.2 MH: See? And that's what I rely on students for because my knowledge of film music is not good. I mean I know a few things, but I'm not like they are, and certainly not video game music, other than the Super Mario Brothers from my childhood, which is surprisingly still relevant, I found.   [laughter]   0:43:04.1 GR: It's amazing.   0:43:05.3 MH: It's wonderful.   0:43:06.5 GR: That's my favorite [0:43:07.6] ____ is the opening of... [chuckle]   0:43:11.2 MH: Or of mode mixture when he dies.   [vocalization]   0:43:15.7 MH: Oh yeah, totally.   0:43:16.4 GR: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. [laughter]   0:43:17.6 MH: It's so great. It's the best example of mode mixture ever.   0:43:21.0 GR: Yes.   0:43:23.5 MH: Yeah.   0:43:23.6 GR: The Water World, The Planning, oh god, don't get me started. [laughter] Well, I guess related to our lecture, your last best practice is have fun, and I think you've given us some ideas of how you create that fun environment in your classes. Anything else to say along those lines?   0:43:41.9 MH: Use puns. [laughter] No, I mean I'm kind of joking, but I just find that it depends on how you are in the classroom. Everybody is different. But for me, I tend to be fairly silly. I mainly... I feel like I just want them to see me as approachable. And I think they do, and I want them to see Music Theory as something that is pleasant and interesting and fun. And so especially with the first year students, I tend to be rather silly. Like today, we were talking about, as I said, instrumental transposition, and a couple of the instruments had to be transposed to C to sound in B-flat and I said, "Do you see what I mean? No pun intended." And it's like the stupidest joke ever, but they all laughed even though it's like... I mean talk about a dumb, worst, stupid pun ever, but...   0:44:44.1 DN: They don't need to be good to be fun.   0:44:45.5 MH: No, they're better if they're bad. [laughter] It's even stupider. But I mean just having fun and adopting a sense of joy and, I don't know, like a sense of wonder or like, "Isn't a half diminished seventh chord the most amazing thing ever?" and then play in a couple of quick examples just on the keyboard, like "Listen to that. Nothing else sounds like that." And just trying to kind of infect them with some of that sense of wonder. And the success varies. Some students are maybe not ever gonna feel like that about Music Theory, but I hope some of them do. [laughter]   0:45:35.9 GR: Gosh, well, this has been just a delight. Any last words of advice or wisdom for our listeners?   0:45:42.1 MH: I mean, I think I mentioned at the beginning, I think the next hurdle, at least for me, is trying to just find a way to acknowledge that this is like, we're talking about total Western tonal music fundamentals and maybe building in even some like, just little writing assignments here and there. And especially if I were teaching non-majors, I would do it a lot more, I think, if I weren't building toward this later curriculum of comparing and contrasting something like Ragas and minor modes, and a way of acknowledging that there's this whole other part of the world and that we value that and we are curious about it regardless of what our focus happens to be here. So I think finding a way to do that in a way that's meaningful and respectful and fosters a sense of curiosity. I think that's kind of like the next, for me, the next hurdle for me and my curriculum and my students at my school. So that's the next challenge.   0:47:00.4 DN: Well, we're so grateful to have you spend this time with us.   0:47:02.9 MH: Yeah, it's wonderful to talk to both of you, and I'm definitely going to look up that Bruce Haynes, The History of "A".   0:47:09.7 GR: Yeah, it's really fun. The funny thing, of course, is if you type the History of A into Google, you get totally unhelpful results. [laughter] So, I think it's either performance pitch or performing pitch, the story of A. So yeah.   0:47:25.6 MH: Okay. I will definitely have to look that up because, I mean I know some things about the history of instruments and stuff like that, but...   0:47:35.0 GR: Yeah. And he goes really down into the weeds, so like...   0:47:37.8 DN: Yes. The details of why a clarinet is...   0:47:40.1 GR: "We measured the C pipe of this organ in this city built in this year, et cetera."   0:47:40.2 MH: Very fascinating. And it would be great to have something like that to point students toward so they can just nerd out on their own time.   0:47:53.6 GR: Totally.   0:47:54.9 DN: That's why we have Bach Magnificat in D, which is later the Bach Magnificat in E. 'Cause it was easier to transpose some of the parts to match...   0:48:07.3 MH: Oh.   0:48:08.2 GR: To match the local pitch.   0:48:09.4 DN: Yeah.   0:48:09.9 MH: Huh. I did not know that. Very fascinating.   0:48:13.7 GR: We are definitely approaching our time in here, so yeah, Melissa, thank you again so much.   0:48:20.3 MH: Yeah, it's wonderful to meet you and to talk to you both.   0:48:23.5 GR: Excellent. Thank you again.   0:48:24.8 MH: Yes thank you.   [music]   0:48:30.1 Leah Sheldon: Notes From the Staff is produced by utheory.com.   0:48:32.8 GR: UTheory is the most advanced online learning platform for music theory.   0:48:36.7 LS: With video lessons, individualized practice and proficiency testing, uTheory has helped more than 100,000 students around the world master the fundamentals of music theory, rhythm and ear training.   0:48:47.6 GR: Create your own free teacher account at utheory.com/teach.  

Season Finale & Coming Features

Leah, David and Greg reflect back on favorite moments of first season of Notes from the Staff, and chat about coming features for uTheory. Links: Solfege Sally uTheory.com Show notes: 0:00:00 Theme Song 0:00:20 Introductions 0:01:00 How David jumped in and sang a Mozart Requiem with Greg on 5 minutes notice 0:03:45 Reflecting on the 2022 Pedagogy in Practice conference 0:05:30 Favorite moments from season one of Notes from the Staff 0:06:14 Theme 1: Using multiple systems to reach learners in multiple ways 0:08:15 Theme 2: Making learning engaging 0:10:30 Theme 3: Trends in Music Theory Pedagogy today 0:14:10 Solfege Sally -- our silly Simon-like solfege game. 0:17:35 What we've accomplished with uTheory this year: a complete backend and frontend rewrite into modern frameworks, over 120,000 lines of code written (or rewritten) 0:18:20 New features coming to uTheory 0:19:00 The ability to create practice assignments 0:20:15 Consolidating all assignment types into a Learn tab, and allowing assigning of content to entire classes, groups of students or individual students within a class. 0:21:10 Rolling out the new uTheory extended curriculum: a curriculum designed to be used over a two-three year period, especially in a high school or middle school context, to allow a carefully paced introduction with ample time for building fluency. 0:22:05 The lessons and exercises will be customized for the student's primary clef, whether its treble, bass, alto or (for pianists) grand staff. 0:22:48 The curriculum will interweave written music theory, rhythm, ear training and improvisation together. 0:23:20 The curriculum will be a spiral curriculum, so that concepts are introduced at a basic level, and returned to with review and more advanced work frequently throughout the curriculum. 0:23:50 And the curriculum will be much more gamified -- with little touches like confetti, badges, and games like Solfege Sally. 0:24:30 With these changes, configuring lesson and assignment order will become as easy as dragging and dropping -- one of the most frequent feature requests we hear from teachers who are using uTheory. 0:25:40 Practice vs Mastery Assignments 0:30:00 The new curriculum should make it even easier for teachers to use uTheory with their classes and students, because it will do even more of the work of customizing the learning for individual students. 0:31:00 Previewing a new game, "Pitchy Fish" to help teach pitch matching and vocal control. 0:35:30 Previewing some of David's new music theory songs which will make appearances in the new curriculum: Where the Half Steps Live, and Black Notes on Pianos 0:38:50 Chit-chatting and signing off for the summer! Transcript: 0:00:00.0 [Theme Song] 0:00:21.2 Leah Sheldon: Welcome to Notes from the Staff, a podcast from the creators of uTheory, where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training, and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education. 0:00:34.6 Greg Ristow: Hi, I'm Greg Ristow, founder of uTheory and Associate Professor of Conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory. 0:00:40.8 LS: I'm Leah Sheldon, head of teacher engagement for uTheory. 0:00:44.6 David Newman: I'm David Newman, and I teach voice and music theory at James Madison University, and I write code and create content for uTheory. A quick thanks to listeners for all your comments and episode suggestions. We love to read them. Send them our way by email at notes@utheory.com. And remember to like us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 0:01:06.3 GR: So it's episode 11, and it's our last episode of the first season. Today, we're gonna look back at some of the highlights from our first ten episodes. We're gonna chit-chat a bit, and we'll share a preview of some of the things that we're working on for uTheory. David, Leah, how are you guys doing?  0:01:24.3 DN: Good. 0:01:27.4 LS: Great. 0:01:27.5 GR: Leah, I think you know this, 'cause you saw it on Facebook, but David and I had this delightful experience this weekend, where I was conducting a concert at Oberlin and a big alumni and community performance of the Mozart Requiem. And about five minutes before the show started, I walked out into the lobby, and who do I see but David Newman there. [laughter] 0:01:50.7 LS: Did you know he was coming?  0:01:53.2 GR: No, I... I knew he was driving through, 'cause David, you were at a conference, right?  0:01:57.7 DN: Right. 0:01:58.6 GR: So, he was driving through from Virginia to Ann Arbor, Michigan. And I... We'd seen each other when David was on the way there, 'cause he has to drive right by Oberlin, but I didn't know David was gonna stop in on the way back, and... Anyway, so I was like, "Hey, wanna jump in and sing?" 0:02:15.1 DN: And... And I did. I didn't... I didn't know you were gonna have a concert on the way back, and when I saw that I was gonna arrive near Oberlin around 1:30, I thought either it would be shameful for me not to go and sit down and take a break from driving to attend [laughter] a performance of the Mozart Requiem, but instead, I got to sing it, which was great fun. So. 0:02:39.1 GR: And I don't know if you know, but you were actually standing basically right behind my dad, who said he was just delighted to have your voice behind him. 0:02:44.4 DN: [laughter] Ah, I did not make the connection. 0:02:49.2 LS: And for our listeners who don't realize, it's not very often that the three or even two of us are together in person, frequently. [chuckle] 0:02:58.1 GR: That's right, yeah, we're in three different states. 0:03:01.1 LS: So this is very exciting. [chuckle] 0:03:03.3 GR: Yes. [chuckle] Anyway, David, thanks for jumping in. That was... That was... That was... 0:03:08.3 DN: Well, it was my pleasure, and... And... Yeah, it really was a joy, and what a great thing to be a part of. And... Yes, as anyone who saw my Facebook post knows that... I also think it's cool, because my great-great-grandfather was the pastor of the other congregational church in... In town, where the Oberlin Conservatory now stands. 0:03:34.4 GR: So that was second, yeah. For anyone who knows Oberlin... Oberlin history, that was second church, yeah, and that's... My office is right on top of where the sanctuary was. That's very cool. 0:03:45.1 DN: Anyway, it was a cool family connection thing for me. 0:03:51.5 GR: So, David, you're just... You're just back from a cool conference. You wanna talk about that a bit?  0:03:56.3 DN: Yeah, I... This was the 2022 Pedagogy into Practice conference. I think we were supposed to do it in 20... The last one was in 2019, and then the... It had been cancelled due to COVID, or altered due to COVID, so this was our first time back together. And it's a great organization and a great conference, at which we are really looking at how to be better theory teachers. And... There are so many presentations, and it's such an incredibly supportive community as well, so I really love that. It doesn't feel like many other academic conferences. It feels like everyone is there to support each other in being better teachers. And all of the talks tend to be on just things that we can do in the classroom to be better teachers, so I'm actually hoping that we can get some of those people on our podcast and let them share their talks more widely with our audience. 0:05:09.3 GR: Yeah, and some of them we've already had on our podcast. You mentioned that you saw Betsy Marvin there?  0:05:14.1 DN: I did; I got to have lunch with Betsy twice. [laughter] 0:05:17.3 GR: Excellent. 0:05:20.4 DN: And Peter Schubert, and Steve Laitz, and Jenny Snodgrass. I hope we can get any or all of them on. [laughter] 0:05:33.3 GR: Awesome. So yeah, you know, I was... As I was getting ready for this episode, I was going back and listening to our previous episodes of the season. We... It's... We've only been doing this, what, since January? And wow, we've talked to some really, really cool people. Leah, David, what are some of your favorite moments?  0:05:58.3 LS: Well, I think that I did the same as Greg; I listened back. I've listened all season long, and several times on some of the episodes, and I've got two major themes that kind of stuck out to me, if I could kinda go in that direction. 0:06:12.5 GR: Yeah. 0:06:14.5 LS: And the first being... Since we just mentioned Betsy Marvin, I'll talk about the importance of using systems, whether it's a solfege system or a rhythm system, and not just from her episode, but from multiple episodes. I guess I just... What stuck out to me was that students learn in so many different ways, and we know that, but hearing it back really makes you think about it, and... Have different learning experiences early on that influence the type of learner that they become later. So, having not just one system, like a rhythm system or a solfege system, but having two systems is so beneficial. This helps for sight-singing. So, when we talked about choral sight-singing with Denise Eaton. And sight-reading; we talked about contest sight-reading with Dr. Andrew Machamer. And then for students who learn with perfect pitch, how sometimes, one system can be confusing; you know, fixed... Or movable do might be confusing versus fixed do, and switching to numbers instead. So, as a teacher, having a system for teaching your students, but then having two systems to get at all the different learners that are in front of you. 0:07:28.6 GR: Yeah. Totally, right? And of course, with pitch solfege, then we're typically talking about the system that names the notes, whether that's letters or fixed do, and we're talking about a system that names function, where something is in the scale, and that's typically our scale degrees in movable do. And then yeah, I hadn't thought about it, but yes, totally, that's a great connection to when we were talking about rhythm systems. And we were talking about systems that are kind of analytical, that label the various subdivisions of the beat, or possibly the... Where the beats are in the measure. And mnemonic system systems, where we give kinda fun names to... To rhythms, whether that's lemon yellow, or watermelon, or you know, whatever kinds of things. Yeah. Nice. That's a great theme. 0:08:16.3 DN: Yeah, and there was a... I don't know if I'm jumping in on you, but one of the other big themes was how to make... How to be... How we can make all of these lessons engaging with the students, and Jed Dearybury talking about the value of play, and... This was... There was a... There was a presentation at the conference I was just at about gamifying the aural skills classroom. Or maybe it was music theory; I'm not sure whether it was specific to aural skills, but... And of course, all the Dalcroze games that we played together, Greg. You know, I love them, and I just... I want to use them as much as I can. I want that kind of spirit in my classroom, so I hope that... I hope we were able to share that with other people in a way that they also felt like they wanted to incorporate that spirit. 0:09:18.6 GR: That was such a fun episode for me to record with you, David, the Dalcroze games episode. And, you know, I think also related to that, our episode on your music theory and ear training songs, right? Like, talk about playful spirit and bringing that kind of joy into the classroom. Those are just so wonderful. 0:09:38.7 DN: Well, I'm working on more, so there we go. [chuckle] 0:09:41.3 GR: Excellent. [chuckle] 0:09:43.9 LS: Funny enough, that was my other theme from the season, was the importance of play in teaching, and specifically, those three episodes stood out to me. 0:09:53.2 DN: And I think especially in the wake of COVID too, we're really living through some collective trauma, and I think we need to have reasons for students to be engaged with us, so that they have a sense of... That learning doesn't... Isn't some tedious thing that they have to buckle down and apply to, but that they can... I think if we make it enjoyable, then they will come more joyously and maybe more fully. 0:10:28.4 GR: Totally, yeah. 0:10:30.7 LS: And I would maybe add one more into that; the part of the episode with Megan Long, where we talked about trends in theory pedagogy. And as someone who's not in that world all the time, or at least as much as Greg and David are, it was really interesting to hear from Megan talk about how she's adapting teaching to... So for example, she talked about analyzing music and broadening the tools that we would need to analyze music beyond just harmonic analysis. That was really interesting to me. 0:11:09.5 GR: Yeah. David, were those themes echoed at the Pedagogy and Practice conference? In terms of broadening approaches to analysis of music beyond just, say, Roman numeral, Schenkerian-style analysis?  0:11:23.5 DN: Were they included? [laughter] Well, Philip Ewell gave the keynote address at the end of the conference, so yes. And yes, you saw that throughout the... There was a lot of presentations about sort of decolonizing or recentering various pedagogies. There's a grad student I'd love to bring on here who talked about using rap to teach rhythm. And that was a really... That was a thought echoed through several different presentations, and one of the things that was a common thread through them was putting up words, so that even students who didn't know notation could align things with where certain words were happening, and talk about what was happening in the music at those words. And there was a lot of talk about ways to talk about musical things without having to use notation, or at least using some kinds of protonotation, which is another theme that we've at least been wanting to talk about. 0:12:40.2 GR: Yeah, I think those had, really, a lot of my... My favorites, I... You know, listening back, there were things I was just... That I came away with as sort of gems of knowledge. I think about, like, Denise Eaton's advice that when you're learning to teach solfege or ear training, find a mentor who's good at it and ask them how they do it. And, you know, this coming from someone who has written a bunch of books on teaching it, that she's right; so much of that is about seeing someone else do it live, and trying out what they do with your own students, and seeing how it goes. I was thinking about our chat with Betsy Marvin. And, you know, I thought I knew so much about what we know about perfect pitch, but it turns out there's a ton I didn't know, and there's so much that we... That I thought we knew, that in fact, we don't know, right? I mean, it was sort of the gospel for about a decade that you couldn't acquire perfect pitch after about age 6, and Betsy really blew my mind when she said, "Well, actually, there may be some research, or there's some research recently that suggests that, in fact, maybe it is possible to acquire perfect pitch later." Yeah, really just fascinating stuff, so I feel really lucky that we get the chance to ask these brilliant people questions and hear what they have to say. 0:14:09.7 DN: Yeah. 0:14:11.7 GR: Great, so shall we... Shall we change gears and maybe talk a little bit about what we have planned for uTheory coming up?  0:14:18.0 LS: Definitely. 0:14:18.9 DN: Sure. I was excited today when... When... To open up my computer and see that Solfege Sally is now available on uTheory. [chuckle] 0:14:31.2 GR: Yeah, yeah, in our experiment section, yeah. David, you wanna tell us something about Solfege Sally?  0:14:37.7 DN: Yeah. I mean, it's something that... Well... That I had been thinking about for years, of wanting to create a game like Simon, except with all of the diatonic solfege notes, and then just be able to practice working memory and identification of those diatonic notes in the scale. And then, when we first talked, it turned out you had been thinking about the same thing, so that was exciting, and I was just glad to see it finally come to fruition, and I think it's kind of fun. 0:15:15.1 LS: It's fun. 0:15:15.8 GR: It's totally fun, yeah. [laughter] Absolutely. [laughter] And a friend of mine... A friend of mine posted on Facebook, "I got 305. What's your top score?" Yeah, I know, I have not gotten to 305. I'm like, "Go, Mattie." 0:15:32.4 DN: Well... Of course, the score is... You know, it adds up... As far as you got every time you hit a correct button, so it's not that the melody was 305 notes long, but... But still, that's impressive. 0:15:48.8 GR: Yeah, yeah, I can't quite do the math backwards to figure out how long that melody would have been, but it'd be long. 0:15:54.7 DN: It involves factorials and... [chuckle] 0:15:57.5 GR: Yeah, yeah, it's a little more complex than factorials, because there's the addition of one on each... Oh, I guess it is just factorials, you're right, yeah, yeah. 0:16:04.4 DN: Yeah. Anyway, it doesn't... It... It... And what I forgot was that you can choose your level that you start at in the... If you click the settings button. 0:16:17.7 GR: Oh. 0:16:18.5 DN: But it's not clearly a settings button, but it definitely... If you go on Jedi Master or whatever is the... The highest level, then you can get some big leaps. [laughter] 0:16:31.6 GR: Yeah. I'll have to try that version of it. Yeah, we'll... We should make that more clearly a button before we graduate it out of the experiments section. 0:16:42.3 DN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a... There's a few... The layout of that is... Is in need of some repair as well, but... Oh well. 0:16:49.0 GR: Yeah. Yeah, and you know, I think... It's fun, though, to... To share, a little bit, some of the things that we're working on in an incomplete format, just so that... Just so that, you know, people can see it. 0:17:00.8 DN: And to get feedback. 0:17:02.3 GR: Yeah. 0:17:03.0 DN: So I had someone, for example, ask, "Hey, could you... Could you do major and minor pentatonic scales?" And I thought, "Yeah, probably with a few lines of code." 0:17:13.1 GR: Mm-hmm, yeah. And... [chuckle] And I had a friend text me, "Is uTheory perpetuating the terrible lie that the fifth degree of the scale is called so and not sol?" 0:17:25.6 DN: Oh. Oh dear. 0:17:26.9 GR: In a very joking way. [laughter] We can probably change that one too with one letter of code. [chuckle] 0:17:35.2 DN: One letter of code. [chuckle] 0:17:38.3 GR: So, you know, it... It's probably not obvious to most users of uTheory, but we have shipped over 120,000 lines of new code this year; a complete backend and frontend rewrite. And, you know, at this point, you can't see that much of anything has changed, because... Because, really, almost none of the functionality has changed. But what we've done is we have gotten the backend framework in a place to where it has become much easier for us to now create new... New ways of structuring and storing data, and the frontend to a framework that makes it much easier to interact with that data. And those are two kind of key... Key building blocks for allowing us to build bigger features. And so now, as we come into summer, we're... We're turning our attention to some... Frankly, some big changes in uTheory. We're internally calling it uTheory 2.0, although we wanna be clear that your existing classes and settings, all those are going to migrate just fine, and if you like uTheory as it is, fear not, you don't have to change. But... Yeah, but some of the things that are coming are things we've been... that teachers in particular have been asking us for for a long time. So, to start with, we're adding the ability for teachers to create practice assignments and to create mastery assignments. Leah, you wanna talk about that a little bit?  0:19:16.0 LS: Sure. So, on the... I think the biggest change here is that teachers have a greater customization. So, for example, if you wanna create a practice assignment that has a set number of questions, or even a set amount of time, a minimum amount of time for students to practice, you can configure that when you create the assignment. You'll also be able to customize the topics a little bit further; in terms of, for example, say, an exercise in key signatures, being able to specify which key signatures are included. You'll continue to be able to set due dates, and you'll also be able to set an available date, so you can create the assignments in advance, and they'll become available to the students on the date that you choose. And you can assign practice or mastery assignments to just specific groups of students versus just an entire class. 0:20:16.3 DN: Or even individual students, if you want, within a class. 0:20:17.7 LS: Yes. 0:20:18.4 GR: Yeah. And along the lines of that, as we add these new kinds of assignments, in addition to the existing lesson and checkpoint assignments and skill mastery assignments, we're gonna be consolidating content into a Learn tab. The Learn tab's gonna become the central location for students to find what they should be working on, and that'll include lessons, checkpoints, custom tests, practice and mastery assignments... And... So that you as a teacher can arrange that sequentially, so students don't have to go "Okay, wait, now it's time to take a test. Oh, where is that? Oh, that's on the Test tab," versus "Oh wait, where am I supposed to go for this skill practice?" So yeah, so we're bringing that all together into one place to make it easy to find and easy to sequence. 0:21:10.0 GR: And then, related to that, we're going to roll out a new curriculum. I've started calling this the uTheory extended curriculum, and thinking of the one that exists presently as the uTheory accelerated curriculum. So, you know, when we started building uTheory, the idea was, how can we quickly get students who are thinking about doing a music degree ready for college level music theory and ear training? And so, the curriculum as it exists right now is designed to be done in a pretty intense semester of work. But that doesn't fit the needs of a lot of our users, especially at the high school and middle school levels, where... You know, where teachers work with students for multiple years, and similarly in private lesson studios. And their goal is not to cram all this knowledge in, but they'd like to be able to pace it out and build fluency on that. 0:22:05.9 GR: So, the curriculum that we're building is designed exactly for that. And from the beginning, it'll start with the option to configure the clef that a student... Or clefs that a student is learning in. So, whether their primary clef is treble clef, or bass clef, or viola clef, alto clef, or grand staff, for a pianist. And the lessons and skills practice and mastery assignments and checkpoints will all... And videos will all adjust to that, so that the student's work early on is exclusively in that clef, until eventually, we start introducing other clefs as well. The new curriculum is going to be one that integrates rhythm, ear training, and written music theory concepts all together into one single learning sequence, so that the things that you're learning in... As you're learning, for instance, to write intervals, you're also learning to hear intervals. As you're learning to write scales, you're learning to hear your way around scales in stepwise ways. As you're learning to write chords, you're learning to hear different qualities of chords. 0:23:20.5 GR: And it'll be what we call a spiral curriculum, so, that is to say that, you know, when you learn, you learn the basics of a concept early on, but we're gonna keep coming back to it. We're gonna keep reviewing that concept in later assignments, and gradually increasing the level of difficulty with it. As David sort of previewed with Solfege Sally, it's gonna be a gamified curriculum. It's gonna feel a lot more like... Like Duolingo, right? Complete with badges, and confetti, and literal games, and all of that, so. And I think finally, the big thing about it is it's gonna be much more configurable; that as a teacher... Teachers will be able to create their own lessons, assignments, tests, or to edit the existing ones, to rearrange them. We recognize that teachers know better than a computer ever can what their students do and don't know, so, we want to give 'em all the tools that you need to give your students what they need. So... Yeah, that was a lot of talking. Did I miss anything?  0:24:34.1 LS: I don't think so. I just wanna highlight again the importance of two things that Greg said based on the requests that we've gotten from teachers, so he mentioned arranging in sequential order, so, this means that you can change the order of the lessons. Teachers have asked, you know, "Is it possible to make this lesson appear before this one?" and now it is; just with a simple click and drag, you'll be able to reorder the lessons. And also, the existing uTheory is not going away or going anywhere for the teachers who are using uTheory as is and love it, and we know that there are a lot of you. This does not mean that you have to change what you're doing. You'll still be able to continue to teach as you have. 0:25:19.3 GR: And effectively for... You know, what will happen is, for existing classes, the Lessons tab will turn into the Learn tab, and will look very much like the Lessons tab looks for your current classes. But you'll have the option then, at that point, if you want, to also add additional assignments, mastery or practice assignments, and tests to that as well. 0:25:43.8 LS: Could we maybe talk just a little bit about the difference between practice and mastery assignments?  0:25:48.7 GR: Yes, absolutely, created, yeah. So, effectively, practice assignments... The... Obviously, a practice assignment... A goal of a practice assignment is to increase the student's mastery of skills. But we're distinguishing between practice and mastery assignments, in that a practice assignment will be an assignment that has a specific number of questions and kinds of questions on it, or a specific time limit for those kinds of questions, whereas a mastery assignment is an assignment where uTheory will generate questions based on a set of skills that you select for that mastery assignment. So for instance, you might create a mastery assignment for the skills of... Intervals between notes with no accidentals on them, white note intervals. Right, and then, that would... That would provide questions and train students until they reach a certain level of mastery on all of the possible questions from that area. And so, as we're doing this, one of the things that's going to change from the teacher perspective is, currently, under Classes and Choose Skills, you have a bunch of checkboxes for sort of the subskills. And what will happen for each of those skills is instead, you're gonna get a more robust configuration panel, so that let's say we're talking about the skill of triads in pitch and harmony. So that's writing triads, identifying triads, etcetera. 0:27:28.1 GR: That skills panel is now going to give you options for things like whether you want to allow triads in various inversions, what qualities of triads you want to allow, how many accidentals and what kinds of accidentals you want to allow within those triads, or if you wanna filter and say "I only want to allow triads within keys, say, up to two flats or two sharps," you'll be able to do things like that. So we're gonna be writing lots of ways to configure the kind of practice that students get when you configure either practice assignments or mastery assignments. Similarly, the ability to configure what clefs are included. And, you know, you'll have the option of choosing a student's primary clefs, secondary clef or both of those and also, you know, any of the... The seven clefs: Treble clef, bass clef, alto clef, tenor clef, soprano clef, mezzo-soprano clef, baritone clef... Did I miss one? I must have. No, I think that's all. Anyway, there's that, right? So, yeah. If you want... If you want your poor students to have to drill on mezzo-soprano clef, you can absolutely give them second line C-clef and make them do everything in second line C-clef. 0:28:52.8 DN: But I love C-clefs. They tell you exactly where C is. It's so useful. 0:28:57.8 GR: Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. You know, and... Although we don't usually have to read mezzo-soprano clef unless you're a conductor, in which case, if you put it over in a transposing instrument, like, say, in the Mozart Clarinet Concerto, it comes out in concert pitch. And similarly, we don't usually have to read baritone clef, you know, again, unless you're a conductor and you put it over a G-transposing instrument, like alto clef in Holst's The Planets, and out it comes in concert pitch. So, even in any case, practice versus mastery assignments. A mastery assignment is one that the student just continues working on until they reach a certain level of mastery, whereas a practice assignment is one that has a specified time or a number of questions cutoff to it. So it's a lot more like a traditional homework assignment. So, yeah. 0:29:48.6 LS: And even with all of these new configurations and types of assignments, uTheory will still do the question generation for you and will still do all of the grading, so we're not adding any work to the teachers' plates. [chuckle] 0:30:00.3 GR: That's right, that's right, yeah. And we think also that this... This new curriculum is going to take a lot of work off of teachers' plates. Some of the... Some of the... Or the power users of uTheory have kind of created their own curricula that bounce around to the different parts of uTheory to make it work, and have then... You know, either in their learning management system, or even in Google Sheets for individual students, have then listed out all of those things to help students find where to go. We really think this is just gonna make it a lot easier for a student logging into uTheory to go "Okay, here I am, and oh look, there's the very next thing I need to do," 'cause it'll basically appear as one long kind of list. So, with that, we have some... So we're hoping to get the... What we're thinking of as the first, roughly, year or 12-ish units of the extended curriculum out around August 1st. And we have some stretch goals with that, including rolling out sight-singing elements in ear training, which is really exciting. We've been working for a long time on algorithms to do pitch detection in a way that works for singing, which has more vibrato, which has changing vowels, which has consonants, and I think we're pretty close on that. David's got a great game that he's been working on called Pitchy Fish, where you... Tell us about Pitchy Fish, David. 0:31:38.3 DN: It's a little bit like Flappy Bird, except that instead of hitting a button, you control the height of the fish in the water with your voice, so you sing a higher pitch and the fish goes up, and then you sing a lower pitch and the fish goes down. And this idiom, I think, will, A, make it fun, but, B, just give so much feedback to students, especially ones that may have more trouble than others matching pitch, or getting the pitch in their head to be the pitch that's coming out of their mouth, and to know whether they're on target or not. And we can extend it to actual sight-reading exercises easily, but... But this is a great sort of training ground that I think, like most good games, feels fun as you're learning to do it. 0:32:38.6 GR: Yeah, and I think... You know, any of us who've tried to help shy singers gain confidence with their voice know that finding ways to do that that are fun... It's critical. It's... You know. People are understandably very self-conscious. You know, as a singer... We've always remained a bit self-conscious about our voice; it is an instrument that is literally connected to us. Yeah, so, you know, whether you're working with student singers or student instrumentalists, helping them to find their voice is huge and raises so much awareness of pitch and intonation and all of those wonderful things. Yeah. Pitchy Fish; of course, we can extend it to... You know, to sight-singing particular things. Also to exercises of intonation, of really fine-tuning with things, so yeah. 0:33:42.1 DN: All of which depends on a good pitch detection algorithm, and boy, you can see how hard that is by how not good so many of the products out there are. [laughter] 0:33:53.0 GR: It's true, it's true. 0:33:54.2 DN: But we've been working hard, and I say we, and mostly you, have been working really hard on this problem and coming up with great solutions, but we've tried so many things to get the computer to accurately recognize what someone's actually doing. 0:34:09.8 GR: Yeah, and I don't wanna give away too much of what we're doing, but... Only to say that we are using a combination of traditional algorithmic methods for detecting pitch. Also machine learning. I'm pretty happy with where that's headed. Cool. I don't know, what else should we say?  0:34:33.1 LS: I don't know. Can we give another call for feedback?  0:34:38.7 DN: You know, yeah. And I recently had... Speaking of comments and suggestions, I got a comment and suggestion from my in-house critic, my wife, who said... [laughter] Not as a criticism, who said, "You know, you should do an episode where you answer questions from your listeners," and I thought, "Well, that's a little bit what we already do, but we don't." We don't say, "So and so said "I have this question," and I answered it." We could... We could... If... You know, if people send us enough questions, we can do a Q&A. Ask Me Anything. Of course, Ask Me Anything can spiral away from music theory very easily, but... 0:35:23.8 LS: Yeah. 0:35:25.3 GR: Yeah. [chuckle] 0:35:27.0 DN: Ask me anything about music theory. [chuckle] 0:35:30.4 LS: You're gonna get song requests. 0:35:31.9 DN: [laughter] I am down for song requests. 0:35:36.8 GR: So, one of the things that I'm super excited about, as we're talking about gamifying the curriculum, is that, you know, we're working to include, as we mentioned, literally these games, but also, to start including some fun music theory and ear training learning songs. David, do you wanna preview that a little bit for us?  0:35:54.7 DN: Well, I did write... I mean, I wrote a couple songs on the way up to the theory conference. And I need to get them recorded, but one of them, I'm... I just almost want to write out just the melody in Notation so that people can play it for themselves, because it's just about how to find C on the piano. And... I mean, maybe if you can't find C on the piano, then this is gonna be problematic to play, but it's "Black notes... " Or I should start on the right key. "Black notes on pianos come in twos and threes. Check out these ebonies. To the left of every pair, you'll find the Cs. That'll get you tickling the ivories." 0:36:44.3 GR: [laughter] Nice. For those of us who have a low F-sharp, yeah. [laughter] 0:36:49.3 DN: But "Black notes on pianos" (sung an octave higher), we can do it up here. [laughter] 0:36:52.7 GR: Right?  0:36:54.8 DN: But, you know, if you... If someone decides that they wanna sit down and play it on the piano, then... [music] 0:37:04.1 DN: Then they're gonna be doing exactly what they... What those words say, and they'll go "Oh wow, I wanna find the Cs. Oh, look at that, that's a C. How useful." [laughter] 0:37:20.2 GR: Nice. 0:37:22.7 DN: I don't know. I was pleased with that, and I've... I've envisaged a nice ragtime accompaniment for it, but I haven't actually written it out yet. [chuckle] 0:37:34.3 GR: Great. And "Where the... " "Where the half steps are", is that... 0:37:40.6 DN: Do you want a preview?  0:37:42.4 GR: Sure. 0:37:44.3 DN: How does it... "From... From sev to one and back again, this is where a half-step lives. And from three to four and back again, this is where a half-step lives. In a major scale, the other steps are whole steps. So let's celebrate where the half-steps live. Where the half-steps live. And let them bring us home." 0:38:34.6 LS: Yes. [applause] 0:38:37.0 GR: Oh, I love it. Yeah, David, if that's done before... In the next three weeks, I am totally using that with my Interlochen students this summer as we dive into writing scales. 0:38:47.6 DN: Okay. Then it will be done in the next three weeks. 0:38:50.4 LS: That's the deadline. [laughter] 0:38:52.2 GR: Yeah, exactly. 0:38:54.3 DN: I think it probably won't be done while I'm in Illinois, but then as soon as I get back... 0:38:58.9 GR: Mm-hmm. You're off to sing some Bach again?  0:39:01.9 DN: I am. I'm gonna go sing St Matthew Passion with Andrew Megill and the Illinois Bach Academy, and then I have a week-and-a-half break, and then I... Well, break... [chuckle] Break from singing, and then I'll be in Carmel and doing the St John Passion with Andrew Megill. 0:39:23.6 GR: Oh wow. 0:39:24.7 DN: And we're... Also, we... This is... We're... At Carmel, we are finishing up a search for the new director, which means that we have all three final candidates coming in to direct different programs, which is... They've each chosen these amazing programs, and I can't wait to work with all of them. So we're gonna do Brahms' Requiem and Bach Easter Oratorio. There's so much great music happening this summer, I can't wait. 0:39:58.0 GR: Nice, nice. Excellent. Well, maybe this is a good place to wrap things up. This has been so fun, I have to say... You know, the... I thank Leah for coming up with a crazy brilliant name for this podcast, and David for our delightful theme music, and all the wonderful editing and everything else you do is just... Yeah. This has been a ton of fun, and I will miss our recording sessions over the summer, but I'm so looking forward to our next season of Notes from the Staff together. Yeah. As always, if you... If... Listeners, if you have any feedback, send it to us, notes@utheory.com. [music] 0:40:47.5 LS: Notes from the Staff is produced by utheory.com. 0:40:50.4 GR: UTheory is the most advanced online learning platform for music theory. 0:40:54.3 LS: With video lessons, individualized practice, and proficiency testing, uTheory has helped more than 100,000 students around the world master the fundamentals of music theory, rhythm, and ear training. 0:41:05.1 GR: Create your own free teacher account at utheory.com/teach.

