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Home > Tips for the Music Theory Classroom
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Tips for the Music Theory Classroom
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- Vary the tasks frequently. Plan on about 10 minutes per activity, though score analysis will occasionally take longer.
- For sight-singing, encourage students to use a pre-performance routine. For
example:
- Analyze melody for key, range, tricky leaps, tricky rhythms, long-term steps.
- Clap and count the rhythm (1, 2-and, 3-e-and-a, 4).
- Sing the tonal grid (scale degrees 1-3-5) for the given tonality.
- Adapt the tonal grid for the particular melody (e.g., it may go from 5 below tonic to 5 above) and sing that.
- Embellish the adapted tonal grid by adding any neighbor tones (5-6-5, 1-7-1) contained in the melody.
- Practice the melody silently.
- Practice out loud.
- Repair any spots that fall apart.
- Practice out loud correctly.
- Perform.
- In sight-singing, find tricky leaps from long-term step relationships, not from the previous note. Practice first without the intervening note(s): just the step. Then sing the same step, leaving time to hear the intervening note(s) in your head. Then sing the passage as written. For incomplete neighbor tones, have students supply the principal note that is missing before trying it as written. The general heuristic is to break problems down into manageable component problems.
- Occasionally work as a group on melodic and harmonic dictations. Ask questions, starting with the big picture and working toward detail. For example, after one play of a harmonic dictation you might ask: "What scale degree is the last note of the soprano? What type of cadence do you hear at the end of the phrase? Does it close or does it imply a continuation? Do you hear any familiar chord chunks? Do the bass and soprano move in contrary or parallel motion? Are there any leaps in the soprano? Are there any linear spans in the bass?" By working as a team, less able students are shown how the adepts think, and all students get to work on this task in a fresh format.
- Following successful transcription and analysis of a dictation melody on the blackboard, try singing only the structural tones with scale degrees. Next try having students sing the structural tones while you fill in lightly the notes that are missing. Then have them sing the entire melody, singing the structural tones but humming the others.
- Following successful transcription of a harmonic dictation, have students sing the soprano and bass lines -- in unison, then in counterpoint -- first with scale degrees, then saying the (roman and arabic numeral) analysis. This works well for the final stages of an analysis. After analyzing "America," for instance, you could replace Samuel Francis Smith's lyrics with "I-vi-ii6-V-I64-V...." Not only does this reinforce the students' sense of harmonic progression in real time, it also introduces a note of levity: they will all laugh at their attempts to say "I64" in the space of an eighth note.
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