039 - A Creative, Integrated Approach to Teaching Music Theory
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039 - A Creative, Integrated Approach to Teaching Music Theory
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James Gutierrez, a music professor at Northeastern University in Boston wrote, "A theory, properly defined, intends to explain. Yet it is not required, nor always useful, for an explanation to be tendered with words. If we think with our bodies and with things, and know more by doing than by seeing, then we theorize—process and explain complex phenomena—not just with symbolic and metaphorical language, but with our bodies, with things, and by doing."
It's an interesting thought, isn't it?
So often in our teaching and learning experiences, music theory is taught as a standalone subject. We have theory books in our private studios, AP Theory in high school, and a sequence of theory classes at the college and graduate level.
What comes to mind when you think about music theory? Maybe words like analysis or structure, music notation, form, or Roman numerals. Maybe the image of pencils and scores, chalkboard analysis, and red-pen marks on your recent part-writing assignment.
Maybe you were one of those music students who loved theory class (you can't see, but I'm raising my hand over here). Or maybe you were one of those music students who dreaded every Tuesday and Thursday morning, who didn't really "get" music theory or found it to be tedious and analytical.
The truth is, theory tends to be a kind of polarizing topic, doesn't it? We either love it or we hate it. And that's what I've found in my studio, too.
There are the students who always complete their theory assignments at home and enjoy the note-naming, harmonizing, analyzing, and matching of musical terms and definitions. And the mazes—they always love the mazes. And then there are the students who conveniently forget to bring their theory book to lessons three weeks in a row, forget they have an assignment, or bring their book to the next lesson and say they didn't understand how to do it.
This is a problem, right?
Theory courses and books are a good thing, don't get me wrong. We need to develop an understanding of theory and musical structure just like we need to develop an understanding of syntax and grammar in language. But I've been wondering lately if there's a better way to incorporate these learning experiences and theoretical conversations into our teaching, especially when teaching online.
Gutierrez noted that "theoretical concepts are presented through symbolic logic as literal truths, and taught procedurally with minimal attention paid to mapping these concepts onto students' lived experience."
How can we as music educators make more connections between music theory and music practice, between the analysis and study of music and the actual creation of it? How can we make music theory more experiential?
That's what we're going to talk about today.
How to Teach Music Theory Virtually
Mark van Duren once said, "The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery." I've been thinking about that this year and how it relates to our work as music teachers.
One thing I've been trying in my studio this year is virtual music theory.
I'm using two tech tools to do this: Google Slides and Notability. The best part is, my students don't even know these are theory activities straight from their theory book. They just think it's a fun, interactive game to play on Zoom. Teacher win!
I started by flipping through my students' theory books.
I teach primarily from Faber Piano Adventures and The Music Tree right now, but I like the activities in The Music Tree a little better than some because they include a few more comprehensive musical skills like ear-training, same vs. different, intervals, and harmonizing. For beginning students, there are also many activities focused on landmark note recognition and patterns, which I was looking to review with a few of my younger students.
I chose 1-2 activities from each unit to recreate in Google Slides. I could have simply scanned the pages and pulled them up on the screen, but then it would be apparent this was from a theory book. By recreating the activities in Google Slides, it feels more like a game.
I looked for activities like
Take a Trip, where a starting note is given followed by a series of intervals up and down
Same vs. Different intervals (like steps vs. skips)
Reading with Landmarks (matching note groups to letter names)
Identifying intervals in a jumble of staff or keyboard images
Reading with High and Low Landmarks
Major and Minor Triads
Ear-Training Challenges
Reading with 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, and 6ths
Triads and Inversions
I pulled activities from Music Tree: Time to Begin, which is the first book, all the way up through Music Tree Activities, Part 3 so far. Each activity is a different file in Google Drive and I organized them into folders by level so I can easily find what I'm looking for when planning lessons. I also made sure to put the unit in the title of each file.