Music Theory Songs with David Newman

David Newman shares his music theory and aural skills teaching songs, as well as some of the stories behind them, in this laughter-filled episode of Notes from the Staff. Links: The Well Trained Ear on BandCamp David Newman on YouTube Show notes: 0:00:20 Introductions 0:02:03 How did you begin writing teaching songs? 0:03:48 David's most popular song: The Periodic Table Rap 0:11:00 Greg and Leah's favorite songs of David 0:11:46 The Dominant Seventh Song 0:14:13 Hinting at future topics in songs about more basic topics 0:15:57 Sophie Lay on My Sofa 0:20:00 Collaborators on the songs 0:23:47 Third Away song 0:26:22 Navigating singing Bach professionally, and recording these popular style theory songs 0:30:25 Intervals in Inversions song 0:34:00 David's favorite song: Second Inversions 0:38:45 The Chord Spelling Song 0:42:51 How teaching songs can help students hear and recognize things as they're happening. 0:46:41 Where can listeners find your songs? 0:49:30 The Notes from the Staff theme song Transcript: [music] 0:00:20.0 Leah Sheldon: Welcome to Notes From The Staff, a podcast from the creators of uTheory, where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training, and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education. 0:00:33.9 Greg Ristow: Hi, I'm Greg Ristow, founder of uTheory and associate professor of conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory. 0:00:40.6 LS: Hi, I'm Leah Sheldon, head of teacher engagement for uTheory. 0:00:44.6 David Newman: Hi, I'm David Newman. I teach at James Madison University and I write code and create content for uTheory. A quick thanks to listeners for all your comments and episode suggestions. We love to read them. Send them our way by email at notes@uTheory.com and remember to like us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 0:01:03.7 GR: In our second to last episode for the season, we're turning the tables one more time. And Leah and I will be interviewing our co-host Baritone David Newman. David teaches aural skills, music theory and voice on the faculty of James Madison University. He's famous for his teaching songs, which have millions of views on YouTube. He released his music theory songs in a 2019 album, The Well Trained Ear. They're widely used by elementary, middle, high school and college teachers. Previously, David taught at the University of California Davis, San Jose State University, University of Virginia and Shenandoah Conservatory. He maintains an active performing career as a classical singer and can be heard on the Philips, Dorian, Analecta, K617, and Nexus Labels. Despite COVID-19 precautions, David continued to make music and inspire others to join in the harmony with his innovative drive and choir concept profiled in both the LA Times and New York Times. David thanks for joining us. 0:02:01.5 DN: I'm so glad to be here. [chuckle] 0:02:03.6 GR: So, we're gonna talk about your teaching songs which are just utterly delightful. I think this is a lovely follow up to our episode a couple of weeks ago with Jed Dearybury about The Playful Classroom. How did you get started writing teaching songs?  0:02:16.6 DN: Oh, wow. I mean, I could go really far back and say that I initially went to music school with the thought of that being a backup for my great career as a singer-songwriter, but really it started when my daughter was in third grade and she brought me a study packet for science and asked me if I would help her study for a test. And we looked at the... I looked at the packet and there was a lot of stuff to memorize. And I said, "You know, we could probably turn some of this into a song." And so I wrote a quick little ditty about soil, [chuckle] and its components and recorded it. And I threw it out on YouTube just to share it that night and got such a positive response that I wrote another song the next day. And I wrote four songs in four days and then I completely burnt out. [laughter] 0:03:25.2 DN: But then I did it again several times, and this was also in the first year that I was teaching aural skills. And so, later in that year, I just thought, "If I can do this for my third grade daughter, why can't I do this for my aural skills students?" And then I wrote a few songs for them and it just kept going from there. 0:03:48.8 GR: What's your most popular song? Is it one of your music theory songs or is it one of your songs for other... [laughter] A uTheory advantage of having YouTube statistics, right? So. 0:04:00.6 DN: You know, I know... And it's... I don't know if I should be embarrassed about this or not, but my... Yeah, my most popular song is me rapping the periodic table of elements. I have over a million views on that song alone. 0:04:15.4 GR: Can we take a listen to that?  0:04:18.2 DN: Sure. [chuckle] And there's of course... I also wrote that in one afternoon/evening, and I was finally ready to record the female vocal parts at midnight, which meant that I accosted my wife at midnight as she was wanting to go to sleep, and I said, "Please, I just need you to sing these few things." [laughter] Yeah. And then I just think it's funny that my entire career as I view it has been as a classical singer, singing Bach, but I probably have reached more people with my rap stylings. [laughter] These are the elements, the periodic table, in orderSo we got hydrogen, helium, lithium, berylium, boron, carbon, nitrogine and oxygen, flourine. Now stop snoring... this isn't boring, and this is stuff you shouldn't be ignoring. Neon ("noble"), sodium, magnesium, aluminum, silicon, phosphorous, sulfur, chlorine. That's under Flourine. Hey, we're up to 17! You've never had it better for remembering the elements. These are the elements...Then we got argon ("nobel"), potassium, calcium, scandium, titanium, vanadium, chromium. Manganese, iron, cobalt nicketl cpper zinc, gallium, germanium, arsenic, selenium, and bromine. That's under chlorine and flourine. Just keep storing the order for your mortar board. Krypton, rubidium, strontium, ytrium zirconium niobium molybdenum, technitium (it's radioactive, woah). Ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, silver ("bling"), cadmium and indium. Tin, antimony, tellurium and iodine. [laughter] 0:06:29.6 DN: I love watching your reactions. [laughter] 0:06:33.2 DN: Well, that was the... Yeah. I don't know. And I would feel totally guilty writing a rap. Which is not my wheelhouse at all, except that, I know what I like about rap. I'm frustrated by educational music that doesn't honor the musical side of things. And so I did try to make it interesting. And I did try to do things like internal rhyme and the kinds of things that make rap enjoyable for me. And I loved so much, sorry, I loved so much watching your reactions. 'Cause I guess you hadn't seen that before. [laughter] And I do try to work humor into my songs. And I really do love sharing some of them for the first time with people who haven't heard them before, and just seeing them react to things that they get. The little inside jokes. I think sometimes the inside jokes are useful for students, too, because if they don't get them, then they want to get them. They wanna know why everyone else reacted at that moment. 0:08:00.6 LS: Or why that "Noble" was such a moment. [laughter] 0:08:08.9 DN: Which I did after every noble element. 0:08:10.5 LS: That will help me remember the noble moments. 0:08:14.4 DN: Of course, I wrote this, what, 11 years ago? And... 12 years ago, maybe? And now it's incomplete. [laughter] There have been eight more... No six more named elements since then, so 118 completes are all of the table. 0:08:40.0 GR: I'm sure that people have made the comparison of this to Tom Lehrer's Element song just made me think of his last verse, 'cause like, there may be many others. [overlapping conversation] 0:08:50.2 DN: These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard, and there may be many others, but they haven't been discovered. [laughter] 0:09:00.3 GR: Yeah. That's right. Yeah. 0:09:01.0 DN: Which is, of course, a Gilbert and Sullivan tune. Yeah, I was aware of that. And Tom Lehrer is, of course, one of my huge influences. But the frustrating thing about the Tom Lehrer version of that song is that it's not in order. It's not only very incomplete by today's standards, but it's also not in order. So it's more just a witty thing that you can do naming a bunch of elements and not particularly useful for learning anything. Or no, you could argue that memorizing the table isn't particularly useful for anything either. But memorizing it in order is something that Virginia students have to do. And so I was writing it specifically in response to a request from my sister who said, "Kids need this." I thought, "Okay, challenge accepted, I will come up with something." 0:10:07.3 GR: And you said, you started writing these teaching songs, right at the same time as you're starting to teach aural skills. And so I presume that's what led to all of your music theory and aural skills songs as well. 0:10:18.5 DN: Yeah. And also, I think there's something... Teaching a new course, especially when it's not something that you've spent a long time thinking about how you were gonna teach, I feel like I grew a million brain neurons [chuckle] that year. I think there's something about learning something new, digging deep into something new that just fosters creativity. And that was an incredibly creative year for me. 0:10:54.1 GR: I know Leah and I have both listened to probably all if not most... 0:10:58.1 LS: I think so. 0:11:00.5 GR: Of... Probably most if not all of your teaching songs. Leah, do you have a favorite?  0:11:07.4 LS: Well I like a lot of them but I do think that... I'm gonna put Sophie up there. [laughter] 0:11:20.4 LS: And maybe The Dominant 7th. 0:11:24.8 GR: Yeah, I was... Yeah. For me the... For me... Yeah, I love Dominant 7th would be totally top of my list, partly 'cause it's just so darn useful. You just play this once as students are coming to the classroom and they never forget what the notes are of that Dominant 7th. 0:11:41.3 DN: Right. As long as you're using movable do. [laughter] 0:11:46.4 GR: As long as you're using movable do, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Should we listen to it a bit?  0:11:50.8 DN: Sure. This is a I chord and a V in first inversion,Then a vi, a passing I 64, then IV.But this song might get boring and you’d prob’ly start ignoring meIf I tried naming every single chord. But there’s one chord that’s terrific, and its function is specific,And it hangs around in cadences for fun.With solfege we can state it if we just arpeggiate it, andSol-ti-re-fa is a dominant 7, which brings us home to I. Of course the IV chord (FA-LA-DO) can be pleasant to the ear.Then there’s V7/V (RE-FI-LA-DO)That’s a chord we’re going to learn about more next year! We’re back to I now, and there’s that V in first inversion,Just repeating what we’d played when we’d begun.And this path that we had charted’s going to finish what we started‘Cause SOL-TI-RE-FA is a dominant 7, which brings us home to… OH NO! That cadence was deceptive!It went to minor vi instead of I!That sort of trick can be effectiveAt making things last longer when we thought that we were done! 0:13:34.1 GR: I love that deceptive cadence, David. 0:13:35.9 DN: [laughter] I have to give credit to Matt Grisset, one of my students, for that. I was still writing the song... I don't know. It was written over a period of time, and I shared my initial thoughts, maybe the first verse or two with my students that year, and Matt said, "You need to put a deceptive cadence in there," and challenge accepted. [laughter] 0:14:10.2 GR: [chuckle] Nice. 0:14:13.1 DN: But that was great, and the... It was so useful... It is useful in the classroom, if you're teaching in movable do, to be able to say "So ti re fa," and just... Then... People... Yeah, it just gets stuck in their heads, which is the thing that you want to have happen. [laughter] 0:14:34.1 GR: Totally, totally. 0:14:35.6 LS: But you also acknowledged other concepts in there without taking away from the Dominant 7th, but really staying true to what's happening musically. 0:14:45.0 DN: Yeah, and pedagogically, we talk about spiraling, or coming back to the same concepts and seeing them with new eyes, and I... Add into that the... I think it's totally fine, in fact, admirable to introduce... To throw out a concept that they haven't learned yet, so that when they get to it, you can say, "Hey, remember when we listened to that song? Remember when it did "Re fi la do"? Now we're gonna talk about what that is. That's secondary dominant, and it gives them a hook to go, "Oh, this is a thing I already know." And I hope, when we're teaching aural skills, that a lot of it can be, instead of, "Here's a theory thing that you have to know," it's, "Here's a thing that you know and love. And now I'm gonna put a name to it. I'm gonna give you a way to name it and understand that it's happening. You already love it. You already know what it sounds like. It's just here's a context for it." 0:15:57.7 GR: When we were talking with Megan Long a couple of weeks ago about hexachordal solfege, and she started talking about [0:16:07.1] ____ and solfege puns from the Renaissance era. Of course, you know, that brings to mind Leah's favorite song, Sophie Lay on My Sofa, which is just... Can you introduce that for us a little bit, David?  0:16:24.5 DN: Oh gosh. Well, I had already written one solfege pun song, but that was just a sort of attempt to do Sound of Music, Do-Re-Mi, but, you know, in a different way. 0:16:39.4 GR: Is that the silly solfege song?  0:16:39.8 LS: The silly solfege?  0:16:41.5 DN: The silly solfege song. 0:16:42.0 LS: I love that too. 0:16:43.3 DN: Which is fine, although it still bothers me that I had to use bad grammar in order to keep the solfege puns going. I mean, it really, really pains me, [chuckle] but I wanted to see if I could incorporate a solfege pun song with lots of chromatic solfege and... Get, yeah, more of those relationships in there, and then, that became a fun challenge, just to see how to write the story in a way that it would make musical sense. And also, I really, really wanted to get "Fa li" in there, which of course means that the li has to be followed by a ti, so how can I make a story that has "Fa li" followed by the word tea. And the version that I recorded and put on YouTube was just me and a guitar. But the version we recorded for the album turned out to be kind of a really fun, bluesy song. [chuckle] 0:18:04.9 GR: Nice. Well, let's have a listen. Sophie lay on my sofaEating raw dough, and drinking teaSophie don't lay on my sofa so...Don't tease me so!Let yourself fall for me.Eating raw dough is folly.Tea's not so bad.But Sophie, don't lay on my sofaEating dough. 0:19:27.4 GR: [chuckle] Love it. I love it. Of course, if you're a la bass minor person, that one is going to be very confusing, for us do bass minor people. [laughter] 0:19:38.5 DN: Well, I'd also... I mean, I think it sort of modulates there in the middle, and I don't modulate the syllables at all, but whatever. 0:19:45.7 GR: Yeah. 0:19:46.7 DN: I achieved my pun goal, and that was the important thing, [laughter] right? So I don't know if that one's pedagogically, you know, super useful, but... 0:20:00.6 GR: I mean, I think just the experience of listening and saying "Oh my god, that is actually so. Oh, that's fi." Right? And yeah, it is totally fun and valuable, pedagogically. 0:20:13.9 DN: I also think this is a good place to give a shout out to Jacob Rose Meisel, who was one of my voice students at JMU, who came to me in the middle of his senior year and said, "Hey, I arranged one of your songs, and I want you to see what you think of it," and it was the Non-Dominant 7ths, and he had created this elaborate progressive rock kind of arrangement of it, and I was... I just thought, "Wow, this is amazing. Can you do this with other things?" And he ended up producing and playing instruments, and he was the driving force behind making this album happen out of a bunch of YouTube videos that I, you know, mostly wrote and recorded in the same day. [chuckle] 0:21:18.5 GR: And you said your backing vocals, those are your wife and daughters, is that right?  0:21:27.1 DN: Depending on the track. Sometimes, it's my wife and daughters. There were a couple songs where I got... I just asked for student volunteers and community... Student and community volunteers, I think. I just had a bunch of people on the album. I got a bunch of people together, and we just recorded all of the backing vocals together, including at the end of the Second Inversions song, Manny Davis did this great, completely ad-libbed riff of Amen [chuckle] at the end of the Second Inversions song, and it's fantastic. I'm just so grateful for all those amazing people who sort of stepped in and helped. Oh my gosh, and... Sorry, if I'm talking about amazing people who stepped in and helped, my friend and colleague Sam Suggs came in and played bass on a bunch of tracks. My friend and colleague, Dave Pope, came in and recorded a sax solo. He came into the recording studio, he did one take, we listened to it, and he said, "Yep, that's good." [laughter] 0:22:53.2 DN: And I'm sure I'm forgetting someone. Who else came in? Oh, Casey Cangelosi, my friend, colleague, and neighbor, came in. He wrote a whole sort of aleatoric drum thing, percussion thing for the first piece. 0:23:20.3 GR: Nice, nice. I was thinking, you know, one of the ones that I love is... Sometimes, when we're trying to convey an idea to students, like for instance, "If you're having trouble finding a note, don't just blindly leap for it, but use your reference pitches of one and five or Do and So in the scale," you know, that's a big concept to convey to them, and it's hard to make it fun. [laughter] 0:23:47.3 GR: So, I was just thinking, I love your Third Away song for that idea, because it does... It says so clearly, and in such a fun way, that any note you need is never more than a Third Away from one or five, from Do or So. And, you know, yeah, it makes it joyous to think about it that way. Should we listen to it a little?  0:24:10.5 DN: Sure. When you're trying hard to sightread and see a leapto a Fa, La, Ti, Mi, or a Re...Well as long as you can always find So and Do,You're never more than a third away.You can try and sing big intervals that you see,And if you're good at it, well that's okay.But as long as you can always find So and Do,You're never more than a third away. So if you're leaping to "Mi," you can think "So Mi"And if you're leaping to "La," you can think "So La"And if you're leaping to "Ti," you can think "Do Ti" yeah...as long as you've got So and Do, you'll go far! So keep working on your intervals big and smallAnd try to practice them every dayBut as long as you can always find So and Do,You're never more than a third away.Yeah, as long as you can always find So and Do, yeah...You're never more than a third away. 0:25:24.0 GR: We really get a sense of your vocal range through these songs from a very low to a very high David. [laughter] 0:25:30.3 DN: I did sing that high C just 'cause I could. [laughter] 0:25:31.9 LS: 'Cause you should. 0:25:32.0 GR: What's the low note like on Sophie? Was that a low F? What was that?  0:25:42.6 DN: I don't know. The Dominant 7th song is a low F. I don't really think about it. Either I can sing it or I can't. I mean, I can probably... Well, if I cheat, I can get close to four octaves now, but that means having to do, [pitched vocal fry] "Ahhhhh," can't get any lower than that today. 0:26:11.3 GR: Okay. 0:26:15.2 DN: But that's a trick. [laughter] 0:26:19.2 LS: And that's a whole 'nother episode. 0:26:22.3 GR: Yeah. Exactly. 0:26:22.4 DN: Right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No... It is funny, I was afraid. When I first started sharing these songs, my biggest fear, and something that almost held me back from sharing them, was I make my living singing Bach. And I thought what if someone hears these and thinks, "Oh, that's not the voice I want." But I decided, and I hope I was right, that someone who hears that I have the flexibility to sing all these different styles will go, "Oh, and he sings Bach well. Okay." 0:27:06.7 GR: Yeah, I have to say, as we've gotten to know each other, I just continue to be blown away by the variety of things that you do and do well, it's... [laughter] 0:27:22.4 DN: I fear sometimes that I do too many things and don't do any of them well, but I guess that's the life of a musician is having to explore all opportunities. [chuckle] 0:27:40.2 GR: Yeah, there's so much fun wordplay in your songs, have you always been one for puns and wordplay and that sort of thing?  0:27:49.4 DN: Boy, I haven't thought of that. I do enjoy it. Have I always enjoyed it? I think I've always enjoyed it, but I don't know that... I think it was especially writing educational songs that I felt both the desire and cultivated the ability to engage in wordplay. But thinking about the best educational songs that I knew and grew up with, the best ones were really compelling both musically and lyrically in ways that made me want to hear them again, or that would make them stick in my head, and I think especially the Tom Lehrer-esque wordplay, for me, was something that just went hand in hand with good educational songs. 0:28:49.2 GR: Yeah. 0:28:49.9 LS: And that's so important that holding true to the musical side of things, because there are a lot of creative lyrics out there that are not musical or are just spoken and auto-tuned and they are very hard on the ears even though the information in the lyrics is good. 0:29:13.9 DN: Yeah. 0:29:14.7 LS: Yeah. 0:29:16.3 DN: It looks like I'm gonna be co-presenting for a conference in the fall that is about music and education, but a challenge in educational music is sometimes that it's written by educators or scientists who maybe didn't think about as much about the musical side of things. And there is even a sense in some aspects of that community that it doesn't matter, that it's all about the content and not about the musical side of things, and I think the musical side of things really does matter, and you can... I just would hate to force my students to listen to music that wasn't very good, just to get a point across. Now, that sounds like I have a high flute in opinion of my own music. And I don't love all my own songs, but I do try really hard to make them good. 0:30:25.1 GR: One of the ones I find most musically impressive, frankly, is the Intervals Inversion song that you were able to make all of these inverted intervals work melodically, which can't have been an easy thing to do. 0:30:40.0 DN: You know the irony is that one wrote itself in about 15 minutes, it just... 0:30:45.6 GR: You're kidding. [chuckle] 0:30:46.1 DN: It wasn't a puzzle to be solved. I was actually reading an old theory textbook from, like, 1920 and looking at its explanations of chords and inversions, and I just, sort of, like, that opening line I was just thinking, "Ta-ta-ta-taa. Ta-ta-ta-taah. Oh." And that just makes such a natural thing and the rest just flowed right out of it in 15 minutes. [laughter] 0:31:22.3 GR: We should listen. A minor third is a major sixth in inversionA major third is a minor sixth in inversionA perfect fourth is a perfect fifth in inversion. Oh.A minor second's a major seventhA major second's a minor seventh, and oh...A perfect unison's an octave in this gameBut what we call a tritone stays the same. 0:32:24.5 GR: I think one of the things I love about that is that totally takes me back to '90s cheesy pop, right? There's something about that that just speaks to the music I loved in my childhood, the music theater, that time period and, yeah. 0:32:43.9 DN: I was listening to that and just remembering, oh yeah, the introduction is all showing different inversions in both hands, and I guess it's not in the left hand, but in the right hand, it's doing inversions deliberately. And I've been asked about the tritone bit because of course, technically a tritone is three whole steps, and so only one of those is a technical tritone. This is though why I said what we call a tritone because in aural skills class when it's out of context, that interval is a tritone. 0:33:24.3 GR: Mm-hmm. 0:33:25.3 DN: At least in my class. Yeah I understand how someone could quibble with that, but I deliberately said what we call a tritone for a reason. [laughter] 0:33:36.5 GR: Yeah. 0:33:37.1 DN: If you wanna listen to... You may not have heard my science song "Erosion", but you'll like that one too. It's got the same era vibe. [laughter] 0:33:47.7 GR: Nice. I'd say the acoustic base on that, I love. When that just comes in, it's so good. 0:33:52.9 DN: Thank you, Sam. Oh my gosh, yeah. 0:33:57.4 GR: Yeah. 0:33:57.8 DN: He's amazing. [chuckle] 0:34:00.7 GR: David, what's your favorite song?  0:34:04.0 DN: Oh wow. What is my favorite song? I've been asked this and I... But I like Second Inversions a lot. I like it because it's got a great groove. I feel like it's extremely pedagogically useful, even though some people disagree with me. [chuckle] And I feel like it just works. [music]Second inversions are chords I adoreI write them down with a 6 and a 4.These chords we encounter in four different ways…You can tell from the context you hear,From the chords that are near,And the movement you hear in the bass. The first we’ll call pedal (or stationary)‘Cause the bass stays the same.But when bass notes move stepwiseOften passing’s the name.When the bass goes a leaping, arpeggiated’s what we’ll say.And when we come to the end of a section, my friendA cadential 64 can help carry the day…. (IV 64)... well that IV 64 was stationary, oh…(I 64)... a passing I 64! Passing I 64!(vi 64)... ain’t it great when we can arpeggiate!And for the next one I’m just going to savor it‘Cause a cadential 64 is my favorite second inversion….Second inversion…Mmm, Second inversion… 0:36:39.0 GR: And that was the famous "Amen" that you were talking about earlier, yeah?  [laughter] 0:36:43.2 DN: Yeah. Oh gosh. 0:36:46.3 GR: That's great. 0:36:48.6 DN: I do enjoy this. The criticism that I've gotten for this is that it's not the way some people wanna teach second inversion chords, or they may even say that they don't even believe in second inversion chords. And it's very much the way it was taught in the book that I was using at the time. And of course, people have different names for these things. I've even learned new terminology that I didn't know before through responses to some of these songs. 0:37:20.3 GR: Mm-hmm. 0:37:21.7 DN: In the Dominant 7 song, the deceptive cadence, I got a note from someone in England saying, "Is that what we call an interrupted cadence?" "Oh, apparently it is." 0:37:37.4 GR: See, and now this is gonna take me right back to my Schenkerian training, because an interrupted cadence is... An interruption in Schenkerian terminology is effectively a half cadence, right? 'Cause the phrase is interrupted before it's able to complete its normative motion of three, two, one or five, four, three, two, one. 0:38:00.1 DN: And some people will insist on calling it deceptive motion. 0:38:06.1 GR: Mm-hmm, or deceptive resolution, yeah. Mm-hmm. 0:38:09.0 DN: Right. The funny thing is, when I'm teaching, at least, I just sort of say there's lots of names for things and there are many lenses to view it through and not one of them is correct. 0:38:22.7 GR: And I think probably at the heart of it, it matters less what we call it, and more that we know what it is as a thing. 0:38:30.5 DN: Right, right, or that you recognize... Yeah, yeah, ideally, we would recognize these things happening musically and just sort of know why they work and not in a limited fashion but in a holistic fashion to go, "Oh, this has a lot of aspects to it." 0:38:48.3 GR: Mm-hmm. So the other one that I find just delightful is the Chord Spelling song because Like... [laughter] 0:38:58.9 GR: Can you tell us about that? 'Cause this one is so clearly to me like this is a pedagogical song, this is a song that I would totally just pull out and use within my classroom. In fact I'm thinking about just transcribing, so that I can do this in singing with my students. 0:39:13.4 DN: It has been transcribed. Mark Boyle has transcribed it, and I will talk to him, but I think maybe we can put up a transcription so that people can use it, he uses it as a warm-up with his choirs. 0:39:29.4 GR: Yeah, can you tell us a bit about the song?  0:39:31.3 DN: Yeah, I think it was my second year of teaching aural skills and I was heading into school. At that point, I had an hour commute, and I was heading into school, and the topic of the day was going to be spelling all the different chords, and as I was driving into in school, I thought, "I cannot stand the thought of standing in front of a blackboard and spelling out one chord after another, each diatonic chord and singing them, there's gotta be a more interesting way to do this." And I basically wrote the song on my commute, and by the time I got to school, I had the general framework of it written, and I taught it to each of my classes that day, and then we sang it at the end of class and recorded it and put it on YouTube. [laughter] 0:40:30.5 GR: Nice. 0:40:31.5 DN: So, that was... Yeah that was composed and recorded within a couple of hours. 0:40:39.2 GR: And when we hear that on The Well Trained Ear Album, are those of your students we're hearing singing?  0:40:46.7 DN: Those are my students although that... And honestly, I think that the recording on YouTube that was recorded within a few hours is probably better than the one on the album. [laughter] 0:41:02.2 DN: The album was recorded very much on a budget, and that particular song suffered because I recorded it without people singing along, I played the piano part and I played it way too fast, and so it's a little bit too fast on the album for my taste. 0:41:23.2 GR: Well shall we listen to the YouTube version?  0:41:25.9 DN: Sure. Yeah, let's listen to the YouTube version. I mean, what's cool about the YouTube version anyway, it's just that students really... I taught it to them. That was the end of class. Do Mi SoFa La DoSo Ti Re Ti So Do Do DoDo Mi SoFa La DoSo Ti Re Ti So DoLa ... La Do MiRe ... Re Fa LaLa ... La Do MiMi Si TiSo Ti Re Do Mi SoFa La DoSo Ti Re Ti So Do Do DoDo Mi SoFa La DoSo Ti Re Ti So DoDo ... Do Mi SoMi ... Mi So TiLa ... La Do MiRe ... Re Fi La So DoSo So Re TiSo So DoSo So Fa Re TiSo So DoSo So Fa Re Ti Si MiLa Do MiDo Mi So TeFa La DoSo Ti Re Ti SoDo Ti Do Ti Do Ti Do Ti Do Ti Do! [laughter] 0:42:45.6 GR: I love it, I love it. 0:42:51.7 DN: And that has more of that cycling, spiraling idea of, but introducing concepts ahead of time. Because at that time you just need to know, here's what I have to sing here, but then later I'm... I could say, well remember when we sang, do re mi so ti, but that's, that's a five, seven, zero, four. And then when they hear that sound they can connect it with the place in the song where they've heard it. And, I mean for me, that seems like a... I just thought why hasn't anyone done this before? , and a little bit the answer is that, people had done it before and I just didn't know. [laughter] And so it's been really cool like to meet Joseph Downing, who has written a bunch of music theory songs, but they're not on YouTube. I probably should... He's sent me the sheet music for his songs, so I should probably record some of them and put them on YouTube. [laughter] But hearing things in context, that's the other tricky thing about aural skills, is that you can't understand any of these things out of context. It's all about hearing them in context. And then, how do you get someone to recognize it in context? So, that's q place, where I think that the songs are useful, because it's just naming things as they happen. 0:44:27.1 GR: Yeah. 0:44:29.0 DN: And to a degree naming things... I was surprised to share my International Chord song with some people and to point out things that were being explicitly named in the, in the song and to discover that some of my colleagues didn't, didn't even recognize what was happening. Didn't recognize, what that those things were being named as they happened, or didn't recognize all the subtleties, I don't know. You know, when I, when I do, sometimes I... Like, sometimes I want to hear some German, sometimes, you know, sometimes I like to hear some French, and then I on the French, you know, I... French is the note that distinguishes him from German. [laughter] 0:45:27.0 GR: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's reality too. 0:45:29.6 DN: But understanding those chords and how they work, It's just helpful to hear them in context. 0:45:37.8 LS: And surely that will help students make the connection to their rap. 0:45:41.9 GR: And also to hear that I think in more popular styles were so often we're teaching these concepts with reference to Western classical music, which frankly, maybe our students aren't listening to that much. 0:45:52.9 DN: You know, I forgot until just now that, you know, I showed you my second inversion song, but that the predecessor to that [chuckle] was the first year I taught, I wrote a chorale. I wrote a chorale that did all four of the second inversions that we were supposed... That I was supposed to teach. And I gave it to them as a dictation. And I wrote little words, you know, about second inversions are chords I adore. I write them down with a six and a four. [laughter] But I didn't... Yeah, the chorale wasn't quite as catchy as the gospel-ly song. 0:46:39.2 GR: The bluesy. Gospel. Yeah. 0:46:40.5 DN: Yeah. [laughter] 0:46:41.1 GR: But this has been really fun to where if people want to hear more of your songs, where can they find them? Where can they find you?  0:46:49.1 DN: They're scattered all over YouTube. And, of course, I have the album on Bandcamp The Well-Trained Ear. If you google The Well-Trained Ear, you will find it. And, of course, I would be deliriously happy if anyone wanted to buy the album on Bandcamp, but you can also listen to it for free. [chuckle] 0:47:14.3 GR: Awesome. So, yeah, hopefully our listeners will support the creation of these wonderful music theory teaching songs. And, yeah, I certainly... I have the album in my iTunes and... [laughter] 0:47:27.0 GR: Yeah, yeah, I hope. Hope others will as well. It's always a little funny when like I'll have it on shuffle at a party and then suddenly, you know, up pops David Newman singing the Silly Solfege Song. 0:47:39.9 DN: That could be particularly shocking if it turned out to be The Locrian Song. [laughter] 0:47:45.9 DN: In what on an any normal album would be shockingly inappropriate. I love that, it goes straight from a poly meter heavy metal song to a swinging jazz tune. [laughter] 0:48:09.9 LS: And let's not forget about TikTok. [laughter] 0:48:13.5 LS: One of my favorite little things is David Newman singing his office number for his students to remember, now I have it memorized as well. 0:48:23.1 DN: That's fantastic. Yeah, no, it's great. And you know, I did write it for my students. Although, actually, I wrote it for me, because I got moved into a new office and then COVID hit. And then I wasn't in that office, and I knew where to find it, but I couldn't remember my own office number, so I thought I need to share this, and then of course, when I realized I was in office 213, re do mi. So that is not on the album. I guess I could add it, add it to the album. Yeah, I put it on TikTok. I have a couple of things on TikTok that are not on the album. So yeah, follow me on TikTok. And if people start following me on TikTok, maybe I'll start making more content for it. [chuckle] 0:49:18.1 GR: Well, I wonder should we close out by hearing The Locrian tune, what an unsettling way to end. [laughter] 0:49:25.1 DN: I'm not sure. That might be something people have to seek out for themselves. [chuckle] 0:49:30.0 GR: Alright, that's fair, that's fair. You know, our listeners may not know or may not realize it, of course, you wrote the theme song for Notes, Notes From The Staff. So that's... 0:49:41.0 DN: You know, I wanted to talk about that. 0:49:42.4 GR: David's voice in here. 0:49:43.1 DN: Do we have time to talk about that?  0:49:44.5 GR: Yeah. Sure. 0:49:46.2 DN: As we close up? I mean, obviously. I started with a surprise. [laughter] 0:49:55.8 GR: In the form of the Surprise Symphony?  0:49:58.7 DN: And I figured that everyone upon hearing, you know, tun tun tun tun tun tun tun they know what to expect. And then I don't give them what they expect. And the way I think about writing these, I am really inspired also by Bach. And, when I thought about writing this I had already seen the the logo with a treble clef and notes on the staff. So I decided that I was going to make the melody do all of the notes on the staff, on the treble clef staff. So that is the opening line is, these are the Notes From The Staff da da. So I did every single note that is on the staff. [laughter] 0:50:48.5 DN: You know, I think sometimes maybe it doesn't add anything, but I think sometimes, I think, what we learn as creative people, is that a blank page is scary, and so it's great to give yourself limitations like that, and out of that, springs creativity. [music] 0:51:13.9 LS: Notes From The Staff is produced by uTheory.com. 0:51:16.0 GR: UTheory is the most advanced online learning platform for music theory. 0:51:30.9 LS: With video lessons, individualized practice, and proficiency testing, uTheory has helped more than 100,000 students around the world master the fundamentals of music theory, rhythm and ear training. 0:51:37.0 GR: Create your own free teacher account at uTheory.com/teach. [music]

