NewsBlog Editor’s Note: This post is the second 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.

Perfect pitch, absolute pitch, relative pitch – all terms thrown around meaning basically one thing: if someone says to someone else, “Sing an ‘A’!” this person can probably do it. Of course, some can do it more accurately than others. More often than not, such a skill is used by those born with this unique ability. For instance, some of my friends have such a sensitive perfect pitch that they can name the notes of the partials of a tire squeaking as it skids. These very same friends of mine have great intonation when performing, and can tune guitars and other string instruments without a piano, a tuning fork, a pitch pipe, an electronic tuner, or other devices which may or may not be readily available when tuning. 

Can solfege be a step in developing such a unique technique? According to a study done by the University of California, San Francisco, absolute or perfect pitch is defined as thus: “Absolute pitch, commonly referred to as perfect pitch, is an intriguing cognitive trait involved in music perception and is defined as the ability to identify the pitch of a musical tone without an external reference pitch. To be considered an absolute pitch possessor, an individual must have the ability to identify pitches accurately and instantaneously.” It is a purely cognitive ability, which implies that it is a trait relating to one’s process of perception and memory. 

In Professor Scripp’s Solfege for Singers class, the students are asked to remember “themes” – the beginning tonic excerpts of popular, tonal works – in different keys. Over the course of this semester, most of the sight-singing exercises used have been in the key of C-major. For this key, the student used a Mozart theme from the Marriage of Figaro – sol-sol mi, sol-sol mi, sol-sol fa re, fa-fa re, fa-fa re, fa-fa mi do. Such an easy melody, whether known before the class or learned in less than 10 seconds during class, has made for an extremely accessible C-major theme for one’s memory. Without having heard a note in the class, Professor Scripp will pull out an exercise, have the students examine it, then ask the students to “sing our theme in C-major.” Without fail, every student will more or less begin on the same note. And during the 3 or 4 seconds of singing the theme, the tonic is eventually established and agreed upon. All of this is done without playing the piano, using a tuning fork, a pitch pipe, an electric tuner – in other words, “without an external pitch reference.” 

These observations have lead me to believe that a goal of solfege, relating to the one the class has already established of reinforcing one’s relative pitch, is to develop or discover an absolute pitch ability within oneself. I have not observed any discoveries in the class as of yet, but I have observed the development of an excellent pitch memory in a couple of students in the class. Knowing that absolute pitch is a cognitive ability, solfege can greatly aid in pitch memory to a point where one can ask someone else, “Do you have a G memorized?”, and this person can respond by singing the Marriage of Figaro theme’s first pitch. After this very basic step, two steps can be taken: 1) the solfege student can develop a excellent relative pitch, which would not only include the ability to sing any interval up or down from the memorized pitch, but also include the ability to reduce intervals to their shortest distances. For example, when I sing an A, I am inclined to sing an A4 in a falsetto. However, if I hear a E-flat2, then I need to either hear that note two octaves up or hear my A two octaves down. Such an ability has been worked on by the students in this class without directly naming this ability. (Professor Scripp encourages the students to jump octaves and sing different parts when sight reading polyphonic works.) And 2) the student can eventually memorize every pitch, and exercise this pitch memory to perfection. In a way, Professor Scripp advocates this method above others, but his method is very subtle, and works on a subconscious level. While the students have not yet sang exercise in every major and minor key yet, Professor Scripp feels it is best to memorize pieces in every key. When this was stated in class, I thought that this would be difficult. But has a music student ever contemplated the amount of repertoire stored in his or her brain? Finding tonal repertoire in each major and minor key might not be as hard as one thinks, if one is a music student. Pianists – if you have played through the beginning of each prelude of the Well-Tempered Clavier, book I or book II, then you can easily develop absolute pitch. 

I must emphasize, however, that this was never directly stated in class, and it is not ever worked on directly in class. If one uses solfege as a method of pitch memory to develop a mild to strong absolute pitch ability, I highly suggest working with an external pitch device extensively in the beginning. I emphasize this because the “sol” in the Marriage of Figaro theme sometimes is a “sol-flat.”

Aside: throughout the semester, I have also briefly participated as a student. The class has helped me memorized an A, a G, an E, and a C. Consequently, when one of my choirs in Providence recently sang a cappella at an elderly person’s home and I did not bring my pitch pipe, we survived.

The Center for Music-In-Education will host a public symposium on November 7, 2007 discussing El Sistema, dubbed the “Venezuelan Music Education Miracle.” The symposium will take place from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. and will feature a panel of invited guests from across the nation and throughout Boston. A showing of the film “Tochar Y Luchar” will open the afternoon session. Further information is available at www.mieatnec.org/venezuelasymposium. Although the Symposium is free and open to the public, we ask that those interested please RSVP via the Symposium website:

www.mieatnec.org/venezuelasymposium/rsvp

A reception follows the Symposium, and will take place in Brown Hall from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
At 8:00 p.m., the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela will perform at Symphony Hall. Concert tickets are available via the Boston Symphony website (www.bso.org). We advise that you purchase them right away, since supplies are limited, and the concert is expected to sell out!

