monday mid-day musicianship gripe

why are we still teaching four part dictation?

to answer this i think you first have to ask where did it come from. after two years of trying to teach the "traditional" musicianship curriculum (and failing), i thought a little research on the history of these classes would be useful. from my brief survey (only english language journals) the results are not clear, but most mentions of dictation and musicianship training only discuss how to teach these classes in a more efficient manner. with not much to go on i think the question becomes “why” but “when”. i bet the answer has much to recorded music. remember then? because if you are reading this the most important music technology in the last 125 years is not the computer, but the tape recorder.

when you think of it that way, dictation makes a lot of sense. until recently scores have always been expensive and hard to find. being able to write down what you heard (in a live performance) melodically and harmonically would be very important so if dictation is a strategy from before audio recording then we should obviously change the curriculum to fit the current technology. i guess the next question i have is why has the teaching of dictation become so entrenched in our university curriculum? if most articles that you can find on musicianship training are all about trying to build a better mousetrap. maybe we shouldn’t be trying to catch mice anymore? transcription anyone? how about giving the students exercises to work out on their own time. figure it out at the piano or using the primary instrument. its amazing what connections a student can make after a doing a dozen of these.

oh yeah... you in the back (my jazz colleague) what about playing by ear on your primary instrument? yeah! yeah! besides the record button, whoever created the rewind and the fast forward buttons should get the nobel prize in music.why don't throw out those meaningless needless written interval and chord drills, and have our students play by ear and develop the music language first before we drill them endlessly with identification drill. unless you can sing or play an diminished triad, how are you ever going to hear it. ok.... i know what some of you who teach these classes are thinking. (they should already be able to do that). yeah right... unless they have been exposed to great music teaching (orff, kodaly, suzuki, gordon/froseth dalcroze and not the current united states pedagogy of technical mastery though competition) our freshman are not coming in with these skills. a good reading through the music journals of the last 30 years suggests that this isn't new. so currently when we expect kids to 'hear'. we are educationally throwing them off the boat and asking them to swim. why not teach the kids in front of us instead the kids we wish we had?

i bet if you look at most college musicianship classes they resemble a quiz show with the professor playing “guess what chord/interval/melody/harmonic progression i am playing” . in these classes there are lots of platitudes given to “make sure you practice this at home”, “you need to work on this at least an hour a day” of course most students never improve, how can they improve if they can’t even play these chords and intervals by ear? so there it is, modeling, playing by ear in class, and transcription. teaching these skills can give all students a fighting chance in hell to become a real musician. lets give them the tools to succeed instead of pushing them out the door to “practice harder”

as you can see i probably have spent my soapbox credits for the year. if you have any insights or other comments on this topic, i would really like to hear them.