A&HHE Special Issue August 2016

From music theory to musicianship: The development of a new curriculum for the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague

Suzanne Konings
Royal Conservatoire The Hague

Abstract

Starting from embodied musical activities, and working from these to cognitive understanding of musical concepts, has become the basis of the new music theory curriculum in the Royal Conservatoire The Hague. This has constituted a major change in the pedagogical approach and the thinking about the purpose of the music theory curriculum. The new musicianship programme is set up to realise a close relation to the professional practice of performing and teaching music.

Keywords

music theory, musicianship, music education, music theory education, curriculum development

Changing perspectives

Six years ago I visited a demonstration class[i] for children in the junior strings department in the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. In this lesson, which turned out to be based on the Kodály approach of music teaching, the children engaged in practical musical activities, singing and playing their instrument. Although this approach was totally new to me then, I immediately noticed there was something important to be learned. By acquiring musical skills and experiences through active music making, the children were able to become familiar with musical concepts that are essential in performance practice, but often are left to a more cognitive approach in music theory lessons.

In 2009 the music theory curriculum of the Royal Conservatoire mainly applied this cognitive approach. As in many specialist music institutions harmony, counterpoint, analysis and ear training were taught from a music theory point of view. Teachers assumed students had already learned broad practical musicianship skills, such as playing by ear, improvisation, some keyboard skills and being able to read and write music with aural understanding during their musical lives before entering the bachelor’s programme, on which the more abstract theoretical learning could be based. Unfortunately in practice, this was too often not the case, and consequently the results of students engaging in the three years music theory programme could best be described in terms of frustration and disappointment in relation to levels of achievement, from the perspectives of both teachers and students. Students often experienced music theory lessons as a disconnected but obligatory part of the study programme. Teachers and students worked hard towards the music theory exams, but had to acknowledge that much of what was learned often became redundant once the students left the conservatoire. Many students were not able to integrate this theoretical knowledge into their professional practice as a performer or music teacher.

In classical music, notation (the printed score) is almost always the starting point for analysis, harmony, solfège and ear training in a traditional music theory curriculum. However, at the Royal Conservatoire, we had something of a transformative experience during a professional development week in 2012 for the music theory teachers. A particularly inspiring session I took part in was with Dr László Nemes (Liszt Academy, Budapest) when the photocopier did not work and scores were therefore not available for us to use. Learning by ear and through guided instruction we reconstructed a Mikrokosmos piece until we knew it by heart. By the end of the session, we could sing it, play it, even move to it, and we understood the compositional structure having explored it from within the music. Through this activity and other workshops given by guest teachers, we recognised that we could indeed create a different approach to transferring musical knowledge, through drawing on and developing practical musicianship skills. Becoming learners again and working from our own core musicianship, we experienced our potential to rise to significant musical challenges in this way, and to have great fun in doing so. This crystallized our thinking, and we recognised that a change was possible and necessary in the School’s theory curriculum.

This change required huge team effort between the music theory teachers to rethink the music theory programme, and included teachers attending one another’s classes. From 2013, nine music theory teachers enrolled in a teacher development plan designed to update their own Master level education, through undertaking research and exploring diverse learning and teaching methods. In this process, we were supported by contact with other schools of higher music education, which helped a lot to stimulate creativity in our thinking about learning and teaching processes. The level of support provided for professional development in this way made a very important contribution to our new curriculum.

This curriculum is characterised particularly by working directly from the musical repertoire to develop musical understanding and literacy in practical ways integrated with the students’ own instrumental/vocal discipline. Cognitive understanding of musical concepts comes as a result of acquiring practical musicianship skills: we focus on developing aural understanding of melody, harmony, polyphony and musical structure, and on stimulating musical imagination and musical memory – all of which provide an essential foundation for ensemble playing, improvisation, music reading, arranging and composing. A particularly important goal for us is that students should be able to transfer the skills they have learned easily and naturally into their own practice as performers and teachers.

Example musicianship activities

This section provides two specific examples of activities that may form part of a first year undergraduate student’s Aural Skills and Analysis class.