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.

NewsBlog Editor’s Note: This post is the first of a series in which MIE Concentration students have volunteered to share excerpts of their emergent MIE course portfolios. Graduate student Bianca Garcia has graciously volunteered to be our first portfolio example.

This blog is a sneak peek of my MIE511 Portfolio entitled, “Multiple Personas”.  In my portfolio I will attempt to define the concept of a “Persona”, describe my own personas as an artist, private teacher, and outreach performer, as well as answering the main inquiry I had throughout my time in the MIE Graduate Seminar with Professor Larry Scripp. 

The first chapter of my portfolio will feature my mission statement. It also will feature two inquiries: What is a “Persona”? & How does one best divide time between teacher and student activity in performance outreach?  Furthermore, the first chapter will highlight excerpts of my answers to Prof. Scripp’s “Persona Questionnaire.” 

The second chapter will give a perspective of my persona as a private flute teacher.  Towards the end of the MIE511 Graduate Seminar I obtained a new flute student, which gave me a chance to create a new persona as an Artist-Teacher-Scholar.  The role of the “Scholar” had been revealed to me by an in-class portfolio exhibit by Laura Umbro.  The concept of documentation in private lessons was impressed upon my mind and as a result, I formulated a “Lesson and Practice Notes” guide that would provide documentation of student progress, as well as foster the student’s own persona as an artist-scholar.  It also implements the Learning Through Music (LTM) Five Fundamental Processes that are intrinsic to fully engaged learning in music.  Another reason for my creation of the aforementioned guide was because my philosophy on private lessons had been stimulated by words of Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi.  Below is part of a Double Entry I had written (with Csikszentmihalyi’s quotes on the right and my words on the left).

Finally, my portfolio will feature my persona as an outreach performer.  Again material from my Persona Questionnaire will be displayed, this time including real-life experiences from my many years of performance outreach.  It also will feature a special chart I made that covers outreach performances from 2002 until this year and shows the ratio of performer versus audience activity in each outreach and documents a steady direction I have taken in dividing activity between the two.  The creation of this chart was made in response to my main inquiry and with inspiration from various articles recommended by Prof. Scripp and colleagues in my MIE511 class.  Among these articles was “Crossing Boundaries” by Gail Burnaford in which she describes Music-In-Education as “entrepreneurship”.  According to this simile, Music-In-Education would then require creativity, pioneering, and fulfilling needs.  I believe this description would find a parallel in the Artist-Teacher-Scholar framework as fulfilling needs definitely aligns with the persona of an artist, creativity with a teacher, and pioneering with a scholar.  Another article I read from class suggestion was “The Teaching Artist and the Artistry of Teaching” by Eric Booth.  In this article, Booth quotes an old adage: “80% of teaching is who you are”.  This quote struck me and caused me to reflect on my former collaboration with the From the Top radio show.  I started an internship with the From the Top radio show’s Education department at the beginning of Spring Semester; however, I had formerly been a From the Top “cultural leader” as a teen flutist.  Something about the experience had felt really powerful and meaningful.  I was not a certified educator and had never taught a class, but children in schools that I had visited enthusiastically received my performance- wanting to hear more than I had prepared, wrote letters to me that looked up to me as a person, and expressed their desires to start playing my instrument.  Later, I learned From the Top’s mission through their education program—“we provide a platform for young artists to present themselves, share their passion, and develop into inspirational peer models.”  These aspects of teaching shine through outreach performance.  They both also relate to one’s persona as an outreach performer.  Musicians in any educational setting are role models, as teachers or visitors, and children are imitators and balls of energy; therefore, we must be at the peak of our behavior and musicianship while presenting for them and our presentations must involve them.

To find my “Practice and Lesson Notes” guide, its basis in the LTM framework, and the Ratio of Student/Teacher Activity chart, look at the attachments below.

The Artist-Teacher-Scholar framework has been around for over a decade. As far as I know, the term was first coined when during the years I served as the Founding Director of Research at the Leonard Bernstein Center for the Arts in Nashville (along with Eric Booth, Teaching Artist Director, David Steiner, former Head of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Alexander Bernstein) where the term was used to understand the Leonard Bernstein’s persona and his life’s work as a synthesis of his artistry, teaching, and scholarly publications and lectures.

