Professional Development AP® Music Theory Teaching Sight Singing Special Focus The College Board: Connecting Students to College Success The College Board is a not-for-profit membership association whose mission is to connect students to college success and opportunity. Founded in 1900, the association is composed of more than 5,400 schools, colleges, universities, and other educational organizations. Each year, the College Board serves seven million students and their parents, 23,000 high schools, and 3,500 colleges through major programs and services in college admissions, guidance, assessment, financial aid, enrollment, and teaching and learning. Among its best-known programs are the SAT®, the PSAT/NMSQT®, and the Advanced Placement Program® (AP®).
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All other products and services may be trademarks of their respective owners. Visit the College Board on the Web: www. Baby Steps Up Parnassus: A Multistage Approach to Sight Singing. What Do You Mean, I Have to Sing?.
Changing Sight Singing Into Recognition Singing. Taking the Leap: Four Ways to Think About Teaching the Hard Notes. Sight Singing Integration: Save Time and Build Technique. 37 Stefanie Katz Shear 7.
How Structured Improvisation Can Improve Sight Singing Performance (and More). About the Editor. About the Authors. 59 iii Introduction Ken Stephenson University of Oklahoma Norman, Oklahoma Musicians approach music in two basic ways.
First, of course, they deal directly with the sounds of the music: They listen to sounds, make sounds, and respond to sounds. In addition, musicians often deal with music through the medium of symbols. Letter names for pitches, such as B-flat or A-natural; names of structures and patterns, such as perfect fourth, melodic minor scale, or compound meter; solfège syllables, such as do or re; hand signs for scale degrees; roman numerals for chords; and drawn shapes, such as the staff and any of the lines, ovals, dots, and curlicues that go on it—all these symbols are familiar to music teachers, and many use most or all of them in class every day. Aural skills involve the ability to translate between these two basic modes of dealing with music.
Because there are two ways of approaching music, there are two basic aural skills: The first goes from sound to symbol, and the second from symbol to sound. Employing the first basic aural skill—sound to symbol—musicians listen to a sound and imagine or communicate the right name or sign for that sound. In the classroom setting, a teacher might play a certain combination of three pitches and wait for the class to say, “major triad.” Here the students, presented directly with a musical sound, have responded with a symbol, in this case a spoken name. When the prompts are longer and the students write the correct notation for the sounds, we call the activity dictation.
Using the second aural skill—symbol to sound—musicians hear or read a name or sign and imagine the corresponding sound. A musician who has developed this skill should be able to read the phrase major triad, for instance, and have the sound of a major triad in mind. How can we possibly develop this essential skill in our students? Without being able to read their minds, how are we able to know whether our students are thinking of the right sounds when presented with musical names or Special Focus: Teaching Sight Singing notations? The answer is that we must complicate the task by asking our students to produce the sounds they are imagining. To be sure that the sounds they produce are the ones they imagine, we cannot allow the students to use an instrument because this would allow them to sidestep the aural skill almost entirely and respond by merely thinking of other corresponding symbols—which keys to press or which holes to cover.
Therefore, we must develop and assess this second aural skill through the activity of singing, and since the normal human voice can only produce one pitch at a time, our endeavor with this skill centers on melodies. Naturally, we call the activity of singing melodies on sight, i., without the aid of audible prompts, sight singing. This collection of essays is intended to help you, the high school music theory instructor, teach the second aural skill through sight singing. Because the task is complex, you cannot simply open your sight singing book to page 1 on the first day of class and expect much success; foundations of meter, rhythm, and scale must be understood, and the skills of vocal production and clef reading must be introduced.
The chapters by Diane McFarlane and Julie Edwards suggest ways to “divide and conquer” by analyzing this complex task in its component parts. The chapters by Terry Eder and me, on the other hand, focus on analyzing the melodies themselves as a means to improved performance. Stefanie Katz Shear addresses the shortage of time in the AP® Music Theory class by suggesting ways to incorporate singing throughout the course, simultaneously improving singing skills and reinforcing other topics. And Nancy Rogers provides valuable singing exercises involving improvisation.
As you will see, the authors do not agree on everything. Some prefer to sing scales before learning to write them, while others believe students should understand the structure of scales before singing them. Some teach intervals by associations with songs, while others avoid the songs and emphasize tonal contexts. Some say sol and some say so.
