Michael Joviala

Tag: by-subject

  • Tonality

    So, yes, the relationship between two tones is not necessarily black and white (see previous post). Tonality puts those two tones into a context which could consist of the many shades of gray, unrestrained technicolor or a tasteful complimentary color pallet. When I use color in a drawing I sometimes have trouble limiting myself. However, In last Sunday morning’s exploratory session with some new watercolor pencils (above) I made it a point to work within some constraints.

    My weakness for unrestrained color combinations has its corollary in sound: I am an avowed congregant in the church of dissonance. When I improvise for myself I very rarely end up using diatonic harmony (subject for an introspective future post?). I do not shy away from this in my playing for children’s classes. Though they may be only able to reproduce a limited range of tones in their singing voice, I see no reason not to expose kids to all sorts of tonal relationships, beyond major and minor. Walks can be Lydian and lunges Phrygian, and stories can be excellent backdrops for all sorts of harmonic worlds. The sun can rise with a Schoenbergian series of perfect 4ths; chromatic birdsongs à la Messiaen can stop bird-loving giants while they are hiking through diminished-scale forests in their tracks; later we can float on the open seas of freely juxtaposed triads for a feeling of the awesome power of nature.

    But when we are doing something that calls for more precision, there is no substitute for diatonic tonality. For little ones taking a solo flight out their adult’s “nest” I end the phrase on a dominant when they bend down to pick up their worm, and resolve it with an authentic cadence when they return. Every once in a while (ok, pretty often) one of the little birds just wants to keep flying. If I stay on that dominant long enough (or even back-pedal to a tonic second inversion) and stay there long enough, that little bird will get the signal: time to land. I’m going for the feeling of one of those long trills at the end of a cadenza that says to the orchestra, “It’s time…”

    Older kids are ready to recognize and respond to tonic and dominant harmonic function with an association type Dalcroze game (“this=that”). For example, during locomotor movement (walks, runs, skips, lunges, etc.) they could be asked to sit if a phrase ends on the tonic, but stay standing and reach toward someone if it ends on the dominant. Whether they are children or adults, if they are doing something at all complicated like a Dalcroze dissociation (“this equals NOT that” or “do these different things at the same time”), I will most likely play as clearly as possible with the major or minor color wheel and 8-bar phrasing punctuated with half and authentic cadences at the appropriate moments. Clarity of form through classical harmony does wonders to regulate the mind and organize body.

    Speaking of organizing and regulating mind and body, we’ve organized a special workshop series in New York City at the Lucy Moses School for plastique animée. Four Saturdays in April and May of 2023. Join us for a physical experience of tonality (among other things) that just might get you out of your head when it comes to harmonic analysis.

  • One Small Step…

    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.

  • Leading and Following, Up and Down

    Over the past few weeks the 4-5 year-old classes have been exploring several different aspects of musical experience that I have written about previously. Now that they are getting used to working together as part of a group, I like to give them opportunities to lead and follow. Recently gingerbread men and women have lead their fellow cookies through the snow to a frozen pond (ice skating ensued…), and elephants have followed their leaders through the crowded city streets on their way to their jobs at the Big Apple Circus.  I have written about these kinds of activities in a previous post which you can read here.

    Also, we are continuing to explore musical elements related to pitch. This year I have found myself singing more to the children throughout the class, and encouraging sung responses from them. It is interesting to see the many different attitudes towards singing that have already taken hold in the children. Some are quite ready to sing anything: made up songs, their favorite songs, what they had for breakfast… To encourage those that may be more shy, I attempt to give opportunities where the entire group is making sound with their voice: perhaps the elephants can call out to each other,  or maybe we can all wonder how a monkey would sing Frere Jacques. Previous posts address other ways I attempt to give them experience hearing pitch, register and scale, click here for more.

    Got a question? Add your comment here. I’d love to hear from you!

    Michael

    December, 2013

  • Phrasing

    A phrase can perhaps be best described as a musical sentence. Phrases can be long, extending over many bars of music, or short, lasting only a few beats. And just like a spoken sentence, phrases are often separated by a breath, or at least a feeling of a breath. The ends of musical phrases can imply the punctuation of a written one: commas, periods, question marks, exclamation marks can all be heard in music. Musicians who play with a good sense of phrasing communicate a feeling of beginning, middle and end to each phrase they play.

    These may be challenging concepts to explain in words to a four-year-old, but children can easily experience phrasing in movement. At first, they are given musical or dramatic cues to encourage them to stop – something they are not always inclined to do on their own. Imagery can also play a role: this time of year, in any given class, snowflakes are apt to drift out of clouds and roll from one drift to another as we transition between activities.

    The image of a horse and rider is very powerful for young children, as anyone who has witnessed a room full of children galloping with complete abandon can verify. Since the very first class we have been riding to songs that gallop such as “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain”. They are practiced in pulling the reins to stop the animal, and so now their attention can be brought to the places in the song that feel like the horse is taking a pause. Very astute groups will be able, after a while, to notice when the horse galloped for a long time as opposed to a short time. Their awareness of phrasing will enable us to explore larger forms in the coming weeks. We have also applied the concept to a song called, “Who Stole My Chickens and My Hens”, which you may have heard your child singing recently. In this song, rests of varying lengths separate the phrases. While the children are singing they walk around. During the rests, they pause to look for their lost chickens. As the year goes on, they will be given opportunities to find ways to initiate, continue and stop movements on their own. This, to me at least, is one of the essences of improvisation. In future posts, I’ll address some of the ways I attempt to transfer the work into the playing of simple percussion instruments.

