The Artist's Diet

Hello, Fellow Artists!

I don't know how this past week has been for you, but it has been awfully rocky for me...I blame the equinox (but then again, you all know my motto: why take it personally when you can take it cosmically?). So, this afternoon, I headed for the hills....literally. A dear friend and I took a little drive up to Silverthorne to look at the fall leaves in the mountains and do a little retail therapy.

That got me thinking....last week, I went to hear Kathleen Battle with the Colorado Symphony, which made me feel really good. Why? Because it was beauty, it was art, and people who are artists need to be nourished by art.

And, when I was in the thick of the week's ickiness, another dear friend of mine said he, too, was having a crappy time, and that he felt a major symptom of his icky feelings was the fact that he had stopped listening to music for pleasure...and that he planned to make it a personal discipline to open up his ears and listen again. All part and parcel, you see....an artist who finds him/herself avoiding the very art s/he loves is an artist who needs help, who needs fresh inspiration. Burnout happens to all of us, and this little conversation was both a good friendship moment and a wake-up call...because sometimes what we need most of all is to feel connected again, to know we're not the only one, and to give ourselves the love and the grace and the artistic nourishment it takes to feed artistry.

So, in that vein, and because it's truly my favorite thing to do, I want to give you all a gift.

All Levels

Take 15 minutes a day, and listen to music. Music you love, music that makes you happy, music that makes you sad, music that is full of memories and meaning for you. That's it. Just listen, and remind yourself of how great it is. And, throughout the day, take little opportunities to look at beauty, notice good things, be grateful for little spots of grace.

If you'd like suggestions for listening:

Sufjan Stevens - Illinoise

J.S. Bach - Magnificat or St. Matthew Passion (especially "Mache dich mein Herze rein")

Alison Krauss - Lonely Runs Both Ways

Randall Thompson - Choose Something Like a Star

Joni Mitchell

W.A. Mozart - Solemn Vespers of the Confessor (especially "Laudate Dominum")

A mix CD from a dear friend

Tomas Luis de Victoria - O quam gloriosum

Edgar Meyer - Appalachian Journey

Vaughan Williams - Dona Nobis Pacem (especially the last movement) or The Lark Ascending

Kansas - Carry on, My Wayward Son

Stravinsky - Firebird or "Gloria" from the Mass for Mixed Voices and Wind Instruments

William Byrd - Any of the masses or motets

Bartok - anything from the "For Children" set of pieces, or the Romanian Folk Dances, or (if you're feeling adventurous), the second piano concerto

The big ZK said that the masterworks of music are our birthright...take him at his word.

PS: and just because laughter is also on the artist's diet....

A college classmate of mine recently posted on facebook that one of her colleagues recently asked a group of music history students to name two early medieval composers of the Notre Dame school. One clever student answered: "Leonin and Penetron."

I'm sure Perotin may have been flattered (and maybe that was his nickname), but if that's not funny, I don't know what is.

The Tonal World

Hello Ladies and Gents,

So, the semester is wearing on....next week is week 5 for us! I hope you are all continuing to feel strong and inspired!

Now, here's my little game for this week -- you've all had some experience with one of my favorite Ottman examples, #12.33....it's not that it's the best melody in world history, nor is it the coolest harmonic progression I've ever heard, but it is a good basis for all kinds of exercises.

Rising Level 2's

Day 1: Sing through 12.33 and (if you haven't already) label the chords implied by the last four measures in Roman numerals...ignore inversions for now.

Day 2: Find an example to sing or analyze from either Music for Analysis or Ottman in the key of IV, relative to the key of 12.33.

Day 3: Find an example to sing or analyze in the key of iii (we're skipping vii, natch...).

Day 4: Find an example to sing or analyze in the key of vi.

Day 5: Find an example to sing in the key of ii.

Day 6: Find an example to sing in the key of V.

Rising Level 3's

Day 1: Sing through 12.33...memorize or re-memorize the last 4 measures. Sing them in letter names.

Day 2: Sing the last 4 measures in solfege again, then transpose to the key of IV and sing in letter names. Then, select an example to sing from Ottman that is in the dominant of that key (so, the key that is the V of IV....F was the original key, you went to the key of IV, and now you're going to the V of that...bringing you back home to F)

Day 3: Sing the last 4 measures of 12.33 in solfege, and now transpose them to the key of III (A Major....just so you don't have to mess with switching from minor to major). Then, find an example to sing that is in the V of that key.

Day 4: Transpose the last 4 bars of 12.33 to the key of VI. Then, find an example to sing that is in the V of that key.

Day 5: Transpose the last 4 bars of 12.33 to the key of II. Then, find an example to sing that is in the V of that key.

Day 6: Transpose the last 4 bars of 12.33 to the key of V. Then, find an example to sing that is in the V of that key.

