Reconsidering Pitch Centricity

Analysts commonly describe the musical focus upon a particular pitch class above centricity. But this seemingly simple concept is complicated by a range of factors. can be understood variously as a compositional feature, a perceptual effect arising from or listening strategies, or some complex combination thereof. Second, the relation the theoretical construct of tonality (in any of its myriad conceptions) is often not consistently theorized. Finally, various musical contexts manifest or evoke pitch centricity in seemingly and to differing degrees. This essay examines a range of compositions by Ligeti, Carter, and others to arrive at a more nuanced perspective of pitch centricity - one that takes perceptual foundations, recognizes its many forms and intensities, and addresses its tonal structure in a given composition

Practical and Philosophical Reflections Regarding Aural Skills Assessment

Assessment in aural skills courses is a tricky intersection of instructors’ expectations, students’ skills in audiation, students’ perceptions and anxieties regarding assessment and performance, and the peculiarities of evaluative instruments. After several years in my teaching position at a large university, I became increasingly dissatisfied with assessment in the second-year aural skills program I coordinate. In short, I was displeased both with the nature of the student activities we evaluated and with the ways in which success on those activities was measured. Students’ and instructors’ frustrations convinced me of the need to make assessment more obviously relevant, less intimidating to students, and more reflective of students’ success in mastering the skills we hope to foster. My hope in sharing the problems I identified, and my responses to them, is to inspire introspection about what our aural skills assessment methods actually measure, the expertise we intend for students to gain from this part of their music studies, and the potentially dangerous distance between these two things. I must acknowledge in advance that, throughout this article, I presume an orthodox approach to collegiate aural skills instruction. Such an approach provides students with strategies for completing common audiation activities such as melodic and harmonic dictation and sightsinging, alongside in-class practice employing these strategies. Students’ mastery of audiation skills is tested periodically with dictation activities (i.e., quizzes and/or exams) and singing activities (i.e., “hearings” or “audits”), student performance on these activities is measured with an assessment tool, and the measurement becomes a basis for students’ grades in the class. It would be disingenuous to imply that this model is the only way in which an aural skills curriculum could work, or that it is without its faults. But rather than attacking this broad-stroked outline, which mirrors normative curricular practice at a great many American postsecondary schools that offer music degrees (including my own), in this essay I will consider closely the role and makeup of assessment activities in this model. Doing so can strengthen the student outcomes of such programs—and our measurements of those outcomes—without upsetting the entire curricular apple cart

The Structure and Genesis of Copland\u27s \u3ci\u3eQuiet City\u3c/i\u3e

Aaron Copland’s Quiet City (1940), a one-movement work for trumpet, cor anglais, and strings, derives from incidental music the composer wrote for an unsuccessful and now forgotten Irwin Shaw play. This essay explores in detail the pitch structure of the concert work, suggesting dramatic parallels between the music and Shaw’s play. The opening of the piece hinges on an anhemitonic pentatonic collection, which becomes the source of significant pitch centres for the whole composition, in that the most prominent pitch classes of each section, when taken together, replicate the collection governing the music’s first and last bars. Both this principle and the exceptions to it suggest a correspondence to the internal struggles of Shaw’s protagonist, Gabriel Mellon. In addition, Quiet City offers a distinctive opportunity to observe the composer’s assembly of a unified tonal structure. Sketch study makes it possible to observe the composer altering his original material in ways that reinforce tonal connections across the span of the piece

Reconsidering Pitch Centricity

Analysts commonly describe the musical focus upon a particular pitch class above centricity. But this seemingly simple concept is complicated by a range of factors. can be understood variously as a compositional feature, a perceptual effect arising from or listening strategies, or some complex combination thereof. Second, the relation the theoretical construct of tonality (in any of its myriad conceptions) is often not consistently theorized. Finally, various musical contexts manifest or evoke pitch centricity in seemingly and to differing degrees. This essay examines a range of compositions by Ligeti, Carter, and others to arrive at a more nuanced perspective of pitch centricity - one that takes perceptual foundations, recognizes its many forms and intensities, and addresses its tonal structure in a given composition