Activity 1. The group sings a descending C-minor scale with the help of hand signs from the teacher, see Fig. 1

Figure 1. Descending minor scale shown with hand signs.

The teacher then demonstrates (musically and rhythmically) a descending melody (Fig. 2), that includes some repeated notes by hand signs (only the first sound and no score is given!); the students imagine the melody in their minds, supported by the hand signs. After a few visual hand sign demonstrations the students can then sing this melody from memory.

Figure 2. Melody shown with hand signs.

Once they have all memorised the melody, the group sings the melody as a two-part canon, see Fig. 3. In this exercise they are asked to raise their hand wherever they hear a dissonant interval between the two voices while singing the canon.

Figure 3. Two-part canon, sung from memory.

After this the teacher sings the first entry of the canon and the students follow. The teacher however changes the melody at the dissonant spots (still no score is given), see Fig. 4

Figure 4. Two-part canon with changed melody.

From this point onwards, it becomes possible to experiment and explore the music in different ways: have the students heard what happened to the melody sung by the teacher? Can they sing the new melody with suspensions and embellished resolutions in canon after the teacher? A final stage comes when the group sings the piece as a four-part canon in the version of Lajos Bárdos, resulting in four-part harmony. The chords can be analysed by ear and the four-part canon can be written down from memory to analyse the counterpoint and chords on paper.

Activity 2. The teacher shows the bass part of “The Queen’s Funeral March” by Purcell with the Curwen hand signs, see Fig. 5. The first pitch for La is given and the students first follow the bass line, imagining the sound in their minds, and they then sing the bass line themselves. Through an iterative process of this kind, they memorise the bass line, including the modulations. No score is present!

Figure 5. Bass line with modulation shown with hand signs.

Then half of the group sings the bass line while the teacher shows the upper voice with hand signs (Fig. 6) to the other students. This upper voice is again learned with aural imagination and the whole group is then able to sing in two parts.

Figure 6. Upper voice shown with hand signs.

Further activities ensue: can the students switch part after they have sung their own part? Can they sing the other part by memory? Can they learn two other parts in the same way or read them from the score? (see Fig.7) Can they play the music from memory on instruments and in different keys? Do they feel the change in the expressive meaning of the notes at the modulations? As part of this process, the students will also listen to a recording of the March, and then will write down the four parts from memory after singing, playing and listening to the piece. They may also sing or play melodic variations based on the chord progression.

Figure 7. Four part score.

To summarise, these activities draw on and develop a diverse set of musical skills including:

• inner hearing / aural imagination;
• singing or playing from memory;
• listening to and making sense of another part – aural analysis;
• singing or playing in tune to another part;
• ensemble singing or playing;
• musical reading and writing;
• transposition when playing an instrument.

The theoretical concepts associated with these skills and activities can equally be brought to the surface for conscious discussion after the students have performed and listened to the music. These include:

• imitation;
• consonance and dissonance;
• suspension and resolution;
• scales, keys, intervals and chords;
• harmony and counterpoint;
• homophony and polyphony;
• sequences and cadences;
• triads, seventh chords and inversions;
• transposition and modulation;
• key relations;
• musical form.

The example activities make use of Kodály teaching tools, such as relative solmisation and hand signs. Five of the conservatoire’s music theory teachers are now developing specialised ‘Kodály-inspired’ programmes for different groups of students: singers, young talent classes, jazz students and teacher training students, but not all of the teachers have taken this specific approach and this has not been the goal of the curriculum change. In each case, however, the principles of learning music through engaging with musical language by singing or playing are central.

David Elliott (1995) describes the procedural essence of musicianship as follows: “When we know how to do something competently, proficiently, or expertly, our knowledge is not manifested verbally but practically. During the continuous actions of singing or playing instruments our musical knowledge is in our actions: our musical thinking and knowing are in our musical doing and making.”[ii]

About formal musical knowledge he argues: “Most musical practices are sufficiently complex that music makers (including teachers and students) must consult sources of formal musical knowledge at various times. […] By itself, however, formal musical knowledge is inert and unmusical. It must be converted into procedural knowledge-in-action to achieve its potential.”[iii]

Starting from embodied musical activities, and working from these to cognitive understanding of musical concepts, has become the basis of the music theory classes in the new curriculum. This has constituted a major change in the pedagogical approach and our thinking about the purpose of the music theory curriculum, although nothing has changed in the size of the groups of students and the total number of teaching hours.