How to Make Music Theory More Interactive
The next step was to figure out how to make them interactive.
Sure, I can share my screen in Zoom and show my Google Slides presentation, but the only way to annotate is with Zoom tools, which can sometimes be a little clumsy, especially if the student is using a phone or other small device.
You've heard me talk about using Notability, a note-taking app for written assignment sheets, and I discovered that I can import files from Google Drive right into Notability. This means I can share my iPad screen and draw right on the screen with my Apple Pencil. I find using the highlighter works well because it's a color, so it shows up well against the black and white, but it's also translucent so you can still see what's behind it.
How to Organize Music Theory Worksheets Digitally
A few notes on organization, for those who are curious:
To organize the files once I imported them into Notability, I added a new subject divider called Activities, then created a new subject for each level (e.g. Part 1, Part 2A, etc.).
I track where each student is in the book (and what activities we've completed virtually) in my physical copy of the Activities book using small Post-It flags with each student's name.
I erase all my annotations and markings after doing each activity so I always have a clean copy ready when introducing it to a student.
A Story About How I’m Using Music Theory Activities in My Studio Lately
Here's an example of how I'm using these activities in my lessons lately:
This is a story about a lesson I had with a 4th grader a few weeks ago. Let's call him Ian.
We've been reviewing landmark notes lately and learning to read music that begins a step or skip above or below these notes. I had planned to do a sight-reading activity with landmark patterns from the Music Tree: Part 2A (Activities) book that day to help reinforce this skill.
We went through the first few examples together: I would ask what the closest landmark was in relation to the first note, he would describe it, and I would write a small X on the line or space. Then we'd determine the interval up or down to find the starting note.
After doing a few exercises like this, Ian suddenly recognized one pattern as the beginning of a piece in his previous Lesson Book (from a different series, at that!). The pattern was from “Grumpy Old Troll” (which starts with G-D-E), but in this case, that pattern had been transposed up a step and he was reading A-E-F and he still made the connection.
Ian played it a few times on the piano.
"That's cool," he said to himself, playing it again. Then, he began exploring. What would it sound like backward? Or upside-down? Or upside-down and backward? He did this unprompted. I love how his mind works!
Since we were on Zoom, I pulled up the whiteboard tool and wrote down these pitch combinations as he discovered them. We talked about direction and intervals, especially for the inversion and retrograde-inversion variations.
This brought me back to sophomore year theory with Dr. A: sitting conference-room style around long rectangular tables in the basement of the Porter Auditorium with chalkboards on all sides, learning about 12-tone music and matrixes and combinatorial set theory.
I loved that class (see? I'm one of those theory nerds). I loved looking for patterns and discovering the underlying order and structure of avant-garde pieces that seemed disparate and random at first glance.
Of course, Ian doesn't know about 12-tone music (and he doesn't need to yet!), but it was fun to explore and generate new patterns with him using retrograde, inversion, and retrograde-inversion without getting into the theoretical labels.
Through this theory activity, he not only made connections to other pieces he knew, he explored how the pattern was constructed and how it could be manipulated. This experience culminated in a short composition, based on that original pattern and musical idea:
G D E
E C D
E D C
F E D
G F E D C
E F D C
An Integrated Approach to Teaching Music Theory
This is just one example of how we can use theory as a tool to develop musical understanding in context, not as a pencil-paper activity that's done away from the instrument, but as an integrated exploration of how music is made.
Every piece of music we teach has a whole list of theoretical concepts embedded in it: form, patterns and repetition (tonal and rhythm), chord changes, tonality, intervals, phrase structure, meter, and much more.
My challenge for you today is to study your student's repertoire and plan and prepare theory-teaching moments that connect to the music they are studying and learning. How can you turn it into a game? How can you help them discover something new?
I'd love to hear how it goes.
Sources:
Gutierrez, J. (2019). An Enactive Approach to Learning Music Theory? Obstacles and Openings. Frontiers in Education, retrieved online: https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2019.00133