    A more challenging exercise asks the students to stand in their own space, while one student delivers a ball to another during a phrase of a song. Many skills are required here, not the least of which is standing still until it is your turn to move with the ball! But to perform this game well, students must have a clear sense of the arc of each phrase, as they have to decide whether to walk to someone near or far depending on the length of the particular phrase.  The five and six-year-olds will work on this exercise to an Irish lullaby called “Cucanandy”, which has a short-short-long pattern of phrasing. This year, I have used the “Cuckoo” movement from Saint Seans’ Carnival of the Animals to illustrate phrasing. In this short magicall piece, a cuckoo calls out at the end of each phrase. We walk quietly through the forest, stopping to point out near and far birds as we go.

    Besides having their attention drawn to one of the most pleasurable aspects of music, the work has obvious application to instrumental work. For example, a violinist or cellist performs a version of the ball game each time she puts the bow to the string. The Dalcroze work allows the students to experience on a large canvas what must eventually be made small.
    January, 2012

  • Register And Scale

    Image converted using ifftoanyTranslating musical phenomena into verbal language can be tricky. Most adults are familiar with the use of the words high and low as applied to musical pitch. Specifically, these words refer to the frequency of the musical tone. Higher tones have a more frequent wavelength than lower tones. When physicalizing these concepts, we take advantage of the other meanings of high and low, which refer to points in space. While adults may take this type of synesthesia (mapping of one sense onto another) for granted, these concepts may be beyond the immediate intellectual grasp of young children. In the Dalcroze class, physical experiences can draw their attention to this very elemental musical phenomenon. After a while, many can intuitively demonstrate the awareness of high and low frequency sounds through high and low gestures in space.

                To encourage this kind of perception, we have gone apple picking. As they walk around the apple orchard, accented sounds in the upper register of the piano ask them to ‘pick’ an apple from way up high in the tree. Accents in the lower end of the piano ask them to scoop up apples from the ground. This focuses their awareness on specific registers of the piano: high, middle and low in very general terms.

                Further exploration of pitch begins with the scale. From the beginning of the year, I have asked them to stand up using the first five notes of the major scale while singing, “Will you please stand up?” Lately, I have been able to drop the singing and just used the piano, the Pavlovian response of standing shows me that they are beginning to hear scale degrees.

                I have also used a poem called, “The Little Man Who Wasn’t There” as a way to apply the idea of scale to a dramatic situation. Many of them know it by now – you might ask them to sing it for you. It begins, “As I was walking up the stairs…” As the melody slowly ascends the minor scale (this is the version I sing, there are actually old swing band renditions of this poem), a mystery unfolds. For the older children, we have dipped our toes into scales other than major and minor. Using the xylophone, they have been asked to choose a starting note, other than C, and climb up 8 steps (as the song does). Each new starting point provides a different scale, known as a mode. These modes each have a very different feeling, and I like to give children an aural experience of them, even if they are not quite ready to grasp the music theory behind the concept. As the play up the new scale on the xylophone, the class shows the man ‘climbing up the stairs’, while I provide an accompaniment on the piano that gives them a feeling of whatever mode they have chosen.

    Many well known pieces of music use modes. One that the children have been hearing in class include Sleeping Beauty’s Pavane by Ravel.

    Finally, older children might enjoy this educational video of Tchaikovsky’s march from the Nutcracker. As the music plays it highlights some of the instrumental and pitch events as they unfold.

    Enjoy, and enjoy the holiday season!

    Michael

    Source: youtube.com via Michael on Pinterest

  • Exploring Meter

    A primary focus areas in the beginning of the year is the subject of meter. Meter can be defined as the grouping of beats into 2’s, 3’s and 4’s. Usually the first beat of the group is felt as a stressed or accented beat, and in the Dalcroze work we also recognize and explores the qualities of the other beats in the pattern.

    I first look for ways to give the children an experience of accent: squirrels jump from branch to branch, subway cars have bounce, and jack-in-the-boxes spring. These experiences lead to activities involving recurring patterns of accent. The 4-5 year-olds mostly work with groupings of two beats. A story of giant building a house gives them an opportunity to chop down trees, saw wood, and hammer nails, all with a two beat accompaniment. Ball passing games in which they raise the ball high before passing to their neighbor gives them an experience of not only feeling the accented beat, but also the building energy that leads to the accent (called the anacrusis). After these experiences, the children are given a chance to invent their own patterns with two, three and four parts on percussion instruments.

    In addition to these activities, the 5-6 year-olds can also explore groupings of three and four beats. In one game they are asked to move alone if they hear no metrical pattern, move with a partner if the music is in two, and come together as a group if the music was is in three or four. This is a challenging listening and cognition task, but with a little coaching, most groups are able to accomplish this!

    In addition to the songs we sing, I regularly slip music from the classical literature into the classes whenever possible. After the movement stories, we usually have a cool-down rest period, and if they are relaxed enough (i.e. if I have worn them out!), they are often more than willing to simply lie on the floor and listen. I have not given the names of the pieces I play yet, but they might recognize them if they heard them on a recording.

    Here are some of the pieces I use regularly:

    1. Far Away Places, #1 from Kinderszenen (Childhood Scenes) by Robert Schumann

    2. Entreating Child, #4 also from Kinderszenen

    3. Sleeping Beauty’s Pavanne, from the Mother Goose Suite by Maurice Ravel

    4. Royal March from Carnival of the Animals, by Saint Seans

    I have been using this last selection in a ball passing game that emphasizes the strong ‘two-ness’ of this piece, along with the exciting chromatic swirls that occur in the middle section. This has been a new invention this year! For extra practice, put on almost any kind of  music (jazz, classical, pop – most kinds of music use meter), and try to find first that recurring cycle of beats with your child.

    Let me know how it goes!

     

    Michael

    November, 2012