Nine years ago at NEC, I worked with Alan Fletcher (now CEO and President of the Aspen School of Music and Festival) to establish the Artist-Teacher-Scholar (ATS) Framework as the conceptual framework for NEC new Music-in-Education Program. It was the ATS framework – employed as an educational model for MIE students at NEC – that attracted years of federal funding to help NEC establish its Music-in-Education Program and the Research Center, representing the two key components of the Center for Music in Education.

Today I understand that the success of both NEC programs is aligned with the inter-related principles of the ATS framework. That is to say, as many students develop musically over time, they become increasingly interested in both the ‘teaching of the musical arts’ and the ‘artistry of teaching’ in schools or in outreach programs regardless of what career path they choose. And eventually it is not unusual for these musicians to recognize the importance of building both a personal ‘scholarship of artistry’ and a ‘scholarship of teaching’ as they develop career paths.

As evidence of this ongoing progression, NEC faculty whose courses count toward the MIE program – all highly trained and experienced musicians – engage in scholarship that takes the form of publishing, lectures, research, advocacy, community leadership, curriculum development, outreach programs, assessment, social action and policy shaping through our local programs and national collaborations relevant to music in education and our society. I believe that the ATS model helps to explain the genisis and effectiveness of these faculty initiatives.

Further evidence of the impact of this framework can be understood through changes in institutional policy. Nine years after the creation of NEC MIE programs and its research center, there are now guided intern programs, concentration programs in Music in Education, and even new research institutes in our partnering organizations nationally. Googiing on the internet I discovered there are now Music-in-Education programs established internationally independent of our work. I think these events have not occurred in absentia of an evolving conception of the artist’s developing persona as an artist-teacher-scholar.

Personally, the conception of the ATS clarifies the need for research and assessment in music-in-education practices. For me, artistry and education have limited impact on public policy, practices or leadership without ongoing research that is both rigorously conducted and aimed at practical significance for musicians, teachers, parents, administrators and students. Without having to arrive at a lock-step view of the ATS framework as a model for NEC faculty or students, I think it is fair to say that Patrick Keppel, Randy Wong, Lyle Davidson, Warren Senders, and Paul Burdick and our many other colleagues at NEC and in our partnering schools, see this framework as a driving force behind NEC’s national or local initiatives, Journal publications and the presentation of student portfolio work coming out of the NEC MIE and outreach programs.

I look forward to seeing more alums presenting their work on the www.mieatnec.org website and blogs. I hope everyone reading our new Journal in May will be stimulated through seeing the work of fellow MIE interns in other institutions. Nonetheless, it is my fondest hope that anyone investigating the publications, student, and alum work will appreciate the evolving forms of artistry, teaching and scholarship represented by NEC faculty and students as a resource and inspiration for advancing music in education and our society.

- Larry Scripp

Larry Scripp is Director of NEC’s Center for Music-In-Education and Executive Director of the MIE National Consortium. Scripp is also on NEC’s Music Theory and Music Education faculties, and is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

While helping New England Conservatory’s Music-in-Education students to prepare and propose Guided Internships, I have begun to realize the extent of complexity —but also, opportunity— involved in teacher education and the creation of teaching artists programs that serve schools and other learning communities. As MIE Program Coordinator, I am faced with the challenge of ensuring that student-proposed Guided Internships be productive experiences for both the interns involved (usually as teaching artists) and for the host organization (i.e, a community program or school) they are conducting their internship at.

Students who propose internship ideas come with a wide variety of prior teaching experiences, and the goals/expectations they set for their internships vary just as much. Most students, even freshmen, have some cursory teaching experience from high school; for example, being a mentor for younger high school peers. Others have already taught college-level courses, led summer programs, or consider themselves lifelong teachers. The MIE Guided Internship Program is designed, however, as a set of individualized/independent projects, and it is usually the approach to pre-planning and documenting the internship (and not the actual teaching component) that poses the most challenges. It is during these phases (internship pre-planning and documentation) that Guided Interns receive hefty doses of mentorship from MIE faculty and MIE Research Center staff.

To what extent can a research center, like the MIE Research Center, play in the planning of guided internships?

Respected educational policy researcher and teacher education advocate Gail Burnaford, of Florida Atlantic University (and formerly, Northwestern University), suggests that by taking a stance in “teacher action research,” teachers can reach new levels of understanding student learning, as well as reform their own understandings of personal learning processes. [Note: Incidentally, I've found Burnaford's article to be very useful, and refer to it often, throughout my own work.] Burnaford writes,

Professional development [Guided Internships] that assumes an action research stance . . . means taking small slices of music, small slices of classroom episodes or video vignettes, and with teachers and artists, asking, ‘What’s going on here? What is happening? What do we see?’ The process involves interviewing children and young people about the experience . . . Developing research questions that are valuable to both teachers and artists can promote dialogue and enrich the actual teaching that occurs when artists visit classrooms.

