Alan Coady’s Musical Blog

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My ears pricked up this morning at the mention of the Street Vibe Festival of Sound which takes place today in London’s The Scoop. The idea of the event is to highlight the appeal of science through music and other arts. The short report on Radio 4’s Today included efforts by Stephen Mesure (Director of The Creative Science Consultancy) and South African percussionist and composer, Eugene Skeef to produce music from carved instruments. The most convincing of these was a carrot built on the whole tone scale.

The report grabbed my attention, not because I plan to race down to London to take part, but because I have been thinking along similar lines. Discussions are to be opened up in a school I visit with a view to pupils and staff playing a more active role in assemblies. The possibilities for cross curricular links seem huge and I see music as being able to play a big part e.g. music & maths; music & science; music & languages – in addition to the more obvious pairings like words & music or music and dance.

The idea which immediately sprang to mind is a piece based on the harmonic series – the physical and mathematical reality which underpins the evolution of Western harmony and instruments over the last 1,000 years. Yes, start small – that’s my motto.

One of the bonuses of keeping this blog is that searching for useful hyperlinks – such as the one for the whole tone scale (above) leads me to interesting resources for pupils. From the same source come this short, interesting video about chord construction.

Slightly more than one year after the idea was mooted, I managed to visit Robert Jones class in NBHS to observe a whiteboard in action*. A Credit Maths class was tightening its grip on the law of indices. Not only was I impressed with the effortless and effective use of the many functions of the whiteboard, but also with the Activote apparatus. This handheld, wireless tool enabled the class to vote on a multiple choice answer – the results being instantly called up in bar-chart form. My first thought on seeing this was that it would encourage uncertain pupils to engage, as it seemed anonymous. I say seemed as the stats are available to the teacher, enabling him/her to see if anyone is struggling or excelling. They are, it turns out, also available to the class if they so vote.

All the observation I’ve done to date has been serendipitous and usually takes the form of over-hearing/eavesdropping while printing from a computer in a Music classroom. What I tend to notice, possibly more than content, is language – not only the words but the tune. What appears to me to be best practice involves simple language**, quietly expressed. And this seems as true of classroom management as of delivery of lesson content. And it was certainly true yesterday. Drifting individuals were swiftly spotted and nudged back on task - sotto voce; the balance of praise, encouragement and prompting felt just right.

There is no formal mechanism for instrumental instructors to engage in observation. As far as I know, there is no formal mechanism for teachers to observe one another once probationary years have passed. However, based on yesterday’s experience, I feel it to be valuable for several reasons:

• there seem to me to be more common principles than significant differences across the curriculum - any primary teacher would tell you that teaching is teaching
• when you’ve taught your own subject for some years, there is perhaps more to be learned from observing the teaching of other subjects – any inspired moments I’ve experienced in the last few years have had their origins in fields other than music
• it’s unusual to see your pupils in another learning situation and, given our in loco parentis status, this strikes me as a little odd

* What was nice about this visit was that the idea came round again after we’d played through a few mandolin and guitar tunes at lunchtime

** While the pupils were engaged in a few exercises, I took the opportunity to pick up a book I’d spotted on Robert’s desk entitled The Physics of Sailing Explained, and read a few pages of the chapter on the weather and why it exists. This impressive read was the perfect compliment to the situation – concise, unambiguous sentences in the right order. It seemed so easy you felt you could have written it yourself.

Apologies to Dorothy (who tagged me) for the delay in responding. What I hope this picture (oringally uploaded by Lorelei Ranveig) represents is connectivity in its widest sense. This is the element about which I am most passionate in teaching. On a superficial level, this refers to the apparent ability of the practical study of music to enhance other areas. More symbolically, it represents striving to overcome:

• the imaginary primary/secondary/tertiary divisions
• those divisions which, for practical reasons, stress the separateness of subjects over the shared principles

Wherever possible,often through analogy, I like to flag up connections and shared ideas, principles, techniques, concepts between music and, say, language, science, maths, sport. The following posts, written around 18 months ago, might serve to illustrate:

Connect 1 - Connect 2 - Connect 3 - Connect 4 - Connect 5 - Connect 6 - Connect 7 - Connect 8 - Connect 9

In turn, I’d like to tag David Gilmour, Don Ledingham, Donald McDonald, John Connel, & Ollie Bray.  These are the guidelines which have been passed on:

1. Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
2. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
3. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
4. Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

Why should religious music be of interest to our largely secular society? BBC 4’s Sacred Music, presented by Simon Russel Beale, visited Notre Dame de Paris to show how two innovations of the 12^th Century Notre Dame School underpin what has since come to be known as western classical music.