Power of Play with Jed Dearybury

Jed Dearybury, author of The Playful Classroom and The Power of Play for All Ages joins us to talk about how bringing play into classrooms--no matter the age or level--leads to deeper, more engaged and more joyful learning. Links: Jed Dearybury’s webpage: https://www.mrdearybury.com/ The Playful Classroom: https://theplayfulclassroom.com/ Jed’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/mrdearybury Jed's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV4Y68wd0lR5kuIzghPGxCw Ron Clark: Move your Bus - http://www.moveyourbus.com/ A Mathematician’s Lament Improving Science Content with Choreographed Songs Show Notes: 00:00:15 Introductions 00:01:00 Guest introduction: Jed Dearybury 00:03:45 How did play become your profession? 00:09:00 Play is when we feel best in life and in the classroom, it allows us to let go of self-criticism and fear. 00:11:00 What are the benefits of play in the classroom? 00:15:00 Sometimes our music teaching is not as playful as our math colleagues imagine it is 00:19:50 Deep play 00:24:15 Value of songs with movement in teaching in non-music areas 00:27:45 Play personalities & types of play (Stuart Brown’s research) 00:35:40 Types of Play 00:38:00 “Level Up” – when students begin to take a game and add a layer of difficulty on top of it 00:38:45 How do you create a culture that’s safe for play? 00:45:24 If you’ve had teachers who were playful, that gives you a model, but what do you do if you haven’t had a model of a playful teacher? 00:47:50 What advice do you have for teachers who may face naysayers when working to create a playful classroom? 00:53:10 What would you say to someone who wants to include play in their classroom, but is worried about still being able to cover all of the content? 00:59:20 Imagination, sociability, humor, spontaneity and wonder – elements of the playful mindset 01:03:26 In the history of educational psychology, we have lots of evidence that we learn through play. Why hasn’t this way of teaching become the norm? 01:09:00 Where can people follow you? 01:11:00 Wrap-ups Transcript: [music] 0:00:21.0 David Newman: Welcome to Notes from the Staff, a podcast from the creators of uTheory, where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training, and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education. 0:00:35.5 Greg Ristow: Hi, I'm Greg Ristow, founder of uTheory and associate professor of conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory. 0:00:41.8 Leah Sheldon: I'm Leah Sheldon, head of teacher engagement for uTheory. 0:00:45.4 DN: And I'm David Newman. I teach at James Madison University and I write code and create content for uTheory. 0:00:52.7 LS: And before we get started today, a quick thanks to our listeners for all of your comments and episode suggestions. We love to read them, so send them our way at notes@utheory.com, and remember to like us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 0:01:07.1 GR: Our topic today is the power of play in teaching, learning, and life. And joining us is world play expert, Jed Dearybury. Uh, Jed, did I say that name right?  0:01:17.9 Jed Dearybury: It was close. It's Dairy Berry. Dairy, like a cow and Berry like a fruit. 0:01:21.9 GR: Great. Actually we can do all that again. [laughter] 0:01:25.8 JD: No, you did fine. You did... You don't even... Don't even, David don't even edit that. He did great. You did great. [laughter] 0:01:33.9 GR: So, yes, joining us is world play expert Jed Dearybury. Jed is the author along with Dr. Julie Jones of The Playful Classroom: The Power of Play for All Ages, of The Courageous classroom with co-author Janet Taylor, and of the forthcoming, The Playful Life, also with Julie Jones, which will be released in November 22. We'll remind you when that gets closer. As a classroom teacher, he was featured in GQ Magazine as Male Leader of the Year, met President Obama as the South Carolina honoree of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science teaching, and was named as a top five finalist for South Carolina Teacher of the Year. Since 2015, he's been leading professional development across the country, as well as training the next generation of educators through his work and teaching in higher education. Jed, thanks for joining us. 0:02:24.1 JD: Thanks for having me and thanks for that great intro. I mean, I think that we're just recording our voices though. So all your viewers can't see how adorable cute I am to know about that GQ award, right? I mean, they'll have to look me up online. 0:02:36.8 GR: I mean, I can just imagine the spread. 0:02:38.4 JD: I mean, just imagine how awesome I look, right?  [laughter] 0:02:43.5 JD: Oh, goodness. Yeah. I'm glad to be with y'all. Thanks for having me. I'll tell y'all, when I was listening to you do the intros, man, y'all all have classic radio voices. Maybe like a NPR vibe, I felt like, "Man, this is like serious business here. I don't know if they're ready for my Southern drawl to be on here." But anyway, here I am. Thanks for the invite. [laughter] 0:03:11.1 GR: Actually, I think we're, but I don't know about you, Leah, I always feel a little jealous of David's resonant baritone. 0:03:16.8 JD: As soon as he started... 0:03:17.7 LS: Definitely. 0:03:18.5 JD: As soon as he started speaking, I was like, "Wow, that is like, David you that... I don't know what you, I mean, you'd said what you did, but you need to be doing that. It's full time. Like get you some gigs, man." 0:03:30.1 DN: I do so many things I can't even think. [laughter] 0:03:37.9 GR: So Jed play... I was just thinking, how did you get into, how did play become your professional life?  0:03:44.7 JD: You know, I knew that you were gonna ask me that question, I had been thinking about that answer and I don't know exactly other than I was born that way. I guess, I was born with this playful spirit personality. I credit a lot of it to my mom. My mom is a very playful person. She had a hard life growing up, there was lots of bumps along her way, but I think that she embraced that and got through that by being, having a playful spirit. She loves to make art. She loves to dance. She loves to try to sing. She's not that great of a singer, but she loves to try. You know, I just think that my mom is probably the one that instilled a lot of that in me. And then when I took that into my classroom, people started noticing what I was doing in my classroom. I was just minding my business. I had a piano in my classroom, new music teachers will love that. I have a great story of how I got the piano in my first classroom. I was working in the building late one evening. I was the only one in the building and I was, I don't know, just in an adventurous mood. And I started going around and looking in the empty classrooms to see if there was anything that I needed for my room. 'Cause if it was in an empty classroom, it's fair game, right? Nobody's using it, you can put it in your room. And in the gym, in a supply closet, in the gym, there was a piano covered in about two inches of dust, and I was like, "You know what? It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission." 0:05:20.5 JD: And I just wheeled that thing right down to my classroom and cleaned it up. And the next day, of course, I started playing with my students and the principal came across the hall and she was like, "Where did you get that?" And I was like, "Oh, it was in the gym." And she said, "We had a piano in the gym?" And I was like, "Yeah, it was in the closet in the gym." And I said, "Do you mind if I use it?" And she said, "Nobody else is using it." [chuckle] She said, "I didn't even know it was here." And so that started the... That started my playful classroom, I think, right there is me having that piano because anytime, and let me just stop right here and say, I'm not an expert piano player by any means, I just know some chords and can... I read music obviously, cause I play the trumpet, and I read piano music bass and treble, and... But I just like to make up stuff. You know, you get a couple of chords and just bang it out and see what happens. And we would make up fun little songs in my classroom to different content that we were learning. One of my favorite ones that we did was, it was learning about the things that plants need to grow. And it was to the tune of bingo. You know, there was a seed down in the ground, how will it grow? Water, light, air, soil, space, water, light, air, soil, space, water, light, air, soil, space. That's what it needs to grow. 0:06:41.0 JD: And then the first year that I did that, I had this really amazing kid, his name was Zaelon. He is now a college graduate, but he was very gifted reader in first grade and he had just read a book about how bees help plants to grow. And so right at the end of that song, he would always chime and go, "And bees," and he would give his fingers like a little spirit finger wave, you know. And so we added that to our song and that was where play started for me, I guess, in my classroom. Fast forward to 2015, I met Julie around that time. I can't remember exactly when we met. I just know that we met and she and I are the exact kind of teacher. We just like to have fun and play with our students all based on the content that we're trying to teach. And both of us work in higher ed and we were trying to write something to help communicate to our college students what teaching should look like. What playful teaching should look like. And we realized about halfway through, this is a book that all teachers need to read, not just our students. We need everybody who's in education to read this, not just classroom teachers, but administrators, anybody who has an education role. So anybody who works at your institutions of higher ed, even if they work in the office, the human resources office, they need to read this book, because they're connected to playful classrooms across that campus. And... But not only those people, but anyone who's in a teaching type role. 0:08:14.2 JD: So I've done a lot of work with the 4-H Club, those leaders, they are absolutely teachers, the American Campus Association, the Special Olympics, all of those people connected to those organizations are in essence teachers creating playful classroom spaces, wherever they teach their participants. And so, next thing you know, people are asking me to come play with them and teach them about play. So here it is, this is my life. And I hate your viewers can't see me, but it's authentic. You see, this is my home office that you're looking at in the background. Maybe take a screenshot, you could put it out there in the world or something, I don't know. But this is what I do. I guess I do play for a living. But you know what? If you're a good teacher, you play for a living anyway, you just call it something different, you call it teaching, instead of playing for a living. But that's what you do, if you're good at it. That was a lot of talking. [laughter] 0:09:14.5 DN: That is when I feel best in the classroom. 0:09:16.0 JD: Mm-hmm. 0:09:18.6 DN: Even, and yeah. Even with a room full of jaded college sophomores. [chuckle] 0:09:25.6 JD: Yeah, yeah. Look, I agree. Sometimes in my college courses, I bring what I think is one of the most fun lessons. And I just finally look at 'em I'm like, "Look, I could pull a PowerPoint up and just talk to you for an hour if y'all would rather do that. And they're like, "No, no, no." I was like, "Then get engaged with this. We need some participation, don't we," like you said, you know? So I fully understand that too, but you're right. I too feel at my best in the classroom when I'm teaching and it's playful like that, and not just with little kids, but I love teaching adults, and helping them to find their childhood again. Because I think the problem is in our culture, we have squashed that. We have forgotten the joy of childhood because the heaviness of adulthood is upon us. But I think if we were more playful as adults, that, that heaviness wouldn't be so large on our shoulders. And there's science to back that up. We're killing ourselves in essence, you know? I'm very open and honest about my own journey with anxiety and depression. And I have found that when I am in moments of play, that that releases itself, it lets go of me for a bit. I get lost in the flow of the playfulness. I let go of that self criticism that fear, play does that, it's 'cause all the things that are released, all the feel good chemicals in your brain that are being released when you're playing, it just makes you feel better. 0:11:04.0 GR: So beyond the feel good nature of it, what are the benefits of play in the classroom and learning?  0:11:11.9 JD: Well, being more playful, first of all, it helps you to have an emotional connection to the learning. So I could absolutely put a PowerPoint up and I could talk to you and you could take notes in a traditional format. And for some people that still is the way they wanna do it. But scientifically speaking, if you have an emotional connection to the learning, you remember it better and play helps us to have that emotional connection. If we took the time to ask each of you to share something that you learned through as a kid, I guarantee you it would be something that was connected to a playful event. The very first thing that most of us learn academically speaking, is our ABCs, right? We learn our ABCs, and how do we do that? We learn 'em through a song. Singing is playing. Music is playing. And so that right there should show you the power of play just that alone should sell you on it, I think, because it makes the learning stick. You have this emotional connection to the song. People cheer for you and you learn, "Yay. You sing all of it. Yay." Now I'll sing along with you. You know, like the end of the song says. And you have this emotional connection, music make the learning stick. You ask somebody to say their alphabet, nobody really says it. They sing it even as an adult. 0:12:39.4 JD: If you have to put things in ABC order, most people inside their brain are singing the alphabet, whether they wanna admit or not, even the business, the suits at the highest levels of the corporations, if they had to put something in alphabetical order, they're gonna sing it in their brain because that's the way they learned it. And imagine if you can take that into numerous aspects of the curriculum. So rather than just a song, maybe you created a piece of art that helped you remember the life cycle of the butterfly, or maybe you did a tableau to help you remember the sequence of events that led to the American Revolution. Or maybe you created a game that involved a piece of paper, balled up in a ball, aiming at a bullseye on the floor that you made outta tape that helped you to remember... I don't know, the physics of that piece of paper. You see, I went really deep there because I was trying to... I went from the life cycle of a butterfly to physics and hitting that bullseye, right? Because that is what, play is for all ages. It is literally for all ages. I get so frustrated when I hear people say, "Oh, that's great for early childhood, but I teach calculus." If ever there was a course that needed some playfulness in it, good God calculus is it, right? I mean, look, I took pre-cal and I honestly, follow this here, I thought pre-cal was what happened before the cal. [laughter] 0:14:09.3 JD: Did you hear what I said there? I took precalculus, I still don't even know what it is. I took that course for a whole year in high school. Miss Inclen, God lover, she was, I'm sure she was a great teacher, but I didn't know anything. I didn't, I really, I still don't even to this day, know what pre-cal is. I still think it's, I think it's just what comes before the cal. [laughter] They're gonna revoke my adjunct teaching position after they hear that, they're gonna kick me out. [laughter] 0:14:39.2 DN: As a fellow adjunct, I... But I've been doing it for 16 years and they haven't, they haven't not rehired me yet, so... 0:14:49.3 JD: Well, that's good to know. That's good to know. I've been doing adjunct work in some capacity since 2010. So I'm not far behind you there. 0:14:58.0 DN: This, that your talk about, pre-cal reminded me of... Greg and I were talking about the other day an article I had read and I found it, it's Lockhart's Lament and it's about teaching math. And of course they're, the first thing he does to say why we teach math wrong is to imagine a musician waking... Having a nightmare where instead of letting kids play music, they force them to just write down notes on a page and know their modes and scales. And we don't actually do music till we get to college. And we were talking about the problem that sometimes music teaching does look a little too much [chuckle] like that. But... 0:15:53.5 JD: Well, I think teaching in general can sometimes look like that, because what happens is and all of you are educators, there's a certain amount of fear that every educator has that they won't know the answer, that they won't know the right path, that they'll lose control of the classroom. And so in order to alleviate those fears, they find a box, they find their lane, they find their path and they get in it and they stay in it because it's comfortable. It's easy. And you don't know what you don't know if you don't get out of the, where you do know, does that make sense? You stay there. And I think that's the problem that we have is that we're just afraid. And some of the fears are valid, especially in public education world, there's a lot of testing going on, you're constantly being evaluated as a teacher, but I think if our administrators who are doing that would read our book and understand the brain benefits of playfulness, your scores are going to increase because your kids are going to be more engaged. 0:17:03.5 JD: They're gonna have these emotional connections to the learning. They're going to feel better about themselves, about each other. The playful classroom is also an empathetic classroom. It's a compassionate classroom. It's a classroom where people are not afraid to take risk with their learning, and maybe even not afraid to take risk with their own personal adventure, you know? Like in a playful classroom, maybe some kid will come to school with a crazy new hairdo because he just felt adventurous that day, and knew that in his playful classroom, he would be loved and accepted. So I will never understand why we hold so tightly to those fears when the evidence is so blatantly obvious, that this helps our students. And it helps you, the teacher. I think we need to address that too. You said it, David, you feel your best when it's that way in the classroom. Leah, Greg, what do y'all think? I mean, when the classroom feels more playful, how do you, as an educator feel?  0:18:11.8 LS: You can't match the level of engagement, no matter the age of the students that you're teaching. When everybody is involved in playing and those light bulbs are going off, whether you know it, whether they know it or not, that is just... 0:18:26.0 LS: The best kind of learning. 0:18:28.6 GR: Totally, and also the freedom to... You learn so much, so quickly about what students know or don't know when you're playing because you just... You see it, you see it in the choices that they make, and you can direct towards that in a way that's a lot easier than if you've got your fixed PowerPoint or whatever. 0:18:49.6 JD: Yeah, 'cause 99% of the time when you're delivering the PowerPoint, you're focused on the PowerPoint. Are your word spelled right? Are you flowing correctly? Did you advance the slide too fast? When the students are playing, that gives you a moment as an educator to truly just watch and to take it in and to listen and to sometimes participate alongside with your students? There's numerous times when I was in my second grade classroom when I was right there beside the students, playing with them, so it gave me a first-hand account of not only their academic ability, but their social ability, their mental ability, how were they... Were they able to handle if something went wrong and if they weren't able to handle it, what triggered them to go the wrong way? Why did they get frustrated? It's just... I just don't know why anybody doesn't wanna have a playful classroom, but they're out there, and that's why we have this podcast, and that's why we have this book, so we can help educate them. 0:19:54.5 GR: I think the reality is that a few of us were taught with a play throughout our learning, it's like... I remember a certain amount of play in some classes, physics class, where we'd be given a challenge and just the whole day to figure out a way to try and solve how far away are we from San Francisco based on the sun shadows or like... Those are some of the most formative learning experiences of my life where it was just like, Just play, just see if you can figure out a way to do it. 0:20:24.6 JD: Yeah. 0:20:26.4 GR: But it's certainly not how most of us were taught all the time, I was so struck reading the playful classroom by... This is gonna sound a little weird, but by what serious business play is, how much really interesting research there is around it in psychology and sociology. Could you talk a little bit about the concept of deep play?  0:20:46.8 JD: Well, you've all experienced deep play, whether you knew it was called deep play or not, think about those moments where you just were completely lost in time, where you started a project or you started a game, and then you looked at your clock and you're like, "Oh my gosh, it's been four hours. We've been doing this for four hours." I think of a deep play, it's very similar to like working a puzzle. Now, I know a lot of people are gonna hear that and they're gonna be like, Oh, that sounds horrible. Working a puzzle, because working a puzzle to some people is just boring, I get it, but if you've ever worked a puzzle, especially with another person, you can get lost in it very easily because your mind becomes fixated on finding that one little piece to make that connection and when you find that one little piece to make that connection, what happens in your brain, you're like, "Ahh, I did it, I did it. I found the piece." Right? You're so excited. And then guess what, you're ready to find the next piece, because what happens is all of that, those endorphins just are like, Ah-Ah-Ah, they got a hold of you and you like you found that piece. 0:22:00.5 JD: And maybe it's not, maybe it's not a puzzle for you, maybe it's being on the golf course and finally making an amazing shot from the bunker into the hole... Like like dude did on Masters a couple of weeks ago. Maybe it is decorating your house and getting that flower in the vase just at the right spot after hours of arranging. So the deep play is digging into that deep inner self of what satisfies you, what brings you joy, what brings you contentment and peace, and a lot of times, our mistake with play is that we think it's what little kids do in the yard with blocks, and it is that, but it's also much, much more than that. And I think that as we dig deep into our understanding of what play looks like as an adult, because I don't think that we talk enough about that. We have these fun cliches, work hard, play hard, and play hard usually means like go to the bar and have drinks after work or something, but I think if we learn how to bring that work and play together, that is what helps us define the deep play. 0:23:14.2 JD: For example, you've seen how some companies are. They provide play bikes during the middle of the day for their employees, they have foosball tables and ping pong tables and all that's great. I love a play break, but imagine if you could somehow figure out how to make the work itself playful. For example, if you're a Mason and you lay bricks all day... Right. Okay, you're scooping out the cement, you're laying the brick, you're scooping out the cement, laying the brick, if you can somehow make a pattern, Boomchik-Boomchik-chikaboom, you've turned it into a playful and next thing you know, you've laid 500 bricks and it was 'cause you were singing and you were playing and you got lost in the deep play of it all, and just that I turned it into music that just was bonus for your listeners. [laughter] 0:24:05.4 JD: I just remembered where I was, all of a sudden, notes from the staff. That was some ideas for the staff right there. [laughter] 0:24:17.7 DN: I don't know if you all know that I collaborated with the planetarium at JMU to write a bunch of science songs for their space camp, and because they were tracking... They were doing pre-testing and post-testing for this camp, we were actually able to publish a paper about the value of songs with movements in teaching these science concepts, and there is... 0:24:53.5 JD: I need you to send me that link. I would need to read that. 0:24:56.0 DN: I will send it to you. Yeah, there is a... The first year they actually had a loss of learning on this one topic, and then the year they introduced my song, it was very high, it was very high the next year, and it was only low the third year because the pre-testing was so high and you can't do better than a 100% on post-testing. [laughter] 0:25:22.6 JD: Yeah, you guys know this because you are music experts and you understand how that is an emotional connection. Even for kids that don't like to sing, the music gets stuck in their head. It finds that little place and it rests there. That's why I like to write. Specifically, I like to write parodies instead of writing my own original music, because that way when they hear that song out in the world, it connects back to learning. I love it when a kid... I had a kid of mine... I wrote lots of parodies too. It's a small world. [laughter] 0:25:58.5 JD: Because... I did, to the same, to the same tune, because number one, the kids knew it, number two, I knew it, I knew the chords, I knew the basic chords, and I can just go over and play it. Right? And so I wrote parodies to "It's a small world," and I would have kids go to Disney World and ride "It's a Small World", and they would come back and they'd be like, Mister Dearybury, they were using your song. [laughter] 0:26:19.5 JD: They are thinking it was a my song, and I would try to tell them, No, this is not my song, I didn't write this. I would set it up, but then they would go down there and parents would come back and say, Mr. Dearybury, we were at Disney World and we were riding the ride, and it's a small world was singing, singing, singing, and all my kid was doing, "There are seven continents, there are seven continents" and they would let me run through this amazing ride, but my students were singing about the seven continents that we had learned. Music is essential to the playful classroom, you gotta have it in some form or fashion. 0:27:02.1 LS: And that applies to adults as well. I watched the snippet on YouTube from one of your professional development sessions where you used "It's a Small World" and "I'm so glad I get to teach" has been stuck in my head for the last week. 0:27:12.5 JD: I'm so glad I get to teach. Yeah, I'm glad you watched that. That's fun. I gotta ask you this, Leah. Was I dressed as a squirrel?  0:27:24.4 LS: No. 0:27:24.5 JD: Or was I dressed just in normal clothes?  [laughter] 0:27:26.5 LS: Normal clothing. 0:27:26.5 JD: Okay, so what you saw, that video that you saw was the very first time I ever sang that song. So it's gotten so much better since then, and now sometimes I dress as a squirrel when I sing that, and it's a whole big production of a keynote that I do, but maybe one day you'll get to see it live and in person. And I'll sing that song and be dressed as a squirrel and you're gonna remember our time together here, you'll be like, I remember him singing that. Oh. 0:27:54.9 GR: So, there were so many things that really struck me in reading the playful classroom. The one that I think just absolutely bowled me over was the idea of play personalities and also of the 16 types of play. I wonder if you could dive into those a bit because I think they're, especially maybe helpful if we're thinking about how to make our contents more playful. 0:28:19.0 JD: I wish that I could take credit for that research and those words... It's just amazing, Dr. Stuart Brown, if you all don't know who he is out there in the listening world, look him up, he's America's leading play researcher that he's like our play guru that we go to and ask questions. Julie and I both had read his work for several years, and then we got involved with the US Play Coalition based out of Clemson University, and they have a conference every year the first week in April. And we go to the conference and there's Stuart Brown, there he comes and we just were blown away that he was at this conference and that he just... He's like milling around, just like hanging out, there wasn't a line a mile long to see him, he was just out and about. And we had this moment where the conference led us in this big group dance, and they were giving us all these different ways to dance and we were... Every time they changed the dance, we had to find a new partner, and one of the ways that we dance was like Spider-Man, and Julie and I did the Spider-Man dance with Stuart Brown, and we were like freaking out. And so we got to know him and he wrote the forward for our book, and the play personalities and the types of play. Those are... That's his work. 0:29:47.8 JD: The play personalities, I think is so beneficial for educators because it's basically helping us get a glimpse into who the student is, to understand who they are and understand how to craft experiences for them. For example, there are eight different play personalities, and I'm going to try to name them all, but I have a little help here. The viewers won't see this, but we have these little posters that we made to help us remember them all, they're out there in the world on my webpage somewhere. Storyteller, Kinesthete... Yeah, Storyteller, Kinesthete, Competitor, Director, Explorer, Joker, Collector, Creator. And in the book, Julie and I came up with a very non-scientific quiz to help you identify yourself a little bit. Think of it like one of those quizzes you used to take in the Teeny Bopper magazines back in the '80s. I don't know what the age group of your listeners are, but surely, they'll know what I'm talking about, but that's what we based it off of. So it's not scientific, but I will tell you almost everybody who has done the quiz has been like, Yeah, that's kind of me, or they say, Well, I got two or three different personalities. 0:31:06.6 JD: Well, that's true too. And depending on your mood, you can be all of these, and I think being aware of the different play personalities is the most important thing as an educator, so that you could craft experiences over time that hit on all of these. Storyteller, I think that's obvious as somebody who likes to tell a story, but also likes to listen to stories, likes to build stories. I thought that Storyteller was gonna be my highest one, because I am very much a storyteller. Public speaking is what I do for most of my work when I'm not in the adjunct career, so I thought storytelling would be mine, it wasn't. We'll get to mine in a minute. Kinesthete, the person who likes to move. A little bit of behind the scenes about that. When Julie and I were writing the book, we kept typing the word Kinesthete into our document and Google wanted to correct that to kinesthetic. And we were like, No, this is Kinesthete is the noun, the person who likes to move and it's in Stuart's work, and we kept using it and it wouldn't even find it anywhere, so we Googled it, and the only place we could find it was in Stuart's work. 0:32:18.1 JD: It wasn't in the dictionary, it wasn't in encyclopedia, it wasn't anywhere. So when we saw Peter, I mean saw Stuart at the play conference, we said, Hey, tell us about this word. He was like, Oh, I made it up. I just made up that word. [laughter] And I guess if you're America's leading play researcher, you can just make up words, so we rolled with it, and that's what we use. Competitor, obviously, the person who likes games, wants to win. Director, think of the director as the person who is behind the scenes organizing, organizing the podcast, getting everything set up, inviting the guest Greg to be on the show. Maybe David is the person who does all the editing, that's very a Director job too, I think. 0:33:05.2 JD: Next up is the Joker. And no surprise, maybe after this podcast, listening to me, this was the one I scored the highest on. I was a little bit shocked, but I think Joker and Storyteller do go hand-in hand, because if you're a good storyteller, you gotta be able to make people laugh in the middle of that, to keep them involved and engaged. And so the Joker is somebody who loves to laugh with others, not necessarily to tell jokes or to be the butt of the joke, but that's... 0:33:36.2 JD: The next one is Collector, which was also very high on my list, and at first I was like, I don't think that's accurate. But if you could see my home office for the benefit of you all... Okay, look over here. Do you see those rainbow cans?  0:33:53.3 DN: Yeah. 0:33:53.9 JD: Every one of those has a different... Every one of those has a different set of pins in it, pins are markers, so I guess I am a little bit of a collector, I don't know. Then there's the Explorer, and this is not just a person who likes to travel, but it's also somebody who likes to try new things, adventurous, just walking around the neighborhood and looking at the world through a fresh lens, but of course travel is on that list. And then there's the Artist Creator, which also was on my list, I think the top three for me are Joker Collector and Creator. Now, why is that important for me as an individual? Well, it helps me to know better what I like and what's gonna connect with me the most. Taking that into the education world, if you had all that information about your students, then when you're sitting there planning your idea, you're not gonna put some kid who hates competition in a game, in a leadership role. 0:34:55.9 JD: You're gonna come up with a different path for that student and you say, Oh well, I don't have time to come up with all these different ways and ideas. Sometimes the ideas just unfold themselves, so if it's a game that you are wanting to do, then why not let the kid who hates the game maybe be the Director of the game. Maybe while the kid is watching the game, he can sketch note or doodle what's happening in the game, so he's still participating in the game, but it takes the competition part out and it's very simple to do, and that you just give that kid another path, but is the learning still happening? Yes, because whatever his play personality is, he's connecting to it in a way, he's connecting to the learning in a way that's meaningful to him. 0:35:43.2 JD: You also mentioned the different types of play. They're 16 different types of play, I won't go through all of those because it would just be boring to listen to me talk about them, get the book, read it. But knowing the different types of play, there's a poster that we have in the book that's also on the website. I encourage teachers to have that poster handy just so they can look at it and think, Oh, how could I drop this kind of play into my classroom? How could that be a director or a artist creator or a storyteller in my classroom? Because what this does, it broadens your teacher toolbox, but it also broadens it in a way that brings meaningful relevance and fun into your classroom. 0:36:29.8 GR: That's awesome. 0:36:30.0 JD: And I hope all that makes sense. 0:36:33.4 GR: Yeah. 0:36:33.4 JD: If it doesn't make sense, I'm available to come and do professional development in your school and we can make it happen in person. 0:36:41.1 GR: Jed, I have to tell you, after reading about the play personalities, like the very next day, I was in the classroom and working with a group of kids, and we were doing this ball game, which involved one student partners, one student bouncing the ball to another student as that student tossed another ball, and it was not going great, and this is a very competitive class, and I just said, Oh, wait a second, I said, Let's make this a game. I say... As I said, Okay, so we're gonna do three rounds as we sing the song, and the group that can keep going the longest without their ball flying all over the room wins, they were so into that game, I couldn't leave that exercise, it was like... They said. 0:37:22.0 GR: Okay wait. Let's do it faster. Okay wait, what if we did it... I was just... I scored lowest on the competitor. It's not where I think at all. 0:37:31.2 JD: Yeah, me too. Me too. I mean... Not me. [laughter] 0:37:34.6 GR: But wow, did that induce the class. 0:37:37.9 JD: I have some deep seated trauma from one year in little league baseball... And when I was in sixth grade, it was traumatic. And so that did me in with competition. But it's amazing how you saw the impact just immediately. Just a little tweak of the game... Or the experience into a game, and then what happened was the student started coming up with ways to level it up. 0:38:02.8 JD: One of the things I talk about a lot in my work with just... I call it level up. And it's just taking something just one little step from where it is to an upward space. And 99% of the time those kids were... Once you give them that freedom and permission to know that they don't have to do exactly as you told them, that they can level it up just a little bit... That's what happens. 0:38:29.8 JD: And they had ownership of it then... It sounds... They said, "Let us do this. Let's try this." And thankfully, you had sense enough to give them that freedom instead of being like, "No, you have to do what I say." You know... Of course, you have to have safety parameters and make sure they're staying on content, but within that parameter, you gave them the freedom that they needed. And it sounds like... You said you couldn't pry them away from it. 0:38:53.4 LS: So how does a teacher, no matter the age that they teach or the subject that they teach... How do you create this culture? How do you get your classroom and your students to a place where everyone feels safe and free to play?  0:39:08.7 JD: Well, it starts prior to even the first day of school... Or the first day of the semester, whatever you're doing. It has to be... And this is why we wrote the follow-up, the playful life. It has to be a part of who you are to some extent. I don't think you can manufacture this. I don't think that you can force it. I think it's something that has to be... You're willing to cultivate it in your own personal life... Daily practice. 0:39:42.3 JD: I will be honest with you, there are some days I am not in a playful mood... Okay... That just happens. We're just in a grumpy mood... Maybe something happened that upset us. That is where you have to dig deep into your own personal play history and who you are as a playful person to get through that in your... So it can come into your teaching. If not, it's gonna crash and burn. You're gonna let that mood get into your classroom. 0:40:08.7 JD: So I think a lot of just personal practice is the first thing that you have to do. Second of all, I think that it's something that you model to your students on a daily basis. And it doesn't have to be just in the way that you deliver content, it's the way that you... If you teach at... The age group where kids have to line up to leave the room... Just in the way they line up. Create a playful way for them to do that. Create a playful way for materials to be passed out. 0:40:41.8 JD: One of the things I loved in my classroom was to create a playlist geared to students in the classroom... Ask them what their favorite song is... Okay. Ask them what their favorite songs, and then create a playlist of just their favorite songs. And whenever their favorite song comes on, that is three minutes for them to dance, to wiggle, to go give their friend a high five... Whatever. It's a great way to introduce a brain break. It builds a culture of play. It gives them freedom to understand that, "Hey, those moments are coming where I'm gonna get my turn to play." And it sets the ground work for you to invite play into the other areas. 0:41:22.1 JD: So I have been in classrooms where a teacher is very strict. Sit in your seat, face the front, in your rows... And then all of a sudden they say, "Oh, now we're gonna play a game." The kids don't know what to do because they don't... They don't know if they're allowed to get into the game... Are we allowed to make noise? And the teacher's like, "Oh yeah. Yeah. Get into it. Get into it. But the teachers never invited them... Never modeled for them how to get into it. Does that make sense?  0:41:51.7 JD: You can't just flip on the switch, and all of a sudden they play... I was in a kindergarten classroom one time... This was heartbreaking to me. I was in a kindergarten classroom and I was doing this lesson with tin foil. Y'all may call it... Look at me, I'm code-switching with y'all. I said foil. It's tin 'foal'. That's the way I say it down here. Tin 'foal'. Y'all might say aluminium foil. But anyway, I was doing... Doing a lesson with foil, and I passed out a piece about a foot long to each kid. And instinctively kids should wanna touch it to make noise with it, maybe even wrinkle it up before hand. These kids were terrified and they sat there and they did... 0:42:40.1 JD: They wouldn't even touch it. Even after I gave them permission, they didn't know what to do with it. They were like, "What do you want us to do?" I was like rip it up. Ball it up. Twist it. And they were just... Kept flattening it with their hands. And one of them said, "We don't wanna mess it up." And I began to think in any other kindergarten classroom I'd been in that wouldn't happen... What was going on in that classroom was so structured. The kids were afraid to experience that. 0:43:05.3 JD: So when you think about how do you... Your question was, how do you start this in your classroom... You have to give kids the freedom that they need. Kids instinctively have this play drive in them... You can go anywhere in the world, and regardless of the kids' social status, economic status, racial status, sexual... Whatever their sex... Kids all around the world have an ability to play instinctively. But when they're in an environment where that is controlled and squashed, they're reserved. 0:43:42.4 JD: And that's what was happening in that kindergarten classroom, is that the model hasn't been set... The freedom wasn't there, and it wasn't part of the teacher's daily practice in her own life. And I knew that teacher personally, and it definitely was... The reason I was even in that room is 'cause she thought that I was just saying a bunch of hog wash and she said, "I need you to come to my room and show me. My kids can't do this." 0:44:06.4 JD: So I went down there. And she was right. They couldn't at first, but by the time I was done with them, they were making little trees and nests and birds and eggs. And we had a great lesson on where do birds go at night... And it was all focused on sculpting with tin foil while we were learning. 0:44:24.5 JD: And a great story, a year later, after that experience, I was at the grocery store... Literally across the street from the school that I had worked at... And a little girl came up to me and she said, "Are you Mr... " She was... First grade and she had a little problem with 'R'. She said, "Are you Mr. Dearybury?" I was like, "I am Mr. Dearybury." She said, "You're the bird man." I was like, "The bird man?" And she said, "Yeah. You came to my school and taught us about birds." 0:44:53.8 JD: A year later, she remembered me being in her kindergarten classroom talking to her about birds. And it's because... I'm a firm believer... It's because we had this emotional experience where we connected with the tin foil. And probably it was probably the first time they had gotten to play in a while based on their reaction there at the beginning. So... I hope that answers your question Leah. Three tip there. Personal practice, modeling and freedom for the kids to explore... And I'm gonna write that down 'cause I liked it. 0:45:31.0 DN: I do... I tell people that... I tell my students that any good thing I do as a teacher is based on me just trying to channel all of my best teachers that I had. And so I guess if you've had a teacher who was playful, then that gives you a model. And if you haven't... What do you do?  0:45:56.8 JD: Do the opposite of everything that teacher did... I don't know... You know what I think about my own teaching career. I had a... And maybe this was why I was drawn to second grade... I don't know. My second grade teacher was not great. She was... I had her the year that... Remember when the Challenger tragedy with the space shuttle... That was the year that I had her. 0:46:25.0 JD: And every second grade classroom was watching the Challenger that day. Now, we didn't know how it was gonna end up. Nobody knew what... The traumatic event that was about to happen. But our second grade class wasn't watching that day, 'cause we had work to do. She was just a mean teacher. She wouldn't call me... My initials are JED and that's how I get Jed. My name is John Edwin Dearybury III. And she refused to call me Jed. 0:46:55.1 JD: She would say if... She said to me, "If your momma wanted you to be called Jed she should have put that on your birth certificate. Now have a seat John. Have a seat." 0:47:05.2 DN: Oof. 0:47:05.7 JD: She was just horrible. Call the kids by the name they wanna go through... Let them be a part of the grade level experiences... That teacher was just... I think back on all the things that she did. She had us sitting in rows, whereas other teachers were starting to experiment with groups during that time. 0:47:22.9 JD: I mean, I get it. It was the mid-80s, so grouping wasn't exactly a popular seating at that time, but they were starting. We didn't do anything fun in her classroom. I remember there was this other teacher down the hall, you'd go by her room and she had stuff hanging from the ceiling and they were out in the hall making stuff. And what were we doing? Sitting in our desk facing the front. And I can't remember anything learning wise from second grade. So if you had a teacher like that, just do the opposite of everything she did... Just opposite. 0:47:55.9 LS: I was just gonna say, do you have any tips or any advice for teachers who face naysayers? Teachers who are inherently playful, and... I think back to when I started teaching and it was an elementary school and there were chairs and desks in the room, and I wanted them gone. And I was looked at like I had three eyes and a horn sticking out of my head. 0:48:19.2 JD: Oh yeah... Look, I have been there Leah, many, many times. I have faced the naysayers... And I'm not gonna lie. I'm not gonna pretend like, it's not difficult. Those naysayers are hard because sometimes those naysayers are teachers that you thought that you loved and respected in the profession. They are people who've been doing it for a long time, so there's definitely a... I always give credence to those who have been teaching longer than me. But I also know that teaching is very evolutionary and that it changes over time, because society changes over time. 0:48:58.2 JD: Kids today are not the same in many ways as 50 years ago, but in many ways, they are... So we have to be evolutionary in our teaching so we can reach the students that we have. And so it's hard to face the naysayers. But I will tell you that's why... If you read the book, I wrote the specific section on the excuses that we have. And one of the excuses was my admins won't like it, or my colleagues won't like it. All I can say to you is that usually naysayers respond to data. They respond to scientific research. They value those things. 0:49:42.9 JD: So carry this book around with you everywhere you go, highlight it and mark it up... Put tabs on it, so you'll know exactly where to flip when somebody says something... There's a specific story in the book where I talk about an instructional coach coming to watch a lesson that I was doing... A sample lesson... A Skype in the classroom lesson... Where we Skyped with an Arctic expert... A Penguin expert who was in an Antarctica. Her name's Jean Pennycook. 0:50:17.5 JD: And it was... Amazing experience. We spent a whole hour with Jean, learning about penguins on Antarctica. And the very first thing that instructional coach said to me when we walked out of that room... She said, "You know at our school, we like to focus on the standards and penguins aren't really standards for third grade." And I said, "No. But this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this." I rattled off like 10 different standards that we had covered during that experience, but she was so fixated on penguins that she forgot of all the other things that we were doing. So I think in order for you to respond to the naysayers, you have to be aware of what you're doing. Don't try... If you know that naysayers are around you, don't try to fly by the seat of your pants. Arm yourselves with knowledge. 0:51:06.9 JD: Know what's best for your kids. Know what's best for their curriculum. Know that you are doing a great job in spite of what they say. Because sometimes those people look with a very narrow lens. And I hate to say this, but sometimes administrators look with a very narrow lens. They look at their checklist and not at this big holistic picture. And because they didn't say two or three things on their checklist, maybe they think, "Oh, well, that teacher didn't do what she was supposed to," or he was supposed to. And I think if you are armed with the knowledge of what you're doing, then that's gonna help fight the naysayers. 0:51:41.2 JD: Another thing too, I'm gonna tell you... You have to ignore some of the naysayers. I don't know if you all have read on Ron Clark's book, Move Your Bus. Have y'all ever heard of that book? Do you know who Ron Clark is? You should look... Look Ron Clark up. He has an amazing school in Atlanta. He's got a book called Move Your Bus, and he talks about in that book how there are different types of teachers. 0:52:06.7 JD: Some of them are go-getters. They're the ones... Think of the bus being like a Flintstones bus with everybody's feet dangling at the bottom... You know... And it's those feet that are moving the bus forward. There are some feet that run, there are some feet that walk, but there are some teachers that have their feet up in the seat and they're not giving anything to the bus. And guess what, they're never gonna put their feet down. 0:52:31.5 JD: And every time you try to get them to put your feet... Put their feet down to power the bus, you are taking energy away from yourself, from your students from the colleagues who are invested and you're giving them too much attention to put their feet down when they've already made up their mind... They're not part of it anyway, and they don't wanna be. 0:52:49.6 JD: And so there comes a time where you have to just ignore some of the naysayers and say, "You know what, the evidence is here. I'm gonna go this path, you do your path, and I wish you well." Because if not, the naysayers can suck life out of you and take away from your playful life. Trust me. I have to tune out naysayers a lot. They comfort me sometimes on Twitter, and I just have to just put my ear muffs on and tune them out. 0:53:18.3 GR: Jed, I have to say, as you were talking about the checklists I recognize a bit of myself in that description. That I often think, "Oh gosh, I really have to get through these things." What would you say to someone like me... I want to involve more play in my teaching, but I'm really worried about losing out on time to cover everything I need to cover. 0:53:39.2 JD: Well, I'm gonna free you up right here. Give yourself grace and give yourself time. Grace and time helps a lot because this is not something that you can go into your classroom tomorrow, Greg, and totally upend everything that you've done for decades. And not only that you've done for decades, but probably... Like you said earlier, that has been modeled for you by your teachers. I would gather to say that most of you when you were in your higher ed institution as a pre-service teacher, you were taught in a very traditional way, how to be a teacher. 0:54:13.8 JD: So we're undoing a lot of years and decades of training. So give yourself some grace there. But also give yourself some time. Because what will happen as you become a more playful teacher, you will begin to look at those things that you have to do with new eyes, with new lens of, "Hmm, maybe I could try this to make that more playful." Right now, you might have to keep doing it like you've been doing it. But over time, as your playful spirit grows... We talk about it in the book, the playful mindset. 0:54:48.8 JD: The playful mindset begins to grow and helps you start to see things in your everyday life that can become more playful. A prime example of how the playful mindset grows... Used to when I would come on a podcast like this in the morning and I would get my tea ready... I would be frantically trying to get my tea ready, but now I've turned it into a game. I know exactly how many seconds I have from the time I close the curing lid until the time tea is ready. So I know that I can come in here, get my computer turned on... Log in... And I've got my timer set. I'm like, James Bond around the house. 0:55:26.8 JD: That didn't happen at the beginning... To make the connection to what you're saying... As a teacher, I fully understand that we all have those checklists of things that we have to get done. Don't try to flip your classroom completely upside down and just play all day every day at the onset. You have to give yourself grace and time to grow into this, to understand this. 0:55:53.7 JD: Think about your first year of teaching. Were you good your first year of teaching? No. Nobody was. Anybody who says they were... They're lying. They don't even know... Maybe a third year teacher would say, "Oh yeah, I was so good." They don't know what they don't know yet. Give it 10 years and then look back and you'll be like, "Oh my God, how did any of those kids survive my class, right? But you did the best you could. And over time, you have grown in that practice. Playful teaching is the same way. It takes time for you to begin... Like if you're looking... If you're an algebra teacher and you have to teach the quadratic formula... I don't even know if I said that right. Quadratic formula... Equation. I don't know. 0:56:34.0 JD: I taught elementary school. Anyway, whatever you're having to teach, you may have a very set way that you have to teach it for now, but as that playful mindset grows, you'll begin to look at it in a different way and maybe come up with an idea that who knows is revolutionary, and you put it on YouTube and go viral, and everybody wants to copy you, and the next thing you know, people are inviting you to your school to teach that playful way of how to teach that quadratic formula equation, whatever. Time and grace, Greg. Time and Grace. 0:57:04.4 GR: Another thing I've started to realize is the things that if I teach them in a very traditional way, if I ask the students about those two weeks later, they don't remember them. It's like we never did that. 0:57:17.8 JD: They don't know anything, they don't know. They don't know. Look, I remember more about the American Revolution from a rap that my student teacher wrote than I ever learned in any textbook, any class that I ever took about US History. Because she talked about the Stamp Act, the Tea Act, she talked about all those things, and she wrote it to a rap. And the rap was so good, then we put it in our class musical that we did, our grade level Musical, we taught it to the other kids, it's just... I don't know, you've got to think of non-traditional ways to deliver the content, you've got to. Because look, you're competing... As much as I hate it, you're competing with YouTube and TikTok, and look, I think... Look, if you really wanna be a great teacher, figure out a way to put every bit of your content into a TikTok. I'm serious. Figure out a way to put all of your content into a TikTok. Your kids will nail the test, I promise, if you can figure out... 'cause that's where they're at. That's where they're at. They're swiping through those TikToks, those reels. If you could figure out how to... Now, you don't have to really put it on TikTok unless you'd want to, but if you could figure out how to deliver look and just those little bits. 0:58:37.4 JD: That's where the minds are, give me little bits, little chucks. And guess what? TikTok is playful. 'cause there's dancing going on. There's this, the fun ones where the little things pop up on the screen. [vocalization] 0:58:51.3 JD: I hate that people aren't seeing me 'cause I'm giving some really good motions here. [laughter] 0:58:56.5 GR: We can put some clips up, actually. It might be... 0:59:00.0 JD: It might... I mean, please put some clips up because I do better in person. People are gonna listen to my voice and they're gonna be like, Lord, he's just a southern redneck from South Carolina, he didn't... I'm better when people can see me. [laughter] 0:59:15.8 GR: That's great. You mentioned the playful mindset. Early on in the playful classroom, you quoted Dr. Anthony Benedet, who identified imagination, sociability, humor, spontaneity and wonder as elements of that mindset, I highlighted that and I wrote... I wrote in my book. I wrote this is a recipe for play, 'cause it really... I just... I... 0:59:38.9 JD: It is. It is a recipe for play that came from his book, playful intelligence, it is a recipe for play, because each of those components is so vital to the playful spirit and in the playful mindset. So the more you cultivate those specifically like spontaneity in the classroom invites playfulness. I'll give you a classic example of what spontaneity in the classroom looks like. Several years ago, I was... Someone nominated me for the Presidential Award for excellence in math and science teaching. You all mentioned that at the beginning of the show, I got to meet Obama, so you know that I won the award. But as part of the award, I had to record a 45-minute video of my teaching. 45 minutes in second grade, it might as well have been a marathon y'all. I'm just telling you, that was an incredible amount of time, and I was like, There's no way there's that it's gonna be 45 minutes of me lecturing from the board, obviously. So there was about five minutes of that and then I let them go with their Lego Robotics, they had a challenge that they were doing. This was actually when I taught third grade. 1:00:45.4 JD: And so they were doing their robotics, doing their robotics, and right in the middle of the lesson, there was this huge splash in the pond that was right outside of our classroom window. We had one of those ornamental goldfish ponds that had been sponsored by our PTA and there was this huge splash, and I'll never forget it. One of the kids said, "Mr. Dearybury, it's a bullfrog, it's the bullfrog." And we knew that there was a bullfrog that had been living in the pond because we often heard him splash going into the water, and we never... So we would run over there and never saw him, but this particular time he was jumping out of the water. So right there in the middle of the video, all the kids leave their robots, run across the room to... They're all glued to the window, and I had this moment where I was like, I can freak out, I can get them back on task. Or I can be spontaneous and we can roll with it. And this particular group, I knew what they had learned in second grade about the amphibians, and so we just had a little pop-up lesson about amphibians right there at the window, we went through the characteristics of amphibian, we sang our amphibian song, and then we went back to our robots. 1:02:06.2 JD: Now, we did have to repair one of the robots that got trampled when all the kids ran to the window, but every single judge for that award, on my feedback, every single judge, there was 10 of them, I think, commented on how the spontaneity of that moment added to my classroom experience, and that was a very playful moment. I could have... My second grade teacher would be like, "Get away from that window. Get back to your work... And that's what a lot of teachers would have done, that's what they would have done because they were so focused on the goal of the robotics lesson that they missed that spontaneity. What else happened at that window? There was some wonder, kids were in awe of the... And yeah. I'm telling you that was the biggest bull frog I've ever seen. I'm trying to think of something in the real world, but like, I'm showing you all about how big it was. It was as big as my head. It was as big around as my head, it was the biggest bullfrog I'd ever seen, and he sat there forever and just let us look at it and it was just amazing. There was... It was just a beautiful moment of play, and it captures like what you said, the recipe for play. I like that, I like that you named it that. 1:03:22.2 GR: This is great, I feel like it gives me a lot to think about. Maybe just one sort of last curve ball question, as I was thinking back on my own Music Education Training and Educational Psychology, I think about reading Pasulotsi and POJ and Ria Montessori and it seems like all of them kind of come from this mindset, and this is not a new thing. 1:03:51.0 JD: It is absolutely. 1:03:53.2 GR: Why do you think it hasn't taken over?  1:03:57.3 JD: Well, I don't wanna go to the canned answer, but it's the right answer, testing. The testing culture of our country squashed this. I think if you look back, the early childhood years really really embraced that POJ and Montessori life, even though now we call it a Montessori classroom or a Montessori school. Back in the day, I think a lot of what happened, and when I say back in the day, I mean when I was a kid, and before... I was a kid in the '80s. My kindergarten classroom was very playful. I remember the kitchen center and the Block Center, and the alphabet Center, and the Play door Center. I remember those things and a lot of that has been taken out of kindergarten, but... And the reason that those upper grades are even more fearful of the playful classroom is that we have developed this culture where test scores are the only thing that matter, and they think that the only way to get those test scores is to cram it all in there. You cram it all in there. Cram, cram, cram, cram, cram. It kills me when I hear a teacher say, Oh, I have to cover this. You are not a coverer, you are a teacher, your job is to teach that not to cover it. But what they're doing is operating on that checklist that's based on the standards, which leads to the test. 1:05:21.0 JD: And I get it. We're under a lot of pressure as teachers, so I'm not... I'm not faulting those teachers, but the question was, why has it not caught on? It's because somewhere between when POJ and Montessori and all that wrote their pedagogical beliefs, we've interjected it with this testing culture, and I don't know that they knew we were going that route. 1:05:46.1 JD: I don't think any of us did, but even in the '80s, I remember taking a BSAP test, we took a test called CTBS test. We used to have these rallies where they would psych us up for the test, you can do it, you can do it, you can beat that test. And it was ridiculous that we did this. So I think that's the number one answer. Number two, our American culture has a lot to do with it. Our American culture is very much work, work, work, work, work, work, work. And anything that's not, work, work, work, work, work cannot be... Lead you to success. I think that's why a lot of older people, and I'm gonna lump myself into that 'cause my generation is kind of becoming an older generation. I'm mid-40s now, that's why they look down on kids who make the TikToks and make the Instagram posts because they don't understand it, they think, Oh, they're just playing. 1:06:47.2 JD: But man, some of these kids have developed multi-million dollar businesses because of... They're just being silly and playing on their Instagram and their TikToks. I think some of these old people are jealous is what it's really... They can't make the millions of dollars. Right? I think our American culture has really distorted what play is and its benefits, I think if you look at cultures that there's always these studies that come out, or cultures that are the happiest around the world, the cultures that are happiest are the ones that don't focus so much on the work, work, work, work work. They have a good balance. And I think one of the ways for us to find that balance here at the beginning is by infusing more play into our work, that's why we want the playful classroom, that's why the playful life is coming. We want you to be playful everywhere, not just in little isolated pods, but we want you to learn that play can happen anywhere at any time with anybody. We... In the next book, we even talk about how you can play with strangers at a coffee shop. One of my favorite things to do is just look at a stranger in the coffee shop and throw up my rock, paper, scissors. 1:07:53.7 JD: Just throw it up, and... Rock, paper, scissors shoot. And sometimes you might have to do it two or three times before they catch on, but I promise you, if you do it, nobody can turn it down. Nobody can turn it down. Even the grumpiest old curmudgeon of a man if he knows the game, he is gonna throw up a rock... He's gonna play with you, I promise. Next time you're at a coffee shop, give it a try. Leah, I know it's a little scary to think about, you're going to have to... Look, you're gonna have to be vulnerable. 1:08:24.6 LS: You saw my face. 1:08:25.9 JD: I saw you, I saw you. You're gonna have to be a little vulnerable there, remember spontaneity part of the recipe, maybe just maybe just try it at a faculty meeting then. If you're sitting at a faculty meeting and just look, make eye contact, look. And this is all you have to do. You don't even have to bet, you don't have to go... All you have to do is like this, and then go and then mouths go, "One, two, three." Just mouth that one, two, three and then, "One, two, three." And then see how many times you win. Oh, let's make it fun, see how many times until you get caught. And then when you get a caught say, "Hey. Everybody, lets play rock, paper, scissors." A little bit of play even in the faculty meeting. Right. What do you think, David, are they gonna fire you if you do that?  1:09:05.2 DN: Possibly. 1:09:06.4 JD: You're an adjunct, you don't have to go, have to go. Wait, do you have to go to faculty meetings David?  1:09:11.6 DN: No, I don't. I don't. It's the blissful perk. 1:09:12.8 JD: Yeah, that's the best part of being an ad job. It is a perk. It is a perk. They pay us pennies, but I'll take those pennies so I don't have to go to that faculty meeting. 1:09:26.6 GR: Chad, this has been just wonderful. If people wanna... Sorry, if people wanna read the book or follow you, where can they find you?  1:09:35.7 JD: Well, I'm on social media, @Mr.Dearybury is my handle on Twitter, Instagram. Those are the two I'm most active on. I try to make TikToks, I'm trying to get better at it. But I'm not consistent, I think. But TikTok is another platform that you could connect with me with. Mr.Dearybury dot com is my consulting website where you can read about the consulting options I have, you can also order a book straight from me on the website. Of course, you can order on Amazon. You can pre-order the playful life on Amazon. I haven't got the pre-order up on my website yet, but should be soon, we'd love for you to order... If you order it straight from me, you get an autograph copy and you get some stickers. Amazon and... Amazon Abaser's, they don't have all that, and you just get a... Just a random copy that's sitting in some warehouse. But from me, you get one filled with love and my signature and Julie's and find a little sticker for your water bottle. Also if you wanna learn more about the playful classroom and see what resources we have out there, theplayfulclassroom.com is full of resources. 1:10:41.6 JD: Also, I wanna mention this, Julie and I do have an online course that goes with our book, it's through the company advancement courses. If you go to advancement courses, we have a... You type in Jen Julie in the search, type in The playful classroom. The official title of the course, I think is Let's Play, creating a playful classroom. You can get renewal credit or you can get grad credit, and you interact with Julie and I through the process we're your assessors. And it's a lot of fun. Our students are giving us rave reviews, and we would love to see some of you pop into the course there. 1:11:22.6 GR: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining us. This has really been a playful fun hour together. 1:11:29.3 JD: Yeah, it's been a lot of fun for me too. A great way to start my day. And let me tell you all this too, I didn't mention this, but a couple of months ago, I started a little YouTube series called a Dearybury of a day. It is where you join me on a zoom call, just me and one other person, and we start our day with a moment of play, it's about 10 or 15 minutes. I come up with a game or an arts experience, or a dance or something that we can do together via Zoom. And then I record it and drop it out there in the world, and you can find it on my YouTube channel, which is also Mr. Dearybury. But if anybody out there wants to be a guest on my show and start your day with a moment of play, if you go to my Instagram, there's a link there where you can sign up for a date. I start as early as 6:00 AM. And my last one, is at 9:00... Yeah, I do look... And people have signed up for 6:00 AM. We get up and it's still dark outside, and I always show my phone what time it is so that people will know that we're starting our day with moment play. But my first recording... I record Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays. 1:12:39.2 JD: First recording is at 6:00, the last one's at 9:00, and I have 30-minute blocks that you can sign up for. So I would love to start the day with a moment of play, if anybody's out there wants to join me, I'd be happy to have you. 1:12:52.1 GR: Awesome. Very cool. Did we miss anything that we should have talked about?  1:12:57.1 JD: This was fantastic. I thought you all had some great questions... This was so much fun, thank you for allowing me the opportunity. I'm so tickled that you reached out and that the book is resonating with you all. And if you all ever need me again, let me know. 1:13:14.9 GR: Thank you. 1:13:15.9 LS: Thank you. [music] 1:13:20.5 LS: Notes from the this stuff is produced by utheory.com. 1:13:22.1 GR: UTheory is the most advanced online learning platform for music theory. 1:13:26.8 LS: With video lessons, individualized practice and proficiency testing. UTheory has helped more than 100000 students around the world, master the fundamentals of Music Theory, rhythm And ear training. 1:13:38.1 GR: Create your own free teacher account at utheory.com/teach. [music]