Practical and Philosophical Reflections Regarding Aural Skills Assessment

Assessment in aural skills courses is a tricky intersection of instructors’ expectations, students’ skills in audiation, students’ perceptions and anxieties regarding assessment and performance, and the peculiarities of evaluative instruments. After several years in my teaching position at a large university, I became increasingly dissatisfied with assessment in the second-year aural skills program I coordinate. In short, I was displeased both with the nature of the student activities we evaluated and with the ways in which success on those activities was measured. Students’ and instructors’ frustrations convinced me of the need to make assessment more obviously relevant, less intimidating to students, and more reflective of students’ success in mastering the skills we hope to foster. My hope in sharing the problems I identified, and my responses to them, is to inspire introspection about what our aural skills assessment methods actually measure, the expertise we intend for students to gain from this part of their music studies, and the potentially dangerous distance between these two things. I must acknowledge in advance that, throughout this article, I presume an orthodox approach to collegiate aural skills instruction. Such an approach provides students with strategies for completing common audiation activities such as melodic and harmonic dictation and sightsinging, alongside in-class practice employing these strategies. Students’ mastery of audiation skills is tested periodically with dictation activities (i.e., quizzes and/or exams) and singing activities (i.e., “hearings” or “audits”), student performance on these activities is measured with an assessment tool, and the measurement becomes a basis for students’ grades in the class. It would be disingenuous to imply that this model is the only way in which an aural skills curriculum could work, or that it is without its faults. But rather than attacking this broad-stroked outline, which mirrors normative curricular practice at a great many American postsecondary schools that offer music degrees (including my own), in this essay I will consider closely the role and makeup of assessment activities in this model. Doing so can strengthen the student outcomes of such programs—and our measurements of those outcomes—without upsetting the entire curricular apple cart

Metrical Issues in John Adams\u27s \u3ci\u3eShort Ride in a Fast Machine\u3c/i\u3e

Employs several potential rebarrings of this fanfare\u27s opening measures to represent the ways in which a listener might apprehend the music\u27s complex metrical features. Meter is manipulated by this music in such a way as to make its very presence uncertain at best, though enough regularity (i.e., periodicity) is present at multiple hierarchical levels to tease the listener into making constant attempts to discover and latch on to a metered surface. The resulting aural sensation reflects that of wrestling to keep control over a powerful machine, as the work\u27s title suggests. Concludes with a consideration of the music\u27s potential metrical narrative

On the Influence of Jazz Rhythm in the Music of Aaron Copland

Surveys scholarly views of jazz\u27s rhythmic and metrical structures in the 1920s (at the outset of Copland\u27s career) focusing especially on Copland\u27s own writings on the subject. Analyses of selected passages from Copland\u27s piano concerto, the second piece of Four piano blues, the Piano variations, the piano sonata, the clarinet concerto, and Appalachian spring help to assess the ambiguity surrounding the identification of jazz-based rhythmic influences in Copland\u27s music

A Contextually Defined Approach to Appalachian Spring

This essay provides analysis of the first Allegro (“Eden Valley”) and the coda from Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Following Joseph Straus and Arthur Berger, this investigation traces the correspondences of the work’s pitch centers with other pitch components of the music’s surface. The varied musical approaches of the Allegro—functional progressions, polychords, quartal trichords, chains of triads related by half or whole step, and pandiatonic melodies—coalesce to create a multi-faceted movement from centricity on A to centricity on F, while also presenting unique, individual narratives of that procession to F. In Appalachian Spring’s coda, both A and F reappear in marked contexts, and the coda’s overall focus on C recalls an important role C had in the progress of the Allegro. The resulting tonal connections span the entire composition. This linking of pitch centers with other musical elements can yield analytic insights into a large cross-section of repertoire cutting across stylistic and historical boundaries. In that respect, this analysis illustrates an approach potentially appropriate to any pitch-centric music