Members of early music specialist choir, The Sixteen and their director Harry Christophers, demonstrated music’s journey from homophonic (Int 2 concept) plainchant (H Music concept) to polyphony (Int 2 concept). Their lively, committed performances, which maximised the acoustics of Notre Dame’s Gothic architecture made it possible to believe that contemporary listeners would have experienced something of the vitality of the Punk revolution in the 1970s. This fresh approach was pioneered by Léonin and developed by his successor Pérotin.

Aside from the obvious connectivity between music and architecture, the links between music and science (notably physics) were explored. Composers, deciding which notes would best fit those already present in the setting of the plainchant would choose intervals (an Int 2 concept), in order, from the harmonic series i.e. 8ve, 5th & 4^th. Although the triad had not yet become the building block of Western harmony, the foundations of the genre had been laid.

Musicologist, Helen Deeming, enthusiastically outlined the possibilities afforded by the second innovation of the time, the development of musical notation. Although the words of the liturgy were written, the associated music was taught by rote and memorised. This meant that, were a new setting to be sent to another cathedral city, a singer, familiar with the music, would have to tag along to coach the choir. Now, the music could be sent and realised from afar.

There remain three more episodes of this promising series. Here are links to details of all episodes, an overview of the series and a reflection on the place of sacred music in a secular world.

Overview of the series

The four episodes: The Gothic Revolution; Palestrina And The Popes; Tallis, Byrd and The Tudors; Bach And The Lutheran Legacy

Richard Langham Smith, Head of Music at the Open University, writes eloquently on Sacred Music in a Secular World.

Of the three elements in music (melody, rhythm & harmony), the one which most colleagues confess they wish they understood better is harmony. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that they don’t understand the language but there’s a difference between knowing the language and being a poet. Analysing harmony is one thing, writing it is tougher and the ability to improvise it fetchingly (in any key) is relatively rare. What are the features that people would like effortlessly to include?

• Added notes - those outside the standard triad - and perhaps something a little more exciting than 7ths (0:42 and also at 1:02 - 1:20)
• well placed inversions -where the naming note of the chord is not always the lowest note - as this can sound a little lead-footed - (0:36 & 0:51)
• suspensions - where notes from the previous chord are allowed to stay on so that they clash with the notes of the following chord - (0:39)
• chords built over pedals - unchanging note - usually in the bass - which don’t sound simply lost or unimaginative (2:28 - 2:34)
• in short anything which adds colour to what might otherwise be a merely functional harmonisation

This clip demonstrates that kind of harmonic language. It’s of Chopin’s Etude Op 10 No 1. There are more professional performances of this on YouTube but many are so fast that the detail is lost. This one, although not entirely error-free, does have a certain tenderness about it.

The other thing many music-teaching colleagues confess is that they wish they could access YouTube in class for illustrative purposes such as this.

By the way, did you know that Chopin had a connection with Mid Calder?

Many pupils can have a musical understanding of a concept and can recognise when it crops up in a piece but struggle to describe it (description of sequence in this post). While agreeing that grasping a concept in its own setting is an admirable thing, I can’t help feeling that part of my responsibility is to help them extract the essence and translate it from music into English - after all it’s not out of the question that some of them may end up being music teachers and this ability would taken as read.

So where to begin? Asking them to write something might prove more fruitful than having them improvise speech. However, I feel that in a 30-minute shared lesson should involve as much playing as possible. Where pupils struggle, or are disinclined, to put things into words, I imagine that the ability to spot an error in someone else’s description is, at least, a beginning. So I tend to go for the True of False format. This in itself can have various levels containing glaring or subtle error e.g.

a sequence is a pattern made up of short ascending phrases which all share the same rhythm

as opposed to:

a sequence is a pattern made up of short phrases - always ascending - which share the same rhythm.

I can’t help feeling that there must be other ways. I’d be very grateful to learn how others encourage pupils to crystallise their thoughts on the concepts of their subjects.

One of my favourite lecturers at Huddersfield used to say that the difference between our degree course and, say, the performance diploma course of the day (1979-82) was that, not only did we have to come up with the goods (musically speaking) we also had to be able to describe them and the processes involved in understanding them in order to prove that we could pass this on to others.