Hexachordal Solfege & Theory Pedagogy Trends with Megan Long

Dr. Megan Kaes Long of Oberlin Conservatory joins us to talk about the earliest system of Western solfege, hexachordal solmization, and recent trends in music theory pedagogy. Links: Dr. Megan Kaes Long's Oberlin Faculty Page Long, Megan Kaes. Hearing Homophony: Tonal Expectations at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century Early Music Sources: Solmization in the 16th Century  Smith, Anne. The Performance of 16th Century Music Orlando DiLasso's Novae aliquot et ante hac non ita usitatae cantiones suavissimae Show Notes: 00:00:20 Introductions 00:01:45 What is hexachordal solmisation? 00:04:10 The pattern of the hexachord 00:05:35 Mutation -- linking hexachords together to melodies beyond a range of a hexachord 00:06:30 Singing a scale with hexachordal solmisation 00:08:15 Relationship between mutation and points of imitation in Rennaisance music 00:10:00 Solmisation in Renaissance musical pedagogy, and the connection to improvisation 00:11:05 The Gamut 00:12:00 Renaissance names of notes, like "C sol fa ut" 00:15:40 The relationship of letter names and hexachordal solfege, and the question of octave equivalence 00:16:30 The Guidonian Hand 00:18:53 The "Do a Deer" of the Renaissance 00:20:40 The interconnectedness of the history of solfege and of staff notation 00:21:30 How do we get the other accidentals, besides B-flat, that aren't in the gamut? 00:24:50 What is musica ficta? 00:28:25 How does thinking in hexachordal solmisation change how you hear Renaissance music? 00:30:15 Puns and jokes in hexachordal solmisation 00:35:30 The intersection of movable and fixed solfege in hexachordal solmisation 00:37:00 Teaching and learning hexachordal solmisation 00:41:50 If we want to learn the basics of hexachordal solmisation, where should we start? 00:42:45 How is the field of music theory adapting to the changing world of music, and a desire to broaden the music that students are able to understand and analyze? 00:46:45 Oberlin's reframing of the music theory curriculum: Rhythm, timbre, melody, harmony and bass. 00:51:15 How might we refocus the music theory teaching we're doing at the high school level? 00:53:17 Do we have to sacrifice part writing for this? 00:55:53 Transforming the first-year theory curriculum from being a weed-out course, to become an entry point and gateway into learning music. 00:57:30 Wrapping up -- plus several conferences to be aware of Transcript: [music] 0:00:03.9 Theme Song: These are the notes from the staff, where we talk about our point of view and we share the things we're gonna do and we're hope you're learning something new, 'cause the path to mastering theory begins with you. 0:00:21.1 David Newman: Welcome to Notes from the Staff, a podcast from the creators of uTheory, where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education. 0:00:35.3 Greg Ristow: Hi, I'm Greg Ristow, founder of uTheory and Associate Professor of Conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. 0:00:42.2 DN: And I'm David Newman, I teach at James Madison University and I write code and create content for uTheory. We have two topics for today, hexachordal solmization and recent trends in music theory pedagogy and with us to talk about both is Dr. Megan Kaes Long. 0:01:00.1 GR: Dr. Long is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and a scholar of vocal music in the 16th and 17th centuries. She's the recipient of the 2021 Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory, the top award for music theory book for her work Hearing Homophony: Tonal Expectations at the Turn of the 17th Century. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Music Theory and Music Theory Spectrum among others, and she's the editor of SMTV, the Society for Music Theory's video journal, we've put a link in the show notes. She's received numerous grants and fellowships including awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. Megan, thanks so much for joining us. 0:01:42.3 ML: Thanks so much for having me. It's a delight to be here. 0:01:45.9 GR: I'm really excited for both of our topics today, hexachordal solmization is something I've heard a lot about over the years but not really done, we thought it'd be fun to chat about because it's this solfège pedagogy system that has a really rich history, but that is I think not something I know. David, have you done much hexachordal solmization?  0:02:07.9 DN: I've done almost none, but I have been super interested in historical pedagogical styles and part a mentee, and when I read about the book The Solfeggio Tradition, I ordered a copy and I started to read it, and so, I've found it incredibly interesting. 0:02:26.1 ML: Yeah, one of the things I really love about hexachordal solmization is that it sounds really scary, the word sounds really scary, hexachordal solmization, and when you read about it, it sounds impossible, how would you possibly do it? But it's actually pretty simple to learn and to put together, and it was invented to teach little children how to sing, just the same reasons that we use solfège today. And it's just as accessible and just as logical and approachable as any of the other kinds of solfège systems that we already use and we already teach, and especially if like me, you're immersed in music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it is so illuminating and it really... The way they say, when you learn a new language, you start to think in a different way, I feel very much that way about singing Renaissance music using hexachordal solmization, I just hear the music differently, I make different musical connections. I feel like I have a much better understanding of how the composers and the musicians that they were writing for understood what they were doing, and that I find extremely exciting, it's like unlocking a door into the world of the Renaissance, which can be a hard place to access. 0:03:38.2 GR: So, what is hexachordal solmization? I think the only time I heard the word hexachordal, in my music theory training... [laughter] 0:03:43.9 GR: Was poly-hexachordal combinatoriality, literally like... 0:03:46.8 DN: Oh, my gosh. 0:03:47.0 GR: Crazy 20th century set theory work. We're not talking about 6-Z7 hexachords, are we? What is this?  0:03:55.2 ML: Absolutely not, it is the opposite of that in every way. So hexachordal solmization is the original kind of solfège and it dates from the Middle Ages, and it was used all the way through the Renaissance, and a hexachord just means a six-note collection, hexa, six, six notes. And so the pattern of the hexachord is ut, re, mi, fa, so, la. So just like our modern do-re-mi-fa-so-la, except we use ut instead of do, and the idea in the Middle Ages was that the notes that were available to sing, the scale, the gamut, you could make that six-note pattern in three different places, so you could make it on F, using a B-flat, ut, re, mi, fa, so, la and you could make it on C with no B, ut, re, mi, fa, so, la. And then you could make it on G, I'm not in the right key, ut, re, mi, fa, so, la with a B natural. And so you have this one pattern and it can only be replicated at three places in the gamut, and those three places are important and distinct because the middle of our hexachord is our half step between mi and fa. And so the hexachord is always helping us orient to where the half step is. And so just like modern solmization helps us figure out where our half steps are, just exactly the same principle is supporting hexachords, just a little more flexible than modern solmization because the way the scale is constructed in the Renaissance is a little bit different and a little more flexible than the modern scale. 0:05:35.2 ML: The other thing that's important to understand about hexachords is that obviously most melodies have more than six notes in them. [chuckle] 0:05:41.7 ML: Right? So the way it works is that you do what's called mutation, you mutate from one hexachord to another hexachord when you're extending beyond the range of your single hexachord, and it's by linking these hexachords together that you can fill out and sing a whole tune. 0:06:03.2 GR: So if we wanted to just sing what we think of now as a major scale, how could we do that since we don't have ti?  0:06:11.3 ML: Yeah, I think... Actually, I think the minor scales are a better way of demonstrating what's interesting about hexachords. Do you have a D? Could I get a D for the here?  0:06:19.3 DN: Yup. 0:06:20.2 ML: Okay, so say we wanted to sing a D Dorian scale, so all the white notes on the piano starting on D, so D, we're gonna start in the C hexachord. So D is gonna be re in the C hexachord, so I'm singing, re, mi, fa, so, la. And when we get to la, we're out of notes, so we need to mutate and since we're headed to B natural, we need the G hexachord 'cause that's the one with B natural in it. So we'll sing re, mi, fa, so, re, mi, fa, so. 0:06:52.5 ML: And that takes us right up our scale, notice that the low "Di-Re" and the high "Di-So" are actually different syllables, so we don't necessarily have octave equivalents in the syllables that we use, but the mutation from the C-hexachord to the G-hexachord makes sure that our half-step is in the right place. Now, say we wanted to sing a D-Aeolian scale, so we're gonna use a B-flat instead of a B-natural, then we need to mutate to the F-hexachord, instead of the G-hexachord, and that's gonna put our half-step in a different place, so we would sing... What would we sing? "Re-Mi-Fa-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La... Re-Mi-Fa-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La... " so we mutate just a teeny, tiny, bit earlier from the C-hexachord into the F-hexachord, and then that ensures that our half-step is between A and B flat, and we get our D Aeolian scale instead of our D Dorian scale. And this is useful because tunes built on D in the Renaissance will use both B natural and B flat, so once you get up to G A, you can kind of go either direction, depending on what your tune is doing. 0:08:02.3 DN: I noticed in both of those, that the text, as it were, of the scale kind of repeated itself. You started, when you mutated, it began with Re-Mi-Fa-So each time. Is that significant in terms of like... We think everyone starts music off having these points of imitation at different pitch levels, is that significant in the solfege system, that you sort of hear where those possible places of repetition are when you solfege?  0:08:29.8 ML: Absolutely. And this is one of the most fun things about singing Renaissance music on solmization. It doesn't work every time, but often when you have a motive and then it's imitated at the fourth or the fifth above or below, the motive will have the same solmization in every hexachord. So we might sing "Re-La-So-Fa-Mi-Re" and then another voice will sing "Re-La-So-Fa-Mi-Re" [laughter] so then you can hear these connections and then eventually, often, another voice will come in at a new pitch level and we'll introduce a new accidental. Then we get, "Re-La-So-Fa-Mi-Re" so the motivation for the introduction of, say, a B flat or something will come from the solmization, and this desire to maintain the solmization, and Renaissance music theorists even had a special name for imitation where the solmization stayed exactly the same. They called imitation that was diatonic, so where the half-steps might move around, they called that imitazione, and then imitation where the half-steps were exact and the solmization was exactly the same, they called fuga, the precursor to our word fuga. Yeah, and they're very insistent about this, and the treatises is like "No, no, no, no, no." 0:09:50.2 ML: "People said that This was fuga, but the syllables change, and fuga the syllables have to stay the same." So there's this real emphasis on how you're solmising, how you're singing the syllables, what their names are, that shapes what kind of imitation is happening. 0:10:06.4 GR: And obviously this was meant to teach singers, but I gather that it's also meant to teach other kinds of musicians, so that musicians were taught through singing. Is that fair to say?  0:10:18.9 ML: Absolutely, and it's important to remember that before anyone does any composing in the Renaissance, what they're doing is improvising. And so little children are taught to improvise pretty complex polyphonic music, and when a composer is notating music, is writing music out, what they're really doing is writing out a complex improvisation, and so having these patterns that repeat themselves in predictable ways is a really helpful strategy for successfully improvising and then successfully composing complex polyphony because you don't have to memorize as many combinations when you know that those combinations can be transposed by fifth without changing anything about the way your counterpoint is structured. 0:11:01.4 DN: If I'm tracking this right, you have access to B flat and B natural in this system, but what about all of my other black notes?  0:11:12.2 ML: This is a great question, and it's a way in which the background scale of Renaissance music is pretty different from the background scale of contemporary music. Renaissance music is built on what's called the gamut, and if you've heard like, "Oh, we're gonna run the gamut," that comes from solmization. And gamut is a kind of portmanteau of gamma-ut. Gamma being the lowest note of the scale, and ut being the solmization syllable for that note. So the Renaissance gamut, it's the set of notes that are considered diatonic in the Renaissance, so more like a major scale or something than all of the keys on the piano, and it starts from the G at the bottom of the bass clef staff, and it goes up to the E at the top of the treble clef staff, and you hear theorists will say something like, "Well, the reason that's the end of the gamut is because anything below that will sound like a low grumbling, and anything above that will sound like a kind of constrained shrieking." So our gamut is constrained in range and register, and the gamut includes what we think of as all the white notes on the piano and also B flat. 0:12:21.0 ML: So like in the example of the Dorian versus C Aeolian scale, B natural and B flat are both available pretty much all of the time. And if you've seen the complicated names for notes like "A-La-Mi-Re" or "C-Sol-Fa-Ut," what those names are, that's how Renaissance musicians named the notes, they're just the letter name for the note, and then all the possible solmization syllables that that note could have. [laughter] 0:12:54.5 GR: So, I wish... I'm sorry... [laughter] 0:12:54.9 ML: Greg is making a face like he's in awe right now. [laughter] 0:12:56.1 DN: I'm just thinking of there's that Shakespeare, fa me Bianca. There's these places where you hear this in Shakespeare, and I just thought it was a bunch of notes, but it's like one note?  0:13:06.8 ML: Yes, if we find that passage, I'd be happy to parse it for you, to construe it for you, which is the language he uses. Yeah, so if you wanna dig that up, that might be fun to look at. 0:13:15.8 DN: I think it's maybe "Be me Bianca," what is the line from?  0:13:20.5 ML: She's also conjugating Latin verbs or something. 0:13:23.2 GR: There was also a composer who used the pseudonym Alamire, remember that correctly. 0:13:28.8 ML: Yes, and so Alamire is like A-la-mi-re, so the note A is la in the C hexachord, mi in the F hexachord and re in the G hexachord and this composer Alamire famously would sign his name by just drawing a base clef and the note A. [chuckle] 0:13:47.5 ML: Because if you saw that, you would say A-la-mi-re, that was the name of the note. 0:13:51.6 GR: Awesome, so that was not a pseudonym? It was a real name or was it a pseudonym?  0:13:55.6 ML: I think that was his real name, I don't know for sure, but that's just the sort of... There's a lot of puns that are possible using solmization, and that's... It's I think really indicative of the way musicians in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance thought. Just like we see the note E-flat and we say that's an E-flat, and sometimes students will say, "That's an E," and we're like, "No, no, no, no, the name of the note is E-flat, and that's important." The note A was A-la-mi-re, there was no just A in the Renaissance, it was important that you used all of that note name and all of the syllables and that was one of the ways you learned to navigate through the gamut as a choir boy. Maybe I should kind of restate what I said before about the gamut and talk a little bit about the Guidonian Hand. 0:14:43.9 DN: Oh, yeah. 0:14:44.5 GR: Sure. 0:14:45.5 ML: 'Cause I know Greg's now hunting for Bianca talking about... [laughter] 0:14:48.6 DN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Be my Bianca right, is the... I found it's Act 3, Scene 1 of Shrew but... [laughter] 0:14:58.6 ML: Oh, here we go. Gamut, I am the ground of all accord, A re, to plead Hortensio's passion. B mi, Bianca, take him for thy Lord. C fa ut, that loves with all affection. D sol re, One clef, two notes have I. E la mi, Show pity or I die. Call you this gamut? Tut, I like it not. Old fashions please me best; I am not so nice to change true rules for old inventions. So what she is doing is learning the gamut the same way a child would learn it, which is you say Gam-ut, A-re, B-mi, C-fa-ut, D-sol-re, E-la-mi. And so she's just learning the first six notes of the gamut and just simply saying their full names in that passage. 0:15:44.9 DN: Wow, so letter names also were a thing. 0:15:49.7 ML: Yes, absolutely, and one of the interesting things that comes up a lot in terms of hexachordal solmization, is there such a thing as octave equivalence in this system. Since you remember when I sang my scales from D to D, D at the bottom was re and D at the top was sol or la, depending on which scale I was in, but they are both D-la-sol-re. So there is that octave equivalence built into the way the notes are named in the gamut, even while they might be solmised in different ways depending on what octaves you're singing in, or sometimes if you're singing in an ensemble, you'll be singing octave Ds say, and we'll be singing different syllables on the same note but somebody will be singing an A that harmonises with it, and that will be the same syllable as something that we're hearing in another voice. 0:16:38.6 GR: So, was this the first version of solfeggian western music?  0:16:41.9 ML: Yeah, so it was and it's the predecessor obviously to our modern solfège. Ut has changed into do, and we have ti now, which is really useful, but it was invented for the same reasons that we use modern solmization. So we don't exactly know the origins of the solmization system, but it's been attributed to Guido of Arezzo who was a monk, and he was active in the early 11th century, he died in the year 1033, and he had... One of his responsibilities as a monk was teaching chant to choir boys, and if you're a monk in the Middle Ages, you sing chant all day and you sing the entire Liber Usualis every year, so you sing thousands and thousands and thousands of chants, and you learn them all by ear and you remember them all because you're in a culture that's steeped in memory. And Guido got frustrated with how time-consuming it was to teach all of this repertory to choir boys and so he came up with this system to make it more efficient to teach them new chant. 0:17:51.6 ML: And so the idea was I will teach these children this pattern ut-re-mi-fa-sol-la, and then I will point to those different notes and then they'll be able to sing those notes back to me, and the way he pointed to them was he drew all of the notes or he would imagine all of the notes in a spiral on the palm of your hand. So you've probably seen these diagrams where you see a hand and a million little letters and note names and things and clefs and all sorts of things written on hand, and the idea was that you would hold up your hand for the choir boys and you would point to whichever joint represented the specific note they were supposed to sing, and then they would sing that note back to you. And the way Guido taught them how the relationships between the notes were, where the half steps and whole steps were, was the same way we teach children now, which is he used a song like doe a deer, a female deer. 0:18:51.0 ML: His song was a chant that he composed called Ut queant laxis but it was the same idea, Ut queant laxīs, Resonāre fibrīs, Mīra gestōrum, so exactly the same idea, ut, re, mi, fa, so, la, each line was one of the notes. And so he used that as a reference and then was able to extrapolate outwards from that with his students to teach them chants, and it's very similar to using solfège hand signs today like we often do in the classroom. It's not a... 0:19:26.1 DN: And... Oop, go ahead. 0:19:26.9 ML: Oh yeah, go ahead, sorry, Greg. 0:19:27.9 DN: As you said, so Ut queant if I remember, 'cause when I took Renaissance Counterpoint in grad school, assignment number one was to memorise Ut queant and to sing it back. [laughter] 0:19:38.4 DN: And if I recall, it doesn't ever leave those first six notes, that first hexachord, is that right? There are no mutations in it?  0:19:45.7 ML: That's right, and this is how you teach solmization to children, and this is how I teach solmization to my college students too, is you start with tunes that live in one hexachord and you get comfortable, and then you add a single mutation. So you add tunes that start in your main hexachord and then just occasionally mutate upwards by one hexachord. And then you add B-flats and B naturals to introduce a little more complication. And then maybe you add something that will also mutate down below, so you kind of gradually add complexity and add mutations as you go, until each mutation becomes kind of second nature. 'cause you can't... When you're singing on hexachords, it's not like you have access to every possible syllable, every possible moment. There're fixed locations where you might mutate from one hexachord to another, and so it's all about kind of practicing and getting familiar with those exact locations. One more thing I wanted to say about the Guidonian hand and Ut queant laxis is that, it's not a coincidence that the history of staff notation coincides pretty much exactly with the history of solmization. 0:20:55.5 ML: 'cause what's happening in the 11th century is a shift from an entirely oral tradition, where music notation is just a mnemonic device to help remind you, "Wait, which chant was this?" So you've probably seen neumes, unheightened neumes and heightened neumes, which are just kind of squiggles that tell you the contour of your chant. This is the period when, all of a sudden, we have the invention of the five-line staff or the four-line staff and the clef, and these more precise ways for notating the exact locations of half and whole steps. So we have to, if we're gonna have a notation that's exact like that, we also have to have a system for understanding how to read that notation, and hexachordal solmization goes hand-in-hand with staff notation for that reason. 0:21:44.2 DN: I am fascinated by this, I have to say. I'm getting a little caught up on this, but I'm wondering about the... Still, how do I get to the other black notes?  0:21:51.7 ML: Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot to answer your question. So there's this idea that like, "Oh well, Renaissance music, it's in the modes, it's very pure, it just doesn't use accidentals." And that's not true at all. And "Oh, the Gamut, it only has B-flat in it, so what about C-sharp? Surely there are C-sharps." So sharps and flats are different in this period. So sharps are kind of ornamental and you use them to make your cadences lovely. So say, I'm cadencing on D, I might sing, re, ut, re, and I'm gonna be singing a C-sharp there. So the rule, which is not entirely agreed upon by all Renaissance music theorists, but is more or less shared by a critical mass of them, is that when you're singing a sharp, because that's a kind of decorative ornamental thing, you don't change your solmization. 0:22:48.7 ML: So, so, fa, so, no problem, you just kinda sharp your fa, you don't say anything different. Flats though will always change your solmization. So a flat will always be fa, no matter what. So if we're hanging out in a world where we have no B-flats and all of a sudden we have a B-flat, we're gonna call that fa, and that will constitute a mutation into the F hexachord. And if we get an E-flat, same idea, we're gonna imagine what we call a fictive hexachord on B-flat. So imagine that ut is B-flat, and then that E-flat is going to be fa in our B-flat hexachord, so just basically transposing our F hexachord down by a fifth and transposing our whole Gamut down by a fifth to make that happen. 0:23:39.4 DN: Very cool. And that's where people may have heard, was it fa supra la and is that where you just put a B-flat on top of an A briefly?  0:23:51.6 ML: Yeah, more or less. So there's this principle, Una nota supra la. Semper est canenda fa, which is bad Latin for, "If you've only got one note above a la, you're gonna call it fa." And so the idea is if you're singing ut, re, mi, fa, so, la, fa, la, so, la, fa, la, so, fa, mi, you don't have to mutate all the way into your next hexachord, you're just gonna go ahead and sing that one as a fa. And that rule mostly exists to avoid a tritone from fa up to mi, 'cause what we don't want is, fa, so, la, mi, la, so, fa, so, fa, so, la, fa, la, so, fa, kind of helps us prevent that indecorum. It doesn't work every time, and it's not a hard and fast rule, but it's a good rule of thumb, it's a kind of shortcut for a mutation that accommodates really common melodic patterns in Renaissance music. 0:24:49.2 DN: And that starts to get into something that we hadn't even talked about, which is this idea of Musica ficta, in other words, we might be looking at a piece of Renaissance music and there might not be an accidental written, but we might have to sing one?  0:25:00.9 ML: Yes. And the tune Greensleeves is a really good example of this. If we see notated versions, it looks like re, fa, so, la, mi, la, so, mi, ut, something like that. And a lot of people will flatten that B at the top, re, fa, so, la, fa, la, so, mi, ut, that's using the fa supra la principle as a way of approaching that. It's not actually obvious that one or the other of those solutions is the right one or the best one, and it may be that that's a tune that could be sung both ways, because yeah, these Musica ficta accidentals, they're are non-notated accidentals that performers would have known to sing, that composers would have implied, but there's a gap between what composers might have implied and what performers might have chosen to do in practice. 0:25:57.6 GR: And there are some required ones too, like at cadences, like you were saying. 0:26:02.2 ML: Yes. Musica ficta is a whole other situation. It gets into a lot of really messy things that I don't think that your listeners are gonna wanna hear all about in excruciating detail. We tested Musica ficta in my class this week, and I think the students left with a lot more questions than they came in with, because the basic takeaway was, all of your answers are probably right and they're also probably all wrong, and we kinda lived in that space. 0:26:35.4 DN: I also feel like as a choral conductor, as a singer, every rehearsal I've been in where musica ficta ever comes up, we all leave with more questions than answers, like, "What note should I sing in measure 23?" 0:26:46.0 ML: The interesting thing about musica ficta from the perspective of modern performance is we're so used to a score giving us all the information that we need. And in the Renaissance, that wasn't necessarily the case, and it's not because this notation was deficient in some way, it's really like a feature not a bug of the notation that there's stuff left up to the performers and stuff that's left unnotated, and it's hard for us to reconstruct that now because it's been hundreds of years and a lot of that tradition has been lost. But this idea that there's only one right set of notes to sing is a very modern idea. And in the Renaissance, there are stories about people getting into fights about musica ficta in rehearsals, like, "Oh, I think this should be flat, and I don't think this should be flat," and the composer's in the room and nobody asks the composer, that's just not relevant, because there's flexibility. The same way that we wouldn't expect somebody to write out today all the rubato that you would take in a performance. That would be so unmusical to put quarter note equals 60, quarter note equals 58, quarter note equals 54, quarter note equals 62. That kind of... 0:28:00.3 GR: Although I've seen some scores like that. [chuckle] 0:28:02.2 ML: Well, and we've all sung Carmina Burana, where every note has an accent and a tenuto and a staccato mark. So I think, in the Renaissance, it's just like, why would you notate all of that stuff? Why are you trying to control something that should be up to the performer?  0:28:20.4 GR: Very cool. 0:28:22.8 DN: So you mentioned early on, you said that singing this way affects how you hear and understand this music. Could you talk a bit more about that?  0:28:32.1 ML: Oh, that's such a big question. There's almost nothing about Renaissance music that I don't experience differently now that I think more in terms of hexachordal solmization. I think for me, the biggest revelation is that B-flat and B natural are both equal partners in the Renaissance style. There's not one of them is default and the other one is a deviation from the norm, but rather that they're both opportunities that are available to a composer over the course of, say, a motet, and that composer may or may not choose to take advantage of that B-flat that's just right there waiting for him. But it's there if he wants it, and that's a really different way of thinking about what it means to be diatonic than we're used to where we're like, "There's diatonic notes, and then there's chromatic notes." 0:29:29.5 ML: So there's a kind of flexibility that goes all the way back to how I sang those two D-scales. Where once we get to Ray-Mi-Fa-So-La, we have a choice to make, we can go either way. That is everywhere once you start looking for it in Renaissance music. The other thing that I've really notice is imitation; noticing where imitative patterns are repeated with the same solmization syllables at different pitch levels. And when I sing with my students, if you're the second voice to enter and you've already heard your line and it's already been beautifully solmized for you, just 'cause you're entering a fifth above you just copy paste what just happened. 0:30:11.1 ML: So that's a really great opportunity that solmization provides. Renaissance musicians also embedded all kinds of puns and jokes involving solmization into their music all the time, and those are really fun to uncover and really revealing about how people were thinking about solmization all the time, even if they were singing music on words or were just singing "la la la la la." Would you like to hear some more about some of those sorts of things?  0:30:41.6 DN: Absolutely. Please. [chuckle] 0:30:42.9 GR: Are you able to tell these jokes, explain these jokes, in a way that doesn't ruin them for us? [laughter] 0:30:48.5 ML: Absolutely. Absolutely. So there's two kinds of solmization tricks that I really like. The first one is what's called the soggetto cavato, which is the idea of a subject that's carved from the words. And so a famous example is the text Lascia fare mi, which means leave me alone, but if you notice, La-scia-Fa-Re-Mi sounds like the solmization syllables, La-So-Fa-Re-Mi. So, the composer sets it, "Lascia fare mi," and every time it comes back at every pitch level, you can solmize it so that the syllables of the... The solmization syllables match up with the sounds of the words, and there are lots and lots and lots of examples of tunes like this, where the composer took somebody's name, or took their own name or anything like that and turned it into a tune, a kind of precursor to Bach's BACH motif. Same idea. 0:31:51.0 GR: That's the kicker, I don't know anybody who likes solfege puns. [chuckle] I've never heard any solfege puns in my life. [laughter] 0:31:58.0 ML: I'm looking at two of those people. They're everywhere. And sometimes you'll find them just in the middle of a motet or something, all of a sudden, it's just for the Altos and as an alto I'm like, "Alright, this is just for me," [laughter] "Nobody's going to appreciate this but me, but I'm loving it at this moment." The other technique that composers use is a technique called inganni which means deceptions, and the idea of inganni is you take a melody that's solmised in one way, and then you mutate somewhere unexpected and you keep your solmization syllables the same, but you change the melodic contour of the tune. And so it's a deception because you think you're looking at two totally different melodies, but actually the solmization is the same for both of those melodies, which is a neat trick. If you give me a second, I can find an example. Just pulling my copy of Zarlino's Art of Counterpoint off the shelf. [laughter] 0:33:06.9 DN: As one does. 0:33:06.9 ML: I'm serious, I literally pulled my copy of Zarlino's Art of Counterpoint off the shelf. Okay, so here are Zarlino's examples of this concept that's called Inganni, so deceptions. He gives us a tune, ut, re, mi, fa, la, so, fa, mi, re. And then he gives us the same tune, but different, ut, re, mi, fa, la, so, fa, mi, re. And then he gives it a different way, ut, re, mi, fa, la, so, fa, mi, re. 0:33:48.6 GR: Gotcha. 0:33:49.7 ML: And so there's a mutation between the first four notes, ut, re, mi, fa, and then the last four notes, last what? Five notes, la, so, fa, mi, re. And he changes what that mutation looks like each time, and so that gives us three different versions of the same tune, that if you're looking at a score, you might not notice, you might not find a relationship between them, but if you're singing in solmization, you can't miss them. And there's lots of really great ways to use this trick. It's really common in the ricercar, which is an instrumental type of composition where you showcase like your most learned counterpoint. And there's this question of, okay, well, ricercar means to... Ricercare means to seek out or to search for something. 0:34:38.7 ML: And one theory of what's being searched for, when you're playing, usually on the organ, when you're playing a ricercar, is what you're searching for is the subject, and what the composer is doing is finding as many ways to hide or bury that subject in the counterpoint as possible, and you, as the performer, have to figure out, using these inganni, these deceptions, where is the subject? Where is it now? What's happened to it? And these get extremely complicated, to the point that some early 17th century musicians, like Trabaci, make these really complicated chromatic ones, and they just label them, they're like, "Inganno, inganno, inganno, inganno." 'cause otherwise people can't find them because the tune is so disguised that they're like, "Wait, but I did something really clever, let me show you." [laughter] 0:35:29.8 DN: Oh, that's great, that's great. I keep thinking with this that, there's an interesting intersection between movable solfège and fixed solfège, and this kinda seems to live somewhere in between the two of them. 0:35:41.8 ML: Absolutely. That's kind of... I grew up on movable do solfège, and now I teach fixed do solfège, which was a challenge, and now I mostly think in terms of hexachordal solfège. So keeping three systems in mind is a real challenge all the time, but one of the things I find interesting is that hexachordal solfège is both a movable solfège and a fixed solfège at the same time. And in some ways, you get a little bit of the best of both worlds when you're using the system, because you get this kind of sense of, here are the actual notes I'm singing, here's where I'm actually living in musical space, relative to the notes I'm reading on the page, but also, here are where the half steps are, here are musical relationships that are being replicated throughout this piece, and I can feel that they're the same, even though they're happening in different places in the scale. One of the reason this works is because there's not that many keys in the Renaissance. So you can't do hexachordal solmization on something in A-flat major or B major or keys with a lot of accidentals, because this is not a system that's designed to accommodate that, but when you live in a world where there's only two key signatures, there's what we call cantus durus, which is no key signature, the hard B, and cantus mollis, soft B, where there's a B-flat signature, it's a lot easier to navigate that whole musical system using this kind of fixed, movable hexachord system. 0:37:18.0 GR: So pedagogically, when you're teaching hexachordal solfège, does that help with fixed do or movable do, or does it hinder? Do people have trouble moving back and forth?  0:37:30.0 ML: That's a great question. So I only teach hexachordal solmization to my juniors and seniors who are taking my Renaissance class. I would not foist it on my freshmen, who are learning fixed do for the first time, but I do like... 0:37:47.3 DN: And they're also learning scale degrees, right?  0:37:48.8 ML: Yeah, and a lot of them came in with movable do, so we do a lot of group therapy in Aural Skills One here. [laughter] 0:37:57.2 ML: So I reserve hexachordal solmization for my seniors, where I tell them, "You thought you didn't like fixed do, just wait." But I think it really helps you to understand the Renaissance in a new way and helps get you in this mindset that this music is just different in some important ways from music today. And they pick it up pretty fast. And all of a sudden, we're in class, and was like, "Well, isn't that a fa supra la? And isn't this a re tonality and how will that be impacted by the sol cadence here?" And it's really exciting to hear them using this vocabulary that's native to music, and you just can't understand this music without having some of those tools. It's a lot harder to find, for instance, exact imitations versus diatonic imitations, if you don't have access to solmization. It's almost impossible to learn how to do Musica ficta, if you don't have access to the tools of hexachordal solmization. So navigating Renaissance music, specifically, is really useful. When I teach hexachordal solmization, I like to use these duos written by Orlando di Lasso, in this collection from... It's called Novae aliquot something, something, something, something, has this long name, from 1577, and he has 12 texted duos and then 12 untexted duos. And this is a tool I learned from Anne Smith, who is a musicologist and historical performance practice person in the UK. 0:39:33.7 ML: But what she found was that the second set of these duos, the untexted Lasso duos, are they clearly designed to teach you one new solmization challenge per duo, and they're really smartly designed, they're kind of really well-designed rhythms in the Hall Rhythm Book. Which is that they start out in slow notes, with not a lot of mutations, and then each one gets a little faster and then introduces more mutations and then introduces some syncopations and they get harder and harder and harder as they go. And then each duo is designed to work a specific mutation point. So I like to start with those in my class and the students kind of build up their solmization skills as they go. It's a great pedagogical tool, and you can imagine these Renaissance musicians teaching music to choir voice in just exactly the same way. 0:40:29.1 DN: This raises so many interesting thoughts for me, but I think back to episode one, where we were talking about different solfege systems, and even Do-minor versus La-minor, and how, depending on the music that you work with, one may be more suitable than the other. It's so interesting to hear this carried over to hexachordal solfège, and here's a system perfectly matched to this kind of music, and also this balance of thinking in fixed versus movable space, that keeping track of where you are on the staff and also where you are in your scale or hexachord. It's such cool stuff. 0:41:08.6 GR: And at the risk of... I don't wanna prematurely move us on, except that what I think is cool talking about the hexachordal system and how that was developed, and then looking at these... Hearing about these Lasso pieces is that these are people, active musicians, thinking about how to teach about pedagogy. "How am I gonna teach music?" And this was something we wanted to talk about. [laughter] Am I premature in moving us onward?  0:41:43.2 DN: No, no, I think that's good. I feel like... I guess the only other question I would ask, Megan, is if someone wanted to learn, obviously, you have really been spending a lot of time in hexachordal solmization with your own study. If someone wanted to learn the basics of this where should they go?  0:42:00.7 ML: I would recommend two resources that are a great place to start. The first is, there's a YouTube series called Early Music Sources, done by Elam Rotem, that is terrific. And he has a great video on hexachordal solmization that is a great place to start. The other place I would look is Ann Smith who has a book called The Performance of 16th Century Music, and there's a chapter in there that teaches how to mutate between hexachords, and she's written out the solmization for a bunch of tunes and explained the thinking behind it and shows original sources and justifies all of that, and so that's a great place to learn these basic techniques. So those are two places I would start. 0:42:46.8 DN: Those are great, we'll put both of those in the show notes. And the other thing I wanted to chat about, is music theory has been changing a lot in recent years, and I think maybe more than even other fields in academia as we sort of confront the biases, and biases in the way that we've been teaching these things, you've been really involved with a lot of work on that, at Oberlin in particular, and I wonder if you might just talk with us a bit about that. You're so plugged into the broader music theory community, how is the world of music theory evolving?  0:43:24.5 ML: This is something music theorists are thinking really hard about, because the way we teach music theory hasn't changed very much since the 19th century. But the things that we're training musicians to do has changed quite a lot since the 19th century. At a music conservatory like Oberlin, obviously we're training a lot of our students to go play in major orchestras or sing in major operas, in opera companies, but a lot of our students are not doing that. A lot of our students are playing a lot of new music, are doing a lot of innovative work with technology, are thinking about outreach and bringing music to the broader public. And we're seeing a lot more musical hybridization, we're seeing a lot more cultural appreciation in what we think of as the realm of classical music performance. 0:44:15.5 ML: One of the things that we're grappling with as a discipline of pedagogues and a discipline of scholars is how do we prepare all of these musicians for their lives as musicians? One way that we've framed it here at Oberlin is that in the traditional conservatory music theory curriculum, we are really great at teaching our students to say extremely interesting things about music by Beethoven and Brahms, and that's great, that's a really worthwhile thing to do. But it's a little disheartening when you have a junior come to your office with a piece by Ravel and say, "I don't have anything to say about this," that's a real failure of our pedagogy, and Ravel is not out there particularly. 0:45:01.4 ML: Ravel is pretty mainstream canonical composer. So then what do you do when you have a student come in and they wanna talk about hip-hop? Or they wanna talk about music videos? Or they wanna talk about something that Roomful of Teeth is doing? Or they wanna talk about any number of new things happening in the musical world? So different... We're working collectively as a community of music theorists to think about how to approach this problem, and our solutions are emerging and are widely varied. Ranging from... On the one hand, just re-discovering the work of a lot of composers who are Black, composers who are women, composers from South America and Latin America, composers who have been excluded from the canon. I'm hesitant to use the word rediscovery because scholars of color have known about these composers, and have been writing about these composers and teaching about these composers for a long time, but White scholars especially and White pedagogues have not been aware of this music. 0:46:10.7 ML: When we add more of this music into our curriculum, it changes the questions we think to ask and that changes the tools that we need to develop to answer those questions, so that's kind of one way that we're working on revamping the music theory curriculum. Another way is just really thinking much more broadly about what does it mean to think about, talk about and write about music when music isn't just western concert music mostly written between the years 1785 and 1914, what if we wanna build tools to talk about a lot more music, so what we've tried to do at Oberlin is reframe our curriculum in terms of musical parameters that are not specific to any one kind of repertory. 0:47:00.1 ML: So our new freshman curriculum is about teaching about rhythm and meter, and that includes all sorts of things from timelines and the idea of groove, and it creates opportunities for us to talk about really complex metrical structures in 20th century art music but also African drumming and that sort of thing. We're talking about timbre, sound production, the different ways that acoustics work and how timbre might be used as a kind of analytical tool. We're talking about melody, so not just... It used to be that we would teach species counterpoint, we would teach out of the Fux book, which is ostensibly teaching the Palestrina style, we'd say, "Well, Palestrina would write melodies that have no leaps larger than a fourth, and when you leap up by a fourth, you must descend, and that's how you write a good melody." Well, so now in my class, we start with film scores, we start with Princess Leia's theme from the Star Wars soundtrack and come up with why is this a good melody? What are its characteristics? What kinds of tools might we use to analyse the melody and you don't have to use music in this kind of western concert tradition to do that, what are the values of melody in a pop music context? What are the melodic values in the context of the gamelan? We're talking about harmony and different kinds of ways of combining different melodies at the same time. 0:48:38.6 ML: That is where we spend most of our time pretty steeped in western music, but there's lots of other ways to think about and talk about harmony. And we're talking about bass, which is not something that I had ever really thought all that much about but becomes very interesting when you start to think about what are all of the different ways that bass and bass lines work and how is that specific to different repertories, different cultures? I really enjoyed spending some time with my students listening to Herbie Hancock's Chameleon and thinking about the bass riff at the opening of that and how it establishes groove and... So we're trying to think about ways to frame the central questions of the curriculum that aren't necessarily specific to a single repertory. 0:49:26.5 GR: I love that. 0:49:27.8 DN: It sounds like... How are the students responding to it?  0:49:31.1 ML: They love it. I've never had my students be more engaged and more excited. And what my hope is for my class is that every student is gonna see some kind of music that is important to them, and every student is gonna see some kind of music that is totally unfamiliar to them, and I want all of those experiences to be valued, I want my students who come in reading only guitar tablature to feel like their musicianship and musicality is meaningful and relevant. I want students who have only really looked at lead sheets before to feel that that's a kind of music notation that is valuable and that that is as important for classical students to learn as it is for jazz students to learn how to read piano staves. I want students whose primary experience is working with Dos to have something to contribute to the class that nobody else has been able to contribute before. I want students whose background is in traditions that aren't the western tradition, to hear music that they grew up with or music that they like to perform, to hear that represented in the classroom, so we have a long way to go. 0:50:41.2 ML: Obviously, we all have a lot to learn to be able to teach musics that we're not trained in in a way that's ethical and in a way that is accurate and respectful, but it's been a really amazing experience to just start to sit down and learn about some new repertories, and to meet brilliant people around the world who are working on this music and learn from them, and to figure out how we can bring that experience into the classroom. 0:51:12.5 DN: So if I'm working say with high school students to help prepare for this broader approach to music theory, what kinds of things should we be stressing at that level, do you think?  0:51:27.3 ML: I think it's really important to teach students how to ask interesting questions, and to learn that a piece of music or a repertory will tell you what sorts of questions to ask of it if you don't come in with too many preconceived ideas about it. So one way I like to start my theory classes is to play some top 40 song that has a lot of cool production techniques involved in it, and to say if we were to build a music theory just to describe this piece of music, what sorts of things would we need to talk about here? And students hear so much, they're steeped in this music, they hear so much that I don't hear, and they're talking to me about filter sweeps and reverb and like oh, it sounds like she's underwater and like oh, it sounds like she's far away, and all of a sudden we're developing all of these schemas, all these categories, we're talking about what's happening, oh, the size of the space she's in, it feels like it's changing, how does that go with the text?  0:52:31.4 ML: And oh, we're hearing a lot of audible breath, and why is that important? And that's stuff that doesn't come up on the AP Music Theory test, but is very much a part of being a professional musician, a working musician today and having interesting things to say about music, it's training your ears to listen for what's there and build around to that. I think the more we can empower our students to identify what's interesting about something and find their own way of talking about it, the better prepared they're gonna be to embrace a new repertory, a new style that they're unfamiliar with and be game to see how it works and to get to know it. 0:53:14.0 DN: That's very cool. That's very cool. The sort of devil's advocate question, but what about part writing? Can they still part write?  0:53:21.6 ML: We're still teaching chords, we still do a lot of that. And if you actually look at what's being taught in music theory classrooms around the country, as much as we're making space for new repertoires, we're still spending a lot of time on Mozart and Beethoven. These people aren't going away. I feel for my class, if I'm gonna teach Mozart arias, I love teaching Mozart arias, I should pick two instead of nine. So I'm trying to think about how can I focus on the most important of these or the ones that I feel like I get the most pedagogical benefit from, and what opportunities come from making room for other things? If I teach a Coleridge Taylor song instead of a Mozart aria on Thursday, what opportunities are gonna be there and what sorts of questions are my students gonna raise? And I've found that to be really rewarding. Another question to play devil's advocate right back. [chuckle] 0:54:28.5 ML: Is what has part writing done for you lately, Greg?  [laughter] 0:54:31.3 GR: Yeah, that's fair. 0:54:34.8 ML: I don't know that resolving the seventh of a seventh chord down every time is that hard of a thing to learn, but I also don't know that it's that useful of a thing in the real world. I think that we have expanded our part writing curriculum to fill the four semesters that we're given, and it is really useful to a small number of students in some very specific contexts. And so what we're trying to do here is find ways to reach those students in those contexts and give them the tools they need to be successful without making a bunch of students who are never gonna use part writing in their lives and who aren't gonna get that much out of it, spend four semesters on that in lieu of learning about any number of other things that they are gonna encounter every single day. 0:55:22.0 DN: Yeah and you know I have talked about this a lot, and that I had that very classical, I can analyse Mozart through Brahms beautifully kind of music theory training, but part writing didn't click for me until I had figure-based training and was actually having to do real-time part writing improvization at the keyboard, and suddenly I thought, oh, doing this all on paper maybe didn't make the most sense for me originally, even so. So I'm with you on that despite my devil's advocate question. 0:55:52.7 ML: One way I think about this problem is traditionally the freshman theory curriculum at the college level is a weed-out course. These are courses that are really hard and that you have to have really strong fundamentals, and you have to just do a lot of part writing, and a lot of students get through that kind of by counting, by writing in note names and by doing the algorithm and doing the math. I'd rather see the freshman curriculum being an opportunity, being an open door, being an entry point, a gateway into studying music, and then giving the students the opportunity to drill down on those really very specialized skills a little later on. 0:56:31.1 ML: So one of the things we're doing here is offering a portmanteau class for sophomores. And so that's where students who are interested to learn really detailed nuances of 18th century style, they learn to improvise in the 18th century style, they learn to compose in the 18th century style. In a way that's really much more robust than what we do in a traditional part writing curriculum. And jazz students probably won't take that class, and probably a lot of voice majors won't take that class either unless they want to, but organ majors probably will take that class, and will get the very specific skills that they need and that will support the repertoires that they're gonna be performing for the rest of their careers. In a way that's actually a lot more interesting and a lot more historically accurate than the way we teach part writing in the traditional music theory curriculum. 0:57:20.4 DN: Yeah, I think it's really lovely and I am jealous of these students getting this broad approach to music theory, and I just can't wait to see what that means for our next generation of young musicians. 0:57:38.9 ML: We can't wait either, and we're all learning and growing together and we're... I'm sure we're gonna make some mistakes and hopefully be supportive of each other as we all find our way through this new landscape because the thing that's clear is that we can't do nothing, we can't just keep doing things the way they've always been done. And so you have to start somewhere. 0:58:00.8 DN: Awesome. Well, I think that's probably a good place to wrap things up, I don't know, do you think, Megan, David, anything we missed we should talk about?  0:58:09.3 GR: I can just say thank you so much for visiting us and talking with us about this stuff, and actually both of these things and actually if I dare with all this pedagogy stuff, there are some conferences coming up that are going to talk about these issues that are focused on these issues, and one of them I can't go to, but I am definitely going to be at the music theory pedagogy conference in Michigan in early June. I don't know if anyone is planning to be there. 0:58:41.9 ML: I will be this June at a conference at Case Western Reserve University about analysing music by Black composers. Really exciting conference that's hopefully gonna be really inspiring for helping music theorists think more about a much wider swath of repertory and how we can ethically bring that repertory to our students. 0:59:04.6 GR: Yeah, and that one's June 16th, am I right about that?  0:59:09.0 ML: That sounds right. 0:59:09.8 GR: I think that's why I can't go. [laughter] 0:59:12.8 ML: Yeah, June 16 through 18. Theorising African-American music. 0:59:18.9 DN: Meghan, thanks so much for joining us for talking about these two huge topics, I feel like I've learned just an enormous amount in this short time from you, and I'm looking forward to diving into these topics a little more. 0:59:31.1 ML: Absolutely. I am always happy to talk hexachordal solmization, it's my very favorite thing. [laughter] 0:59:36.8 GR: Thank you so much. Excellent. [music] 0:59:43.1 ML: Notes from the Staff is produced by utheory.com. 0:59:45.7 Speaker 5: uTheory is the most advanced online learning platform for music theory. 0:59:49.9 ML: With video lessons, individualized practice and proficiency testing, uTheory has helped more than 100,000 students around the world, master the fundamentals of music theory, rhythm and ear training. 1:00:00.0 S5: Create your own free teacher account at utheory.com/teach. [music]

