Music As A Language Part 4

The last step in the teaching of dictation is the treatment of what may be called the 'mixed phrase', i.e. one in the course of which the number of parts varies. This is the most difficult stage of all, and will need the utmost patience on the part of the teacher. But by this time the children will have begun some of the practical work at the piano described in the chapter on 'The Teaching of Extemporization and Harmony', and this will help them to recognize easily the drift of the mixed phrase.

CHAPTER IX

THE TEACHING OF EXTEMPORIZATION AND HARMONY

In early days the art of melody was developed before that of harmony.

The same plan should be followed in the general musical education of the child.

As every child possesses a voice, but does not in every case learn an instrument, it is clear that the fundamental training in music must be given through the use of the voice. The first step will consist in learning how to sing at sight and how to take down easy melodies from dictation. Parallel with this work the child should be taught to extemporize melodies, and to sing them.

Quite little children will take pleasure in completing a musical phrase of which the first few bars have been given them. The procedure will be as follows:

1. The teacher writes two bars in C major, [2/4] time, on the blackboard.

2. The cla.s.s sings it through twice, first using the Sol-fa names for the notes, then singing to _lah_.

3. Volunteers are then asked for to complete the phrase by adding another two bars. The more musical children in the cla.s.s will at once respond, and their efforts will stir the ambition of the others. It will soon be a question of taking the children in turn, a few at each lesson--so eager will they be to 'express themselves' in melody.

It is important not to be too critical of these early efforts. The great thing is to get the children un-self-conscious--variety of melodic outline and of rhythm will follow quickly enough.

The next step will be for two children in the cla.s.s to extemporize the whole phrase between them, one taking the first two bars and the other the last two. The key and time should be varied as much as possible--keys a fourth or fifth apart should be used in succession, or the children will a.s.sume that any melody can be sung by them in any key, which is obviously not the case. A melody sung in C major, which uses middle C and high F, cannot be sung in the key of G major with the child voice.

The cla.s.s will now find it quite easy to extemporize the whole of a four-bar phrase. Suggestions can be made by the teacher, such as:

'Begin on the third beat of the bar.'

'Introduce two triplets in the course of the phrase,' and so on.

When this becomes easy to them they will be ready to begin eight-bar melodies. At first the teacher will give the first four bars, and different members of the cla.s.s will finish the tune. Modulations should now be introduced. The same procedure as before should be followed, until any child in the cla.s.s can give the whole of a tune, in any given key and time, and with a given modulation.

Next comes the sixteen-bar tune, in which at least one modulation should be introduced. A good plan is to begin with the well-known simple form:

1. Four bars to the [6/4] [5/3] cadence.

2. Four bars to the princ.i.p.al modulation.

3. Repeat the first four bars.

4. Four bars to the end.

Three children can be used for this, in the following way:

The first child sings the first four bars, the second goes on to the end of the eighth bar, then the first child repeats what she sang, and a third child finishes. This affords excellent practice, particularly for the first child, who soon learns to confine herself to a simple opening, as this must be remembered and repeated later.

Memory plays a much larger part in the power to extemporize than many people realize, and if this step in the preliminary work be conscientiously taken there will be abundant results later.

We now come to the important stage of extemporizing on the piano. It must be remembered that a very thorough foundation of the knowledge of chords has been laid by the ear-training work, leading up to the power to write down chords from dictation, and to sing them in arpeggio.

The first exercise will consist in playing a very simple tonic and dominant accompaniment on the piano, while a melody is extemporized with the voice. There is far more variety possible in this than appears at first sight. For instance, the sequence of the chords may run in any of the following ways, among others:

I V I V I I V I } } I I V I I I V I } } I I I V I I V I } } I V V I I I V I }

Those who have studied elementary algebra will recognize a simple application of the theory of permutations!

It is interesting to note the ease with which children will do this exercise, if they have been carefully trained in all the preceding work.

Grown-up students are usually very much slower than children at it, partly because they are inclined to be self-conscious, and to worry about the sound of their voice, &c. But the child who has been accustomed to sing at sight and to extemporize with the voice in front of a cla.s.s is not in the least embarra.s.sed at being told to go to the piano and combine a sung melody with a simple piano accompaniment. At first there will be a tendency to restrict the melodies to the actual notes of the tonic and dominant chords, but with a little practice pa.s.sing notes, &c. are soon added, and graceful little tunes will result.

The next exercise consists in the use of three chords, tonic, dominant, and subdominant; the melody, as before, being sung. At this stage it is wise to let the dictation work in the cla.s.s take the form of phrases which can be harmonized with these chords, so as to accustom the children to use them. This gives invaluable practice in the first principles of harmonizing melodies, and should precede all formal treatment of the subject.

Another useful exercise at this stage is to let the children add a second part, either above or below a given melodic phrase. This will be the foundation of later work in formal counterpoint.

The cla.s.s is now ready for the treatment of modulations on the piano.

If the preliminary work in cadences, dominant sevenths, &c. has been conscientiously done in all keys there will be no difficulty in extemporizing a sung melody, which modulates, and adding a simple accompaniment at the piano.

Other chords can now be added, and the children will be ready to extemporize short tunes, entirely at the piano, without the aid of the voice. To some people this may seem an easier thing to do than to accompany the voice, but experience has proved the contrary. The child is so accustomed to use the voice that it will at first be inclined to think of all melody as vocal, and will be a little troubled when told not to think about vocal pitch.

The discipline of these early restrictions is obvious, and cannot be over-estimated. It quite does away with the 'hymn-tune' style of early composition, which is such a trap to many amateurs.

Side by side with this work it is advisable to get the cla.s.s to extemporize chants, under the same restrictions as have been put on the melodies, i.e. they will begin by using only tonic and dominant chords, then adding the subdominant, and so on. The double chant will give opportunities for more than one modulation being introduced at a time.

This work will prepare the way for figured ba.s.ses, and more formal harmony. The children will learn to avoid consecutive fifths and eighths because they gradually notice the ugliness of them, which seems a better plan than to learn to avoid them as a 'rule'.

There is an interesting reference to methods of teaching harmony in the Board of Education Memorandum on Music, issued in 1914.

The writer says:

'It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the current method of teaching harmony, whereby pupils are taught to resolve chords on paper by eye, quite regardless of the fact that 99 per cent. of them do not realize the sound of the chords they are writing, is musically valueless.

'In no other language than that of music would it be tolerated that the theoretical rules of grammar and syntax should be so completely separated from the actual literature from which they are derived, that the pupil should never have perceived that there was any relation whatever between them.

'Another very common result of the neglect of an aural basis for harmony teaching is that students who can pa.s.s a difficult examination, and write correctly by eye an advanced harmony exercise, are often quite unable to recognize that exercise played over to them on the piano, or even to write down the notes, apart from the time, of a hymn or a tune that they have known all their lives.'

The whole chapter in this memorandum is well worth reading.

The final stages in the teaching of extemporization will consist in:

1. Expressing a given idea in musical form, e.g. a march, or a gavotte.

2. Extemporizing on a given theme.

Although these last stages may be thought to be beyond the power of the average child, experience has proved that it is not so, provided the previous work has been carefully graded, and that none of the early steps have been omitted or hurried over.