I recently shared some ideas about possible start-up practices for new teachers working with the Queensland General Music Syllabus[i] that I feel – given the current context in Queensland – might translate well to an online and/or asynchronous learning environment, whist remaining musically ‘good places to go’. We’ve all now had our experiences in working remotely with our students, and it was likely a challenge to maintain robust and meaningful musical encounters without the opportunity to as immediately and easily guide and support their experiences. Though what follows is focused through the lens of the Year 11 and 12 context in Queensland – starting out with ‘Designs’, or continuing with ‘Innovations’[ii] – the approaches could easily be taken elsewhere and/or adapted as the goal is likely the same – working with music musically[iii], and bettering our ability to converse in and with music.  

The first unit of the Queensland General Music Syllabus is ‘Designs’. This unit delves into the way music is arranged both horizontally and vertically and offers a great degree of flexibility in terms of the repertoire we may engage with. Encouragingly, any style and genre of music can fit this brief – all music is ‘fair game’. This hopefully invites us as teachers to engage with music that shares connection and commonality with the musical lives of our students[iv]. It also offers us opportunity to understand and highlight the diversity that exists in any one class. From this starting point we can explore music and ‘places we wish to take’ the students through an examination of common features/uses of music elements and concepts between works shared and those deemed ‘educatively necessary’. We might also, as the syllabus suggests, use a ‘reverse chronology’[v] approach, or simply trace through the influences of one musical style on another, finding ‘remnants’ of one in another as we encounter new things. If we choose to honour their music, I am confident that we, in almost every instance, will learn of something new. If we work with them as we work for them, both sets of understandings will be heightened.

In the third unit – ‘Innovations’ – our focus is on the innovative use and manipulation of music elements, concepts and compositional devices across and between periods and styles of music – and we must be sure to stay true to this, with a focus on music (of course, we acknowledge the historical and sociocultural influences, but this serves to position the music). The guiding question for the unit is situated in how institutions, established facts and customs provide tradition in music (itself), and how composers have used, manipulated, combined and reimagined the ways in which music is constructed to break these traditions. The innovation is in the change – so some knowledge of what it has changed from is important. We need to ensure that there is some level of familiarly here, and this may happen in earlier years of formal music education, and through experience with much of the music in instrumental music lesson and ensembles… though we are often staunch traditionalists, which we may consciously or unconsciously transfer to our students, it is something we need to consider…

Now, setting this context for the shared practices aside, the fact that we might find ourselves working remotely, shouldn’t massively challenge the drivers that underpin our practice. For me, this includes: not being dismissive of what the students are bringing (musically) to the classroom (after all, it is their music education); that practice/experience comes first – before the attachment of ‘labels’; that the basic/foundational subject matter is the music elements (that they do not work in isolation and there is a hierarchy… but that’s for another time); and, that our collective aim is to converse musically and communicate using specific and focused vocabulary.

Taking this, below are some of the ideas I have employed in my Year 11 and Year 12 classes in the context of the aforementioned units – it is certainly a non-exhaustive list, but ones that I have found valuable. For me, there is always a link between the making and responding components of a task – being influenced and informed by works of others to create your own – though I have tried to position the activities in the respective strand/technique for clarity (hopefully!). Each of these activities can be completed remotely, in live or asynchronous contexts, and can be supported via a range of learning management systems, notation software and audio workstations (DAWs).