Funding Your Program with Leah Sheldon

Leah Sheldon shares tips for going beyond bake sales to build a sustainable fundraising model that can support a vibrant music program. Like what you're hearing? Have topics you want to hear more about? Drop us a note at notes@utheory.com. Show Notes: 00:00: Introductions 03:28 What does the fundraising landscape look like these days? 04:00 Traditional fundraising: Sales and Raffles 06:00: How to choose the right time and the right things to sell 08:10 Challenges of sales-based fundraising 10:30 Build a strong team of parent volunteers 11:37 Passive Income Fundraising Sources: online donations/crowd-sourcing/project funding  14:30 Know the policies of your school for fundraising, handling money, and restrictions on uses of various accounts 16:37 Getting creative on fundraising: Sponsorship ideas 19:45 It doesn't hurt to ask -- you never know who's just waiting to help out. 20:45 Sponsoring Students: "Make it possible for a student to join band" 21:30 Creative raffles: parking space raffle, seating raffles, "band on demand" raffle 23:45: Shoe drives 25:15 Grants: What they are, where to look for them, how to get them 27:30 Finding a match between the granting organization and your program 29:00 How to work with your administration on funding 31:30 Covid Relief Funding: CARES & ESSER 35:11 Last thoughts: Build a core group of parent volunteers, know your school policies, send thank you notes. And, above all else, don't do nothing: even if it's one little thing, your students and families will see your own investment in the program and it will be reflected in their attitudes. Links: NAfME’s ESSER Funding Toolkit: https://nafme.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ESSER-Funding-Toolkit-2021.pdf  How to develop a needs statement for grant writing: ​​https://www.grantsedge.com/needs-statement/  Grants4Teachers: https://www.grants4teachers.com  GetEdFunding: https://www.getedfunding.com/c/index.web?s@1_9EUGaBPOylM  Scholastic: https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/teaching-tools/articles.html Grant Watch: https://www.grantwatch.com/cat/42/teachers-grants.html Solfeg:io - https://solfeg.io/music-education-grants Transcript: [music] 0:00:21.6 Gregory Ristow: Welcome to Notes from the Staff, a podcast from the creators of uTheory, where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training, and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education. 0:00:37.0 Leah Sheldon: Hi, I'm Leah Sheldon, Head of Teacher Engagement for uTheory. 0:00:40.7 GR: And I'm Greg Ristow, founder of uTheory and Associate Professor of Conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory. 0:00:46.9 LS: Before we begin, we want to thank our listeners for your feedback and episode ideas. We love hearing your thoughts. Let us know what you think at notes@utheory.com. 0:00:55.9 GR: Our topic today is Funding Your Classroom. And we're again turning the tables. I'll be interviewing my co-host, Leah Sheldon. Leah is Head of Teacher Engagement for uTheory and an experienced public school music educator, having served as a middle school and high school band director, assistant marching band director, and kindergarten through fourth grade elementary music teacher. A recipient of the Teacher of the Month Award through Partners in Education, Leah is passionate about helping teachers meet the needs of today's learners. Leah, thanks for joining us. 0:01:27.6 LS: Thanks for interviewing me. 0:01:29.2 GR: So Leah, for our listeners who may not know you in this context, how is it that you have wound up having so much experience in this area of fundraising and funding a classroom?  0:01:39.9 LS: Well, when I taught, I taught in a wonderfully supportive district. The administration and the community were both very supportive of music programs and arts programs in general. I was very, very lucky in that sense. But the district as a whole did not have the means to create an appropriate budget that is required by an instrumental music program, or even a choral or elementary program, for that matter. It was very fairly allocated across the district, but it just didn't leave me with enough to, say, purchase or maintain instruments. And we had a large percentage of each class in the programs, so we're talking about a lot of students, a lot of kids. So I just often had to turn to outside sources of funding to meet their needs. 0:02:27.8 GR: So are we gonna be talking about bake sales today?  0:02:30.8 LS: [chuckle] We'll touch on bake sales a little bit, but we're also gonna talk about getting creative and what else you can do if you're not into selling items. 0:02:38.7 GR: Yeah. I think probably this is a challenge that a lot of us are familiar with around the country, around the world. That it is expensive to run a high quality music program, whether that's, as you said, elementary, chorus, orchestra, or band. And when you look around schools, it seems to me that everyone is selling something, right? It's like, "Oh look, here come the cheerleaders selling their chocolate. Here come the whatever selling their candy-grams," and all that. So I'm glad to hear that there are other things beyond that. Maybe can you introduce us a little bit to what the fundraising landscape looks like these days?  0:03:20.7 LS: Sure. So it's still really popular to sell things, and I think that's because it's familiar and it's safe, in some way. Students are the ones going and selling items, or sometimes the students' parents, let's be honest. And parents are familiar with it too. You look at an order form, or you go online and place an order, and it's... Almost guarantees a profit. So it's just... It's familiar. It's easy to turn to. There are lots of companies that provide fundraising for selling things, whether you're selling wrapping paper or candy or... I mean, uh... Candles. There are just so many things. And then we've got big ticket items too, right? Like, now it's getting more and more popular to sell Christmas trees and mattresses, and even a local district where I live right now, they're actually selling mulch. You can have it delivered by the yard or you can have the boys' lacrosse team come and spread it for you for an additional fee. But so that... I thought that was a creative take on selling things. But I think... Yeah, it's just... It's readily available, everyone knows what to do with it, and it's usually profitable. 0:04:33.0 GR: Yeah. So what else is there beyond sales, in the big picture of things?  0:04:37.3 LS: Yeah. So sales, and I'll kind of put raffles in under that as well, just selling tickets either for a 50-50 raffle, or selling tickets to win something like a gift basket, and even just selling tickets to concerts. I know that's a hot topic. Sometimes should we be asking parents to pay to come to concerts? And I think the answer is maybe sometimes. But yeah, so selling things and raffles. And then we're also gonna talk a little bit about some passive income options, some creative options, like I said. And then we're also going to touch on grant funding and COVID relief funding. 0:05:24.5 GR: Great. Great. So maybe what should we start with?  0:05:28.4 LS: Let's keep going with the sales and raffles, because I think they're... Probably everyone's familiar with it. And if you've already heard this before, I hope that maybe you hear something that gives you a new idea or reminds you of something that you do like to do. 0:05:44.1 GR: So I think about when we're at music educator conferences, like OMEA or TMEA, and we see all sorts of companies with ideas for selling things. And what would you say are some of the most successful ones in this area?  0:06:00.8 LS: Well, I... It's hard to define success, because it's gonna depend on your community. It's gonna depend on other groups in your district. If there's already another group that regularly sells chocolate-covered pretzels, and everyone knows to go to them at a certain time of year for chocolate-covered pretzels, you're probably not gonna have as much success if you try to jump on that bandwagon, and might even create some tension by maybe kinda stealing their thunder a little bit. So you don't really wanna get yourself into competing with another local group or group within your district. So look for something that's different. If you can find an item that you think that the community would have a need for or be interested in and would be willing to purchase it through the school or through your program, then that's what you should go for. And I can't necessarily tell you what that is. 0:06:52.7 GR: It's great advice, yeah. You mentioned a number of creative ideas already, and I see in our outline, you've suggested a few others that I hadn't thought of in a long time. What is a spirit wear. 0:07:07.9 LS: Oh yeah. So a spirit wear sale is you're literally selling t-shirts, sweat shirts, with the school logo on it, and then usually also something that denotes that it's from the music program. So maybe you get a logo drawn up or you have your students design a logo with the school mascot and marching band or choral department, something along those lines. The nice thing about those now is that mostly everything is done online, so parents can go online, look at all the products that are offered, and maybe even have the option of customizing, so getting a student's name also printed on the clothing item. I think spirit wear sales can be replicated across the district, so it's okay if your soccer team is doing it and the football team is doing it and the band is doing it, because they're all gonna be just a little bit unique, and parents and students want something that represent what they're in, so that's usually a pretty successful and easy thing to pull off. 0:08:14.1 GR: What are some of the challenges of doing sales-based fundraising?  0:08:17.9 LS: So the challenge, like we've already mentioned, that sometimes you find yourself selling things that other groups are already selling, or the students are just tired of selling things. They do it all the time, or their parents... Parents are tired of either helping their students sell it, or they're tired of buying it. [chuckle] So the students and parents kind of lose motivation, maybe, and then if there is product involved and if you are... If you're gonna need to be distributing that product at the end of the sale, then you've gotta have a group of volunteers to help with that, for sure, parent volunteers, because it's often too much for just one single teacher to manage on their own. It can be done, but it's a lot easier with volunteers. 0:09:06.2 GR: And I'm thinking about return on investment too. How much are you putting out monetarily to get the product versus how much it costs for these kinds of things. 0:09:18.2 LS: Right. So all companies will take a percentage of the sales, so the school will make... They'll tell you up front what it is that you're gonna make, and I think it's really important to look into what company you're going to use to sell things. And it's okay to reach out and sort of interview lots of companies before you pick one for this kind of sale, because you wanna see who has the highest percentage of profit that will come back to you, and also look for other things, like, do they require a minimum amount of product? Or a minimum threshold of money to be reached? Some of them do have a minimum, and if you don't meet the minimum, then there's an additional fee, or they take a higher percentage of the cut. So that's always something to look out for it, especially if you've never done it before and you're not sure what you're going to be making. Maybe look for a company that doesn't require a minimum to start. 0:10:14.2 GR: It also sounds like a lot of organizational work and coordination of people. Yeah?  0:10:21.4 LS: It is. It definitely is. And I was gonna touch on this later too, but one of my biggest tips for fundraising, whatever fundraiser you do, you have to have a solid group of parent volunteers. It's just... There's so much demand on teachers already. We have so much that we're doing, and this could turn out to be a large investment of time, unless you've got some people that you can trust and delegate it to. So whether that's your booster group, or you just reach out and you have a group of parents in charge of fundraisers for the year, as much of the fundraising that you can turn over to them as possible. Let them look for ideas, let them look for things to sell, or companies, or things to come up with. Really give them some room to make some decisions, and with your approval on everything, of course. But the more that you can hand over to them, the better it will be for you. [chuckle] 0:11:16.3 GR: So with some of those challenges you've outlined, if I as a teacher starts to realize, "Okay, so maybe sales isn't the strategy we wanna use, or maybe it's part of our overall strategy," what are some other things we might look at?  0:11:33.1 LS: Yeah, so I always say that the best place to start is just find some passive income. It's gonna be the least amount of time investment, least amount of work, physical work and preparation work, and anything compared to a selling type of fundraiser. So when I say passive income, I'm talking about using something like GoFundMe or DonorsChoose or even just seeking donations. 0:12:03.3 GR: Can you... For those of us who haven't heard of those, what's GoFundMe? What's DonorsChoose?  0:12:09.1 LS: Yes. So let's talk about DonorsChoose. So donorschoose.org, that's a website, it's an organization that lets teachers post usually, like, a specific project that they're trying to fund with some explanation. They let you post it on their platform, and then anonymous donors who are browsing the site for projects that align with their mission will choose to make donations to your project. This is free, free for teachers. The only thing that you need to be able to do is define your need and define your project and what your goals are and how much money you're looking to raise. 0:12:47.1 GR: It sounds great. And so then let's say I posted a project, right? Let's say that I wanted to get all of our school-owned instruments worked on because a technician hadn't touched them in however many years, then what do you do? Do you then reach out to parents? Or do you just sort of hope that the broader world sees it and says, "I wanna support this," or... 0:13:11.8 LS: I think social media is huge here. This is something that if you have a social media account for your music program, it gets shared there. If you can get your district to share it from any of their social media accounts... Alert the parents, too, and ask for them to share it as well. The more it is shared, the more people who will see it, and more likely that someone will say, "Oh, I support that. Let me make a donation." 0:13:38.0 GR: Awesome. So that's DonorsChoose... And you also mentioned GoFundMe. I think a lot of us have seen GoFundMe campaigns, but tell us a bit about those. 0:13:46.5 LS: Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about. The thing about GoFundMe, it's not specific to education. DonorsChoose is just for teachers, and I think teachers are gonna have a lot more success on there. But if you wanna post your project in both places and... You never know, right? It doesn't hurt to try. But yeah, GoFundMe is open to anyone for any idea, any product, anything... So I would definitely start with DonorsChoose. 0:14:17.5 GR: So DonorsChoose, GoFundMe, any other sources of passive income we should look at?  0:14:21.6 LS: Don't be afraid to ask for donations, even if it just means printing a little blurb in a concert program about, "We're always looking for this," or, "We'd like to increase our instrument inventory," or, "Music is expensive. If you'd like to make a donation... " And just simply put how or where they can make a donation of any amount. 0:14:43.1 GR: Speaking of that, I'm just imagining I finished conducting a concert. A parent comes up to me and hands me a $100 bill... 0:14:48.2 LS: Yes. 0:14:49.8 GR: I'm suddenly very nervous about that, about the implications of money coming in, and it's gonna be true for all of these fundraising things. What sorts of things do we need to be aware of there?  0:15:00.7 LS: Yeah, absolutely. You need to know the policies for money and for fundraising, and if you don't, please ask your administration or whoever it is in your district that handles that. Know what the rules are. Know what the policies are. Know where the money is going to go. You can ask them that, "Hey, if someone wants to make a donation, even if they just give us a cash donation, what do I do with that? Where does it... " Most schools are gonna have some sort of form that gets filled out or a special safe that things like that go into until it's deposited appropriately. But know exactly what account it's gonna go into. Make sure it's not gonna just go into some district general fund. You wanna know that that's gonna actually come back to your program, and it's more likely to do that if you know the process and you take the appropriate steps. 0:15:48.5 GR: Awesome, awesome. Passive income sounds great. I have to say the effort of all the sales stuff is not something I love, but... Yeah, but the idea of sharing, "Hey, these are some things we need," and making it possible for people who do have the means to support that, to support that. Really sounds great. 0:16:08.5 LS: Right. 0:16:09.1 GR: It probably depends a lot on your community. 0:16:10.9 LS: It absolutely does. That's just what I was gonna say, and sometimes it's just a matter of making your needs known. People don't know that there's a need, and the nice thing about passive income, you're not putting something else on top of the students, or asking parents to do any additional work for some profit. It's just a simple ask. 0:16:30.7 GR: Great. So what else? We've talked about sales, raffles, we've talked about passive income... 0:16:38.2 LS: Okay, so let's talk about getting creative. So what of your parents and students in the community are losing motivation to participate in the traditional fundraising? Sometimes it's a matter of just a slight change of wording. So continuing on the donation request, if asking for donations is not working, then try asking for sponsors. The thing about asking for a sponsor is usually right up front, you're saying exactly what you need a sponsor for. So, like, "We're looking for a sponsor for this concert," or, "We're looking for a sponsor for a student." Say, for example, a student who isn't able to afford the fees for the program. Then the person who's making the donation knows exactly what their money is going for, or even exactly who it's going to. And that's a huge difference. If someone knows exactly that, "Oh, this $50 that I'm gonna donate is going to buy a piece of music that I'm gonna hear at the next concert," they might be a lot more willing to give that up versus just, "Oh, here's $50 for the program?" So yeah, just changing the wording a little bit. 0:17:48.9 LS: And some more ideas to go along with that. So asking someone to sponsor a concert. This might be something that you go to a local company for or a well-known restaurant in the community. And you explain what it is that you're gonna do, and you offer to, of course, put an ad for them in the program, or if they would like for you to hang a sign somewhere at a concert, you offering to do that. They like that. 0:18:21.7 GR: And can I ask, like, what... Sorry. Can I ask how much would you ask to sponsor a concert?  0:18:29.0 LS: Again, the 'how much' questions, this always is going to depend on your district, your community or what your needs are, you might go out and get multiple sponsors for $100, you've got five sponsors for $100 each, and they've sponsored the concert by providing money to buy music with, you're gonna have to... You really have to know your community, know what people are willing to support. And also know your program needs. If you do have, like I had, an extremely supportive community, you may be able to find companies that will... Or even individuals, not really, not individuals, but you may be able to find someone who will sponsor a season, so for example, an entire marching season, a company that will say, pay for all the snacks for the marching band students, or pay for the dry cleaning of the uniforms twice a year. So again, it's gonna depend on what your need is, but you can kind of sit down, prioritize your needs, break them up into create three levels, like a big need, a medium need, and a small ask, and then decide what you want those amounts to be from there. 0:19:49.1 GR: Yeah, and I think back to when I was starting teaching too, and I was frankly just so afraid to ask, but especially companies, a lot of them are looking for ways to be visible in the community, and they're used to being asked these things and it's not abnormal. It doesn't bother them. They're happy to say no, if they're not... If they can't do it. 0:20:12.1 LS: Right. Yeah, it does not hurt to ask, you may also find out that parents within your program have connections either because they work for a company or a local corporation that is willing to donate or they know someone who is, so just by putting the need out there and asking you never know what you might end up with. 0:20:34.1 GR: Yeah, that's great. Sponsorship. That's a great creative idea. Yeah. 0:20:40.0 LS: And sponsoring students too. That's one that... I didn't do that right away. I didn't do that until later in teaching, till I figured out really how to word it, and once people realize that they could make a donation that would go directly to allowing a student to be in band, it was very successful. 0:20:58.2 GR: So what wording did you use to invite parents to make that kind of donation?  0:21:03.7 LS: Yeah, so it ended up being as simple as just saying, Make it possible for a student to join band, we had such a big alumni base in our community that they knew what joining band meant and what that would mean for that student, and so they were happy to make that possible. 0:21:20.6 GR: Great. So yeah, other creative ideas?  0:21:25.8 LS: So we talked a little bit about raffles, which usually look like buying tickets to win a basket or 50-50 raffles, but again, know your community and find something that you think they would say, "Oh yeah, I would buy a ticket to that." So for us, parking was an issue, it was always an issue because we just had small parking lots, and that meant the concerts... People had to park very far away and walk a lot, so we tried raffling off a parking space real close up front, and that was very successful, so that was something that we decided to continue with. But yeah, so parking spot raffles, you can do concert seating raffles, again, that's gonna depend on what that looks like, is it a matter of raffling off a really good seat or is it mean raffling a padded folding chair versus the bleacher, the concert seating was a good one, and this is my favorite concert on demand raffle. Again, it worked for our community because it was a small community, but we called it Band-On-Demand, and parents could buy tickets to you have the band show up in their front yard and play a concert or on their street if there wasn't room to fit the whole band in, but that was wildly popular. 0:23:00.7 GR: That sounds amazing. 0:23:01.4 LS: It was fun. 0:23:03.5 GR: Awesome. Yes. Okay, so sponsorships, raffles, these are just great creative ideas and also it seems like not as frankly much work as say, selling mattresses or whatever. 0:23:18.8 LS: Right. There's still... I don't wanna say that it doesn't require any work, it might just be a little bit of work upfront to create a flyer that you're going to take to businesses to ask or putting that wording together. But then once you've done it, it's done, and you don't have to keep recreating the wheel. And there's one other thing I wanna bring up. It's been popular, and I've even done it myself, shoe drives are gaining popularity, and there are a lot of organizations now that will do this, but I worked specifically with Funds2Orgs, that's funds number two orgs. And it was a very profitable fundraiser. You ask for the community and parents and students to donate shoes, and then they at the end, they come with a grappling giant truck and you load up all the shoes onto the truck and they take it and they weigh it. And your profit depends on the poundage of shoes that you were able to collect, and they take nearly all types of shoes from used to gently used to even new. The challenge of a shoe drive is there is some physical work involved, all the shoes need to be tied together or rubber banded together and put into plastic garbage bags, and you need to have somewhere to store that, you might think that you know what 100 bags of 25 pairs of shoes looks like, but then you see it and you realize, "Oh, this is a lot of shoes." 0:24:52.0 LS: And then you get 500 bags and then it's really so the... Yeah, the challenge with the shoe drive is making sure that you have students and parents who will volunteer to help put things together for it and make sure that you have the room to store it but very profitable. 0:25:07.8 GR: That's great, that's great. Okay, so we have sales, fundraising, we have these wonderful creative ideas, passive income ideas, and then probably the big area that we haven't talked about is the area of grants. Can you talk a little bit about that?  0:25:24.4 LS: Sure, so grants are... A grant is money that you receive from an organization, it does not need to be paid back, and usually they'll board money for a project that aligns with their mission. The thing about grants is that they... Yeah, I'm not gonna lie. Grants are a lot of work. When you're writing a grant, the grant application itself does require a bit of writing, companies who typically receive grant funding generally have a staff person dedicated to grant writing, and your district may have someone dedicated to grant writing, but funding the music program may not fall under their umbrella of responsibilities. So if you might be interested in looking into a grant, just know that you're going to need to be prepared to write a project summary, you're gonna have to write about how you're going to evaluate it, because grants do require evaluation and reporting because they wanna know that the money that they're giving is having an impact. 0:26:38.4 GR: So meaning, let's say I receive a grant from our local arts council, but at some point in the year after I receive that grant, I have to provide back some kind of report?  0:26:48.7 LS: Yes. And even in the initial application, you're gonna have to talk about how you plan to evaluate for that, what you think the impact will be, what the community need is, your current strengths and challenges of your program and future sustainability without the grant funding. So those are just some things that you'll need to prepare to write about up front and then again throughout the year, be collecting the data on that evaluation and then submit an evaluation at the end of the life of the grant. 0:27:25.2 GR: I've worked with a community chorus for a number of years, and part of my responsibility there was being involved in that grant writing process, and one of the things that I found, and I know that you and I have talked about this as well, is how important finding a good match between the organization and... The organization that needs the money and the organization that is making the grant, how can you know if you're... If the organization you're looking at who's giving grants is the right organization to approach?  0:27:55.3 LS: Call them and ask. Do not be afraid to reach out to them, to email or call and say, "Hey, here's what I'm doing. Does this align with your mission?" They'll be happy to answer questions, in most cases. 0:28:10.5 GR: Yeah, yeah, and where even do I begin to figure out what grants are available?  0:28:16.1 LS: So this may require a little bit of research on your part, but we will provide a couple of links in the show notes that are a good starting place. A couple of organizations that either provide grants for music teachers or provide a list of other organizations that provide grants for music teachers. And also in the show notes, we'll also put a link to a website that helps you develop a needs statement. A need statement is very important for your grant application, and honestly, it can be used for all fundraising, especially if you're planning to be requesting donations or looking for sponsors, check that out, check out this website, read through how to develop a needs statement because that will help you clearly define your needs, no matter who you're asking for money from. 0:29:11.8 GR: Great, great. I think also speaking about that, maybe... Especially for teachers who are just getting started. One thing we haven't mentioned is, you can certainly start by going to your administration and saying, "Hey, we have these needs to make the program really successful, to be able to provide the experience that students need, we need these specific things. Is there funding for that?" And I think that's a lot of times, just that organization, as you're talking about, making a need statement, but also taking the time to actually just make a budget and say, this is what running a top level program for the course of the year really costs, and how much of that can come from the school's budget, and how much of that do we have to be more creative about finding ways of funding. 0:30:08.3 LS: Yes, absolutely, that's a great point. Don't be afraid to ask administration, but if you're planning to do that, yes, absolutely, prepare to do that. Like you said, and I wanna add to that, also prioritize the needs, because very frequently the administrator's gonna say then, "We can't do all of this, but if we can do some of it, what would you like us to do?" Come prepared, have the numbers, have your need clearly defined and prioritized and just make it easy for an administrator to look at and say, "Okay, I understand." 0:30:43.2 GR: Yeah, yeah, I've always found with the administrators that if I say I need 20% more money, they say no, but if I bring them a list of like, Okay, here's what we need, and here's why we need it, their response is, we may not be able to do it, but let's see what's possible. And that makes for a much easier starting place for a conversation. 0:31:02.1 LS: And back it up as much as you can with the student achievement, if you can tie it into state standards on why we need this particular new method book, or why we need to be purchasing new music, and again, make it show how it applies to the students learning as much as possible. 0:31:22.9 GR: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Great, what else should we know? This is just such good stuff, Leah. 0:31:29.9 LS: Well, we haven't talked yet about the newest available category of funding, which is a COVID relief funding. If you wanna touch on that. 0:31:37.2 GR: Yeah, please. 0:31:40.3 S12: Yeah, so the CARES Act in 2020 brought this new level of funding for schools, that is now the most recent bill of this is the America rescue plan, but this all falls under the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund. The thing about this money is that the federal government distributes it to states, and then the states distribute it to the districts. Some districts may get a lot, some districts may get none, so the first thing that you need to find out is, did our district receive any emergency relief funding? And then if your district did, then I suggest just like when talking to administration, you pull together your needs and prioritize your needs, and then you present this to administration. To receive this funding, a teacher cannot go and request it or fill out an application for it. Again, the state gives the money to your district, so you need to talk, you need to find out who it is in your district that handles this. Is it a principal, is it the superintendent. Is it the head of the LEA, the Local Education Association. 0:33:00.2 LS: So you need to find out who to talk to and then come prepared to discuss your needs and what you're looking for, the funding is available for anything related to creating safe learning spaces due to COVID or addressing any learning lost from remote instruction when schools were closed for COVID. So for example, technology and software for virtual learning or remedial instruction, additional instruments and equipment to avoid students sharing supplies for cleaning and sanitation, materials for social distancing and PPE, facilities improvements and even extra-instructional support, so even hiring a private lesson teacher could all fall into that. 0:33:50.2 GR: And as I recall, with the ESSER funding and specifically, kind of the big catch-all is that idea of remediation, the idea that there was learning lost because of remote learning, and we need to make the current situation better to make up for that, and that opens a lot of possibilities for requesting funding there. 0:34:10.6 LS: Absolutely, so if a teacher wants to use uTheory to address remedial or to provide remedial instruction, then that absolutely falls under that category. 0:34:20.1 GR: Great. So yeah, so CARES Act, ESSER and these things. Can you remind me when does ESSER expire? When's the last chance people can get funding for that?  0:34:29.7 LS: So the first round of funding actually expires, I believe this coming September, September 30th, 2022, there will be money available until 2024 for this, so it doesn't hurt to ask now. 0:34:44.0 GR: Great, great. Well, I have a lot of ideas now. This is certainly exciting, ideas other than calling up my boss and saying, "Hey, I need more money," although that's not an awful thing to do. Is there anything that we've missed or is this a good place to wrap things up?  0:35:04.2 LS: We can wrap it up. I just wanna reiterate that, you know, no matter what fundraiser you decide to do, I think it's really important to have a strong group of parent volunteers to help with some of this, and again, knowing the school policies and knowing the rules for allowing students and parents to handle cash. Even if you do have very trustworthy parents or students, always have multiple adults present if there's going to be cash being handled, and definitely have supervision over students collecting cash, and please remember to say thank you and send thank you notes. Thank you notes to donors or sponsors or those parents who are volunteering their time a little thank you note will go a long way because then they will know that they're appreciated and that they've been seen and they'll be more willing to come back and help again. 0:36:03.3 GR: And even administrators who are able to up your budget ever so slightly, they appreciate those little thank you notes too. 0:36:10.8 LS: And one final tip here is, don't do nothing, do something, even if it's one little thing, one little fundraiser, one little request for donations, start somewhere. By doing nothing, you're showing your administration that, Oh, you're fine with whatever funding you get, if you get any. And you don't really have any needs or anything like that, and it won't be on their radar for next year that I need to consider what the music program needs, and also if the parents and students see you going above and beyond to give them the best possible program then, that's gonna be reflected in their attitude and their effort as well, so don't do nothing. 0:36:54.1 GR: Awesome, that's great. It's great advice. Leah, thank you for that. Thank you for all these wonderful ideas. And thanks for joining us. 0:37:04.2 LS: Absolutely. Any time. [music] 0:37:08.8 Speaker 3: Notes from the staff is produced by uTheory.com. 0:37:11.7 Speaker 4: UTheory is the most advanced online learning platform for music theory. 0:37:15.6 S3: With video lessons, individualized practice and proficiency testing, uTheory has helped more than 100,000 students around the world master the fundamentals of music theory, rhythm and ear training. 0:37:26.4 S4: Create your own free teacher account at uTheory.com/teach. [music]

