NewsBlog Editor’s Note: This post is the first of a series written by CMIE Research Fellow Anthony Green, as part of the documentation for Green’s CMIE Research Internship. See other posts in this series here

Recently, I have been assigned to be apart of the research process observing the ear-training component of New England Conservatory. As one small cog in a machine of parts, my responsibility is to observe Professor Scripp’s Solfege for Singers class, which meets Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 5 to 6. Time is noted here because vocal chord quality is affected by many things, including time of day.

Just a bit of background about myself, I am a 2^nd year Masters student, studying Composition. I also have a 5-student piano studio, and I am a vocal coach to a local singer (who is not a student), an accompanist, and a music history and theory tutor. More about me can be found on my website: www.agreencomposer.com.

Week One

My first week of this class actually started during the second week of the school year. The students and Professor Scripp were still getting acquainted with one another, and new introductions of not only me but also another MIE intern were made. This initial class began with a recap of what was discussed in the previous week, which was a general introduction into solfege.

The students along with teacher determined that solfege is the use of syllables assigned to pitches to facilitate the ease of sight-reading, especially when singing. It can be used for different goals, such as re-enforcing one’s relative pitch, improving sight-reading, re-representing and re-articulating familiar songs, proving the accuracy of pitches during sight-singing, and more. Students solfeged “London Bridges,” and professor Scripp encouraged the students to learn from the moments of “pause.” He also established the rule that it is most important in this class, when solfeging, to get the syllable correct.

Conducting was examined as a way to verify rhythm. Students observed what information is portrayed through conducting and how, how subdivision can solidify information in a conducting pattern, and how subdivision can aid and correct rhythm. Two main questions were reflected upon:

1) What is rhythm?

“Variation of beats within a given time.”

“Beats arranged in a pattern.”

“Placement of a note in a given time, meaning duration.”

“Proportion, ratio, grouping.”

“Patterns governed by periodicity.”

and …

2) Why do we conduct?

“To verify where a beat should lie.”

Professor Scripp introduced the class to contextual conducting, which is a method in which the conductor chooses hand gestures and specific subdivisions that best represent the music. Such conducting can be used not only when sight-singing, but also in warm-ups and perhaps themes.

The breadth of information in each class is extensive, but is usually in the form of discussion rather than lecture. The students show quite a bit of enthusiasm for participation, and the atmosphere is such that mistakes are welcome and fear or embarrassment is rather low. Another wonderful aspect of this class is the varying backgrounds that the students have in music. The class is approaching a point where it can be a forum for each of the students to draw on each other’s various histories and experiences.

This Fall marks the beginning of several changes we’re making to the CMIE Guided Internship program at NEC.

One of the most exciting developments is that Guided Internships are now being formally recognized by the Conservatory’s Registrar; this means that students who successfully complete internships will get those internships listed on their academic transcript. To register for a guided internship, students should meet with me prior to their academic advising appointment and present a Guided Internship Proposal. Upon acceptance and review of the Guided Internship Proposal, Larry Scripp and I will sign a Special Enrollment Permission Form that the Registrar uses. Registering an internship with the CMIE Office and the Registrar guarantees some very important things:

1. Your internship meets CMIE program guidelines;
2. You promise to complete your Guided Internship within the semester of registration;
3. Your internship will count towards the CMIE Concentration;
4. You will receive credit for your internship on your academic transcript

IMPORTANT: These guarantees only apply if you register for your internship in advance of doing it. From this point forward, you can no longer tell us about your internship “after the fact” and expect to receive credit for it. Also, all internships MUST be registered for by the completion of ADD/DROP period; we cannot honor requests or proposals past the Conservatory’s ADD/DROP period for the semester that the internship work is planned for.

Other exciting guided internships await in new partnerships we are forming with our community partners. Through a new relationship with the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, we are able to offer MIE students opportunities to work with Boston’s Asian immigrant population. If you are interested in teaching workshops or classes that align music learning with American cultural studies and/or English Language Learning, or you would like to teach vocal music, come by the CMIE Program Office and speak with Randy Wong.

A position statement by CMIE graduate student Hermann Hudde has been printed today in El Universal, a Venezuelan newspaper. Hudde, a guitar performance major and CMIE Concentration student, plans to graduate from New England Conservatory in Spring 2008.

Read Hudde’s article, via Google Translate, here:
El Universal Article – September 1, 2007 – Computer-translated (into English)

Read Hudde’s untranslated article here:
El Universal Article – September 1, 2007 – Untranslated (in Spanish)