Composition

Compositional activities offer so much opportunity for differentiation and allow students to engage with, manipulate and apply the music elements and compositional devices first-hand. A commonality between them is that they are all based on something that exists – there is no pulling ideas ‘out of thin air’. We are building on the works of others and making them ‘new’. Being largely an individual process, these compositional strategies have worked well in remote learning as introductions for larger explorations later on:

• One-note and three-note compositions, particularly when you workshop them live and ask for the pitches from the students. There are great opportunities to demonstrate the use motif, development and repetition, the combination of the pitches both horizontally or vertically, the application of expressive devices etc… Decisions are applied to (more) controllable data, thereby reducing cognitive load, but without limiting the possibilities. I have written on this before (see Working with tentative composers… limiting the options), with Stacey Kent’s performance of One Note Samba (Jobim, Mann & Mendonça) and György Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata (1) as some of the examples. My students experimented with ideas largely using keyboards, before transcribing them in Sibelius.
• Manipulating the meter of a simple song, say from simple time to 5/8 or 7/8 (or some irregular meter) e.g. Greensleeves (trad.) has worked well for me and focused in on one element at a time (mainly), again reducing load on students. Again, students ‘play’ with their ideas on their instrument before notating (Sibelius or NoteFlight) or recording their ideas to share.
• Providing some parameters to the task, such as a basic theme and variation composition – provision of a theme to vary; there is potential to then combine the responses as a class, discussing how we may transition between the variation offered.
• Again, limit the musical manipulative through motif-only based composition – e.g. using the famous Symphony No. 5 (Beethoven) fragment (first four pitches), transform it through techniques such as retrograde, inversion, transposition, extension, augmentation, diminution, permutation (not to mention simultaneous combinations of these) etc… to create an entire composition solely on these 2 pitches and two rhythms. This proved very accessible to and successful in my Year 11 Music class. We used NoteFlight to share our work with each other whilst online.
• ‘Cellular melody’ composition (à la Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring) – breaking a folk melody into even metrical units (e.g. a beat) and recombining as melody and accompaniment patterns (similar to the activity above). This worked really well when I shared the melody from r. 25 in Dances of the Youths and Maidens in MIDI form, with the students working in GarageBand.
• On the theme of reusing music, sampling. Last year, my Year 12s explored the use of My Woman (Bowlly) (1932) in a range of music (recently, Dua Lipa’s Love Again) and/in conjunction with the use of the ‘Amen break’, used samples from each to form a new work. This worked really well in GarageBand, and similarly, SoundTrap. In essence, this could be linked/foregrounded by the motif and ‘celluar’ work above – very similar processes of recycling and reusing. Great for both discussing musical design, and innovative approaches to composition.
• ‘New clothes’ ideas, such as reharmonisation of a simple, well-known melody (Happy Birthday works well) – melody, extended harmonisation, manipulation of durational aspects (meter, rhythm etc…). Good to explore extended harmony, functional progressions in a supported way (you have the melody). I received a range of responses to this from my Year 11s last year, with some incredible extended harmonic choices – in both notated files and multi-layered recordings.

Musicology

Musicology activities are often more manageable in remote learning contexts, and can offer robust connections to making activities, assisting assigning meaning to practice. In this, again, it is important that we focus on the analysis of music elements/concepts themselves – the historical, societal influences, and artist/composer background/information is contextually important but shouldn’t distract from the analysis of the music elements, concepts and compositional devices (it might help to further inform choices a composer has made). Musicology (in this context) is about the analysis and evaluation of music.

This leads me to another point, we should have a reason for our analysis – why we are embarking on this for an understanding the meaning a work is communicating. What ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions do we have? This is where we set some form of evaluative criteria, which we get when we ask, for example, how the music communicates a specific mood, or why the music might suit a specific context… This provides some guiding parameters for our investigation into the music – without an inquiry question, focus, or reason for the analysis, it becomes a task that could be near endless (and largely meaningless). An evaluative criteria provides a frame, and we analyse features of works that can be packed into this frame to support an answer to the question. I’ve written on this before in more detail – see Music analysis and evaluation: Beams, hooks and bags…, Reframing cognitive processes in music ‘analysis’, Mr Tim Pani talks music analysis and evaluation…, Instructions for ‘detangling’: Structuring a Musicology viewpoint, and in Disentangling the entangled: Thinking about and through Musicology.