Dalcroze Solfege Games with Gregory Ristow

Eurhythmics teaches music through movement, improvisation and play. In this episode, Greg Ristow shares some favorite games for teaching solfege drawn from the Dalcroze approach to music education. Videos: Bodyfege for teaching solfege:https://youtu.be/ArVsGHZ8pTE Doop Canon for teaching Quarter, Eighth, Half and Whole Notes:https://youtu.be/kj7tNtNHeVM Links: Urista, Diane. The Moving Body in the Aural Skills Classroom Ristow, Gregory. An Introduction to Dalcroze's Solfège Pedagogy Ristow, Thomsen and Urista. Dalcroze's Approach to Solfège and Ear Training for the Undergraduate Aural Skills Curriculum Dalcroze Eurhythmics with Lisa Parker (YouTube) Show Notes: 00:23 Introductions 01:40 What is Dalcroze Eurhythmics? 04:00 Dalcroze Eurhythmics has been around for a while, but not that many people teach it, why? 07:05 Let's do some Dalcroze solfege games together. 07:44 Goals of Dalcroze Eurhythmics solfege training: Ground in students a sense of the feeling of each degree of the scale, and build the skills that allow them to translate immediately between knowing where they are in a scale and knowing what note that is (if they know what key they're in). 08:10 Solfege systems used in Dalcroze Eurhythmics. Eurhythmics teachers use two systems: one system to identify where we are in the scale (functional), such as moveable Do or scale degrees. One system to identify the letter name/pitch level of the note (phenomenological), such as fixed Do or letter names. 09:20 Bodyfege 12:00 Pacing of introducing notes over multiple classes. Changing the roles, having students lead the exercise to build improvisation skills. 13:30 Dalcroze games enable students to learn from each other, because they can look around and see how other students are moving, and help each other to find the right answer. 19:00 Bodyfege is a great game to sprinkle in for about 30-seconds at a time in each class over a long period of time. 19:30 To build translation between function (scale degrees/moveable do) and pitch space (letter names/fixed do), you can do Bodyfege using either. 20:20 Why do we leave out accidentals and syllable alterations for chromatics in Fixed Do, and usually not sing accidentals for letter names, for Dalcroze Solfege? 24:00 Relation of Bodyfege to Kodaly/Curwen hand signs 25:00 Partnering vs groups for Bodyfege. 27:00 In Dalcroze pedagogy there's no fixed version of any activity. Each game is an invitation to create a new variant of it to fit the students you have at that moment. 27:30 Dalcroze C-to-C Scales: Goal of making it possible to hear any note as any degree of the scale. 32:30 Using C-to-C scales to build fluency of translation between scale degrees/function and letter names/pitch space. 34:05 Different ways of prompting C-to-C scales 36:00 C-to-C scales help students call to mind harmonic context for parts of a scale. 36:45 Prompting C-to-C scale with a V7 chord with C on top. 39:45 The whisk and cluster prompt for C-to-C scales. 43:41 Using and trusting physical knowledge -- whether knowledge of what something feels like in the hands at an instrument, or the physical emotional feel of a scale degree 45:20 Modulation Exercises 47:45 An example of Dalcrozian way of teaching rhythm -- "Doop Canon" 50:30 The importance of keeping exercises musical 51:50 Teaching the layering and relation of rhythms 53:30 Ways of spinning out the Doop Canon into improvisation and rhythmic dictation 57:00 Learning through Play 58:05 Wrap-up & sign-off Transcript: [music] 0:00:00.0 Theme Song These are the notes from the staff where we talk about our point of view, and we share the things we're gonna do, and we hope you're learning something new, 'cause the path to mastering theory begins with you. 0:00:21.6 David Newman: Welcome to notes from the staff, a podcast from the creators of uTheory where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education. 0:00:35.0 Greg Ristow: Hi, I'm Greg Ristow founder of uTheory and associate professor of conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. 0:00:42.1 DN: And I'm David Newman. I teach voice and music theory at James Madison University and I code and create content for uTheory. 0:00:49.4 GR: Thanks to all our listeners for the great feedback and ideas you've been sending us at notes@utheory.com. Keep them coming, we love your ideas and we'll try and get to everything that you suggest we should do. 0:01:00.4 DN: Our topic today is Dalcroze Solfege Games. Today, we're turning the tables and I'll be interviewing my co-host Greg Ristow. When he's not working on uTheory, Greg is an associate professor of conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory, where he also teaches classes in Dalcroze Eurhythmics. In the Summers he conducts the World Youth Honor Choir and teaches music, theory and ear training at the Interlochen Arts Camp. He has given numerous workshops on Eurhythmics in the US and abroad and his writing on your Eurhythmics appears in the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, American Dalcroze Journal, Being Music: The Canadian Dalcroze Journal, and Theory and Practice. He holds the Dalcroze Certificate from the Juilliard School and the Dalcroze license from the Longy School of Music. Greg, Welcome. [laughter] 0:01:44.7 GR: Thanks David. 0:01:46.0 DN: So, [laughter] this is the big question. What is Dalcroze Eurhythmics?  0:01:51.1 GR: Yeah, So, the 30 second elevator: pitch Dalcroze Eurhythmics is a way of learning music through movement improvisation and play. In a Dalcroze Eurhythmics education, we approach musical concepts first by exploring them in movement in physical and musical improvisation. And then we turn from that towards theoretical concepts. A lot of people think of Eurhythmics as a method for learning rhythm, but in fact, as Dalcroze envisioned it, it's a method for learning all about music, any concept that you can think of in music, you can teach using Eurhythmics. Dalcroze himself was a teacher at the Geneva Conservatory in the late 1800s. 0:02:39.8 GR: He then actually resigned from the conservatory to found a school outside of Dresden in Hellerau, Germany where actually two brothers who were kind of industrial. I don't know what I call them. I guess magnates at this point. They were wealthy industrialists who built a little town with the idea that everyone would take classes and go to concerts, etcetra. And so they built the whole Eurhythmics school there to Dalcroze's specifications, including staircases in every classroom, so that you could practice all your rhythms not just on the flat surface, but going up and down the stairs and you know, this was, Eurhythmics really had its Heyday while the school was open which is like 1909 to 1914. And during that time everyone who was anyone was there: Stravinsky came, Orff came Diaghilev was so taken by the school that actually, they hired one of Dalcroze's top pupils to help them prepare the premiere of Rite of Spring, the choreography of Rite of Spring and so Nijinsky and Marie Rambert, Dalcroze's student worked super closely in that. So, yeah, in a nutshell, that's Eurhythmics. It's, I find it a very joyful way of both teaching and learning music. 0:04:00.6 DN: Is... I hadn't, I read a lot about Eurhythmics from, in reading old books and I kind of thought about it as an old thing. It never got brought up in my music education classes and I didn't know anyone before you, who taught it, and I think we've talked before about some reasons why that is but, why don't we know more about it?  0:04:26.9 GR: Yeah, I think at the heart of it is, there's a very tightly controlled certification process, which has has ensured over the century or so that Eurhythmics has been around, that people who are teaching it are super qualified and really good at it. But has also made it much harder for more people to learn about it. So at this point to get the top level of certification, which is the only level that allows you to certify other people, you have to go over to Geneva to the Dalcroze Institute there and do a course of study which takes about two years usually to do that. So... 0:05:03.5 DN: Wow. 0:05:04.7 GR: I have my certificate from Juilliard and my license from Longy. That's the highest level you can get in the US without going over to Geneva. And I've spent some time in Geneva, but not nearly enough to get the diploma, which is the highest level of certification. Also, I think a real impediment is that, Eurhythmics teachers, when we teach, we generally teach from the piano and we're generally improvising music for whatever musical concept we're teaching. And so there's, there's some piano skills that are required. Although, you can do a lot of improvisation on any other instrument, but certainly there are improvisation skills that are required which may not be at the center of a lot of people's musical training. Although, if you come up in a Eurhythmics approach, then improvisation is very central to all the work we do. 0:05:47.2 DN: Yeah, and of course, a lot of the conversations in higher level Music Theory Pedagogy is about how we need to do more improvisation. 0:06:00.1 GR: Yeah. 0:06:02.1 DN: So, this is exciting to me to sort of see how what ideas I can grab from this without going through the whole certification process. [laughter] 0:06:12.6 GR: Absolutely. And I think actually, that's a great way of looking at it: that Eurhythmics, even if you're not going to go and become a full-fledged Eurhythmics teacher, then absolutely, there are great ideas from the Eurhythmics approach that you can bring into your teaching especially because so many of the things we do are little short games, you can just... You know I think it was just being like, "Oh, yeah, let's sprinkle in a little Eurhythmics here, and then let's go back to the chalkboard and teach the way I normally teach." 0:06:40.8 DN: Yeah. Yeah, and I've already got some, you had recommended to me the, the book. 0:06:48.5 GR: Diane Urista's book?  0:06:49.7 DN: Yeah. 0:06:50.5 GR: Yeah. Mm-hmm. 0:06:53.1 DN: The Moving Body in the Aural Skills Classroom, which has a whole bunch of great ideas in it. 0:06:58.0 GR: Yeah, it's a great book and, yeah, we'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. Yeah, I thought what we might do today is... Our topic is Dalcroze solfege games... Is that we might just play the role of teacher and student, and I might take you through some Dalcroze solfege games that I might do with a class. Does that sound good?  0:07:18.3 DN: I am so here for this. 0:07:19.8 GR: Okay, [laughter] awesome. And for everyone listening at home, we're also video recording this because a lot of Dalcroze work is movement involved. So while we'll try and talk about what we're doing in movement, we'll also put some clips up to YouTube and put those in the show notes so that you can check out and see actually what we're doing beyond our audio descriptions of it. As we dive in, I should say, a primary goal of Eurhythmics training is to really ground... Of Eurhythmics Solfege training, is to really ground in students a sense of the feeling of each degree of the scale and an ability to translate immediately between the degree of the scale and the note name in whatever key we happen to be in. And so Dalcroze teachers work always in a system that describes where we are in the scale and in a system that describes what actual pitch level we're at. And so for many Dalcroze teachers, that's a scale degrees to describe where we are in the scale, and fixed Do to describe what pitch level we're at. But I thought today, because it's more common in America, that we'd work using movable Do for where we are in the scale and using letter names for what pitch level we're at, since I think more of us in America speak that language, and that's absolutely consistent with the Dalcroze work. You just need one of each system to work. So, yeah, shall we dive in?  0:08:49.1 DN: Yeah. 0:08:49.6 GR: Great. Okay, David, if you're comfortable doing so, would you stand and step back a little bit to where we can see a little more of your body, and I'm going to do the same. 0:08:57.5 DN: I might have to adjust my... 0:09:00.7 GR: Your camera a bit. Sure, and I'll do the same for mine. Good. 0:09:04.5 DN: I'm not sure I have the... [laughter] Can I kneel?  [laughter] 0:09:11.5 GR: I think that's gonna work, okay. As long as we can see your hips then we're fine, and yeah, great, okay. We're going to do a game that I call Bodyfege. I learned this game from Lisa Parker at the Longy School of Music. When I introduce this, I just say, "Face a neighbor." And you have to imagine, David, that you have a neighbor, and I say, "Do what I do four beats later." And then... Yeah, okay, so here we go. Let's just be, why not in this key. Do, Do, Sol, Sol, Sol. 0:09:45.3 DN: Do Do Sol Sol Sol. 0:09:47.9 GR: Good and the "Sol, Sol, Sol" for everyone who is listening as we do this, the Do is fists tapping on your thighs. Yup. And the Sol is high tens with your partner, so flat palm high tens with your partner. Great, okay, here we go. Do-Do-Sol-Sol-Sol. 0:10:08.0 DN: Do-Do-Sol-Sol-Sol. 0:10:11.5 GR: Sol-Sol-Sol-Do-Do. 0:10:14.4 DN: Sol-Sol-Sol-Do-Do. 0:10:17.5 GR: Do-Sol-Sol-Do. 0:10:20.3 DN: Do-Sol-Sol-Do. 0:10:23.1 GR: Do-Sol-Do-Sol-Sol-Do. 0:10:26.2 DN: Do-Sol-Do-Sol-Sol-Do. 0:10:28.3 GR: Do the same thing, but I'm gonna play it on the piano instead. [music] 0:10:34.0 DN: Do-Do-Sol-Sol-Sol. [music] 0:10:39.8 DN: Sol-Sol-Sol-Do-Do. 0:10:41.5 GR: Good, and David, I'm gonna make just a little correction on what you're doing. The Do is actually straight arms really on your thighs, not on your hips, but on your thighs. 0:10:48.2 DN: Fantastic, okay. 0:10:48.6 GR: We're gonna need our hips for another degree of the scale as this goes on. [laughter] Okay, great going on. [music] 0:10:57.7 DN: Do-Sol-Sol-Sol-Do. [music] 0:11:03.4 DN: Sol-Do-Sol-Sol-Do-Do. 0:11:06.4 GR: Sol-Sol-La. 0:11:10.9 DN: Sol-Sol-La. 0:11:11.5 GR: And La is as a little snap, just above the high tens, so exactly. Go ahead and snap as you do it. Sol-La-Sol-La-Sol. 0:11:21.2 DN: Sol-La-Sol-La-Sol. 0:11:23.3 GR: La-Sol-Do-Do-Do. 0:11:25.3 DN: La-Sol-Do-Do-Do. 0:11:29.9 GR: Do-La-Sol-Do-Do. 0:11:32.9 DN: Do-La-Sol-Do-Do. [music] 0:11:38.9 DN: La-La-Sol. [music] 0:11:44.7 DN: La-Sol-La-Do-Do-Do. [music] 0:11:50.9 DN: Do-La-Sol-La-La. [music] 0:11:56.7 DN: Sol-La-Sol-Do. 0:11:58.6 GR: Good. Now, I'm gonna keep adding notes, and I think it's worth saying here that when I'm doing this with a class, this is something that I space out over a number of weeks. We start with just a few notes, usually with just these first three notes, and then once those start to be really solid, we gradually add other notes to it. Although I'm gonna get us through the whole scale now, this is not something I would do in one class. This is to gradually build up over it. Now, the other thing that as we're building it up, in any Dalcroze exercise, a great joy is to switch around who's the teacher and say, "Okay, let's have... Who would volunteer to lead this?" And it's a great game to lead and also for you to test not only can students identify what they hear, but can students call to mind the sound of each Solfege? So David, do you wanna lead it with these three notes so far?  0:12:50.1 DN: Sure. 0:12:50.9 GR: Great. 0:12:52.1 DN: Sol-La-Sol-Sol-Sol. 0:12:56.9 GR: Sol-La-Sol-Sol-Sol. 0:12:58.1 DN: La-Sol-Do-Sol-Sol. 0:13:03.3 GR: La-Sol-Do-Sol-Sol. 0:13:03.6 DN: Sol-La-Sol-Do-Do-Do. 0:13:05.8 GR: Sol-La-Sol-Do-Do-Do. Excellent, excellent. And now, why don't you lead it? Sing like... Bum-Bum-Bum, something without the syllables. 0:13:19.5 DN: Right. Bum-Bum-Bum-Bum-Bum. 0:13:22.6 GR: Do-Sol-La-Sol-Do. 0:13:24.6 DN: Bum-Bum-Bum-Bum-Bum-Bum. 0:13:27.5 GR: La-Sol-La-Do-Do-Do. 0:13:29.7 DN: That's great. 0:13:30.6 GR: Yeah, yeah. No, this works really well in classes, even very large classes, because the students also see what's happening around them. So if they're wondering, 'Wait a second. Was that Do-So? Or was that Do-La?' They can kind of see, 'Is my partner going to a snap, or is my partner going to a high ten?' [laughter] 0:13:50.3 GR: And there's that sort of communication and trust. And I think this is true of a lot of Dalcroze games, that the class teaches, in many ways, itself through that. And now, if I had given you a pattern that you had made a mistake on, then what... Instead of just doing that pattern over again, or saying, "Oh, that was wrong". 0:14:13.1 DN: Mm-hmm. 0:14:14.1 GR: I'll often then do a pattern that will correct it. So let's say that I'd given you... [music] 0:14:19.5 GR: And you went, 'Do-Sol-Sol... ' Then, I just go... [music] 0:14:25.1 GR: At which point, you've got, 'Oh, yeah. It's Do-La-La-La.' Right, so, just a pattern that simplifies things to correct it. Yeah, good. Should we add some more notes?  0:14:34.5 DN: Sure. 0:14:35.2 GR: Okay, great. Now, do what I do four beats later. Do-Do-Mi. 0:14:39.5 DN: Do-Do-Mi. 0:14:41.9 GR: So, Mi is a clap right in the center of the chest, right in front of the body. Do-Mi-Sol-Sol-Sol. 0:14:49.3 DN: Do-Mi-Sol-Sol-Sol. 0:14:52.3 GR: La-Sol-Mi-Sol-Sol. 0:14:55.4 DN: La-Sol-Mi-Sol-Sol. 0:14:58.5 GR: La-Mi-Sol-Do-Do. [chuckle] 0:15:01.2 DN: La-Mi-Sol-Do-Do. That's a... 0:15:04.2 GR: La-Mi-Mi-La-La. 0:15:08.2 DN: La-Mi-Mi-La-La. 0:15:12.1 GR: Sol-Mi-La-Do-Do. 0:15:16.4 DN: Sol-Mi-La-Do-Do. 0:15:20.6 GR: Mi-Do-La-La-Sol. 0:15:24.8 DN: Mi-Do-La-La-Sol. 0:15:29.1 GR: Sol-Mi-La-Do. 0:15:32.5 DN: Sol-Mi-La-Do. [chuckle] [music] 0:15:33.7 DN: Sol-La-Mi-Mi-Mi [laughter] [music] 0:15:40.3 DN: Mi-Mi-La-La-Sol. [music] 0:15:46.0 DN: Sol-Mi-Mi-Sol-Sol-Mi. [music] 0:15:52.1 DN: La-Sol-Mi-Do. 0:15:53.4 GR: Do-Do-Re. 0:15:55.7 DN: Do-Do-Re. 0:15:58.1 GR: Re is hands on hips, elbows out to the side, a big strong posture. Do-Re-Mi. 0:16:07.0 DN: Do-Re-Mi. 0:16:09.6 GR: Mi-Re-Mi-Re-Re-Do. 0:16:14.7 DN: Mi-Re-Mi-Re-Re-Do. 0:16:19.8 GR: Sol-Mi-Re-Do-Do. 0:16:24.3 DN: Sol-Mi-Re-Do-Do. [music] 0:16:26.7 DN: Do-Re-Mi-Re-Do-Do-Do. [music] 0:16:32.0 DN: Do-Re-Mi-Sol-La-Sol. [laughter] [music] 0:16:39.5 DN: La-Sol-La-Sol-Mi. [music] 0:16:42.9 DN: La-Sol-Mi-Re-Do. 0:16:49.8 GR: Do-Mi-Fa. 0:16:52.4 DN: Do-Mi-Fa. 0:16:55.0 GR: So, Fa is hands up and out to the side in a questioning gesture like, 'What is that?' [laughter] 0:17:01.8 GR: Do-Mi-Fa-Fa-Mi. 0:17:04.3 DN: Do-Mi-Fa-Fa-Mi. 0:17:06.9 GR: Sol-Fa-Fa-Mi. 0:17:09.1 DN: Sol-Fa-Fa-Mi. 0:17:11.3 GR: La-Sol-Fa-Mi-Do. 0:17:14.0 DN: La-Sol-Fa-Mi-Do. 0:17:16.7 GR: Re-Fa-Fa-Mi-Mi-Mi. 0:17:19.7 DN: Re-Fa-Fa-Mi-Mi-Mi. 0:17:22.8 GR: Sol-Fa-Mi-Re-Do-Do. 0:17:26.0 DN: Sol-Fa-Mi-Re-Do-Do. [chuckle] 0:17:29.2 GR: So, yeah. Exactly, you did it. 0:17:33.8 DN: I can keep up with the syllables, but not with the action steps. [laughter] 0:17:38.8 GR: Not with the motions, right? This is the other thing to... Of introducing it over a longer period of time, yeah. So, what remains? Ti. Of course, Ti, right? And so, Ti... Actually, before I introduce Ti, I usually introduce a high Do. So, high Do... Our low Do is fists with straight arms on thighs. Our high Do is fists pumping straight up into the air. So, Do-Do-Do-Do-Do. 0:18:00.3 DN: Do-Do-Do-Do-Do. 0:18:04.0 GR: Sol-Sol-Do-Do-Do-Do. 0:18:06.6 DN: Sol-Sol-Do-Do-Do-Do. 0:18:10.2 GR: La-La-Do-La-Sol-Do. 0:18:13.6 DN: La-La-Do-La-Sol-Do. 0:18:17.0 GR: La-Sol-La-Do-Do. 0:18:19.9 DN: La-Sol-La-Do-Do. 0:18:22.8 GR: Do-Do-Ti-Ti-Ti. 0:18:25.5 DN: Do-Do-Ti-Ti-Ti. 0:18:28.2 GR: Ti is just a good old-fashioned curving point-your-finger T, with arms... Upper arms parallel to the shoulders and fingers pointing up. Do-Ti-La-Sol-Sol-Sol. 0:18:42.3 DN: Do-Ti-La-Sol-Sol-Sol. 0:18:46.3 GR: Ti-Sol-Re-Re-Do. 0:18:49.4 DN: Ti-Sol-Re-Re-Do. 0:18:52.4 GR: Fa-Mi-Re-Do-Do. 0:18:55.3 DN: Fa-Mi-Re-Do-Do. 0:18:58.0 GR: Anyway, you can see how you can introduce this slowly, let's say, over the course of a semester, or even longer, especially if you're working with kids, to introduce each of the notes. 0:19:08.8 DN: Yeah. 0:19:09.1 GR: And an important thing... 0:19:09.3 DN: And we get a work out. 0:19:10.5 GR: And we get a work out. [laughter] 0:19:12.0 GR: Yeah, you have seen. You get moving. I love to do this even with my college students, with Oberlin College Choir. I love to do just 30 seconds of this at the start of rehearsal. And just brings us into thinking about a tonal space, which is great. You can also, with your classes, and this is a very Dalcrozine thing to do. I give the prompts on Solfege, you give the prompt back to me in letter names. I will tell you what key we're in, and we switch it around that way. Or vice versa, right? Or I tell you the key, I give you the prompt from the piano, you give it back on letter names. You're still doing the motions showing where we are on the scale. So, let's say if we count to D major, right?  0:19:53.6 DN: Right. 0:19:54.0 GR: Then, if I gave Do-Do-Sol-Sol-Sol, you'd give D-D. A, A, A. And just because it takes too long to say F sharp, F sharp, F sharp, F sharp, F sharp, we don't bother saying the accidentals when we do this. We just say the letter name. Yeah. 0:20:15.8 DN: Is that... In the long run, does that inhibit or... I know that when you do fixed Do, you don't... I'm doing fixed Do in classes right now for non-tonal Solfege, and we're using the chromatic declensions for the purpose of interpreting exactly where we are, so we know exactly what the letter name is, but... Obviously that works. I just wonder why it works. [laughter] 0:20:50.5 GR: In other words, why in fixed Do not using the accidentals works? 0:20:55.0 DN: Correct. Yeah. 0:20:58.7 GR: I'll tell you in... If we actually go back and we look at Dalcroze's book on Solfege pedagogy, which came out in 1906, he suggests actually using alterations for the chromatic syllables, but he stopped doing that in his own teaching at some point, I think to match more just how fixed Solfege is used throughout Europe. But actually, we'll get to this in a moment. In the Dalcroze world, there's actually a little bit of benefit to not using alterations because in some of the exercises we do, it's about discovering where the half and whole steps are. And by not using alterations, in other words, F would always be F, even if it's an F sharp, F flat, etcetera, or if we're using fixed Do, it'll always be Fa. Then the class can sing, for instance, through a scalar passage, not knowing what key they're in, but discovering as they go where the half and whole steps are, to then be able to figure out what those are. 0:22:08.6 GR: That's, boy, without a classic example, that seems really weird, so maybe we should dive into some of that stuff, yeah? But before we do, one more thought on Bodyfege, which is, this is designed to get students to recognize the feeling of each note of the scale, to build up comfort... to make it comfortable for students to go between any two degrees of the scale. What intentionally it does not teach is intervallic thinking. It really teaches, does that sound like a Do, does that sound like a So? I remember where Do is, I remember where So is. And our goal is with that Bodyfege work, that students are really memorizing where each degree of the scale is in relation to tonic, and that they would be able to go to and from any other degree of the scale regardless of interval. 0:23:06.5 DN: Which is so much more useful, I think, for most levels of... Yeah. 0:23:13.1 GR: Yeah, yeah. We do have to build up tonal intervals. We'd have to build Do, Mi, Re, Fa... We have to build up the thirds within the scale, the fourths within the scale, etcetera. And it points to that La-Mi moment where it was like, "Ooh, that La-Mi feels weird." 'Cause it does 'cause that's a much less common leap. Yeah, the other thing that as you're teaching these, as you get enough notes to build the different triads, to work through arpeggiations of the different triads within the key as well, to build those in. Cool. Okay, shall we leave Bodyfege?  0:23:45.8 DN: Sure. [laughter] But that was great, and I can see so many reasons to do it. As I may have mentioned possibly, it's embarrassing, but you know at the college level, I hadn't done Kodaly hand signs until maybe five years ago. And I hadn't ever seen anyone else do it at the college level except in choirs, but I thought we need to get some physical involvement. And I think what's neat about this is it has the same opportunity for a kinesthetic engagement, and I like how much more physically engaged this is. I'm making plans for... [laughter] 0:24:38.0 GR: It's also, I don't know if you noticed. It's actually, it's designed to transfer to and from the Kodaly hand signs relatively easily, 'cause Do is fists, just the way it would be in Kodaly. Re you put your hands on your hips and if you just bring those up, they become like the Re. Mi, your hands are flat when you clap, and of course, Mi also flat hands. The Fa is the weird one and that's fine. 0:25:00.6 DN: It's fine, and the partnering aspect of it, that sounds great. If you have an odd number of students, do you group three people together?  0:25:09.3 GR: Absolutely, and actually, sometimes early on in this, I'll have students work in groups of three or four with the hopes that at least one person is going to be strong in that group of three. 'Cause if you have one leader, they can gradually pull the others along. 0:25:26.3 DN: That's great. I've always looked for ways of having the stronger students help the weaker students without pointing out like, "Hey, you should probably get help from this person." [laughter] 0:25:37.4 GR: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And also your stronger students asking for volunteers to lead it, it will often be those students who know they're strong at it who are like, "Oh yeah, I wanna lead this." And it's another level of magnitude harder to lead this than it is to follow it. And of course it is improvisation. You're creating little one-measure phraselets. 0:26:00.7 DN: But what a great start to improvising. That's not intimidating. That's not gonna be intimidating to most people or... 0:26:07.9 GR: Yeah. Especially... 0:26:09.3 DN: I shouldn't say that. 0:26:10.5 GR: No, no, no. Especially if you start with, say just Do and So. 0:26:13.5 DN: Right. 0:26:14.0 GR: Right? That's... Yeah, you can... Yeah. 0:26:16.8 DN: And then you're encouraging them to explore on their own how those notes function with each other and what sounds good and maybe what sounds bad. [laughter] 0:26:29.0 GR: Yeah, yeah. And I should say also, we were in 4/4, but I love to do this in different times as well. So, maybe we'll do it in 3/4, which actually... When the... As the duration between when you hear it and when you respond shortens, it becomes harder and harder, and so 3/4 in 2/4 is very hard, 6/8 is delightful because there's just so much more space in the measure to have different notes. 0:26:56.3 DN: Mm-hmm. 0:26:58.7 GR: Yeah, so lots of possibilities for extending that. Then of course, if you want, you could extend it to two measures, although I think there's something fun about the quickness of the call and response nature of it. 0:27:10.6 DN: Mm-hmm. 0:27:11.5 GR: And this is also... This is really central to Dalcroze pedagogy is the idea that it's not... There's not one right game, but every game is an invitation to create other games out of it, to modify the rules to change what we're doing, etcetera. 0:27:27.1 DN: Right?  0:27:27.5 GR: Yeah. Cool, okay, so in Dalcroze Solfege, we have these weird scales that are called C-to-C scales, and they're very central to the classic Dalcroze training. And what we mean by that is we sing all of our scales major and minor starting from C or C-sharp or C-flat, whatever is in the key, going up to the next C and coming back down. [chuckle] 0:27:55.6 GR: And as I describe that, you might be thinking, "That sounds a lot like modes." 0:28:00.8 DN: Right. 0:28:00.9 GR: Right? It sounds like a rotation of a scale, and you're right, the notes are the same as the modes, but what we work really hard to do with these is to actually learn them as major or minor scales already in progress. 0:28:20.1 DN: Right. 0:28:20.5 GR: So that if we were going to do the F-major C-to-C scale, we'll start on C, but we wanna hear that C... We wanna hear it not as being some... Ah, sorry. As being some sort of lovely Mixolydian thing. 0:28:40.0 DN: But that was a very nice Mixolydian demonstration. Thank you very much. 0:28:43.1 GR: Yeah. Absolutely. And you feel... And that C feels like tonic and that B-flat feels like part of the mode, and that is... And there is a modal C-to-C, right? But instead, what we work to do in Dalcroze is to say, "Can you make this C feel like scale degree five in your mind?" And to help that along the way, as we're introducing the scales generally one by one over a longer period of time, we'll say, "Okay, let's sing our F-major, C-to-C scale. Let's sing it on movable Do Solfege." So what syllable will be start on in F-major, David?  0:29:25.0 DN: Sol. 0:29:25.7 GR: Absolutely. So let's sing together our F-major, C-to-C scale, on movable Do. Here we go. 0:29:32.7 DN: Sol La Ti Do Re Mi Fa Sol Fa Mi Re Do Ti La So. 0:29:51.2 GR: And the tonic is?  0:29:52.7 DN: Do. 0:29:58.0 GR: Yeah, and so now that F feels very much like tonic, right? Even though we've sung the scale from C-to-C, we're very clearly in F-major. Now, let's do the same thing... Would you do it on letter names this time?  0:30:10.2 DN: Okay. 0:30:10.9 GR: And I'm just going to play one chord underneath you as you do it. Here we go. 0:30:15.0 DN: C D E F G A B C B A G F E D C. 0:30:23.8 GR: And the tonic is?  0:30:36.2 DN: F. 0:30:37.7 GR: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so at that point, you have both the movable Solfege and the letter names going in your mind. Now, let's do the same thing... And I'm just gonna play a C, but we do the same thing. And at any point in the scale, I might call out switch, which means change from letters to scale degrees or vice... Letters to movable Solfege or vice versa. Yeah, so start in whichever you prefer. 0:31:04.7 DN: Sol La... 0:31:06.8 GR: Switch. 0:31:08.3 DN: B... Oh, shoot. [laughter] 0:31:11.9 GR: Now, I'd suggest you imagine playing along in your mind and it'll... Yeah. 0:31:15.7 DN: Right. 0:31:16.8 GR: Go ahead. 0:31:17.3 DN: Sol La Ti... 0:31:20.8 GR: Switch. 0:31:21.2 DN: F G... 0:31:23.2 GR: Switch. 0:31:24.8 DN: La Ti... 0:31:25.6 GR: Mi Fa... [laughter] 0:31:28.7 GR: Yeah. 0:31:29.9 DN: Ooh, boy. 0:31:30.5 GR: Yeah. So... 0:31:31.4 DN: This is tricky. 0:31:32.7 GR: Let's do the intermediate step that we totally skipped, which is... 0:31:35.2 DN: Okay. 0:31:35.5 GR: Sing each note on both. So Sol is C, La is D, etcetera. 0:31:42.8 DN: Sol is C, La is D, Ti is E, Do... Yes, Do is F, Re is G, Mi is A, Fa is B-flat, really?  0:32:08.4 GR: And... 0:32:09.4 DN: Sol is C. 0:32:11.8 GR: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we built that up, and even you feel the mental gymnastics that goes on to do that, right?  0:32:19.6 DN: Yeah. 0:32:19.9 GR: And this is... I think the connection, the instantaneous connection of letter names and Solfege, this is something that takes a lot of time to develop, and it's something else to take the time to develop in each key. 0:32:32.8 DN: Mm-hmm. 0:32:34.5 GR: I was thinking back to our episode with Denise Eaton, where she was talking about how important the visual element of each key is when you're doing sight singing. 0:32:43.8 DN: Mm-hmm. 0:32:44.5 GR: And this is another way of getting at that of saying, "Okay, we're gonna do... We're gonna be working in this key." Let's work our C-to-C scale in that key, and let's practice going between the letter names and the Solfege, so that when we go over to the staff, I see that C and F-major and I'm like, "Yep, that is a Sol, and I know it." 0:33:05.9 DN: Right. 0:33:08.6 GR: And similarly, if I am hearing music that I know is in F-major, I hear a Mi and I say, "Oh yeah, absolutely, that is an A." And I know it. 0:33:22.1 DN: Yeah, that's a great thing to establish that connection. 0:33:26.0 GR: Yeah, yeah, I find my experience with students has been that the analysis of music is typically slow because the process of moving between the letter names and where they are in the scale is also slow. 0:33:45.0 DN: Right. 0:33:45.6 GR: And so these C-to-C scales, that is their primary goal is to connect in an inseparable way, that sense of in the key of F, A is three and three is A and ever more shall be so. 0:34:02.7 DN: Right. 0:34:04.7 GR: The other thing we do a lot with the C-to-C scales is we have different ways of prompting them. For instance, I could say, "Okay, hey everyone, let's sing our E-flat major C-to-C scale and let's sing it on movable Do so we'd all start on La and that would be fine." Actually, David, would you do that, would you sing the E-flat major, C-to-C scale starting from C on movable Solfege. 0:34:31.2 DN: Okay, using La based minor then?  0:34:33.9 GR: No. This is an E-flat major scale but we're starting from C, so we are starting on La. 0:34:40.1 DN: So it's La Ti Do Re Mi Fa Sol La. 0:34:52.3 GR: And that feels very much like C natural minor and... 0:34:57.3 DN: Right. 0:34:57.9 GR: To moveable-do La minor people sounds like it... Right. 0:35:00.7 DN: Right, absolutely. 0:35:02.2 GR: Okay, would you do the same thing again and I'm going to give us a little harmony. 0:35:06.0 DN: Okay. La Ti Do Re Mi Fa Sol La. 0:35:21.0 GR: And coming down. 0:35:22.4 DN: Sol Fa Mi Re Do Ti La. 0:35:32.6 GR: And the tonic is?  0:35:34.5 DN: Do. 0:35:36.5 GR: And when we're that close we sometimes sing up to it. 0:35:39.1 DN: La Ti Do. 0:35:40.0 GR: Yeah, exactly, just so we feel... Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And now it feels it's the same notes, but it feels very much like E-flat major. 0:35:50.0 DN: Mm-hmm. 0:35:51.5 GR: And a primary goal of these scales is also to start to be able to hear harmonic contacts so that I could just singing La Ti Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Sol Fa Mi Re Do Ti La Do versus La Ti Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Sol Fa Mi Re Do Ti La Si La that I could call to mind whatever harmonic realm I want for those notes. 0:36:27.8 DN: Yeah, yeah, it's interesting that I heard the harmonic context of both of those. [chuckle] 0:36:35.8 GR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the other thing about this, I said I could prompt it by saying what we're doing, but I could also prompt it by playing a C and then giving you a chord that's going to strongly suggest what key we're in. So here's that C and I'm gonna give us a chord that makes C very clearly a specific part of the scale. 0:37:02.0 DN: Okay. 0:37:02.7 GR: And let me know what part of the scale you think that is. 0:37:10.8 DN: That sounds like Ti. 0:37:13.1 GR: Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. Now, students may not get there that quickly, and one of the joys of singing without accidentals is that we could sing up and down the scale to feel out where the half and whole steps are on letter names. So let's do it, let's do it without accidentals on letter names, here we go. 0:37:30.9 DN: C D E F G A B C D. 0:37:38.4 GR: C, come down. 0:37:43.4 DN: C B A G F E D C. 0:37:50.1 GR: And tonic is?  0:37:55.6 DN: Do. 0:37:56.8 GR: Otherwise known as D and what kind of D is that tonic by the way?  0:38:06.0 DN: That's... Oh it's gotta be a D flat. 0:38:08.3 GR: It's gotta be a D flat because it started from a C natural, yeah absolutely. So we could cue a scale just by giving a chord, let's do another of those. So I've put C on top. Let's sing it together in letters and let's see what we figure out. 0:38:24.9 DN: Mi Re Do... 0:38:25.9 GR: Yes, bingo, good, let's sing on letters, here we go. 0:38:37.0 DN: C D E F G A B C B A G F E D C. 0:38:51.6 GR: And tonic is?  0:38:53.3 DN: A flat. 0:38:54.0 GR: A flat indeed, yes. [laughter] 0:38:55.5 GR: Right, so... And so yeah we can cue... uh, what I'm doing is I'm just playing a V7 chord and I put a C on top of that V7 cord. 0:39:04.3 DN: Right. 0:39:04.9 GR: So in that case, it was just an E flat dominant seventh and I put the C on top which makes it a dominant 13th chord. 0:39:12.0 DN: Right, but still, as soon as you have that dominant seventh chord, if you're thinking in standard tonal harmony, it just tells you what key you're in. 0:39:22.0 GR: Absolutely, absolutely. The proof of that, of course, is there's only one tritone within the major scale, so theoretically, if you have the tritone plus any other note of the scale, you can identify where you are. That's actually a very hard prompt that we sometimes do is we'll do tritone plus C. 0:39:40.2 GR: Gosh yeah, and can I share with you another prompt that I love?  0:39:45.1 DN: Sure. 0:39:45.2 GR: This is called the whisk and cluster prompt. Whisk and cluster, ready?  0:39:48.8 DN: Okay. 0:39:54.4 GR: I whisked first, and then I clustered, and now hum around in that and see if you can figure out where we are. 0:40:10.0 DN: Yeah, it sounds Lydian to me, but... 0:40:17.2 GR: Right. Uh-huh. And now, of course, if I put with it a... Now it feels not so Lydian, right?  0:40:24.1 DN: Right. 0:40:24.4 GR: And the harder version of that is we take the whisk away and we do purely the cluster. Ready for a cluster?  0:40:32.2 DN: Yep. 0:40:32.8 GR: Okay, here we go. 0:40:33.5 DN: Da da da da. Da. Da da da da da da da da da da. 0:40:45.0 GR: Almost. 0:40:45.3 DN: Oh, thank you, thank you. Da da da da da da da da da da da... 0:40:53.1 GR: Good, let's sing it on letters, ready? Here we go. 0:40:54.7 DN: Alright. 0:40:55.2 GR: Here we go. 0:40:56.2 DN: C D E F G A B C B A G F E D C. 0:41:08.8 GR: And the tonic is?  0:41:12.8 DN: Do. 0:41:13.4 GR: Yes. Otherwise known as, in letters?  0:41:20.0 DN: B flat. 0:41:21.3 GR: B flat, indeed, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's... Yeah so that's the cluster prompt, right?  0:41:28.0 DN: Right. 0:41:28.2 GR: And that one is just great to let students hum around and sort of figure out where are the half steps, where are the whole steps? And then they're purely identifying where they are in the scale based on that arrangement of half and whole steps, which is really I think fun and delightful. You can do the same thing with harmonic minors. Right to where now we know clearly we're in... 0:42:02.1 DN: Yeah, well... Da da... I hear that very well. Can you cluster it again? Da da. Da da da da da da. 0:42:16.2 GR: Yeah, uh-huh. 0:42:19.4 DN: Da. It's decayed so much that I'm not sure I can hear it anymore. Da da da da da da da da da. 0:42:31.9 GR: Mm-hmm, yeah, so... 0:42:33.4 DN: Hava Nagila, Hava Nagila... I can't help but hear it in a mode. [laughter] 0:42:38.6 GR: And that's kind of a question, do you hear Hava Nagila in... With this as tonic or do you hear this as tonic? I hear this a tonic myself. I hear it starting on a V chord. But you know, either way, right? In any case, yes absolutely, we're starting from... Oh, pardon my clock here. It's got... This is the thing about doing these C to C scales is, you really start getting into hearing where are things between C and C?  0:43:18.3 DN: Uh huh. 0:43:18.3 GR: And then, I don't know about you, but after I've done a few of these, especially these cluster examples, I'll turn on the radio and I still have in mind where C and C are and I just start hearing the collection of clustered notes between C and C and the key emerges and suddenly, I know all the notes I'm listening to. 0:43:39.9 DN: I think there's great value in having a lot of avenues into things. And one thing that I have never quite explained to myself, because I'm a terrible pianist but I can still, within my skill limits, I can play anything that I hear by ear. Anything? That's probably an exaggeration, but definitely a pop song. And I've noticed that I can be going along and listening to a pop song and I will get to a chord or get to something and I will lose track of where I am. And I'm trying to mentally analyze where things are. Doesn't everybody do this, mentally analyze all the pop songs you hear on the radio? Anyway, I have exposed myself. Alright. But I have found moments where I lose track of where I am and I think, "How would I play it?" And my fingers immediately know where they would go. 0:44:41.8 GR: Yeah, yeah. 0:44:44.3 DN: I will be like, Oh, now I know where I am. 0:44:48.9 GR: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. 0:44:50.9 DN: That's some other part of my brain that knows how to do that, but I think having these multiple avenues... 0:45:00.1 GR: Yeah, and Dalcroze was really after training that sort of subconscious level of the brain. That the goal was to make things so automatic that you couldn't disentangle pitch from scale degree, that you couldn't disentangle hearing the half steps and whole steps in a row and going, "Oh yeah, I know that that exists as either two, three, four or as six, seven, one. And therefore, I am in a specific place in the scale. 0:45:30.9 DN: Right. 0:45:31.4 GR: And which is it? Oh, now I have enough information. It's two, three, four" 0:45:34.4 GR: Right. 0:45:35.3 GR: Which also leads to wonderful exercises of modulation as well, that we could say, I'm starting from C again, and what arrangements of half and whole steps was that? That was a half step and then a whole step. What are the keys I could be in? Don't tell me, just think of them. And would you improvise a little tune that starts from that C that convinces me of what you have decided is tonic in that key." 0:46:00.2 DN: Uh. Da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da. 0:46:10.4 GR: Great. And I believe absolutely that you're in A flat major. Yes, you fully convinced me of it. Did someone in the class pick a different key? Don't tell me what it was. Let's hear your tune. And suddenly you've introduced the concept of modulation. 0:46:24.3 DN: Right. 0:46:24.4 GR: And of pivot. Of pivot scale fragments instead of pivot chords. Of course, you're having just sung that we would then sing it back either on letter names or scale degrees or moveable do. 0:46:34.1 DN: Right. 0:46:35.0 GR: Mi fa sol la ti la sol fa mi, la ti do, do re me. [laughter] 0:46:44.7 GR: Sorry... I live in fixed do you see, and so... 0:46:45.6 DN: It's hard to switch. [laughter] 0:46:45.6 GR: I'm gonna need numbers. "Three, four, five, one, sev, six, five, four, three, one, two, three. A six, five, four, three". I think you did something like that. Do you remember?  0:46:55.6 DN: That was good memory. 0:46:56.9 GR: Right? And so was... 0:46:57.6 DN: This is another thing we try to teach students. 0:47:00.7 GR: Absolutely. Absolutely. It's the... Yeah. Yeah. And of course going back to the Bodyfege, that is also about tonal... About tonal memory, memorizing small... 0:47:07.7 DN: Yeah. 0:47:08.7 GR: Smaller sections, yeah. 0:47:11.6 DN: Now I think, of course, I was trying to not sing a tune that immediately sprung to mind. And then I thought, "Oh, well, for another key... Oh, Danny Boy... ". [laughter] 0:47:21.5 GR: Yeah. You were gonna sing... Yeah. [music] 0:47:28.4 GR: Yeah, which is a great... I mean, there aren't that many well-known examples of tunes that began on scale degree 7. Isn't that a great one? "Sev, one, two, three". Totally. Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so these are the C to C scales. There are infinite games that you can spin out of them. We've only... We've only touched on a few. I wanted to share one more thing, which is just to give a sense of how Dalcrozians might introduce rhythm elements in the classroom. Shall we do a quick rhythm game?  0:47:55.1 DN: Sure. 0:47:55.9 GR: Okay. So this is gonna sound familiar, 'cause this is something you hear quite a lot in a Dalcroze class. "Do what I do four beats later." [laughter] 0:48:03.8 DN: Okay. 0:48:04.3 GR: Doop. Doop. Doop. Doop. Doop. Doop. Doop. Doop. Oh, we have earphones on, we have to tug on our earlobes for this next part. Because for the "Doops... " When we say the "Doops," were touching our pointer finger to our nose. And when we get to "Chikas", which will be tugging left, right, left, right, left, right on my earlobes. When I eventually get to "Ooh's", I'll be tracing a long arc of a hand from down by my knee up to the sky. And then when I get to a "Ksss," I'll do a clap in the middle of my body, spreading out over the full length of the "Ksss". Okay. So now our listeners know what we'll be doing physically, but we also post it quick. Okay. Here we go. Doop. Doop. Doop. Doop. 0:48:42.7 DN: Doop. Doop. Doop. Doop. 0:48:45.5 GR: Chika. Chika. Chika. Chika. 0:49:21.1 DN: Chika. Chika. Chika. Chika. [vocalization] [laughter] 0:49:42.2 GR: So this was... You should know David and I are doing this over the internet, and we're using Jamulus, which has pretty low latency. There's still a little bit of latency, so I was having to be ever so slightly ahead of David, which was totally... drammatically confusing for me. [laughter] 0:49:58.3 GR: But yeah... So, just to talk through the sequence of that. First we did one sound at a time, leaving silence and echoing. Then I would do one sound for measure and the next measure, I do was put a... [vocalization] 0:50:09.2 GR: A whole note in. 0:50:11.3 DN: Mm-hmm. 0:50:11.4 GR: And then each measure changing to whatever I want it to be, but still... By the way, every fourth measure I was putting a ksss [whole note] 0:50:21.8 GR: In, so that there was a sense of cadence and ordering to the phrase length. 0:50:26.5 DN: That is so important, to me, is that things be musical. 0:50:32.8 GR: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. 0:50:34.4 DN: Because you can do things at random, and if you don't make them musical, are you really... It's like you're putting another impediment in the way while you're creating new skills. 0:50:46.1 GR: Yes, yes. And I'm really glad you said that, because the next thing I would do... Actually, let's just go a little more, yeah?  0:50:54.5 DN: Okay. 0:50:55.5 GR: Ready?  [vocalization] 0:51:15.9 DN: I started my chikas too loud. 0:51:17.3 GR: Oh, it's all good... [laughter] 0:51:21.2 GR: It's all good, right? But to intentionally then create dynamic, and even pitch shapes within it, so that it starts becoming not just a... We have doops, we have chikas, we have oohs, but we start to create a thing. 0:51:31.3 DN: Right. There's a whole other layer of information that we often don't work on. 0:51:39.7 GR: Yeah. And intentionally, when I first did this exercise, I do not put that layer of information in. 0:51:45.4 DN: Right. 0:51:45.5 GR: At the beginning, this is an exercise of, can I do one thing... [laughter] 0:51:51.7 GR: While seeing another thing being done?  0:51:52.6 DN: Right. 0:51:54.4 GR: And that's a really hard skill to learn at first. With college students, yeah, great. But with elementary students, that I'm holding my own, and I'm not doing what I'm seeing, that takes a lot of work. And actually, what I will do in that, I do sort of like a Simon Says kind of thing. I'll say, "Do what I do. Do, do, do." We're all doing it. And then I say, "Keep doing that. Don't change until I say change." Class keeps doing it, I start to... chk-ah chk-ah 0:52:23.4 GR: "Keep doing your doops until I say... Change." And now we're all doing... chk-ah chk-ah 0:52:28.6 GR: Until I can... So you can layer it up that way of having them experience, "I'm doing eighth notes while I'm seeing quarter notes," or vice versa and starting to feel the relationship of those different notes. 0:52:39.4 DN: And you know what's also great about this? And this is just stating the obvious, I know. But it's all a game. 0:52:47.0 GR: It's all a game. 0:52:47.9 DN: It's all a game. 0:52:49.3 GR: It's all a game. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, okay, let's spin this game out a little bit. So now I'm just going to do the sounds at the Piano. But would you do everything back just as you were doing it?  0:53:00.5 DN: Okay. 0:53:00.8 GR: So when you hear doops, chikas, oohs and... [vocalization] 0:53:02.2 GR: From the Piano. [laughter] 0:53:03.8 GR: Ready? Here we go. [music] [vocalization] [laughter] 0:53:47.5 GR: Yeah, Exactly. 0:53:49.0 DN: And then you end with the symbol crash. Fantastic. 0:53:51.7 GR: The symbol crash, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And of course, what we are doing is rhythmic dictation. We're doing real-time rhythmic dictation. 0:54:00.3 DN: Yeah. 0:54:00.8 GR: And as we build it up, I could change the note value within the measure. Which I wasn't doing at all, I was doing a full measure of each, right?  0:54:06.6 DN: Right. 0:54:08.1 GR: We changed the note values within the measure, which adds a little bit of complexity. Or as I was doing that, I was trying to play things that kind of sounded like our sounds. But I could just improvise freely, and everyone would still do about the same motions. But I don't necessarily have to do that. Or I could do like a bad Beethoven Sonata, like a... As if I start, it goes... [music] 0:54:37.6 GR: You know, if I just... 0:54:38.0 DN: Right. 0:54:39.1 GR: You can just spin it out in any number of ways that you wanna spin it. 0:54:44.7 DN: And if I didn't feel confident at the piano, I can go... La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. 0:54:55.8 GR: Absolutely... Which is equally good. Which is... Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And, as we were talking about with Bodyfege, having students lead this exercise, starting with the basic form of doing the doops and chikas, as we talked about. With the rule of every fourth bar they're gonna do a ksss [whole note] 0:55:10.3 GR: And that's hard, that's really hard to remember. Often actually, as they're doing it, I just politely say, "One... Two... " At the start of each bar. "Three... " And then gradually take that away. To learn to create four measure of shapes... 0:55:26.6 DN: Right. 0:55:28.7 GR: Is wonderfully challenging. And as we did, adding that layer of musical information that exists on top of notes and rhythm as well, really, these are wonderful pathways into Improvisation for students that they can do away from their instruments and in an art school classroom so cool. 0:55:49.7 DN: This was great. [chuckle] 0:55:52.6 GR: I feel like that's probably enough as with anything in Dalcroze, you can take any of these and spin them out in infinite directions to fit your class... 0:56:03.2 DN: Right. 0:56:03.6 GR: To fit what you wanna work on, but I think... 0:56:06.2 DN: Yeah, I think, yes, I would love to see seven more hours of games, but just knowing this approach, there's a whole lot that one could invent on one's own... 0:56:19.5 GR: Totally. 0:56:20.5 DN: Just saying, "Oh, okay, I can use this." And probably, probably many people already are using games like this and they... 0:56:29.8 GR: Yeah. 0:56:31.8 DN: But if you're not, holy smoke. What a great process!  [chuckle] 0:56:35.7 GR: Yeah, yeah, and I find having a number of these in my tool bag as it were, these are great quick transition fillers, like, we're going between this piece and this piece, insert 30 seconds of doop canon. [chuckle] 0:56:51.0 GR: And that we're working. And it's just great ways, especially if you're teaching in a band or a choir orchestra situation, great ways to sneak in some really deep musical learning without having to take a bunch of time aside for it. 0:57:05.0 DN: Yeah, yeah. And the joy of playing, and we learned so much by playing, that's how we learn. 0:57:13.9 GR: Yeah, yeah, and this is the other thing because this work is so rooted in play, it takes, it removes a layer of stress that can absolutely be a blocker for learning concepts. I think when we're learning to play basketball, right, we don't go like, "Oh, I missed the basket, I give up." Right?  0:57:34.5 DN: Right. 0:57:34.6 GR: And we don't overthink it. 0:57:36.1 DN: Well, some of us do. 0:57:36.7 GR: Some of us do. Yeah... [chuckle] 0:57:37.9 GR: Especially adults, right? But give a kid a basketball and a basket and they'll just keep trying, and they're learning so much by that trying without horrible negative voices. The negative voices can typically come from maybe the coaching or the pressure of the game, of winning, but yeah, just working in play can be, especially for any students who are inhibited by their own stress or self-critique, it can be very freeing. 0:58:11.0 DN: Greg, this is fantastic, and thank you so much for sharing all these ideas today, I'm excited to incorporate some of them in my own classroom, and I'm sure that anyone listening is going to be thrilled as well so... 0:58:26.5 GR: Awesome. Well, thanks David. This was fun to flip the tables and do this. So... [chuckle] 0:58:31.2 DN: Great to see you. 0:58:32.5 GR: You too David. 0:58:35.7 DN: Bye. 0:58:36.6 GR: Bye. [music] 0:58:37.3 S1: Notes from the staff is produced by utheory.com. 0:58:40.0 GR: UTheory is the most advanced online learning platform for music theory. 0:58:44.1 S1: With video lessons, individualized practice, and proficiency testing uTheory has helped more than 100,000 students around the world, master the fundamentals of Music Theory, rhythm, and ear training. 0:58:54.9 GR: Create your own free teacher account at utheory.com/teach.