Rising Level 4's

Day 1: Write out the progression for the last four measures of 12.33 in the key given, and play it on the piano (or guitar, if you prefer...I would recommend duplicating the voice leading and inversions used in the example for the right hand and playing the root of the chord with your left hand)

Day 2: Play the progression in the key of IV

Day 3: Write out the progression in the key of vi and play it (using the same numerals, but changing the qualities as appropriate for minor vs. major). Does the progression sound as good in minor as in major? If you'd like to change a chord or two to be more to your liking, you may.

Day 4: Play the progression in the key of ii.

Day 5: Play the progression in the key of iii.

Day 6: Play the progression in the key of V.

Extra fun: improvise your own melody over the harmonic progression....go nuts!

So, these little exercises will quickly take you through a lot of keys and force you to think in 5ths and in absolute note names....which is hard at first, but will absolutely make it easier to think in one key. Enjoy!

And now for something different...

Hello Solfa Scholars!

One of the main bright spots in my week this semester is participating in an early music sight-reading group on Wednesday mornings. It's really fun! There's a group of five students and a faculty facilitator (who is quickly becoming one of my very favorite people), and we've been singing lots of super-cool early Renaissance pieces, causing me to feel newly inspired by and interested in this wonderful period in music history. So, I'd like to share some of this great stuff with all of you!

Rising Level 2's

For the first two days, look at Ottman 16.80. On day 1, work through the rhythm and locate the place where you will need to use a "fi"...isolate it and sing through it (hint: if you're having trouble singing that spot, switch to C-do for two measures or so....that "do'-ti-ti-la-do'" figure is highly characteristic of this era, and is called a Landini cadence...you may remember it from your music history classes). On day 2, sing through each voice part.

For the next two days, look at Ottman 20.25 and 20.26. Before you tackle these, look at the text under "Section 2: Composed music" to know what to do with the sharps above the staff...they do indicate that you should sing those pitches as sharps, so definitely do so. You may choose to sing mm. 5-6 of 20.25 in G-do, and 20.26 is easier than 20.25, so you may want to do it first.

Finally, choose any of these pieces and work through the rhythm. If you feel inspired, sing through them as well....notice the composer's name. Yup, you guessed it -- he's the guy with the cadence.

Rising Level 3's

Using this piece, accomplish the following tasks:

Read through one voice part per day for the first three days (the piece is essentially in 9/2, and I would advise alternating between D-la and A-la solfa, depending on what seems to work better on a phrase-by-phrase basis).

Then, analyze the verticalities created between the top voice and the middle voice one day, and the verticalities between the middle voice and bottom voice the next.

Finally, look for the vertical sonorities of all three voices. In particular, take note of the cadences -- how they are approached, and what sonorities indicated a feeling of "finishedness" at this time.

Rising Level 4's

Look at this fun little piece....and yes, this is about the guy with the arrows and tights.

First, keeping track of your tonal center (F/A-flat) will be the key to being able to deal with the accidentals in this piece (mostly fi and di), so look through each part and be able to find the F at the end of each phrase.

Next, learn one voice part a day on solfa for the next 3 days. Notice that there is some sharing and repetition of musical material...

Finally, sing through the parts on words (the bottom two parts are the same, word-wise, so do those two one day and the top voice another day). Ruh-roh! How did Mr. Cornysh do with his text accentuation? It's a leetle funky, no? Do vee seenk zees may be a French influence? And what the heck is a "lemman"? And, hmm...do we detect a poetic/musical form here? Extra points if you can derive it for me, and double extra points if you can tell me whether it is one of the formes fixes of this era.

Enjoy!

Back to the basics...

Hello, solfa darlings!

All Levels: Read my sermonette below, then sing:

Rising 2's: Ottman 10.17, 11.1, 11.13, 11.24, 11.25

Rising 3's: Ottman 12.18, 12.20, 12.27, 12.32, 10.76

Rising 4's: Ottman 14.58 (downward stems), 14.58 (upward stems), 14.55 (top voice - mode?), 14.55 (bottom voice), choose one of the above and sing one part while playing the other or call a friend and sing a duet.

Whew! The second week of the second year of my second graduate degree is hereby complete! I hope all of you are happily off and running in your schools and that there are lovely hints of autumn sneaking into the air in your part of the world.

I hope some of you enjoyed last week's little game...this week, I'd like to revisit some basic tenets of what we do in the Kodaly solfa world. Why, you ask? Because academia wields a two-edged sword in the form of a lot of really smart people with a lot of creative ideas, all jammed together into a fairly compact area. At times, this seems to result in the instructor's desire to get right to the "good stuff" and gloss over the basics -- I'm guilty of it, too. It's fun to swim in the deep end of the pool -- it makes everyone feel really good. But, the truth is that we need to function in the shallows first and be certain that we can keep ourselves afloat in a place where our feet can still touch bottom.