Now, this said, however, I do actually find some value in this form of ‘disconnected’ analysis, but want to clarify that in the context of it being foundational and connected to specific/discrete subject matter for the purpose of consolidating understanding, and importantly, to make the point above. Essentially, there are ‘levels’ or categories of analytical work here – diagnostic/foundational, discrete, evaluative and procedural:

Diagnostic/foundational knowledge:

• Task the students with a short recorded/live presentation about: a) one of the music elements and how it can be talked about; b) a specific compositional device with an example; c) a specific musical feature/device found within an element (e.g. 6/9 chord, mixolydian mode, V/V chord etc…). This can be collated and shared, and also forms the basis for some really good clarifying discussions.
• The ‘sticky note activity’ is something I have been doing for years. Students add an idea to a sticky note about one feature of the music played; they then place these under the respective music element on the board. All voices are de-identified and ‘heard’, and another good opportunity for clarifying class discussion (e.g. when placed in the wrong element). I detail this more in Encouraging ‘deeper listening’ and own thinking about and of music, and will try an updated version on Padlet this year.
• Have students individually locate and share works that they deem innovative, or have a specific design feature for later analysis and discussion. You might find some really good leads here into music useful for the unit.
• Though ‘descriptions’, in which students are presented three very similar, deidentified works and they write down features that describe each on a sperate piece of paper (no title, number of piece to be indicated). Then, we mix-up and share responses with another student and have them place them in order they were played (an idea from the wonderful Helene Galettis). This year I am using: 1) Lux Aurumque (Whitacre), 2) Salvation is Created (Chesnokov), and 3) Magnificat (Pärt).

Discrete analysis:

• Limiting the cognitive load by focusing on one/two elements at a time, and connecting feature to element.
• ‘Explanation Fact Dump’ activity, where students focus on an element in a short section of a work, and exhaust the description (explanation) of what is there as much as possible (keep asking for more…!). This is ‘dry’ explanation – no connection to purpose other than what is there. We examined Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor (Op. 28, No. 4) last year in Year 11.
• The next step from the activity above is an ‘Analysis Fact Link’ activity, whereby students are presented with 8 bars (or a small section) to analyse, say duration and pitch (interconnectivity), e.g.  bb. 15-22 of Café 1930 (Piazzolla), or Main Theme from ‘Edward Scissorhands’ (Elfman) exhausting the discussion as much as possible.
• Looking for broader connections between elements though use of analysis template (attached in Resources), in which aspects are explained and then connected; analysis isn’t then discrete.  

Evaluation and procedural knowledge:

• Setting practice questions that the students will face in the EA, ensuring the analysis, evaluation and justification elements are present.
• Remove the cognitive load through something more familiar, such as a biscuit analysis – ‘which biscuit is a healthier choice for my morning tea?’, in which the cognitive levels/processes are connected to biscuits (nutritional value, taste, size, shape, colour etc…). I have attached the workflow and resource here. Last year, this was done ‘live’ in class with biscuits and all, but we did use Padlet to collate responses.

More recently, I have found an initial focus on compositional devices, rather than style/genre, useful here in that students deal with the combination of music elements and specific ways that they are used and combined – this interrelationship is important in how music works, and in what the Integrated Project and EA[vi] demand of students. Things like accompaniment, contrast, development, unity, themes, and variation, are undercurrents to every style and genre of music to some degree. Compositional devices house the music elements and importantly they show how multiple elements work in conjunction. They also offer perhaps a better place to start with tentative learners, even without robust music element vocabulary – our job is to add this, to expand students’ ability to engage in music discourse.  

Performance

Always an enjoyed place to start, but unless it is personal practice, not always an easy one to facilitate!

