I mentioned in my last post that I had accepted a second part-time position to teach theory and aural skills. With the need to re-invest in my commitment to aural skills and the feeling that I have lost my edge, I have decided to take the plunge away from the traditional materials that I have used for years and select Gary Karpinski’s Manual for Ear Training and Sight Singing as the textbook for my courses. I have long admired Professor Karpinski and think that enhancing my teaching with his approach to aural skills a refreshing challenge at this stage of my career. I’m curious to hear from anyone who has used his texts in their classes.

To help with my transition, I am currently in the process of spending my EMF days in the local university’s well equipped music library poring over journal articles and re-acquainting myself with his influential pedagogical text. In the process I am also reading some of the articles about music therapy curricula with the vague notion that I might be able to provide something more to the therapy students at Marvyille and perhaps to the theory/therapy communities as a whole. (Besides, given the fact that theory jobs outnumber composition jobs somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 to 1 or more, it certainly can’t hurt to work up the chops and pedagogy is my only research passion.)

At some point, I might also try to write some music, though I think it will be more natural to return to this once the rhythm of the school year returns in just about 7 weeks. I do tend to write more and better music when I’m the most busy anyway!

In my current role as supportive husband and adjunct faculty, I’ve got plenty of time on my hands. So much time in fact that I feel that I need to find a few more diversions to keep myself motivated and busy. After all, opportunities often come at unexpected times and as I’ve recently learned, the old saying about making one’s own luck is a good piece of advice, and the business of manufacturing good fortune just can not wait until tomorrow.

Throughout my life, I’ve always observed that when I feel the busiest and under the most pressure I have also been the most productive. With the end of my spring semester last week and without our normal trip to Europe to occupy my time, I’ve got even more downtime than usual so I intend to throw myself into a few projects in the hope that it helps keep my mind engaged and spurs on my creativity.

Although I have several compositions to finish and a collaborative project that’s been on hold for over two years that needs to be addressed, I want to take on some research in theory pedagogy that has been bouncing around my melon for a few weeks and also seriously consider getting out into the community and doing some volunteer work once school resumes in the fall.

In the future I’ll have some more on the research I’ve been thinking about, but in the meantime, I really wanted to get a sense of what sort of community service my peers and colleagues are doing out there. What are some good ideas and good ways that you’ve brought music to your community, especially those that involve education, children, and don’t require the infrastructure and financial backing of a university or college to be successful?

As we learn more about the backgroundand identity of the NIU shooter, the story grows even more senseless:

Kazmierczak, 27, who police said shot 21 people before shooting and killing himself, was an award-winning sociology student and a leader of a campus criminal justice group, according to school Web sites.

Kazmierczak was a student about 175 miles away at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, police said, and there “were no red flags” warning of any violent behavior.

His University of Illinois faculty adviser, Jan Carter-Black, described Kazmierczak on Friday as a “very committed student, extremely respectful of me.”

I’m just a music teacher and not qualified to speculate about what causes these types of tragedies, but it is sobering to realize that my wife teaches at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville… 159 miles from Champaign-Urbana.

My thoughts and prayers to the NIU community and families of the victims. I hope this is the last campus shooting that flickers across the news ticker, at least for a very long time. There is no place for fear in a college classroom.

My apologies for not posting as actively as I would like, but this is “that time of the year” again where stress begins to mount as deadlines approach.

I’m working on a new brass quintet for the Smoky Mountain Brass Quintet, teaching my 8-week World Music course, and finishing up theory class next week. Maryville has the ensembles concert on Sunday night, so that’s been another additional stress. I always look at the last month of the semester as the price that must be paid for having such nice vacations during the holidays and summers.

The good news? In just about one week, the grading will be done, the semester will be over and the Christmas music will be put on the stereo!

Clearly, as this video demonstrates, the internet is a good thing when it comes to teaching a world music course.

What’s the old saying? Something about a thousand words and a picture?

Too much freshly-written music goes unplayed and unheard, too few people go to free recitals because they imagine that something free might not be worth their time, and too many young people who ask our advice, advice that we give freely, don’t listen.

This comes from a post written a month ago ago by Elaine Fine on her very thoughtful blog Musical Assumptions. I’ve been meaning to write a post commenting on this but something always seemed to demand my attention. My apologies Elaine.

