Blog Post #2

Brandt Schneider "Creating Musical Flexibility Through the Ensemble"

• Critique the article.  
• How do we determine that someone is a good musician?

I enjoyed this article very much because it challenged me to create a curriculum where my students are building an aural understanding of music rather than mere key pushing skills.  Bach chorales are one good vehicle for such a style of learning because the voices tend to develop linearly, i.e. primarily through stepwise motion, and are thus are comprehended and absorbed in an aural fashion more easily.  Having students learn each of the four chorale voices in a variety of keys not only supports their mastery of the melodic content of the chorale (horizontal comprehension), it lays the groundwork for them to understand the harmonic structure as well (comprehension of vertical progression).  This is a skill I am always stressing to my theory students: to develop an aural comprehension of the theory topics we are covering, and then apply these concepts to music they are working on.  The model Schneider creates allows the instrumental (or vocal) ensemble to become a laboratory for learning theory concepts in an applied setting, thus bridging the divide between “theory class” and the ensemble setting.  While not all theoretical concepts may lend themselves to this model just yet, I believe that this style of learning is invaluable for students as they increase their instrumental-vocal skills.  How do we determine if someone is a “good” musician?  Perhaps one yardstick of such a value designation is if an instrumentalist can get beyond the mere technical necessities of their instrument while playing music to a true aural understanding of the music being played.  Do they have an understanding of the vocabulary and grammar of their music, or as Ken Trapp said “are they merely barking the notes?”