Have you ever seen a theremin played outside Bill Bailleyesque comedy? May I recommend this short video featuring Pamelia Kurstin? Lest you fear that the timbre is going to be a little samey throughout, try to hang on until at least 2:45 when the sound changes dramatically. At 14:15 there is a lovely arrangement of Billy Strayhorn’s Lush Life featuring Makoto Ozone on piano. What’s nice in this film is the juxtaposition of sensitive playing with extremely merry explanatory dialogue between the items. The musical sensitivity is all the more surprising when you realise that the only parameters specified by the hands approaching the instrument are pitch (frequency) and volume (amplitude). Pupils interested in both science and music might enjoy puzzling out which one is responsible for producing vibrato*. If you haven’t already clicked the Theremin link, try to guess when the instrument was invented.

* an Int 2 concept

Of all the SQA Listening Concepts, the one* which arises most frequently in the world of instrumental teaching is sequence. This is one which pupils understand and can spot but find difficult to put into words. In the end, we often agree that a the following conditions have to be met:

• that there is a pattern which can be spotted (seen and/or heard)
• that, having spotted the pattern, we can predict what should come next (by playing and/or describing)
• that we should be able to tell whether what actually came next was what we were expecting (by listening and/or reading)
• that - on a good day - we should be able to pinpoint the deviant note, name it and say what we were expecting to be in its place (by pointing to the page and/or playing)

Here is an example of the longest sequence I know. Most sequences extend to 3 units and break away on the 4^th. Some even break away on the 3^rd. This familiar sequence has 5 complete units and even begins its 6^th breakaway unit on the expected note: sequence 

The discussion of sequences and patterns in other subjects comes up e.g. maths, dance, art etc. Pupils are asked to listen to a numerical sequence and to add the next number:

• 2, 4, 6, 8, ?
• 1, 3, 5, 7, ?
• 1, 4, 7, 10, ?
• 1, 5, 9, 13, ?

An S1 pupil today offered extremely quick answers to the more challenging of these and when I commented on this he said that he enjoyed, and was quite good at, this sort of thing. For interest’s sake, he agreed to be timed reciting a times table of his choice - he chose the nine times table and we agreed that he should simply announce the products, omit the “nine ones are” prefixes and stop at 10 x 9. His time was 4” - impressive!

If you’re not convinced, try timing yourself simply reading the answers aloud:

9, 18, 27, 36, 45, 54, 63, 72, 81, 90.

If you achieve a good time, why not try calculating and reciting the answers to another table?

* I’m excluding here the most straightforward ones e.g. ascending/descending or silence

According to Alex Ross, author of the very interesting blog (and book) on contemporary classical music entitled The Rest Is Noise, Monday 17^th of December could be regarded as Worldwide Atonality Day. Ross argues that the publication of Arnold Schoenberg’s Ich darf nicht dankend (scroll down to Zwei Lieder für Gesag und Klavier op. 14) marks the beginnings of his straying from tonality. Tonal and atonal are Int 2 Music Listening concepts which you can look up by following the links (audio illustration and explanation provided courtesy of LTS).

The fact that these pupils are expected to be familiar with these concepts is proof that knowledge of them exists in schools. But performance of atonal music in concerts is almost completely unknown for the simple reason that most people (myself excluded) don’t seem to like it. I have stated here, in lessons, on reports and at parents evenings that musical concepts are better understood when heard than read about, and best of all when pupils have played them - have held them in their hands. Yet, it could be claimed that I rob pupils of the true experience of atonality by avoiding it for the simple reason that its appearance results in laughter, complaint and disengagement. The idea of extended rehearsal and performance of an atonal guitar ensemble work at a school concert seems almost unthinkable.

It’s strange that, as we consider how best to prepare pupils for the 21^st century, much of the music of the 20^th century still seems too avant garde. Or did the Western European classical tradition simply take a wrong turning there from which we have recovered? Why is that that pupils would respond more readily and with more intuitive understanding to music from, say Africa or Japan than to music whose origins lie 100 years ago in their own culture? I’d be very interested to know if other aesthetic subjects experience similar situations.

There are many films of Schoenberg conducting his own works on YouTube. You can also hear the voice of Schoenberg here paying tribute to George Gershwin - a composer with an unmistakable love for a sense of key.