My experience with music has always been about the thrill of the performance and the satisfaction of writing music. As I’ve matured I’ve been able to marry this with the joy that I get from being a teacher. The problem, as Elaine so eloquently stated, is that much of the energy that we as musicians and teachers exert seems to go for naught.

However, when the great performance does come along, or more importantly a student makes a connection or gets a flash of insight, it nourishes the soul and provides the motivation to continue, often far out of proportion with the reality of the situation.

If you play golf, you know what I mean. You can have a round of 100 strokes, but it’s the one or two magical shots that you remember an hour after the clubs are back in the garage.

I ran across a new blog this morning titled Mathemusicality. The author James Cook raises some very interesting points about the purpose and teaching approaches of music theory. This led me to craft a very long response which I naturally thought would be equally appropriate as a Friday post to this blog.

In his most recent post, the James asked the following question:

Let me ask the Texas Tech faculty (or anyone else out there) this question: how exactly would your approach to any passage of music (say, one of the Beethoven examples discussed previously) differ if you were teaching composition students, as opposed to history, theory, or performance students? And why?

I initially started to reply directly to the question, but after reading the entire blog and giving it some careful thought, my response has grown into a behemoth.

I do agree with his point of view about theory curricula and our seeming over-dependence on Roman numerals and chorale textures as a vehicle for teaching harmony. As many of my students have expressed over the years, it doesn’t truly represent the true experience of music. Schenkerian theory provides a better approximation, but still falls short of the mark, at least in my opinion.

That being said, the question does indeed come down to the best way to systematically present musical material in a way that allows for both a clear understanding of the material as well as the practical application of newly found knowledge. (“The right knowledge at the right time” is how a former pedagogue once explained it to me.) That is ever the challenge for any teacher.

I have recently (finally) been given my own choice of textbook, and my decision to adopt a relatively new offering (The Musician’s Guide) has been fueled, in large part, by this very problem. Though still not (in my eyes) perfect, this text begins with the usual discussions of fundamentals, proceeds to two-voice counterpoint, notation, and basic instrumentation before moving to a more traditional four-voice presentation of harmony. Along the way it provides a large variety of well-presented musical examples from a variety of genres and styles.

It is my hope that this will provide students, especially in their impressionable first semester, with a more intuitive beginning to their formal theoretical training and will lay the groundwork for subsequent discussions of the works/passages that delve more deeply and meaningfully into the “art” of the music. As we all know, the best lectures/discussions are those that reveal hidden subtleties in a passage and then lead the students to make those magical connections to other works that they have performed and studied.

It also makes theory more pertinent to the student, a common enough problem at any program but especially problematic at my school, where the majority of students are aspiring music therapists. While I strive to be certain that they have a solid background in traditional theory, I am slowly learning that they also require a great deal more “practical” theory (is that an oxymoron or what??) than students at more traditional programs. (Words fail to describe the different approach, perhaps in a few more years I’ll have a more quantifiable explanation of this phenomenon.)

In the end, I would say that I am providing an introduction to the vocabulary of music as much as well as teaching them to be free thinkers and creative musicians. The two should not be mutually exclusive. A good semester for me is always one where the students come away knowing the “rules” but also understanding that these “rules” are in truth merely guidelines applied or ignored by composers depending on circumstance and need. It is especially rewarding when students can see (at least occasionally) how the “rules” are regularly broken or modified (particularly by the “great” composers) and evolve through use rather than through consistent and rigid application. After all, how do you define “great” or even “good” if you can’t explain what constitutes “average?”

As to the final question, in my experience (upon which I model my own compositional teaching) my best composition teachers were those that facilitated my learning by fostering, among other things:

• My ability imagine the music, fully orchestrated, “in my head.”
• My understanding of how a composer achieved a certain effect/sound/passage
• Developing my sense of form and proportion
• Gently molding my general aesthetic (as opposed to style) by pointing out less successful passages (according to their own aesthetic) and suggesting possible improvements while not demanding them.

Therefore, when I teach composition, theory rarely enters the conversation and when it does, it tends to focus on issues of meter, rhythm, orchestration, and motive far more than discussions of pitch collections and harmony. Though I almost always start a student with some basic acoustical properties, especially with regards to dissonance and consonance, pitch is well down the list of priorities for a variety of reasons and thus discussions of passages from the classical canon tend to be far different than those that might occur in a theory classroom or between myself and a colleague who is a theorist.