But the authors agree that a syllable system for pitches is necessary for maximum success (the authors, in fact, all use the same system). Also, the authors all agree that sight singing should not be isolated from other aspects of music theory. But most of all, all six authors agree that this important skill is central to any successful AP Music Theory class. Students must sing often; we dare not teach scales, harmony, and voice leading on paper, and then sing only when we have time left over.
Because sight singing is a complex task, it engages many parts of the mind. At the very least, singing can reinforce what your students learn through written exercises. But because it is at once visual, auditory, verbal, logical, and kinesthetic, many students will find in singing the inroad to learning all the other material in the class. 2 Introduction What we offer here is practical advice based on experience.
Every chapter of Special Focus: Teaching Sight Singing offers step-by-step plans from veteran instructors for dealing with particular issues. For further information—both more foundational and more advanced—we recommend consulting issues of the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy (JMTP) and Gary Karpinski’s Aural Skills Acquisition. In JMTP, you will find, among other things, researched articles examining which pitch syllable system works best and presentations of new rhythmic syllable systems, issues only touched on or assumed in the present collection. Karpinski’s book analyzes the tasks of both the teacher and the student of sight singing with great detail, addresses many topics not covered here (such as intonation and assessment), and explicitly ties his conclusions to research—research often documented in the pages of JMTP.
To these invaluable resources, all the authors of this collection are indebted. And now, let’s focus on sight singing. 3 Baby Steps Up Parnassus: A Multistage Approach to Sight Singing Julie Edwards Indiana State University Terre Haute, Indiana Most music educators agree that sight singing is an invaluable skill to the development of musical literacy, but the complexity of the task often makes it intimidating for both teacher and student. The ultimate goal in sight singing is not the singing of a melody itself, but rather the development of inner hearing: the audiation of the melody that takes place before (and during) the actual singing.
The act of vocalization allows the teacher to have a window through which to view the student’s mental processing. Sight singing is an effective teaching activity because it engages students on several levels: visual, aural, kinesthetic, and cognitive. But the very multifaceted nature of sight singing that makes it so useful is also what makes it such a complex and overwhelming task. When teachers ask students to sight sing, they are actually asking the students to do a variety of things simultaneously and fluently.
First, students must see and understand the visual cues—the rhythm and pitch notation on the staff. Then, they must interpret the images as recognizable tonal and rhythmic patterns (also including harmony and form) that have been encountered in previous experiences with tonal music. Next, and most important, the students must imagine—must audiate—sounds associated with those patterns. Finally they must produce vocal sounds that match the audiated sounds.
But the task is not complete yet. The students must listen to the sounds produced, compare them to the audiated sounds, and adjust them if necessary, while looking ahead to see what comes next. This means that students are engaged simultaneously with the past, present, and future, by remembering what was just heard, producing the present sounds, and anticipating the next. Is it any Special Focus: Teaching Sight Singing wonder that students struggle with sight singing, or that teachers find it formidable to introduce sight singing to their classes? Sight singing is a much less frightening prospect if it is approached as the blend of several components that can be attended to separately and then combined in a systematic way.
These components include management of the voice, rhythm, pitch, syllables, and musical fluency or flow. Such a gradual approach allows the student to focus on one thing at a time, achieve a level of success, and then move on to focus on another component while the first task continues as a background event. Managing the Voice Gaining the cooperation of the voice is quite a challenge for some students. The teacher can help by showing students how to warm up the voice through brief vocal exercises that can also reinforce patterns of syllables, pitch, rhythm, and harmony.
Encourage students to “make friends with” their voices. Have them get to know their comfort zones—the parts of their range that require less vocal effort—and how to approach pitches outside those comfort zones. Each student should discover the range of his or her voice in order to know the upper and lower limits that he or she is capable of producing. As melodies for sight singing become more complex, they will have increased ranges and will require more vocal agility to navigate leaps.
Experience with singing is the best teacher for each individual voice. The more that students sing, the easier singing becomes. Rhythm Rhythm-reading exercises are extremely helpful for strengthening a sense of pulse and meter, and for building in a memory library of common rhythmic patterns that will likely be encountered in melodies. Many available books contain rhythmic examples to be used for just such a purpose, and reading through several on a daily basis is quite productive.
Tapping the beat while verbally counting the rhythm heightens the internal sense of pulse, while conducting a beat pattern emphasizes the relationship of how rhythm fits into the patterns of strong and weak beats that we know as meter. If it is initially too physically demanding for students to conduct and count simultaneously, half the class can be asked to “whisper-count” the beats of the meter while the remainder of the group counts the rhythm aloud. Then the two groups switch tasks.