• Audio-visual recording of performance work; sharing with teacher for feedback and completing a self-reflection based on performance-level descriptors on ISMG[vii] (sample attached here). Might be shared through LMS, Soundcloud, YouTube link, file transfer…
• Analysis of own work (with connections to the themes/meaning sought to convey; this acts as an evaluative filter).
• Critique of sample performance statements[viii] and highlighting where the response demonstrated the cognition at a specific performance-level.
• Locating and critiquing different versions/interpretations of the work the student is performing – stylistic/interpretative approaches; connect to own identified themes (evaluative criteria).
• Multi-class performance activity – videoing parts of a work to combine into a whole to maintain community and cohesiveness.
• Learning new music remains a very important part of what we do – singing or playing throughs something previously unseen/heard, and connecting our musical ‘vocabulary’ and experiences to new contexts and thereby both broadening and consolidating our understanding.

These lists were a few approaches I thought might translate well to the week were are about to face (and unfortunately may have to face again). It is challenging to reduce the complex happenings in these activities to description, but hopefully there is something meaningful here that can be used (I’m always happy to elaborate on these in further discussion). There are obvious connections that can be made between these strands/techniques – ways of working – from both responding to making (becoming informed and influenced) and from making to responding (to choices made in execution, explanation of compositional workings…), and this interrelationship is important in making meaning.

Into practice….

I’ll meet my new Year 11s on Monday (I’ve never taught this group before), and we are going to work on a small-scale project, which hopefully is a little bit of fun and, importantly, focused in on actually engaging with music first-hand and the interactions between making and responding.

This all starts with us listening to Believer (Imagine Dragons) and considering the prompts below. It is a wonderfully simple and effective song, with high use of repetition rhythmically, melodically and harmonically. It is in 12/8 meter, with multilayer percussion/clapping parts, and 3 chords – Am, E, and F (with some variation on the E)… The questions I will pose after listening are:

• What is the mood of the song?
• What instruments (including voices and effects) do you hear in the song?
• What is the structure of the song? How many sections are there and what is the function of each? What instruments are present in each section?
• What is the meter (time signature) of the song? How do you know?
• What is the pattern of the clapping and main drum patterns you hear? What does this look like in notation?
• How many different chords are used in the song? How do you know? What are they?
• What is the key/tonality of the song? What are the qualities of the chords (e.g. major/minor)?
• What is the harmonic rhythm of the piece (how often/rhythm of the chord changes)?
• What is the rhythmic pattern of these chords in the song? Does it stay the same/change?

After we have covered these questions and found out ‘what we need to know’, the students will be tasked with aurally discerning the:

• the lyrics and melody and sing
• the repeated arpeggiated/outline chord sequence and play on guitar or keyboard
• the ‘thickened’ dramatic electronic chords and play using your computer
• how the vocal effects might be achieved using your computer
• the drum and clapping parts.

We will then workshop these ideas and processes, assign parts and then each go and work on our parts. The intended output here is a multi-screen video of us all performing the work – singing, playing (body percussion). This way of working attends to many of the ideals I outlined earlier – we are starting with practice, developing and connecting our musical vocabulary through conversations, and starting with something familiar. Through this, in this remote context, I feel we are still attending to meaningful engagement with music and the cognitive processes it demands of us – hopefully, we are working with music musically.

For the Queensland music teachers, all the best as we navigate this week together… and indeed to all music teachers everywhere.

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[i] General Music Syllabus v1.2 (2019), Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority.

[ii] Designs is Unit 1, typically studied at the start of Year 11; Innovations is Unit 3, typically started in the students Year 12 year.

[iii] Yes, I’ve yet again borrowed this phrase (title!) from Swanwick’s book Teaching Music Musically (1999) – it is wonderfully suitable for what we (should) do.

[iv] I briefly spoke of the use of collaborative playlists through which both the students and I shared music we thought the other should be aware of.

[v] p. 12 – General Music Syllabus v1.2 (2019), Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority.

[vi] Two assessment techniques from the syllabus. EA stands for ‘External Assessment’, a state-wide written examination sat in November.

[vii] Instrument-specific marking guide – common marking guide for responses detailed by the syllabus.

[viii] Performance statements are statements of intent about the choices made in the performance of repertoire. They form part of the assessment technique, Performance.

Image credit: https://schoolofmusic.ucla.edu/resources-for-remote-learning/