One of the initial steps we encourage students to take, when planning their Guided Internships, is the formulation of overarching inquiry or research questions. Even questions that seem simple at first (i.e., “What’s going on here? What do we see?”) may actually require quite a bit of planning to answer thoughtfully. Because the answers to these questions, and the questions themselves, are at the forefront of determining what kinds of artifacts are collected for the intern’s portfolio, it is important for interns to be very thorough as they plan the collection of said documentation.

Burnaford outlines some of the more common approaches to documentation:

The methods of teacher action research provide a number of ways to do this: collecting field notes, looking at video, doing a lot of listening to recordings—not of performances, but of student thinking, of children talking with each other about their art. These reflective methods (Wolf & Pistone, 1991) are intended to improve children’s performance and achievement; they are valuable as tools to contribute to evaluation of arts initiatives; they are also effective approaches to professional development for adults in schools.

Some interns, but not all, are able to see the immediate value of having these various artifact types in their internship portfolios, and are able to structure them into their lessons; for example, through class assignments, private lessons, conversations with mentor teachers or school/community center administrators, personal reflections, and MIE seminar work. For other interns (such as those less familiar with the portfolio process, or with less teaching experience), I direct them to the following passage from Burnaford’s article:

Gardner’s four roles for students who are engaged in the arts (Gardner, 1973) are useful frameworks for professional development of teaching artists, music teachers, and classroom teachers. The four roles, composer, audience member, critic, and performer give artists and teachers a frame or empty outline to use in order to ask the inquiry questions, ‘Why is the child doing this? What is she learning? What is he expressing? What did I as the teacher or artist do to help? What can I be doing next?’ . . . Teacher learning is the way in to student learning; teachers need to experience all four of those roles too.

I find Burnaford’s reminder (that Gardner’s four roles are also applicable to professional artists and educators) to be a refreshing and welcoming statement germane to the emergent workforce of artist-teacher-scholars: that the personae that result from the triangulation of Artistry, Teaching, and Scholarship truly incorporate all four of Gardner’s roles.

-Randy

Quotations used in this post are from “Crossing Boundaries: The Role of Higher Education in Professional Development with Arts Partnerships,” written by Gail Burnaford for the Journal for Learning Through Music (Summer 2003). Guided interns of all experience levels can benefit from readings found in the Journal for Music-in-Education and its previous incarnation, the Journal for Learning Through Music. Both journals are available for free, online at the MIE National Consortium’s website, www.music-in-education.org

Randy Wong is Program Coordinator for the Center for Music-in-Education and Information Architect for the Music-in-Education National Consortium.

From the Journal for Music-in-Education:

This first section of the Journal for Music-in-Education tells the stories of several musical artists at different points in their careers: a promising young composer, a celebrated concert pianist, an extensively recorded improvisation artist, and a recent conservatory graduate embarking on a career in world music.

These portraits are not intended to foreground the impressive trajectory of their musical accomplishments, but rather to draw out a clearer understanding of how a life in music can be defined by the deep yearning to learn, teach, serve, and connect with others. These portraits show—in the words of the artists themselves and in commentary from their mentors and peers—that musical endeavors take on greater depth through a broad range of social encounters, role modeling, reflective thinking, and community involvement, all of which are becoming better understood as essential to the successful education of the performing artist in society today.

Thus, the enterprise of learning music for the highly trained artist, as represented in these chapters, takes on a particular significance as a “transformative”model for public school education. Time-lapse documentation of Julia Carey’s childhood notations presents an intriguing mosaic of how children’s understanding of music evolves over time. Yet her simultaneously expanding interests in academic excellence and role modeling through community engagement provide the larger picture of a musician preparing herself for rich and mutually satisfying connections to people and thus for meaningful contributions to society itself. Lorin Hollander’s precocious sense of music’s interdisciplinary association with physics,literature,and psychology and his depiction of personal transformation through mentorship can help educators appreciate the potential contributions of musical understanding to young children’s cognitive, aesthetic, and social-emotional wellness and to the solution of systemic social problems, such as the disillusionment ofour youth,cultural intolerance, or violence in our schools and among nations.

The divergent roles musicians play in society is also emphasized in the reflections by Michael Cain and Randy Wong. Both provide extensive detail of their experiences sidestepping their early classical training and choosing to “take delight”in exploring other forms of musical genre and culture. Here again, the evolving models of musicians and music in education are seen from the perspective of how engagement in ensemble improvisation and world music outside the conventions of classical traditions can support our youth, who yearn to connect contemporary modes and media of self-expression to our changing society,as Mr.Cainputs it,“around the world and around the block.”

• Download JMIE 2007, Part I. Yearning to Connect: The Enterprise of Music and Learning [2 MB, .pdf]