Future challenges

Our new curriculum for music theory began for first and second year undergraduate students in September 2014. Their responses have been characterised in two main ways. Firstly, they are positive about the much more practical approach. Secondly they also perceive that the new classes sometimes feel ‘less difficult’ than previous music theory classes, or are ‘not about real analysis or harmony’ (i.e. theoretical exercises that you do on paper). Some second year students have also said that they have not ‘learned’ as much as they did in their first year. The real implications of these early comments are not yet clear. It could be that the feeling of learning something that is more abstract is what they perceive music theory lessons should be about. The experience of delivering the new curriculum on the other hand has shown that in fact it is often necessary to go back to very basic practical musicianship skills for the students to establish a solid foundation, and it may not always be easy for them to accept this.

Other challenges that we face concern the teachers and their perceptions of the skills they are responsible for developing. Whilst they may understand that the concepts and goals behind the lessons are the same or similar, students may perceive an aural skills and analysis class taught by another music theory teacher as a completely different subject. This depends on the style of teaching, the choice in repertoire and the background of the teacher. Teaching musicianship is closely connected to the musical identity of the music theory teacher and his or her relation to music as an art form. We do try to make the best use of the special skills of the individual teachers, for example in the aural skills and improvisation and keyboard skills and harmony classes. We are still working on this issue, trying to find ways to continue supporting individually inspired music teaching, and at the same time creating some kind of comparability in the curriculum so that students gather equivalent experiences.

Communicating this in a comprehensive way to the students and for example to quality assurance agencies is another challenge. The outcomes of the new music theory curriculum have to be described in terms of musical behaviour, in the context of the students’ performance and teaching practices, and in relation to their understanding of formal musical knowledge. It is hardly possible to access the demonstrated skills as wright or wrong, or count the number of mistakes. However I have noticed, in working on this new approach during the last few years, that students do have quite a good understanding of the skills they are acquiring and the progress they are making themselves, just because they experience these in every lesson.[iv] This reflective side of the musical learning process (which can not always be described in words easily) is almost automatically incorporated in the practical musicianship workshops, and is clearly much needed in order to be able to grow as a musician.

When active music making is at the core of the music theory curriculum, every lesson must be musically challenging. It requires also that teachers create new content and teaching approaches, which take much more time to prepare. The connection of the music theory classes to the students’ main subject repertoire has always been considered to be very important. How can the diverse repertoire of the students be integrated in practical musicianship exercises, at the same time maintaining an appropriately scaffolded progress? An important step yet to be made is to find ways to involve the main subject and methodology teachers in the new musicianship programme. I think this is possible; and it would in fact be the ideal situation. Initiatives with particular groups of students and their teachers are currently being developed to explore possibilities, for example with the brass class of the conservatoire.

In the Royal Conservatoire we hope and expect that the new musicianship programme will closely relate to the student’s professional practice of performing and teaching music once they leave Higher Education and become fully-fledged professionals. It would be a great achievement of the curriculum change if in a few years we start to see students coming in to the conservatoire with a much broader and more developed background in essential musicianship skills, aligned with our approach in Higher Education. This should begin to happen if they are taught and inspired by our alumni who have learned to integrate musicianship skills in all aspects of their lives as musicians.

Footnotes

[i] This demonstration class was taught by David Vinden during the Second Reflective Conservatoire Conference in 2009.

[ii] Elliott DJ (1995), p.56.

[iii] Elliott DJ (1995), p.61.

[iv] See also: Elliott DJ (1995), p.72-76.

References

Elliott DJ (1995) Music Matters – A New Philosophy of Music Education. New York: Oxford University Press.