At the fair institution I attend, the theory faculty make use of movable do, but with do-based minor and do-based modes. Probably a majority of departments and colleges of music in the U.S. make use of this system. The logic of this system rests upon the notion that it's best if tonic is always called by the same name, and from a strictly cognitive point of view, this is appealing. However, music education is not a study of ideas only, but a study of how to accomplish musical tasks -- specifically in the aural skills classroom, how to translate sounds into symbols and symbols into sounds. To this end, if we are to make use of a particular system in the process of converting sound-symbol and symbol-sound, I propose that any such system should serve both as an aid to the conversion process and an assessment tool of whether the process happened accurately (both sound accuracy and conceptual accuracy -- i.e., did the student make the correct sounds and did the student show that s/he understood what sounds s/he was making).

In my view, fixed-do will definitely act as an assessment tool from a cognitive standpoint -- if you call the syllable the wrong note name, it means you don't know where you are for sure (however, a singer could use a note name for 3 pitches within a half-step of one another and technically still be using the right name: do = C, C-sharp, and C-flat). However, it does nothing to facilitate the conversion process (half and whole steps must be accounted for aurally/vocally without a change in syllable to indicate this process), nor does it show the student or teacher in an obvious way whether the student is aurally/vocally correct or not.

Movable-do, while being visually more complicated from the outset (a student must know his/her key signatures in order to apply syllables to a given example), simplifies the process of converting symbol to sound and vice versa by using phonetic sounds as cues to the voice, ear, and brain to produce a particular interval relationship. It is true that a student must learn to apply the syllables differently in different keys, but this is a visual difficulty that a student educated in the visually dominated Western educational system can usually overcome with reasonable practice. Additionally, the application of syllables acts as a form of instant analysis of harmonic function in tonal melodies, creating a means for sound and conceptual accuracy assessment.

Do-based minor and do-based modes require the student to assess the tonic of a given example before singing it. Indeed, this is an advantage in several ways -- the "instant analysis" factor of movable-do is equally simple and straightforward in any case under these conditions. However, the conversion of symbol to sound is more difficult vocally in do-based minor and modes because major key tonality syllables must be altered to indicate changes to the whole and half-step scheme of major tonality vs. anything else. These syllables are frequently less vocal (for example, le is a lowered 6th scale degree and la is the regular 6th scale degree, but the vowel for le is brighter than the vowel for la, and from a vocal standpoint, brighter vowel = higher pitch, which is the opposite of the effect the system is trying to evoke) and the fact that they are alterations of the "normal" syllables creates a lesser muscular/verbal allegiance to an altered syllable than to a "normal" syllable.

La-based minor and relative/comparative modes are used far less than the systems mentioned above, in part because they are considered childish or old-fashioned. And, it is true that from an "instant analysis" standpoint, vesting more than one syllable with the power to be the TONIC is more complicated and requires some getting used to. However, by using the key signature as the determining factor for what syllables to apply to which notes, the arrangement of whole and half steps is known to the singer from the outset, which makes the translation of symbol to sound consistently easier regardless of mode (major/minor/Dorian/whatever). And, if the student is as careful to look for the tonic in la-based minor as s/he would have to be to accurately sing an example in do-based minor, cognitive accuracy is also quickly and easily assessed in this system.

The winning argument for me is that children in the United States are trained to use their eyes and the analytical and verbal parts of their brains within an inch of their lives -- both in school and out of school. However, our ears and our voices are typically not nearly so trained, so they require the support of visual, verbal, and cognitive intelligences. Therefore, a system that is more complicated visually, verbally, and cognitively, but less complicated aurally and vocally is what we need to look for to even the score (as it were).

So, that's the story as I see it these days. I don't believe that any system has all the answers, and I do hope I've been fair to all systems in my description of their respective merits and drawbacks. If you feel I've been myopic in some way, I heartily invite discussion. At this moment, I believe the most important thing is to be aware of a system, any system, and to have one's endgame in mind when selecting tasks for students: we are working to raise up the next generation of independent, thoughtful, accomplished, artistically aware, heartfelt musicians, and the most menial of musical tasks is still an important part of their education. Therefore, we move proudly from the known to the unknown, we hold our heads high when we and our students thoroughly understand that which is simple, because we know the truth: the simple is the only real key to the complex. And, despite the fact that I thoughtlessly and flagrantly break his tenets on a constant basis, I will close with a quote from my favorite armchair philosopher, Mr. Frederich William Dietrich (aka my big brother, who has the most German name in world history):

"If you can't say it simply, you don't know much about it."