Rhythm Counting Systems with David Newman, Leah Sheldon and Greg Ristow

Rhythm counting systems: what they are, how we use them, and why might we choose one over another. We break down the plethora of approaches (including 1-e-&-a, Takadimi, Gordon, Kodály, and Orff) into groups, and share tips from our own experience teaching these from preschool to college.  Links: Free Printable Rhythm Resources on uTheory Eastman/1-ti-te-ta Counting System Traditional American/1-e-&-a Counting System Gordon Rhythm Solfege Takadimi Counting System Varley, Paul. An Analysis of Rhythm Systems in the United States: Their Development and Frequency of Use By Teachers, Students and Authors. (Ed.D Dissertation, UMSL, 2005) Show Notes: 0:30 Introductions 01:20 What are counting systems? What ones do you use? 03:05 Kinds of Counting Systems: Analytical/Metric Subdivisional vs Mnemonic 04:45 1e&a/Eastman/Traditional American approaches 06:11 Gordon Rhythmic Solfege 07:55 Takadimi 10:11 Mnemonic/Pattern-based/rhythm word approaches (Orff) 14:00 Note-syllable approaches (Kodály) 16:00 Kinesthetic Approaches (Dalcroze) 17:35 What are shared goals of counting systems? 19:40 Conceptualizing rhythm as existing within a metric grid, rather than as the addition of longer- and shorter-duration notes 21:22 How do you use these systems when you're teaching? 24:00 Role and value of using rote teaching with rhythm 25:50 Teaching the reading of rhythm using counting systems 29:23 Value of using multiple approaches: using both a subdivision & pattern-based system, and with each system varying the kind of activities and engagement 31:45 Teaching dictation using rhythm counting systems 33:00 Protonotations ("Box approach", "Beat sheets", drawings, symbols, etc...) 35:45 Call and response exercises 37:55 What are strengths/weaknesses of analytical-subdivisional approaches and mnemonic/pattern-based approaches? 43:50 Creating a sense of meter, especially in systems that don't make them explicit 49:30 A shared goal with pitch solfege systems is to learn a rhythmic system so well that in the end, we don't need it at all 51:40 Challenges of analytical/subdivisional systems 53:50 Wrap-up Transcript [theme music] 0:00:20.3 Leah Sheldon: Welcome to Notes from the Staff, a podcast from the creators of uTheory, where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education. I'm Leah Sheldon, head of teacher engagement for uTheory. 0:00:37.3 Greg Ristow: And I'm Greg Ristow, I'm an associate professor of conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory and the founder of uTheory. 0:00:43.1 David Newman: And I'm David Newman, I teach voice and music theory at James Madison University and I write code and create content for uTheory. 0:00:50.6 GR: Our topic today is one that several of you wrote in to say you would love to hear. Shoutouts to Noel Warford, Michael Joviala and Maddy Tarantelli, in particular. 0:00:58.9 LS: We'll be talking about counting systems or rhythm systems, which are basically solfège systems for counting rhythms. 0:01:05.6 DN: There are a lot of systems, but we'll break them down into categories and give examples of why you might use one or more of these to help teach rhythm. 0:01:14.3 LS: We've also got links in the show notes to helpful references, including printable rhythm system resources you can find at utheory.com/teach/resources. 0:01:24.9 GR: So, yeah. Let's dive in. What is a counting system? Probably many of us have had encounters with these growing up. The most common is, in America at least, is probably the 1-e-&-a, 2-e-&-a approach. So yeah, so what are these? Why do we use these? And I wonder, what systems do you use, Dave and Leah? 0:01:45.7 DN: Well, when I started teaching aural skills, I didn't use any system at all, I definitely used a version of counting in college when I was learning. Mostly in choir though. Then we switched to Takadimi at James Madison University. And then recently we have switched to what we're calling the Eastman System, which is 1-e-&-a and 1-la-li, 2-la-li. I guess that's not really the Eastman System, but it's some hybrid. [laughter] 0:02:19.4 GR: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, totally. I think it's probably... One of the things you mentioned you did a lot of it in high school choir. I think that for a lot of us, that's probably where we learn our counting systems is through our school music programs. 0:02:32.6 DN: Right. 0:02:33.2 GR: Certainly for me that 1-e-&-a, 2-e-&-a was a constant partner to my years in band. How about you, Leah? What systems do you use, have you used? 0:02:42.6 LS: Yeah, I grew up using 1-e-&-a, 2-e-&-a, so just a traditional counting system. Used that throughout college as well. In my first couple of years of teaching, especially at the elementary level, I actually taught with Kodály syllables. And then when I began teaching at the middle school and the high school I was mostly teaching counting again. 0:03:05.2 GR: Yeah, yeah. So there are different kinds of approaches to this and in a lot of ways, I think they parallel the debate about how to teach reading, just how to teach reading a language. And there are approaches that you might call phonics approaches, where you kind of break down the rhythm and analyze the relative durations and then there are approaches that you might think of as being more whole language or whole word approaches, where you learn basically rhythmic patterns in groups. So you might learn like an eight and 2 16th, ti-ta-ta as pine-apple, or 2 16th and an eight as cherry pie. So we're gonna talk about these approaches in different categories, we'll talk about what we're calling analytical or metric sub-divisional systems and these are the kind of traditional systems like the American Counting System, 1-e-&-a, 2-e-&-a, or the Eastman System 1-ti-te-ta. Gordon, the du-de's and Takadimi as well. And pneumonic or pattern-based systems, these are especially used in the Orff approach to music education. 0:04:16.4 GR: Note syllable systems, as Leah mentioned, the Kodály system, where we have things where the syllable is associated with the note duration, so ta as a quarter-note, ti as an 8th note, etcetera. Although doesn't follow that exactly. And a little bit kinesthetic approaches like the Dalcroze approach to music education, which combines a bit of the analytical metric subdivisional system approach and pneumonic approach with work through movement. So yeah, let's dive in. Let's talk first about these analytical or metric subdivisional systems. We've said a couple of times, probably the most common is that 1-e-&-a. It doesn't really have a name, if you look around, people call it the Eastman System though the Eastman System is proposed by McHose and Tibbs was actually 1-ta-te-ta, which is still in use in quite a lot of places. When we say that, what we're saying is that if you take 4 16th notes in simple time, you would call each of those notes by a syllable 1-ta-te-ta, right? So if I had 2 eighth notes, I could say 1-te, 2-te, 3-te, t-te for a measure. If I had a measure of 16th, I'd say 1-ta-te-ta, 2-ta-te-ta, t-ta-te-ta, 4-ta-te-ta. [laughter] 0:05:30.8 GR: Which, you know, the Eastman System seems to have been... Is newer than the Traditional American System, which I think most of us are familiar with 1-&-2-&-3, right? It's modified so that you get a more percussive beginning to each syllable. In the Traditional American System, we go 1-e-&-a, 2-e-&-a, t-e-&-a, 4-e-&-a. And if we're in compound meter in the Eastman System, we go 1-la-li, 2-la-li, or if we have 16th notes, say we're in six-eight and with 16th notes, we can subdivide all the way down to 1-ta-la-ta-li-ta, 2-ta-la-ta-li-ta, 1-ta-la-ta-li-ta, 2-ta-la-ta-li-ta. See that's Eastman/Traditional American System and a lot of people use a combination of those. Leah you wanna talk about Gordon? 0:06:14.5 LS: Sure. So Edwin Gordon's music learning theory really focuses on teaching the students to audiate and think in rhythms and that's done through learning the patterns that are really based on macrobeats, microbeats and then what he calls melodic rhythm. So for example, if the macro beat were a quarter-note, that would be duuuuu-duuuuu and we break that down into eighth notes then we have duuu-de, duuu-de all the way down into 16th notes du-ta-da-ta and in compound meters, we're breaking that into du-da-di-du-da-di and if there's further subdivision, du-ta-da-ta-di-ta. But again, the whole approach of Gordon is to help students audiate the rhythm. So it's not necessarily looking at the rhythm and reading it from notation, but hearing it so it's subjective. What one person hears as a macrobeat might not be what someone else is hearing as the macrobeat. But it at least it gives us a way to analyze the rhythm that's heard and be able to break it down into those syllables. 0:07:31.6 GR: And the Gordon music learning sequence places a big focus, I think what you're saying, is on the sound before sight kind of thing. 0:07:39.7 LS: Yes, yes. 0:07:42.2 GR: Yeah. And if you're listening and you're saying, oh my goodness, they're saying all these syllables and how am I going to remember what's what, don't worry. We've prepared resources on these counting systems for you at utheory.com/teach/resources. So how about Takadimi, David? 0:07:58.3 DN: Takadimi is interesting. It was conceived relatively recently, about 20 years ago, maybe a little longer, as a way of sort of making a fluent way and a logical way of dividing up each beat, so. And I think all of the systems that we've talked about so far, they're... We've talked about them referencing a quarter-note beat, but they can be used with a half note beat or a whole note beat. They're really beat-based and how you divide up that beat. So when you divide up a beat into four parts in Takadimi, you use, surprisingly enough, Takadimi. [chuckle] And if you divide it into three beats, you do ta-ki-da and if you divide that further into six beats, then you use ta-va-ki-di-da-ma. And one of the things that they tried to design it around, aside from the fact of changing the part of your mouth that makes each syllable so that they're easy to do fast syllables together, is that they made sure that di is always the middle of the beat, so the middle division of the beat. So even if you have ta-ka-di-mi, ta-va-ki-di-da-ma, di still lines up in the same place. 0:09:30.6 GR: Cool. I have to say, I love the sound of Takadimi when I hear people do it well and fluently. It has kind of... I find it as a sort of musical flow, maybe because of what you're talking about with where the syllables are, that my beloved 1-e-&-a doesn't have so much. 0:09:51.0 DN: And people like the crispness of the consonants as well, which is my colleagues' main complaint with the counting, is that wa is very ambiguous about it, where it starts. 0:10:08.3 GR: Yeah. For sure, for sure. So these are all these what we've been calling analytical or metric subdivisional systems, which is to say that given a beat that's either in simple time or at a time where the beats divide in two or four, or in compound time where they divide in three or six, then we can break down the beats into the notes within the beat into various syllables. These are the most probably common approaches to teaching rhythm. We also have mnemonic or pattern-based approaches, sometimes these are called rhythm word approaches, where you assign different... You can assign different words, actually literally English words to syllables. 0:10:48.0 GR: So I use these a lot myself when I'm teaching compound meter, which has fewer commonly used patterns. So for instance, say we're in six-eight and we have three eighth notes, if we're in geography land, that might be Ca-na-da, Ca-na-da. The dotted quarter could be Ro-me, Ro-me. The eighth and a quarter could be... I don't know. What's a good da-di, da-di-da? I've used Lo-ngy, Lo-ngy because I learned these at the Longy School of Music, but that may not apply anywhere else. And for eighth quarter, I've always used Scot-land, Scot-land, Scot-land. So just wind up with... And I think one of the nice things about these mnemonic approaches is that they get students thinking at a beat level and not at a micro sub-divisional level. And they get them there very quickly. 0:11:45.5 DN: That's super important. And I did the... I realized I did the same thing. In 2011, I made a video that ended up going a little bit viral with... Using food words that we had come up with in my class for simple meters. It wound up on a t-shirt somewhere. 0:12:06.2 GR: And this is... I think, especially anyone who's had training in Orff is saying right now, Oh yeah, this is what we do. This is just very, very central to the Orff approach to teaching music education is thinking in these words. And there's that connection as well with Gordon and I think a lot of music education philosophy of... That allows doing a lot in sound before actually moving to musical notation. 0:12:40.8 DN: Yeah. Which is another great advantage of it. Although I regularly see memes being shared on Facebook with words attached to various rhythms and there's always one that's wrong. [chuckle] 0:12:56.9 GR: Yeah. Where the stresses just don't work, right? Yeah. 0:13:02.4 DN: Yeah. 0:13:02.4 GR: Yeah. We'll talk more about various strengths of these. But one of the challenges of, if you're assigning a word to each pattern, is sometimes, the way these patterns line up in music, they don't all begin... The musical idea could begin before the beat, not necessarily on the beat. And then, how does that change the words you might wanna say? 0:13:30.9 DN: Right. 0:13:31.3 GR: The danger of, sometimes, these patterns, is that they always... You wind up with words that always stress the first note of the pattern, which may not be where the stress actually falls, musically. So yeah, so we have the mnemonic or pattern-based approaches. And, generally, people who use those tend to call them approaches rather than systems, because there is this idea of, let's find words that match and maybe one class will have a different set of words because that's come out of the students ideas in another class. There are also note syllable systems. We mentioned Kodály. Leah, do I remember that you taught with Kodály? 0:14:14.0 LS: I did, I did. And, although I have my Orff levels, I drew on a variety of approaches based on what we were working on. And even in my own circle of music education peers and colleagues, there were some discrepancies between what the actual syllables are once you get to the 16th note level. Some may disagree but... 0:14:37.3 GR: Can you talk us through the basic syllables? Can you talk us through the basic syllables for Kodály? 0:14:42.6 LS: The quarter notes are always ta and a pair of eighth notes is ti-ti and 16th notes are, either, ti-ka-ti-ka or ti-ri-ti-ri, or I've even heard, ti-ki-ti-ki. So, the disadvantage being that you're not necessarily distinguishing where the macrobeat is versus the microbeat. Like, an eighth note isn't ta-ti, it's always ti-ti. But it does make it very easy for students to identify types of notes from a very early age and understand that, oh, it's a pair of eighth notes and that's a beat that's divided into two sounds. 0:15:26.9 GR: And because of that, there's not... You don't have to make this determination early on are we in... When Looking at music, is this in simple time or compound time? 'Cause you can just name each note by it's syllable, or each rhythmic... 0:15:41.9 LS: Yeah, so much so to the point that students in kindergarten through second grade, may not even know that that's a quarter-note. That's a ta and that's a ti-ti. Which is probably a challenge. [chuckle] 0:16:01.1 GR: Good, so yeah. So, okay, so we've talked about analytical or metric subdivisional approaches, mnemonic approaches, note syllable systems like Kodály and then kinesthetic approaches, the Dalcroze approach is, probably, the most famous for this, where... Most Dalcroze teachers will connect rhythmic patterns to particular rhythm motions. And one of the things that I do a lot, when teaching basic rhythms, is, I'll do an echo canon with students. So I'll say, okay, I do what I do, four beats later and I'll tap my nose as I say, tu-tu-tu-tu and then they'll tap it back and I'll, with my right hand, left hand, tug gently on each ear and say, chk-chk-chk-chk for eighth notes, to a little raising arm motion, ou-ou for half notes and do a clap, with a long, kssss, for whole notes and you can spin that out in a bunch of ways to get to reading and things like that. But that is... You're connecting sound to different motions and in the Dalcroze approach, I think similar to Orff, it's not that there is one approved motion for a particular rhythm pattern, but there's a real emphasis on having these movements, these sounds, these words, be drawn out of the students as they learn to feel the different patterns. Leah, you've got your Orff certifications, would you say that's parallel in the Orff approach? 0:17:35.7 LS: Yeah, absolutely. 0:17:37.3 GR: Yeah, great. So, with that overview of counting approaches, what are our shared goals of using counting systems? Why do we use them? 0:17:48.6 DN: Accuracy [chuckle] but also understanding. But they all do encourage different ways of understanding. 0:17:54.5 GR: Yeah, for sure. I think some of them are definitely geared towards helping us to get quickly between sound and notation, they're very notational-based approaches, especially those... The metric subdivisional ones, but I think... And, Leah, what you were talking about with the Gordon approach, right? That maybe there's more of a focus on oral analysis. 0:18:15.3 LS: Right and exposure. Exposure to rhythm patterns and meters and giving students, even young students, an opportunity to build a rhythmic vocabulary and to, down the road, then, have a deeper understanding of rhythm and reading it and writing it from notation and also just facilitation for ease of imitation and repetition and everything that comes with sound before note. 0:18:50.4 GR: I think it can also really reveal if there is some rhythmic issue happening. Adding syllables or words to it can help you, as a teacher, diagnose what's going wrong. Let's say you have a student trying to perform two sixteenths and an eighth and they're performing it wrong, you say, "Okay, we'll try it on rhythm syllables," and they say, "Okay, 1-&-a" then what you've discovered is they've misidentified looking at it, visually, where the 16ths were versus where the eighth was, right? And so it can help you get to understanding, Is this a visual theoretical misidentification, a misrecognition of a pattern, or is this an issue in the actual accounting of it? And if you're doing mnemonic words then that becomes very apparent right away, yeah. 0:19:42.3 DN: I'm also reminded of a student that I had where they just couldn't do rhythms, they couldn't dictate rhythms properly. And I finally figured out that they were trying to figure out how long each note was, instead of figuring out where it happened within the framework. 0:20:00.5 GR: Yeah. 0:20:01.6 DN: So, that is another... 0:20:03.8 GR: David, I think this is... You've touched on something that I think is really huge and that maybe a lot of us aren't aware of, but I think there... I would say, there's a good 20% of students out there, at least that I see at the college level, who come in and they believe rhythm is about the addition of short and long notes together and not about orientation within a metric grid of some sort. And especially, I do... There're a lot of things I love from the Kodály method. But especially students whose only approach to reading rhythm has been Kodály and a ti is this long and a ta is this long and a to is this long, can fall into that trap. So I think it does go back to if you're using an approach like that, it's important to combine it with another approach where as we've been talking about, where they understand where they're fitting within that metric grid, because students who think of rhythm as the addition of long and short notes, the minute inaccuracies that add up each time they perform a note, get bigger and bigger. And what do those students do if they get lost in the middle of a measure? There's nothing to help them find their way back in, so I'm so glad you brought that up, David. 0:21:21.6 GR: So let's talk a little bit about how we use these when we're teaching. And I guess the classic things are... We're generally either going from notation to sound in some way, whether that be performing on an instrument, or we're going from sound to analysis or sound to notation, right? We hear something, we wanna be able to play it back, we hear something, we wanna be able to write it down, we hear something, we wanna be able to say, "Yeah, that's a du-ta-de." So yeah, maybe let's talk about reading rhythms and teaching rhythm reading. Leah, I think you probably have the most recent experience teaching this at the most basic level of, "Oh, my God, I'm facing a class of elementary students and middle school students, etcetera." Can you talk with us a little bit about how you would work with students in that context? 0:22:14.5 LS: Sure. And it also... It does depend on, not necessarily what system you're using, but it does with young learners, you have to have a very clear objective and outcome. And for example, with a teacher who's teaching with the Gordon learning sequence, you're looking at whole-part-whole instruction in most cases and the rhythm solfège really plays into the part of that, where you've shared a song and now you're breaking it down into parts and you're isolating the rhythm patterns from the song. And that's where you're chanting rhythms using the du-des. And then putting that back into the big picture, again, back into the whole for students to have learned to sing a song or to perform a song versus using Kodály syllables that more quickly transfer to notation, that could be something as simple as looking at the rhythm on the board, labeling the notes with ta and ti-ti and then having the students chant that rhythm, first together and then until they're able to do that individually on their own. 0:23:31.7 LS: So it really depends on what you're working on and we don't even possibly have time to get into all the ways to go through that. But as just a quick overview, most of the time it's just working with a whole group of students, having them chant together as a group, maybe slightly older students then are able to work in small groups and be doing that on their own, especially with Orff, coming up with their own words for the rhythms that are presented to them, drawing on either a book that was just read or a song that was sung. So, the options are endless. 0:24:10.4 GR: Yeah, they are. One of the things that you love that I forget about a lot, especially working at the college level, is this idea of, maybe first learn something by rote and then figure out what's in it. And that can be really, really beautiful to do, yeah. And I think it's generally our default when we're working with younger students, especially at the elementary level. 0:24:31.9 LS: Absolutely and that depends on teacher's philosophies too. But generally, if you are someone who has Orff levels or has gone through the Gordon Institute of Music Learning, then you're probably gonna be doing rote teaching and whole-part-whole instruction. 0:24:50.7 DN: Even at the college level, I think Cynthia Gonzales recently told me that she never makes them do a rhythm or a melody by dictation that she hasn't already done with them in class, that they haven't already defined in class. 0:25:09.4 LS: And it doesn't mean that your students can't independently do this. Again, Gordon's whole point is, that your students are able to audiate rhythm patterns. So you're gonna get to a place with your students, if you do enough chanting and if you're teaching an appropriate sequencing, that your students can look at a pattern and think, audiate how it's going to sound or be able to chant it in tas and ti-tis, or... Like I said, come up with words that fit. So, they can also read it, we're not... I'm not talking about only teaching by rote at the elementary level, but that's definitely a big part of it. 0:25:50.8 GR: Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about... Actually, if we did wanna focus now on teaching the reading of rhythm, ways that we might use these systems. Let's talk metric analytical systems, so these are the Gordon, are Takadimi, are Eastman or American traditional systems. I think the two most common ways would be you're looking at a rhythm and then you either count aloud all of the subdivisions at whatever subdivisional level you need, while clapping the rhythm, so that might be something like 1-e-&-a, 2-e-&-a, 3, kind of a thing, or you speak the rhythm using just the syllables that begin each node of the rhythm. So if you take that same rhythm of... If that was 1-e-&-a, 2-e-&-a, 3, if I were speaking or chanting or intoning, people often prefer so that it's a bit more vocal, becomes 1-&-2-&-a-3, kind of a thing. Yeah, does that match with how David, Leah you do things when using these approaches? 0:27:05.3 LS: Yeah, I think to add another layer on to that when you're teaching instrumentalists though, that you're also teaching them to be constantly having whatever system is running in their head because they're not clapping and counting aloud when they're playing their instruments, they're pulling their instruments. So, constantly being able to have the... If you're counting then you've got the 1-e-&-a's running in your head while playing, so. There's a whole host of techniques that come up with instrumentalists, so now we're sizzling on mouthpieces the rhythm, or we are just T-T-T, the rhythm, because that's how we're gonna articulate it on the instrument source of... [chuckle] I don't know if we're trying to go down that path right now, but... [chuckle] 0:27:55.2 GR: No, I think that's beautiful, yeah. 0:27:58.3 DN: That really emphasizes how important it is to have that inner metronome going and whatever we can do to reinforce that inner metronome with inner subdivisions. [laughter] 0:28:12.4 GR: Yeah. This takes me... I wonder... We had a doctor beat in the end which is this metronome that probably a lot of us experience that will actually count aloud the 1-&-2-& and 1-e-&-a and you can turn up or down all the subdivisions, probably with that goal of getting... Leah as you were talking about, that constant sub-divisional line running in your head as you are performing. 0:28:45.0 LS: Right. 0:28:45.0 DN: There's also the... If you're reading music, there's a visual component and then there's a, "What does it sound like?" Component. And so I know that in the Musicians Guide series, they encourage written exercises where you just write in the syllables that you're using, so that you've dealt with the visual component, so that's again one of those assessment opportunities where you can sort of figure out whether there's a problem understanding what you're seeing versus understanding how it sounds. 0:29:23.6 LS: Right. And again, when you're working with middle school level students, for example, you're not always just picking one way and sticking with that, you're trying a whole bunch of different ways to get at all the different learners in the room, so. Just like David said, yeah, sure, I would have students write in the counts and then sometimes we would also... They came to me with knowledge of ta's and ti-ti's, so let's go ahead, write in ta and ti-ti. And then we would go through and we would chant them a couple of different ways and then however the students were thinking in their head when they're playing, they've had an opportunity to vocalize that and reinforce that. And this kind of leads me to a point. I think it is so important to have two frameworks for the students, especially if they're coming from something like ta and ti-ti or just using words connected to rhythm patterns. It is so important then to be connecting that to something analytical so that they have a means for figuring out what the rhythm is independently. 0:30:31.5 GR: Yeah, this seems to be a theme that's come up on just about every episode so far, this idea of using different ways of thinking about things with Solfege systems, something to name the letters, the actual pitch space versus something to name its function in relation to a scale, to a key. I'm 100% with you on that Leah. I think we need something that does let us do that subdivisional analysis, but we also need something that gets us to that pattern level thinking where we're not looking at every rhythm as though it were a totally new thing that we had to analyze, but we recognize a lot of what's within it. 0:31:11.5 LS: And I'm not saying that there's any right or wrong way to do it, I think it takes a variety of approaches. Like David said earlier, there have been times out on the football field, that I was shouting words just to get the students to bring the rhythm together so we could get it lined up and you are like, "Whatever works." [laughter] 0:31:30.0 DN: I love whatever works. [chuckle] 0:31:33.0 GR: Especially on the football field, oh my Lord. 0:31:37.3 DN: Oh, gosh. 0:31:38.4 GR: Something we choir directors pretty much never have to do. 0:31:40.8 DN: Yeah. 0:31:41.7 GR: Yeah. So yeah, reading, that's great. And then dictation is really oral analysis and Leah you talked about with the whole-part-whole approach, the idea of taking a song we know, a piece we know and then breaking it down, what are the rhythmic patterns in here, what's going on? And whether we write that down or not, that's a kind of dictation, right? 0:32:10.9 LS: Mm-hmm. 0:32:11.8 GR: And very related to what... Say, if we were at the college level in an aural skills musicianship classroom, the kind of thing we'd be doing there, if we're using analytical methods there... If students are familiar with them and have used them a lot, then they can often go straight from sound to, "Oh, yeah, that's a 1-&-a," or that's... Whatever in the system we're using. One of which I think is probably worth mentioning is what some people call the box approach, which if you're using a sub-divisional or analytical system, or let's say that you're just starting off with beats and rests, so you have... Say, we're working three/four, you have three boxes, you have a rhythm, ta-ta and the students mark, "Oh, there's one in box one, there's one in box three," and learn how to translate that to notation. If you break it down to the eighth levels, here we're still on three/four then now you have six boxes, a box for one and two and t-& and the students mark down where the notes begin and translate that to notation. And actually, for students who've used a drum machine, this feels very natural to them, 'cause drum machines and things like Ableton or Logic, wherever you see all your subdivisions spread out and you turn on or off different sounds on different subdivisions. Do you all use the box approach? I use it very early on and I try and get away from it as quickly as I can myself. [laughter] 0:33:50.5 LS: I used... It's basically the same thing, I call them beat sheets, where there's literally a picture of a heart because we're feeling the beat. So maybe a four/four, then there's four across and it's a four measure patterns, you've got four across, four going... It's the same exact thing. 0:34:09.8 GR: Are the four down the subdivisions of the beat for you or is that four measures? 0:34:16.6 LS: So four measures, but we can easily subdivide the beat by drawing a line right down the middle of the heart. 0:34:22.7 GR: I love the heart, that's so great. And beat sheet, that's so much better. 0:34:26.6 LS: It's very, very popular, but it's... I've stolen that from many other educators, that's not something I came up with by any means. 0:34:35.6 GR: And now I'm going to steal it from you. These will forever be beat sheets when I teach now, it's great. [chuckle] Yeah. 0:34:42.4 LS: You don't have to stick to heartbeats, you can get creative, but... [chuckle] 0:34:45.3 GR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I suppose drums work too, there's something nice about a heart, although a heart's really hard to divide in four. 0:34:52.0 DN: I've used both, spatial... Spatial analysis works really well for me, but for a student who has trouble with spatial awareness, that isn't gonna work really well necessarily. I've also used beat level systems like piano roll notation and also symbols symbolizing what happens within each beat. 0:35:16.7 GR: So yeah, beat sheets or whatever we wanna call them, these are kinds of protonotation, there are things that provide an intermediate step between Western musical notation and sound and there are lots of different ones. Jenine Lawson Brown just published an article on one in Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy and actually we'll be talking with her about that in an upcoming episode. And yeah, those can be great for helping smooth that transition between our aural recognition. One of the things that I think is really useful that certainly those of us who have a Music Education Degree were taught to do is probably a lot of call and response kind of things, where I'll do a pattern aurally for students, I'll perform aurally O and students will respond with whatever approach we're using. So if we're using a Kodály approach, I might go... I'll choose intentionally not to use Kodály syllables, I might go boom-boom-boom-boom-boom and they go ta-ti-ti-ta-ta, that kind of back and forth and all of these approaches enable doing that sort of real-time aural dictation. I think one of the things I found teaching aurals was at the college level, is maybe some of us tend to go too soon to let's write down what we're hearing, that maybe we skip sometimes that first step of do we actually have these rhythmic patterns in us for each beat before we're trying to write down an eight bar rhythm? 0:37:04.6 LS: And on the complete other end of that with the youngest learners, that often looks like picture notation or just for example, where your students are... Maybe not even dictation, maybe this is even more composition but your students are composing rhythms using pictures of strawberries and blueberries and squeaky shoes, 'cause I'm drawing from a Pete the Cat lesson that I used to teach and they're writing these wonderfully complex rhythm patterns without any notes, not even stick notation. So again, maybe this is... Maybe we consider this a protonotation, but... 0:37:46.0 GR: Absolutely. 0:37:46.7 LS: We've got patterns of strawberries and blueberries and they can look at it and they can chant it and so now they have a means for dictation as well. 0:37:56.3 GR: Leah, I think when you said the importance of combining two different approaches, can we circle back to that? Can we talk a little bit about why that's so important? In other words, what are some of the strengths and weaknesses of say, analytical subdivisional approaches versus mnemonic pattern approaches and why might we need to combine both things? 0:38:21.2 LS: Right, so like I was just saying, the younger students before they're even, maybe even reading words can be dictating rhythm and composing and using symbolic notation if you're using a word-based approach or even a pattern-based approach. But then if you continue to just, to only do that, then when they're in an ensemble or they start taking piano lessons or whatever it is that they're doing, they're looking at this notation going, I don't know this, but then they hear it and they know it. So helping them make that connection is going to allow them to be independent musicians much sooner than just down the line, suddenly, okay, now we're gonna count this instead. And they're not realizing that it's something that they already know, they think they're learning something new versus if we had introduced it much earlier than they've already got the skills. 0:39:19.1 GR: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, so if we're talking about mnemonic, or pattern-based approaches, one of the things that I found working with students who've learned primarily or exclusively using this system is sometimes those students really think at the beat level. And for instance, an example of poor performance might be Cherry Pie, watermelon, apple, right? Where that's like you can hear the thought of the time in between that it takes them to get to what each mnemonic is. And of course, right, that's something that we have worked to smooth out and you might get that as well in an analytical subdivisional system. But in the mnemonic approach there's nothing that specifically says, here is the underlying metronomic subdivisional flow to it. And so, usually when we're working in these mnemonic systems or pattern-based approaches, we're doing something else to encourage that. And so that's... It might be something kinesthetic with students patting the beat or swaying the beat or conducting to help build in that flow and that understanding of it. Certainly, another thing about these pattern-based approaches is... And Leah, this goes to exactly what you were saying of so I know these patterns in experiments, orally I have this protonotation, whether it's drawing ice cream cones or whether it's... You know. But then... 0:40:54.3 LS: The options are endless. [laughter] 0:40:55.8 GR: The options are absolutely endless. I've done so many little compositional activities with, you know, ice cream, ice cream. Yeah and yes, absolutely, right. And ice cream cones are very easy to draw quickly, which is helpful for little kids. But yeah, as connecting that to the analytical side of things, so that students can eventually... Well, wait a second, I don't know this pattern. What is this? This isn't... This is a less common rhythmic pattern that maybe I don't have a word for. And how do I count that? Yeah. I find the mnemonic approach leads itself to a lot of creative kind of work, those compositional activities you were talking about. But it may not engage... It makes it a little harder sometimes to engage with on an analysis of the music. 0:41:48.7 LS: Right. If students know that this is a macrobeat and this is a microbeat and they have a way to apply that to writing or reading, then they know that they can figure out how rhythm is gonna go, is this du-du-de-du-du or this is ta-ti-ti-ta-ta. But they probably aren't gonna look at notation and go Oh yeah, that's a watermelon and... [laughter] 0:42:20.5 GR: Yeah. But you know... 0:42:23.1 LS: And that's how they've been taught consistently. Again, I'm not... Nothing is off the table. 0:42:28.1 GR: Yeah. I'm actually down in Colorado right now, covering a maternity leave for a Dalcroze friend of mine, who runs this wonderful community music program for kids ages four through high school. And they have five levels of Dalcroze classes that they go through. And they learn all of their rhythmic patterns, like, just about everyone you could think of on color names. And it is the most complete mnemonic pattern-based approach I have ever seen. And to the point that, you know, I will put the rhythm on the board and I'll say, What's this? And they will say, that's a neon lemon yellow. [laughter] Right? They just... That is how they hear those. 0:43:19.3 LS: So I'll make my point again, that it really depends on the teacher and the sequence and what the learning objectives are. 0:43:26.6 GR: Totally, totally. Yeah, you know, but I have had like, oh, I wish... You know, especially with the upper levels of those classes. And like, oh yeah, we need to also start layering on to this a rhythmic analytical system because it's not enough to see them in little blocks of patterns. Yeah, one thing we haven't talked about so much is some of these approaches lend themselves to helping us know where we are in a measure better than others do. Like the traditional American counting system, one and two and the Eastman system, where they name the beats. You can hear right away, Oh yeah, okay. That's where I am in the measure. And that's important, right? The relative stress shape of the measure tells us a lot about how to perform music, so if we're not working with the Eastman or traditional American system, how can we get students to feel that, to internalize and know how to translate measure shape into performance? 0:44:41.2 LS: Conducting. 0:44:42.5 DN: Even at the middle school, elementary school level? 0:44:47.1 LS: Yeah, absolutely. Especially for students who are in an ensemble. I started out teaching them conducting, 'cause otherwise they don't know what I'm doing in front of them. 0:44:56.6 GR: Awesome. 0:44:56.9 LS: They have no idea. They need to know that, like, if they're not sure, for example, where we are in the music, how do they find the downbeat again, they need to know what a downbeat looks like in conducting, because if somebody doesn't teach them that they probably don't know. 0:45:15.0 GR: Right. 0:45:15.6 LS: And if you're not counting using numbers, then if they're just thinking in their head and in another system that is not giving them numbers, they're just thinking, du-u du-u du-u and everything's quarter notes then they're gonna be so lost. 0:45:35.3 DN: We do also, at the college level teach... Just to have them conduct with it. And we definitely did that when we were doing Takadimi, so that we knew where we were in the measure, just required conducting. But I have also taken my students and had them dance to something, [chuckle] step, clap, step, clap and just show that there is a meter that is so common, we call it common time and that they already know how to conduct it with their feet and their hands. So, yeah. 0:46:12.3 LS: And my other answer was gonna be Dalcroze. [chuckle] 0:46:14.8 DN: Yeah. [laughter] 0:46:17.4 GR: Yeah and for listeners who don't know, I come from a real Dalcroze background, I do a lot of teaching using approaches from the Dalcroze method and I also teach teachers to teach the Dalcroze method. And David, when you asked, even at the middle school, elementary level, I'm about to teach a class of 4-year-olds in a couple of hours. And on our lesson plan for today is we're going to be doing a game where we're in two/four and we're patting, touching our head, back and forth. And then on three/four and we're patting, clapping and touching our... Excuse me. No, we're patting, we're in a circle and then we clap our neighbor's hands for a side and then we touch our head one, two, three and then when we're in four/four we go pat, clap, touch our neighbor's head, so it's pat, clap, neighbor's head. Right, so it is... And that is of course, right like that, so that it's the traditional conducting gestures. 0:47:16.3 DN: Gotcha. 0:47:17.5 GR: And then as the students... When I'm working with slightly older students, say I'm working with 7-year-olds where they now have the dexterity to be able to bounce and catch a ball, you can translate into... Yeah, you just build all those things in through various conducting like motions and sequences. 0:47:38.9 DN: That's brilliant, I love it. 0:47:39.9 GR: It's great fun and you're having students... You give students... Let's say we're in four/four, right and so we might be doing, bounce, catch, toss, catch and walking around the room, or we might be in place. A great classic Dalcroze game is I play a rhythm, a measure later you translate that rhythm into movement in your feet across the floor. So, they're moving with their ball, doing their bounce, catch, toss, catch the hair, di-da-da-di-da-da and they're still bouncing and catching, but now they're also walking it across the floor doing that. We've assigned specific things, so quarter notes are steps and eighth notes are step touches or you can do... You make them up and change them. So yeah, yeah, movement, it's great if you have the space to move across the floor, but yeah, certainly, we can all think of any patterns, movement patterns to get a sense of where we are in the beat. And the classic one of course, if you have instruments in your hand, it seems really basic, but tapping the foot, it's just... It doesn't help us know where we are on the meter but it certainly does help us know where we are in the beat. Yeah and then eventually teaching students to just squeeze their toe and then just feel it and... [laughter] 0:48:56.9 LS: I was just gonna say or just tapping toes because telling smaller children to tap their foot becomes a whole stomping fiasco. [laughter] 0:49:06.3 GR: Yes it does, but it can be really helpful actually to see... I certainly, in piano lessons have had students just tap in a way that I can see it so that I can identify are they aware of where the note falls in relation to the beat? 0:49:23.5 DN: And I suppose with all of these, then we have to make sure that we leave them room to unlearn that behavior when they're performing. [laughter] 0:49:33.8 GR: Yeah, yeah. Oh, in this... And if we go back to episode one on solfège systems, this idea that we want to learn a solfège system so well, that at the end of the process, we don't actually have to think about it, I think applies here for these rhythmic approaches also. We wanna learn them so well so that at the end, I don't have to be thinking my du-ta-de-ta's or my 1-e-&-a's or my watermelons. I know so deeply how these rhythms feel, how meter shape feels that I can just perform it, hear it and if I need to, I can go back to analyze it or figure out what the patterns are. Yeah, but that's that last stage, fluency. Certainly, fluency is the goal, speaking music as a language, hearing music as a language, reading music as a language, are the shared goals of solfège and rhythmic counting systems. 0:50:35.1 DN: I love hearing from both of you that a combination of techniques is helpful. Because I think I've thought that too, but I feel obligated to commit to a system and I think maybe for an analytical system, it's useful to commit to one system so that students aren't trying to embrace multiple analytical systems but having multiple approaches sure gives students a lot of avenues into understanding. 0:51:09.9 GR: Yeah and I've certainly found for some students an analytical system is like oh yeah, this is me, I want this, I love this. And for other students, a mnemonic pattern-based approach is what really speaks to them and so it can be... Leah, you mentioned as well speaking to the different ways that students in your classes learn really, yeah, yeah. 0:51:34.4 DN: Plus there are problems with the analytical systems that you might want another method to supplement and we should talk about what some of those drawbacks are. 0:51:46.4 LS: I think we've touched on some already, but they can be very mathematical and maybe this plays into knowing where you are in the measure but it lends itself to being unmusical since the students are literally looking at it, maybe even like a math problem. They're going through and they're counting and writing in subdivisions and now it's become this complex thing on paper that is not music they're performing, but it's this problem to be solved. 0:52:20.6 GR: Totally. I think also with these analytical subdivisional systems, if you start thinking about patterns, they sound really similar like du-te-ta versus tu-te-de. The actual sounds tu-te-de versus du-te-ta, there's nothing there that makes the whole thing different from the other whole thing. Whereas if you're working with mnemonic things like cherry pie or pineapple, they have a very different sound from the first moment in a way that these... The Takadimi, du-ta-de-ta, 1-e-&-a don't have a different sound from that first syllable for each pattern. 0:53:06.9 DN: Although I noticed that within the analytical systems, there's also some that are stronger in that department and some that are weaker. It's always bothered me that that's one of the weaknesses of Gordon, is that all of the syllable sound so similar. But it was only recently that I had read and I don't know if this is true or not, that it was actually designed to help young students articulate well and that's why they all have that same sharp consonant at the beginning. So, it's a flaw, but it's also an advantage, so it just depends on what you feel is important to reinforce. 0:53:49.6 GR: Great, well, this has been a great discussion and have we... Would you agree we've covered everything we wanted to cover, have we missed anything? 0:53:57.4 DN: I think we got to a lot of things. [chuckle] 0:54:00.6 GR: Yeah, great. So lots of resources to be found in the show notes also our sheets on rhythmic counting systems at utheory.com/teach/resources. Great, well, David, Leah, thanks and for all our listeners, if you've enjoyed this episode, if you wanna hear more things like this, let us know what you'd like to hear, write us at notes@utheory.com. [music] 0:54:28.5 DN: Subscribe to notes from the staff on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts and check us out at utheory.com/notes. 0:54:36.4 LS: Notes from the staff is produced by utheory.com. 0:54:38.7 GR: UTheory is the most advanced online learning platform for music theory. 0:54:42.6 LS: With video lessons, individualized practice and proficiency testing, uTheory has helped more than 100,000 students around the world master the fundamentals of music theory, rhythm and ear training. 0:54:52.9 GR: Create your own free teacher account at utheory.com/teach.  

