Tag: adult dalcroze

Whole and half steps are kind of like air. We tend to not pay too much attention to them unless something unexpected happens. For years they were certainly invisible to me – or rather, inaudible – unless I made a mistake in a musical passage, an easy enough thing to fix for pianists. It didn’t seem like such an important subject, just a way to label the movement between two adjacent scale tones.

In his solfège texts, however, Emile Jaques Dalcroze put this subject front and center for beginning students, and the longer I teach the more I appreciate why. As I learned to perceive them, I learned to use them to do all sorts of things. They are the keys (pun intended) to modulation and, maybe most importantly, and they offer great potential expressive power when playing a melody.

But inside a scale? They tend to just disappear. One of my first tasks then in the adult Dalcroze solfège class is to make them at least visible, hoping that in time they will become perceptible as well. I am working for bottom-up recognition, the kind that is instant and effortless, but to get there we may need to go back and forth between what we hear and what we know analytically for a while.

Fortunately there is the layout of the keyboard. Though they are literally invisible on a violin, the half steps stick out like sore thumbs on the piano, at least when you are in the key of C Major. This can create a kind of C major bias for some students, old and young. (I am reminded of Anne Farber often referring to “the tyranny of Do”.) However, it’s a good place to start. To combat the notion that the black notes sound different from the white I might play a Gb major scale and ask how many black notes they heard, some students will say, “None,” and are quite astonished to learn that I was primarily playing black notes.  

Gestures come in handy, too. By creating a simple movement association for half and whole steps (for example, paint the scale in space, keeping the hand open for whole steps and closing it for half steps), I can ask a student to sing the scale with an absolute naming system (e.g. fixed do solfège or letter names) while gesturing for whole or half steps. As she sings, I can play exactly what she gestures, even if it is in conflict with what she is singing. This technique is a bit like mild electroshock therapy, but it can be startingly effective. This technique is supercharged by starting and ending the scale on different scale degrees (one of Dalcroze’s most brilliant pedagogical inventions).

For young children we’ll need a different approach. This is definitely one of those “teachery” subjects that invite eye glaze or outright rebellion if pushed too much (I can see watery eyes even from adults if I spend too much time on this). With elementary-age students I start with the keyboard, again no matter what instrument they play. I look for ways to physicalize the pattern of white and black. I play a game based on the American sidewalk game ‘hopscotch’ I call ‘hop-scale’. We move across the room imagining the chromatic layout of of whole and half on the keyboard, jumping with two feet when we would land on a black note, and one foot for white. I have them speak the letter names, thinking with sharps when we ascend, and flats when we descend. The trick is remember the two sets of adjacent white notes. The pattern is just off-center enough to keep students from going on auto-pilot until they really know the map.

We can do a version of this for adults, too, by having them sing the chromatic scale, but step only on the notes of the C Major scale (or any other key, even starting on any scale degree). If the students are seated, have them clap, snap or gesture on the notes of the scale. Another way to bring this perception into awareness is for me to play a whole or half step on the piano. If it is a whole, they will sing the two notes and put the gesture in the middle, if half they sing without the rest. When I do this, I try to make it feel like music, rather than the atonal randomness of my own college ear-training classes. It is in the context of a melody that the power of the half step becomes tangible, especially when I put them to use in a modulation. Which is just what they do in “real life”, outside of the ear training classroom.

I’ve been thinking about representation lately.

No, I don’t need a lawyer. I’m talking about how we ‘picture’ music. As an experiment last week, I asked my kids to draw a picture of rhythms we were working with during the session. I didn’t ask them to use notation. Some of them are too young to know any notation anyway (the older ones have basic reading skills). I just said, “Draw a picture of the two’s on one side and the three’s on the other,” which had been the focus of the day’s activities.

A few drew groupings of lines or shapes, but most simply drew whatever it is they liked to draw. There were human figures, airplanes, even a well-shaded piece of fruit. I asked them to hold up the side that matched the music they heard, and I improvised music in two or in three. In most cases, I would have been unable to discern which drawing was which by merely looking. I needed an explanation from the artist. When it seemed to me to that there was an identical piece of fruit on both sides of the paper, the student explained to me that the one with more empty space was for the two’s. Of course, the words ‘draw’ and ‘picture’ naturally send kids into a particular mindset. Interestingly, this mindset is usually representational in some way. We don’t always draw what we really see.

Our minds are built to associate meaning with symbol, and musical notation takes advantage of this proclivity. All of the words and symbols on this page are mostly arbitrary. We have agreed on their meaning, and so I am able to communicate with you. It has without question made possible some profound and glorious combinations of sound throughout its history, and yet I find myself wary of placing too much emphasis on it in my teaching. Notation creates a hierarchical grid that is not part of my experience of so much of the music that I make and that is important to me. Making things worse, the names in American English are highly problematic. Four-quarter time? Sure, makes sense. One quarter is 1/4^th of a measure of four beats. So how can one “quarter” note stand in for 1/3^rd of a bar in three-quarter time? And on and on. (In naming their rhythm units after knitting needles, the British have an advantage here.)

I experience a rich interplay of pulse levels and even meters when I listen to, for example, a Sonny Rollins recording. There is great pleasure to be found in the play of two’s and three’s (on many levels) as my perception shifts from one to another. The musicians communicate through a dynamic, flexible and somehow simultaneously precise and ambiguous rhythmic language. Of course, students learning a Haydn Sonata need to be able to decode the shift from eighths to sixteenths to triplets and then to thirty-seconds, but I am loathe to lock them into that too soon via notation.

When a quarter becomes the de facto representation of a beat, something is lost. Anything can represent a beat: a quarter, an eighth, an apple… In the Dalcroze classroom I try to split the difference between my natural inclination to avoid reducing music to representation too soon and my responsibility to make sure my students are prepared for their music lessons. I want to create musical experiences that will be solid, tangible, lived, felt and authentic. If I am doing that, I can feel more at ease showing them a quarter note and telling them that it represents—or can represent—a beat.

I made the drawings some time ago to help myself visualize a couple poly-meters and cross-rhythms. Some will be easy to see, some less so.

But I’m ok with that.