Another interesting discussion by James Cook in his new blog Mathemusicality concerns the instruction of orchestration, and more particularly the type of prescriptive language found in orchestration textbooks:

The apparent failure to understand that musical knowledge consists of experiential knowledge leads to the absurdity of “prescriptive” pedagogy, such as we find in many orchestration books: “Avoid placing the oboes above the flutes.” Interpreted as “advice” for practical musicians such as composers, this is at best a complete waste of ink. As a composer, you should know what it would sound like if oboes were placed above flutes, and if you do, then you either want that effect or you don’t–you presumably don’t need to be informed of your own desires by a book. If useless prescriptions of this sort are what people mean by “compositional theory”, then the latter is, well, useless.

I suspect that the prescriptive nature of orchestration texts comes from their use in courses primarily directed at non-compositional musicians who have never really imagined these sounds in their head. They seem to have evolved more as reference books for the harried musician than as effective tools for teaching what is essentially (as James correctly points out) an experiential process. In fact, the only time I ever open my own copy (beyond teaching) is when I can’t remember the lowest note of whatever instrument it might be that I haven’t written for in a while.

A much better use of the prescriptive text would be to show the example of what not to do and then provide a recording of why it sounds bad compared to a better fix to the problem. I have learned far more about orchestration by listening to my mistakes and failures than I ever will from listening to success.

Another academic year is in the books and I have a few random thoughts before putting a neat red bow on this school year:

• For whatever reason, it had been a while since I was able to teach first year theory from beginning to end. It is really nice to watch the growth of the students as they progress from fundamentals through secondary function and small sectional form over the course of a school year.
• Teaching theory and aural skills at two separate schools using different textbooks was a great way to hone my pedagogical approach to theory. Confusing as hell, but well worth it when all is said and done.
• For what it’s worth (about a wooden nickel, I’d imagine), I think that the music program at Maryville is headed in the right direction.
• Finally, and most importantly, the students at Maryville presented me (and the other faculty) with flowers and an enormous card with “Thank You Dr. Connor, We (heart) You!” written across the front and notes from each student written inside. It has been one full year since I left my full time gig so this gesture was not only a very special, but also very timely. A big thank you to all of my students!

Marta and I are leaving for Bulgaria tomorrow. My next few updates will likely be of the travelogue variety, though I might sneak in some other topics if I’m feeling energetic. Congratulations to all of you who have successfully negotiated another academic year.

My apologies for not posting very often in recent weeks. I have been very busy this semester having taken on yet another class. I think I may have stretched myself a bit too far this time, but I will get some relief in just a month’s time as one of my courses is only 8 weeks.

In the meantime, I have a question for my fellow “theory” types that occasionally frequent this site: I was preparing for a class tomorrow morning and was browsing The Elements of Music, 2nd ed. by Ralph Turek and came across the following excerpt from the Bach chorale (”Durch Adams Fall is ganz verderbt”) and was a bit surprised by the harmony on the third beat of the first full measure.

I understand what it is, and when I look at its use, it seems obvious that it is filling in the ascending melodic minor bass line, but since I can’t ever recall seeing it happen this way (with the seventh being included in the analysis) before tonight, I’m curious about how often this harmony occurs in this unexpected way. Can anyone (Rob? Scott?) shed some light on the topic and would you agree with my feeling that teaching this particular example might create confusion for the students when they are finally introduced to applied chords? Would it not make much more sense to teach the E-flat as a suspension and dismiss the harmonic implications created by the chord quality or perhaps more appropriately just call it an exception and move on? If so, then how far into minor variants do you delve when you teach non-dominant diatonic seventh chords?

My thought is that it’s probably best to not even open this can of worms and instead keep the students focused on contexts that emphasize the dominant quality of this sonority. Personally, and with an eye towards future topics, I would rather the students recognize the major-minor seventh as a V7 in every context before I drop an exception on their plate and ask them to chew.

I know that I answered my own question (and yes, I do answer when I talk to myself), but I still want to hear your explanation. Not really for any good reason, but just because…