Demystifying Perfect Pitch with Elizabeth West Marvin

What is perfect pitch and why do some people have it when others don't? How does it work and is it possible to learn it? In this episode, Dr. Elizabeth West Marvin (Eastman School of Music, and an author of the Musician's Guide series of textbooks) answers these questions and more. Links: Elizabeth West Marvin's Faculty Page at Eastman Musician’s Guide to Theory and Analysis  Marvin, Elizabeth West. Absolute Pitch Perception and the Pedagogy of Relative Pitch Ross, Gore and Marks. Absolute pitch: music and beyond Van Hedger, Heald and Nusbaum. Absolute Pitch May Not Be So Absolute Show Notes: 00:20 Introductions 00:50 Guest introduction: Dr. Elizabeth West Marvin 03:20 What is perfect pitch? 04:28 Is absolute pitch (AP) the same thing as perfect pitch? 05:20 How did you become interested in studying absolute pitch? 06:55 Working with students with absolute pitch in an aural skills classes 08:40 How do people acquire absolute pitch? 10:25 Do animals have absolute pitch? 11:10 Can you train young children to acquire perfect pitch? (Eguchi Chord Identification Method) 13:04 Vowel colors/overtones and absolute pitch 14:40 What's the relationship between absolute pitch and timbre? Are there people who have absolute pitch for only a particular instrument? 16:18 Can I acquire absolute pitch as an adult? 19:28 How common is it to have a musician who has absolute pitch who did not begin study at a young age? 22:27 To what degree is AP valuable as a musician? 24:53 What is relative pitch (RP)? 26:33 Is there a relationship between AP/RP and choosing a solfege system (relative vs phenomenological systems)? 29:56 Why does absolute pitch change with age? 31:00 Ross, Gore & Marks's research on two kinds of AP: Heightened Tonal Memory (HTM) vs Ability to Perceptually Encode (APE) 33:27 How do people with AP and RP hear differently from each other? 36:50 What can people with AP and RP learn from each other? 40:08 Latent AP/AP without musical training 41:45 AP as a continuum and not a binary 43:50 What research is being done now on AP? 46:55 Van Hedger, et. al., research on flexibility of AP 48:57 Can you talk a bit about the Musician's Guide series of textbooks that you've authored? 55:35 Thank you and wrap-up   Transcript 0:00:21.9 David Newman: Welcome to Notes from the Staff, a podcast from the creators of uTheory, where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education.   0:00:35.1 Gregory Ristow: Hi, I'm Greg Ristow, founder of uTheory and Associate Professor of conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory.   0:00:41.5 DN: And I'm David Newman, and I teach voice and music theory at James Madison University, and I do programming and content creation for uTheory.   0:00:50.1 GR: Our topic for today is perfect pitch, and joining us to help demystify it, is special guest, Dr. Elizabeth West Marvin, professor of music theory at the Eastman School of Music. Dr. Marvin's research interests are broad and encompass especially the areas of Music Cognition and Music Theory Pedagogy. She's known to many of us as a leading author for the popular Musician's Guide series of theory and ear training textbooks, now in its fourth edition. Betsy, thanks for joining us.   0:01:18.1 Elizabeth West Marvin: You are absolutely welcome. It's a pleasure to be here.   0:01:21.4 GR: It's great to have you. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?   0:01:25.6 EWM: Well, as you said, I'm a professor at the Eastman School of Music in the Department of Music Theory. I was also a student there, so I've been at Eastman for a very long time. I grew up as a choir kid, I played piano and organ and sang, but I do not have perfect pitch, so that's important to know going into this conversation. I always knew that I wanted to do music of some kind, but I flirted with all different majors until I got to Eastman and found Music Theory, and then I was really sort of hooked. And flash forward to today, I've been on the theory faculty at Eastman for over 30 years, and I have a textbook that's been out for 15 years in its fourth edition, as you said. But the Music Cognition part came right at the end of my graduate studies. I became very interested in how we perceive music, and I started taking courses over at the University of Rochester's River campus, and again, I was sort of hooked, I found the whole thing really fascinating, and it's developed into that whole area of music cognition that was sort of in its infancy when I was a student, but now is really a big part of music theory.   0:02:35.1 GR: And the University of Rochester, Eastman is part of the University of Rochester, which some of our listeners may not know. And you now have a connection there, you do research together with the Brain and Cognition department over there. Is that right?   0:02:48.6 EWM: Yes, Brain and Cognitive sciences, I have a secondary appointment over there. For many years, I taught a course called Music and the Mind, which was attractive both to Eastman students and to Brain and Cognitive Science students, and linguists and audio engineers, and it was a really, really diverse group of students. I'm not teaching it anymore, I've handed it over to a new hire that they have in their department, but that was a very interesting and fruitful teaching experience.   0:03:18.2 GR: Great. Well, shall we dive into our topic for the day?   0:03:21.4 EWM: Absolutely.   0:03:24.8 GR: So...   0:03:24.8 DN: Let's get into the nitty-gritty.   0:03:27.8 GR: Yeah.   0:03:28.8 DN: What is perfect pitch?   0:03:28.8 GR: I feel like this is... None of us really knows, because we either have it or we don't, and we can't know what it's like to be the opposite, so yeah, so Betsy... Yeah, sorry, what is it?   0:03:41.1 EWM: Yeah, so I'll try to demystify some of that. Some of my recent research actually involves interviewing people with absolute pitch. I've interviewed about 50 kids between Eastman and some work I've done in Hong Kong, so I can tell you a little bit about their stories, but the official definition of absolute pitch is that it's the ability to recognize and name a pitch that's heard, or to produce a pitch when it's named, without any reference to an external standard like an instrument. And I would say, Greg, you were saying either you have it or you don't, but I actually believe that AP is on a continuum, and that people can have degrees of absolute pitch, so that's one of the more recent findings in research.   0:04:29.7 GR: You talked a little bit about the music cognition side, how did you get interested specifically in absolute pitch? And also maybe... You've been saying absolute pitch. What's absolute pitch versus perfect pitch? Is there a difference?   0:04:40.6 EWM: Oh yeah, I use absolute pitch partly because of my experience with students. If I ask them, "Do you have perfect pitch?" They'll hesitate and they'll say, "Well, it's not always perfect," they'll have good days or bad days, or it's not perfect enough for them, they can't tell the difference between A442 and A440, so it's not perfect. But absolute pitch is the term used in Music Psychology, so I tend to use that more. But my interest came out of teaching, so when I was first hired at Eastman, I was hired to run the RR Skills program, and I did a big re-write of the whole curriculum. I got in there and started teaching, and realized that in the same classroom, I would have two kids with absolute pitch, and all the rest with relative pitch. And from my own experience of having been a student myself, I remembered that teachers would do things like have the absolute pitch kids take all the melodic dictation in alto clef or tenor clef, or they would hear it in F-major and have to write it in C-sharp Major, things like that.   0:05:57.4 EWM: So as a new teacher, I started doing the same stuff, and I realized that the kids were feeling persecuted or punished for having absolute pitch, and I also realized that there were some things that they actually could not do very well, not as well as the relative pitch kids, like naming intervals. You play a perfect fourth, and they would write F, B-flat, and then they would sit and figure out, "Oh, that's a perfect fourth." It wasn't an immediate relational thing. And similar with dictation. So I started spending time thinking about ways to teach function instead of just absolute identification, and I can get more into that later if you want.   0:06:47.2 DN: I do, I want. [laughter] I have made it a... I don't think that my perfect pitch students feel persecuted, although some of them may, but I never play any melodic or harmonic example in the key that it says.   0:07:07.0 EWM: Well, do you wanna talk about that now? I could tell you what I do.   0:07:09.9 DN: Sure.   0:07:11.7 EWM: What I do, I try to not single out the AP kids, and so what I do is I try to avoid announcing a key or writing on the staff at all. So I do a little bit like what Gary Karpinski does with protonotation. So say for a melodic dictation, they would write out... They would take dictation of the rhythm, and then they hang on to that rhythm, so scale degree numbers. Everybody, not just the AP kids, so that you're forced to think in a relational way. And I'll wander around the classroom, if I see those AP kids writing down letter names or notes or anything, I stop them, and I say, "I want scale degree numbers." And then at the end, you can have them transcribe it onto the staff, which helps the relative pitch kids gain facility with dictation, but it also forces the AP kids to think in a relational way. And I do that with harmonic dictation too, soprano, scale degrees, base scale degrees, Roman numerals.   0:08:13.4 DN: I love that. Yeah.   0:08:14.9 EWM: I think it works really well, and it's good... As I say, it's good for the RP kids too, relative pitch kids.   0:08:21.0 GR: And for any of our listeners who don't know, Gary Karpinski is the author of Acquiring Aural... Or Aural Skills Acquisition, I guess is the easy title?   0:08:26.5 EWM: Yeah.   0:08:28.3 GR: And also has a sight-singing text manual for sight-singing and ear training. So absolute pitch, I don't have absolute pitch. I maybe have the ever slightest shade of it, where I can usually tell if I'm hearing a white note or a black note. How is... How do people...   0:08:47.7 EWM: That's a thing.   0:08:49.3 GR: Yeah, how do people get absolute pitch?   0:08:54.9 EWM: There are many theories of how people acquire absolute pitch, and I think that... I can run through various theories, but one has to do with heredity, so maybe you are born with it. Another theory is that you're taught music at a very young age, say you began at age four to six, and somehow you have what's called a critical period, similar thing for language acquisition, where your brain is perfectly tuned to learn this association of letter names with pitches. So if you begin your music lessons at that early age, you're more likely to have absolute pitch. There's even a theory that all babies are born with absolute pitch, and that as we learn relational processing, we discard that strategy and take on the relative pitch processing. And then the question is, why do some people keep the AP whereas others discard it? And in cognitive science, it's kind of interesting that development of relational processing is true in many domains, not just pitch, so little babies recognize faces by recognizing a mouth, or the hairline, or the eye, and it's not till they get older that they put all that together in a relationship to make a face. [chuckle] So, it's an interesting thing.   0:10:25.7 GR: I was re-reading your, I guess, your 2007 article in Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy this morning, Absolute Pitch Perception and the Pedagogy of Relative Pitch. Was it there that, I think, actually it was mentioned that maybe some animals have forms of absolute pitch?   0:10:42.2 EWM: Yeah, birds. There are certain birds... Well, there are certain animals that have what's called vocal learning, which means they learn their... Like a bird learns its song from its parents, and vocal learning is necessary for things like rhythmic entrainment and so on. But some of these animals, or birds in particular, I'm thinking, sing their songs at an absolute pitch, rather than a relative pitch, so sort of always in the same key. I wanted to say something else about the early learning hypothesis. You would think that if starting music lessons at age four is all it takes to get AP, why not just take a bunch of little kids and train them up, and then you would have shown that. And in fact, there is a researcher who did that. Her name is Sakakibara, she's a Japanese researcher, published in The Psychology of Music. She took 24 little kids, ages 2 to 6, so these are toddlers, and trained their parents in something called the Eguchi chord identification method, and it's sort of a game for little children in which they'll hear a chord... This chord is, you raise the red flag. And when you hear this chord, you raise the green flag, and when you hear this chord, you raise the blue flag.   0:12:01.2 EWM: And then after they're good at the chords, you narrow it down to single pitches, raise the flags, and then after you're good at the single pitches, you take away the flags and add note names. So these parents trained their two-year-olds, two, three, four-year-olds, every day, multiple times a day for about two years. Okay. So this is like maybe bordering on child abuse, but maybe it was also... Maybe it was gamified and fun. But these kids, two kids dropped out of the 24. At the end of the experiment, all 22 of them had absolute pitch.   0:12:37.0 DN: Wow.   0:12:37.6 GR: Wow.   0:12:37.7 EWM: So that's kind of interesting. Yeah.   0:12:42.8 DN: I'm curious...   0:12:44.4 EWM: But is it worth doing that?   0:12:45.8 DN: Yeah, I wonder why she started with chords before notes.   0:12:52.4 EWM: It's apparently easier, because maybe there's more overtone information or something like that, but the chords for little children are easier to discriminate between.   0:13:03.6 DN: I have... I don't know if you've seen the work that Ian Howell has been doing around vowel... Picking out vowel colors. And as he has refined his ability to identify specific vowel colors, he has also developed a kind of absolute pitch where he can recognize it by the vowel color that it inspires in his...   0:13:28.6 EWM: Well, that's interesting. No, I haven't followed that, but it's similar to synesthesia maybe, where there's a pretty high incidence of synesthesia in people with absolute pitch, that being an association between most commonly color and pitch. So I could see vowel sound in pitch. But the color and pitch is interesting because it's not just a color, but it's often a color and a texture, like brown corduroy or red velvet, or something that you see. So I would believe what you're telling me about the vowel sounds.   0:14:09.5 GR: From a physics perspective, it makes sense, because the overtones that give the vowels their color tend to be at a relatively fixed pitch level across different voices, regardless of what note you're singing. So it could just be that Ian started to actually hear the kind of interval between the fundamental and the fixed vowel formants above it. For those who don't know, Ian Howell's a Professor at the New England Conservatory, who leads their voice pedagogy, voice sciences area there.   0:14:43.3 DN: But it kinda led me, what you were saying, to wonder about the relationship between absolute pitch and... There are some students who seem to have absolute pitch related only to one instrument color. Is that something that you've seen, or is that... Am I making that up?   [laughter]   0:15:01.8 EWM: Nope. That's very common, actually. And it has to do with that early learning hypothesis that I was talking about, so if a student acquires AP through lessons on a piano, or lessons on a violin, say, they're better and faster at identifying pitches on that piano or on that violin, and in the range of their instrument. So, like a violinist has trouble in the low registers because their instrument doesn't go down that far. So that is in fact very common, and it's continent with this early learning hypothesis. And also what Greg said before about white keys and black keys, that is also consistent with the early learning hypothesis, because if you think about your piano lessons when you're a little kid, you're mostly playing those little five-finger patterns, C-major, G-major, white keys, and that's when your critical period is maximally available to you. But as you get older and the black keys come into play, then that window is closed and you're doing quick half-step displacements from the more familiar white keys into the less familiar black keys, and so it's slower and more prone to errors.   0:16:17.5 GR: So you've been talking about this early learning critical period hypothesis theory. I sort of, I think as many of us, have often thought, wouldn't it be great to have absolute pitch? Wouldn't it just be super handy to know, "Oh yeah, I'm hearing this and this and this and this," without having reference to anything else? YouTube, I think, targets me on this, 'cause I can't tell you how often I see promoted courses to teach me perfect pitch. Can I at this point learn perfect pitch? Or is it too late?   0:16:53.9 EWM: This is an active area of research. There was a time when I would have said, "No, it's too late, time has passed you by." But there are some researchers now who are developing training regimens, probably different from the ones that are on the internet for you, but we'll see, in which the AP drills are gamified so that it's fun and you're trying to beat levels and... Just like some kind of video game. And it inspires people to spend many, many hours at it, and I think it does take many, many hours to acquire any new skill. That said, this is new research, and I'm still a little bit skeptical about it. I wonder whether that kind of adult acquisition is really as fast and immediate and effortless as the true absolute pitch of people who've had it since childhood. For them, some of them, they can't turn it off, it's just completely immediate and always accessible, whereas, I suspect that the adult-trained people have more cogitation that goes into it. Have you ever clicked on those things? Do you know what the courses are like?   0:18:14.5 GR: They tend to be like, "F-sharp is red. Listen to this and imagine that F-sharp is red."   0:18:21.4 EWM: Exactly, I... Before there was clicking on the internet, I sent off for the David Burge method, David L. Burge method, and it was... It started with F-sharp and E-flat, and it said... And you only had to tell those two apart, and E-flat was mellow and full and rich, and F-sharp is brittle and biting, and so it was teaching affective qualities of each note, and then once you got those two under control, then you'd add a third note and then a fourth note, and each one had a little affective character to it. So it's interesting, but I'm skeptical. And I think, again, for true AP people, it is just instantaneous, like you would see the color red and say red, or the color green and say green, it's instantaneous, and no effort for AP people. And I imagine that there's effort to it, if you've had adult training.   0:19:25.0 GR: Some of your research has looked at the correlation between the age that someone begins study and whether they have absolute pitch or not. What is that correlation?   0:19:38.0 EWM: I don't know the answer to that, Greg. [laughter]   0:19:39.0 GR: Sorry, that was a really specific question. Or I guess I should say, how common is it to have a musician with absolute pitch who didn't begin study at a young age? Say before age six.   0:19:53.0 EWM: Yes. Let me back up and just say that I think that there is... AP exists on a continuum, as I said at the beginning, and I think there is something like good pitch memory that people have, that's not AP or not fully AP because they don't have the labeling function there. So this is a roundabout way of answering your question, I realize. But somebody with really good pitch memory might be able to acquire AP later in life because they already had that good pitch memory, and there are ways of testing that that don't involve naming. So they might, for example, play you a pitch and then do all kinds of interference noise, music, words, etcetera, and then you have to remember that pitch.   0:20:44.2 EWM: Some people are very good at that, so perhaps they could learn AP later in life, whereas other people might not be able to. And there are also people who can sing pop tunes in the right key without prompting, it's a different kind of AP 'cause it doesn't have the labeling, but I'll just say, going back to the choir kid thing, when I am in church and open a hymnal, I will look at the hymn and I'll often imagine it in the right key. The organist comes in and there I am right with them. So I think I have some kind of long-term pitch memory associated with familiar repertoire, and that's been shown in experimental settings too. There's an experiment in which pianists are played movements of the Well-Tempered Clavier, which are in every key possible, each prelude and fugue.   0:21:42.8 EWM: And if they're played the C-major prelude in C-sharp major, they don't see notation, but they can tell the difference, so they have some kind of long-term memory for these pieces without actually having AP. So in terms of your question about age, I think there's so many factors involved, like do they have this kind of inherent enhanced pitch memory? If so, maybe they can acquire AP later in life. Or were they born with some kind of genetic predisposition for AP? In which case maybe they have it right from the get-go. So it's a difficult question to answer.   0:22:26.5 DN: I have a couple of questions related to the value of acquiring, or the value of having AP. Because I think my thinking changed on this at that first Music Theory Pedagogy conference when... I can't remember who gave the talk on meditation as a way of helping AP students get through oral skills, and I thought, "Why would AP students need help getting through oral skills?" But of course, it's a different kind of challenge, it's a different way of interpreting sounds coming at you. I guess my question is, to what degree is AP valuable as a musician? Does it make you a better musician? Should we... Is it something worth acquiring?   0:23:14.5 EWM: I don't think that AP makes you a better musician. I think a kind of mythology has arisen around absolute pitch, because there are famous musicians who are said to have had AP, like Mozart, like you can go hear a piece, and because you've got absolute pitch, you can go home and write it down, and then this is a great mark of musicianship, or you can go home and play it. But in fact, there are many fabulous musicians who don't have AP, but we just don't talk about that, so I don't think that it is a mark of the child prodigy or the great, great musician. It's just that there are certain things that they can do, they can give the pitch for the choir or they can play really well in tune, or they can take dictation easily unless their teacher is punishing them. [chuckle]   0:24:13.3 EWM: But I do think that there's a kind of mythology, and that's why we have this persistent idea that the person with AP is a better musician, but as I said earlier on, there are some tasks that AP musicians are not very good at, and those have to do with relational hearing. And I think that if they are able to acquire both the absolute hearing and the relational hearing, then they've really got a good toolbox as a musician.   0:24:48.1 GR: Maybe we should just take a moment. You use the term RP, relative pitch person. Can you just talk about relational hearing and relative pitch a little bit?   0:24:57.8 EWM: Yeah. It's interesting, I'm actually on a team of researchers right now who are doing a study on relative pitch, 'cause there's so much research out there about absolute pitch and people just automatically say, "Oh, relative pitch is the other thing." [chuckle] It's not very well-defined. So, some people... And so I guess I'll say that there are different definitions floating around out there. For me, relative pitch is relational hearing, so that you hear dominant to tonic function, you hear leading-tone to tonic, you hear intervals as opposed to pitches, so it's all about relationships of notes. Every key sort of sounds the same. So it doesn't matter. For people who have difficulty with white keys and black keys, AP listeners, it might be harder for them to process music in F-sharp major than C major, but for a relative pitch person, it's all relationships, so it doesn't really matter which is which.   0:26:00.2 EWM: But there are some people who have very different definitions of relative pitch. For example, some people think that relative pitch is having good pitch memory for one note, like A or C, those are the two most common ones, and then everything else is a relationship from that, and I would say that's sort of on that AP continuum. If you can always remember A or always remember C, then you've got one level, one degree of absolute pitch and then you're using relative pitch skills to figure everything else out.   0:26:32.2 GR: This brings back to mind a previous episode we did on Solfège systems, and it makes me think a little bit about movable "Do" versus fixed "Do" and functional systems versus phenomenological systems. Maybe can you talk a little bit about that and how AP, RP influence one's choice of a Solfège system, and... Yeah.   0:26:53.6 EWM: Yup. So, in the broadest possible terms, fixed "Do" is a... Advantages people with perfect pitch, and in some ways it sort of helps to develop perfect pitch. Relative pitch is more facilitated by movable "Do", where the tonic of the key is always "Do". Fixed "Do" means the C is always "Do". So if C is always "Do", and every time you hear or sing an A, it's "La", and every time you hear or sing an E, it's "Me", then that reinforces a kind of absolute pitch way of hearing. As you said, a phenomenological system which focuses on associating a name for a note. If you have a relative pitch system, it's bringing to the fore that relationship T to "Do" is always a half step ascent functionally resolving to "Do" no matter what key, so it could be F-sharp to G and G-major, D to E-flat, and E-flat major so you're thinking functionally.   0:28:08.4 EWM: So the message I want to convey is, that I think it's not a good idea if you end up with a student in your class who has perfect pitch and has had fixed "Do". I think it's not a good idea to try to convert them to movable "Do", because it's very hard for them to have one system in their head, where Do is C and another system in their head where Do is all kinds of things depending on the key. So in that case, I would try to get that student to think, to keep the fixed "Do" for the note names, and to learn movable numbers of scale degree one, scale degree five. So Karpinski, whom we've just mentioned, says that it's a good idea for all students to have two systems, one that is note identification and one that is functional, so some people prefer fixed "Do" plus numbers, that gives you the note naming and the function. Other people prefer movable "Do" and note names, so the note names give you the naming function and the movable "Do" gives you the relational function.   0:29:21.0 DN: Yeah. That provides a challenge when we get students from countries where Solfège is the note names. [chuckle]   0:29:31.7 EWM: Exactly, and that's why I think they really have to go to numbers at that point because it's really confusing for them. And again, they feel punished in another way, "Here I have to learn something completely nonsensical to me," it's very, very hard. And their perfect pitch is kind of turned against them.   0:29:48.3 DN: And they're already trying to learn a new language maybe... [chuckle]   0:29:51.9 EWM: Yeah, yeah, it's hard.   0:29:55.2 GR: So I've also heard that absolute pitch can change with age, that the pitches can seem to sag. Is that true? And do we know why that happens?   0:30:05.6 EWM: It has to do with your basilar membrane, which curls around in the cochlea in your inner ear. As you age, it becomes less flexible, so it's interesting, sometimes you hear that the pitch creeps sharp, and sometimes you hear that it falls flat, but at any rate, is no longer true, and it has to do with your basilar membrane, which is where the pitches are sort of located in the inner ear, and then that sends a signal to the brain to identify the pitch. So it could be that that has to do with the kind of test that's being given, whether it's a produce the pitch or an identify the pitch, but at any rate, it's very common with aging. I'm sorry to say, for our listeners with absolute pitch, it's probably coming. And it drives some people crazy.   0:30:58.3 EWM: Now that we're talking a little bit about physiology, I'll say something else about theories of absolute pitch, which is that there are these researchers named Ross, Gore and Marks, who have the theory that there are actually two kinds of absolute pitch, one they call HTM and one they call APE. An HTM is heightened tonal memory. An APE is ability to perceptually encode. So HTM, heightened tonal memory, is what I was talking about this enhanced pitch memory with a template from early childhood, so people with HTM, they have AP, but it's associated with a template that's clarinet timbre in a particular range. So they have trouble with high and low, they have trouble changing timbre, they have trouble with none A-440 tunings, like people who learned on piano, if you get into Baroque tuning or some other kind of tuning system, it can throw them for a real loop.   0:32:06.0 EWM: People with APE, ability to perceptually encode, the theory is that they actually are encoding pitch in a different way in their brains, and that they have the ability to encode all frequencies, not just the A-440 template that they learned in childhood, and so they're more flexible, they can do all kinds of timbres, they can do really high, really low, they can do different, they can quickly adjust to other temperaments and tunings, because they're processing it in a little bit different way.   0:32:36.4 DN: That explains so much about several people that I know. [laughter]   0:32:42.0 EWM: It does, and it explains why there are conflicting findings in the literature too. You read something in one article and something different in another article, and you say, "Well, how can that be?" Well, it could be that they just have two different flavors of absolute pitch. They're processing it slightly differently and they learned it in a different way. One of them, the APE is the hereditary inborn one, those kids can't ever remember learning AP. They just kind of always had it. In fact, they think that everybody has it, sometimes it's not till they get to college and they're in some ear training class and the teacher says, "Oh, you must have perfect pitch." And they say, "What's that?" They just thought, everybody heard music that way. It's interesting.   0:33:25.0 GR: So I guess that actually leads to a question of... We've talked about a bit how people with AP and RP hear music differently. What can we learn from each other?   0:33:36.5 EWM: Let me go back to the hear differently first, because there are a couple of things I'll just throw in that I haven't said yet. One of them, I mentioned that I had been doing some research in Hong Kong with a Eastman alumna who teaches there now, Su Yin Mak, and we interviewed a lot of AP listeners there who specifically spoke to listening to Western music and listening to traditional Chinese music. And they have a real hard time with the traditional Chinese music, because it's not in the same temperament and tuning as Western music, and so some of them are able to adjust, so one or two of them even play a traditional Chinese instrument, but some of them are really turned off by it and cannot listen to it, or really cope with that music at all, they just find it really aversive. And the same, as I mentioned, Baroque tuning, instead of A-440, it's often A-415.   0:34:38.4 EWM: Now, some kids can adjust to that, it's almost like being bilingual, they have one way of being in the world of A-440 and one way of being in the world of A-415, but others cannot abide it, and we heard story after story of people having to take melodic dictation from a Baroque recording and just freaking out, going into sweats and crying and just... It's like their AP has been taken away from them, and it's part of their identity and suddenly it fails them, it's really difficult. It's kind of funny, but it's really difficult and challenging for them. So that's one way in which AP listeners are different from RP listeners. Another way is that some of them told us that they have a constant string of Solfège syllables going through their head as they listen to music or note names. So one of them sort of illustrated a melody singing it on this really fast Solfège, and he says he can't turn it off, it's just constantly these little syllables going in his head, and again, I think that's probably an early learning thing, just like we attach a timbre or...   0:35:47.9 EWM: Well, in your case, that sound, but he's attached Solfège syllables, and so he was talking really eloquently about having problems with phrasing and musicality and large-scale gestures, because everything is very note-y to him, because all these little words are going through his head, so that's another way of hearing differently. And then the synesthesia, the people who are hearing colors as music goes by, that's almost hard to conceptualize for somebody with relative pitch. And some of them, in addition to colors, will have emotions associated, the E-flat heroic and the different emotions that might be associated with keys. We read about that in history of theory, but key color and affect and so on, but for people with absolute pitch, for some of them, it's a very real thing, these different affects associated with keys.   0:36:50.0 EWM: So what can we learn from each other? I think that, as I said before, the relative pitch skills can really add to the absolute pitch student's experience of music, if they get both the affect and the key and the precise tuning and all the things that AP gives them, but then if they also learn to hear the function and the harmonic progression and so on, I think that just gives them a 360 degrees or something of how to perceive music. It's more challenging the other direction to think about what can AP listeners teach RP listeners. I was thinking about that a little bit, and it's a hard one because for relative pitch listeners, absolute pitch seems so unattainable and it's kind of mysterious about whether you want it or not and does it make you a better musician and so on. So, I don't know whether... I don't know exactly what we, relative pitch listeners learn from AP listeners. I don't know. Do you guys have thoughts about that?   0:38:07.3 DN: Well, I just did a gig in December where I really wished that I could have a tuning fork, an A tuning fork just implanted [chuckle] in my skull, just above my ear so that I could stay on pitch through long, long acapella sections.   0:38:28.9 EWM: Yeah, absolutely, and singing atonal music too, for another thing. That's a different thing, that's a relative pitch person just wishing they had AP, but in terms of...   [laughter]   0:38:39.9 EWM: In terms of what can RP listeners learn from AP. Maybe precision of tuning is one of them, but I think relative pitch listeners tune via relative pitch, they're tuning in relation to the piano, or in relation to the choir around them, rather than to some absolute sense of where A is or C-sharp is.   0:39:07.5 GR: I was gonna say, I've done some gigs with people with very, shall we say, precise absolute pitch. Singing gigs where they could be inflexible about, "No, no, no, A is here." But if that A is the third of the chord, maybe it needs to be a little bit somewhere else, so yeah, I can see...   0:39:28.4 EWM: Yes, I agree, there's some AP listeners have inflexibility about pitch, and so they sometimes have trouble with ensemble music, chamber music, because they have a sense that I'm right and you're wrong with regard to tuning and intonation. But then again...   0:39:48.9 GR: Definitely not, definitely not all AP listeners, right? It's...   0:39:52.0 EWM: Correct, and maybe that's part APE versus HTM, part just personality, part socialization and how they were brought up, and all kinds of factors probably play into that.   0:40:07.6 DN: So I have a student, this is a tangent, but it's totally relevant. I have a student who does not have, at least typical AP. But if he learns a song in one key and then I say, "Hey, you know, I think this is a little high, let's transpose it down a step," he has to completely relearn the song, he can't name the pitches out of the blue, but once he's learned a song, it's in that key, has to be in that key, and learning it in a new key is a totally new thing. Do we have a name for that?   0:40:48.8 EWM: I think that's part of AP on a continuum thing, so I think he has probably some kind of AP without labeling, that idea that you're singing the hymn in the right key, or singing the pop tune and the right key, you've learned it in a particular place in your mind and your voice, and for these, especially kids without a lot of musical training, he does... He's in your program, but it may be that he has not learned to... The relational bit though, and so he's learning in an absolute way, so that a new key is a new thing, that's really interesting. But I think it's probably that AP without labeling kind of thing.   0:41:33.4 DN: If you want another subject to study, I can connect you.   [laughter]   0:41:39.3 EWM: There are so many incarnations.   0:41:44.3 GR: It's just fascinating for me to hear about these varieties of absolute pitch and these sort of different kinds and the different ways that, something for so long I thought of as just being like a binary, you have it or you don't. It's one thing and it's not. It sounds like there's really a lot of variety there. It's very individual.   0:42:00.9 EWM: Yes, and I thought the same thing, Greg. I don't know if I was taught it, but I really thought it was an on or off switch. Either you have this or you don't, but just even from my own personal experience, I know I don't have absolute pitch, I can't pull any pitch out of the air with a letter name or whatever, but I do have this good long-term memory for keys of pieces I've sung or played. If I sit down to sing something that I've sung a million times, it just comes out in the right key, or music notation is sometimes that way too. I remember once when I was running the sight-singing Program and I was singing a lot... Lots of Otman tunes. I would audition people to be a teaching assistant, and if I would start a tune like I was asking them to coach me or something, I would just start it in some random key that was comfortable for me, and I had people say to me, "Well, don't you know that's the right key? You're singing in the key in the book." But I had not given myself a pitch or planned on it, it's just... I don't know, I think I had some kind of long-term memory for it, or a long-term memory for queer notation, and the stuff sits in my voice or something like that. But I don't have the out of the blue, acontextual labeling, a note kind of AP at all.   0:43:21.0 GR: Yeah, I had to experience... Re-reading your 2007 article this morning. There was a harmonic dictation example in there written in A-major, and I just started listening to it in my head, and I was like, "No, that's the wrong key, and I just stopped, and then I was like, "Oh there," and then I listened to it in my head, and I was like... And I just know that's the right key, and I went over to the piano, I was like... And sure enough it was, and it's just, it's so weird and fleeting and bizarre, and yeah. So, you mentioned a little bit when talking about, can I acquire absolute pitch at this age? Some current research, what research is being done now on absolute pitch, what might we know more about in the future?   0:44:03.0 EWM: Yeah, one thing I haven't talked about very much, but there are people doing it, is not the cognitive side, but the physiological side, so there are people who do that genetics. Is there a gene for absolute pitch? And in fact, I worked for a little while with a genetics researcher and he was very excited because they were finding some similarities between synesthesia genes and AP genes, but that is such a huge field and genetics is so complex, that there has not yet been found an AP gene though AP runs in families. So there probably is some kind of genetic component, there are people who do brain imaging with absolute pitch, so pretty robust findings. A number of people have reported that people with absolute pitch have asymmetry between the two hemispheres of their brain, so we don't know whether people born with asymmetrical brains are more likely to acquire AP or whether the process of acquiring absolute pitch somehow creates an asymmetry as your brain is growing, but that's there. So those sort of physiological and brain imaging kinds of studies, I think there's also more connectivity in certain parts of the brain for AP listeners, maybe different things are connected up.   0:45:31.2 EWM: One area that hasn't been studied very much at all is cross-cultural aspects of AP, so we are so attuned to Western classical music or western pop music too, which has that A-440 standard, but what of other cultures in which there is no standard in which maybe every ensemble has its own tuning, or every village has its own tuning, or something like that. Can AP exist in that environment? And if you have the genetic part of AP, like you have this predisposition to acquire AP, can you without a consistent [chuckle] tuning system? So that's interesting. And then the work that I've been doing recently is this qualitative research where we collect the personal stories of people with AP. Do you remember when you first discovered it? Do you remember being taught AP? When is AP difficult for you? Those kinds of things that we've been talking about today, those personal stories, they are interesting, really interesting and entertaining, but they also tell us some clues about AP, and then we might develop more experiments to follow up on those, like the intonation and tuning part.   0:46:56.7 EWM: Oh, incidentally, I meant to tell you about this interesting study by a researcher named Van Hedger et al. He has shown that AP can be kind of flexible, so that he played a bunch of listeners who have absolute pitch a Brahms Symphony, but unbeknownst to them, the Symphony was being slowly, slowly, slowly lowered, so slowly that you could not tell the difference that it was being lowered, it was over the whole course of a movement, and at the end of it... So they tested AP, sorry at the beginning for truly tuned pitches, A-440, and then quarter tone sharp, quarter tone flat. Then they lowered this whole Brahms Symphony and once it reached the new standard, you heard the other movements, and then they re-tested them for AP and they discovered that people had adjusted where A was, now it was a quarter step flat.   0:47:57.0 EWM: So maybe absolute pitch isn't so absolute, maybe we are constantly having that AP reinforced by using pianos and A-440 tuning, so every day you hear that A-440 over and over and over again, it's reinforcing and re-learning and so on. But if everything in the world were slowly detuned, I think they would adjust to that. [laughter] It's kind of an interesting experiment. So there's lots still being done. I think it's an endlessly fascinating topic for teachers and for musicians and for lay audiences, there's a whole new area of public musicology where people go out and speak to non-musicians about music, and I've done this several times with absolute pitch talks, and they find it absolutely fascinating. So there's still lots to be done, I think.   0:48:56.4 GR: Yeah, so turning the page a little bit, as many of our listeners know, you're also an author for the Musician's Guide series of textbooks. I wonder, could you just talk a little bit about that side of your life, maybe tell us about the series, who it's target audience is, and what's unique about its approach?   0:49:15.9 EWM: Target audience is everybody. [laughter] When I teach my theory pedagogy class, I often talk about a sort of dichotomy in theory teaching between horizontal approaches and vertical approaches. So a vertical approach is one that sort of salami slices music into verticalities, then you can slap a Roman numeral on each verticality. And a horizontal one is one that deals more with counterpoint between lines and prolongations of harmonic areas and so on, so sort of Shankar influenced, and we tried to position our book in the middle. So that we use a phrase model approach where harmonic progression is taught tonic, predominant, dominant tonic, and that each of those areas can be expanded, so the expansion idea is the linear approach, but we also do things like complement that with teaching about progression by root motion, ascending fifths, descending fifths, descending thirds and ascending seconds and so on, which is a more vertical approach. Then the idea is that if a teacher on either side of that divide is dissatisfied with how things are going with their textbook, it's kind of an easy journey to us in the middle, and we try to help teachers through that adjustment with lots of online materials and like our textbook workbook has a complete answer key.   0:50:52.0 EWM: Every single exercise has been part written for you, every single interval spelled, every bar line put in a rhythm, so that teachers who are making an adjustment have an answer key, there they have kind of authoritative response, and so that it can help the situation in many schools where the choir director or the flute teacher or someone else's teaching theory, and it may not be that these are professional theorists, but there are other musicians who are teaching theory. So we try to help supply materials, also recording, so now we have the internet, thank goodness, but once upon a time we had to run to the library in the morning and find recordings of everything you were gonna use in class, we have a really robust... Every single thing in the book is recorded, we have an anthology that goes with it, all recorded mostly by Eastman musicians. The entire book is also an electronic book, so during that quick switch to remote teaching that happened in 2020, it was pretty seamless for users of our book because the whole thing, when you buy the text, you also get access to the electronic book, which is all click and play every example, you can hear it, and it's exactly formatted like the textbook. It has a note slide-enabled workbook, so they could do all their homework online and turned it in online.   0:52:23.1 EWM: So all of that I think is really helpful for teachers. The other thing we've tried do since the very beginning is to have diverse repertoire. Since the beginning, we've had black composers and women composers in there, we also tried to diversify to have band music in there, choir music in there, and solo flute and solo cello, and so that every student can see himself or herself in the book in the instrumentation and so on. But we've really ramped that up in the fourth edition, so now every single chapter has at least one piece by a woman featured, that's 40 chapters of pieces by women, and we've increased the number of black and Hispanic composers in the book and the anthology. We have art songs in Spanish as well as French and German.   0:53:13.7 EWM: So we're really trying to be more inclusive, I guess, is the way we say that. And not to forget, it's all coordinated with aural skills books, so our colleague, Joel Phillips and Paul Murphy are the primary authors on that, but chapter by chapter, each concept in the textbook is reinforced with a sight-singing and dictation book that I think is just wonderful, and it uses a lot of these techniques we've been talking about like writing out scale degrees or Solfège instead of going straight to the staff. And those books too have lots and lots of music by underrepresented composers and women. So we're very excited about the fourth edition, you would think that after going through revising a textbook multiple times, it would get old. It is a lot of work, but it's exciting each time, because we solicit input from teachers across the country, we have things in our own minds that we want to change, like in this edition, we have two full chapters on popular music analysis, that's different for most books. So a lot of books sprinkle popular music throughout, and we do that too, but we have two focus chapters on popular music. So again, it's exciting to be able to keep tinkering with a product and make it better and better each time, so that's exciting for us. Thanks for asking.   [laughter]   0:54:43.6 GR: As in yeah.   0:54:44.6 DN: Well, I used your fundamentals book right into the pandemic, so... [laughter]   0:54:50.0 EWM: Oh, good. Yeah, and the fundamentals book has self-grading homework too, so you can assign these things that the computer will grade for you, which is nice.   0:55:01.7 DN: It's vital.   0:55:02.9 EWM: Yeah. We're about to do, not a new revision of the fundamentals book, but a re-working that pulls out some controversial repertoire. There's been a lot of talk in the Music Theory discipline about using music by Stephen Foster who started out in the minstrelsy tradition, so we're doing a new reprint edition now that pulls all the Stephen Foster out and replaces it with music mostly by women and minority composers. So look for that. [chuckle] Next year I hope.   0:55:34.4 GR: Great. Look, Betsy, this has been just an absolute delight. I've learned so much from this. Thank you for joining us.   0:55:42.8 EWM: Oh, you're welcome. You've asked great and probing questions, it was fun for me to think about answers, and to think about applications to teaching and to future research. So thanks for inviting me.   [music]   0:56:00.2 DN: Subscribe to Notes from the Staff on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. And check us out at utheory.com/notes.   0:56:07.3 GR: Notes from the staff is produced by utheory.com. uTheory is the most advanced online learning platform for music theory, with video lessons, individualized practice and proficiency testing. uTheory has helped more than 100,000 students around the world master the fundamentals of M