Ivan Frazier, a member of the UGA piano faculty
since 1977 and formerly Keyboard Area Chair and Chair of Piano, teaches
piano, pedagogy, and supervises the class piano program. A native of Utah, Dr. Frazier
attended the University of Utah where, in the first Honors Program class at that
school, he earned the Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in piano and music education, and
in music theory respectively. His Doctor of Musical Arts in Piano Performance,
Literature, and Pedagogy was awarded in 1977 by the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Frazier's principal teachers include Frederic Dixon (a student of Joseffy), Oscar Wagner,
Guy Duckworth, all in piano; LeRoy Robertson (a student of Schoenberg & Bloch), in
theory; and Alexander Schreiner, in organ. Dr. Frazier is active nationally as a performer, lecturer, and clinician. As a founding member of the Committee on Learning Theory in the National Conference on Piano Pedagogy, his work on that committee, and in the World Piano Pedagogy Conference, and MTNA Pedagogy Saturday programs has been of influence in piano teaching and teacher training across the country and beyond. Ivan Frazier's writings and research in piano pedagogy may be found in Keyboard Companion, Piano Life, Piano Pedagogy Forum (an Internet journal), Southeastern Journal of Music Education, and in Proceedings and Reference volumes of the National Conference on Piano Pedagogy. As a performer Dr. Frazier is active as soloist and collaborative artist. Concert and recital performances have taken him to many locations in the West, Mid-West, and South East. He is a founding member of the Artrazann Trio of Athens, Georgia, which specializes in trio literature for oboe, horn, and piano. He is heard on a compact disc recording released by ACA Digital Recordings in
collaborative performances with David Stoffel, bass-baritone; and Milton Masciadri, double-bass.
Ivan Frazier
School of Music
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602
706.542.2715
ifrazier@uga.cc.uga.edu
Jerome S. Bruner (1986), the eminent psychologist and educator, relates the experience of observing a teacher, Miss Orcutt, who told her class, "it is a very puzzling thing not that water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, but that it should change from a liquid into a solid." In describing the lesson Bruner noted that the students were invited into a realm where molecules, Brownian movement, solids, liquids were not merely bald facts and figures but a means for imagining and pondering possibilities. Triggering the invitation was the simple, but vivid narrative relating water's transformation from a liquid to a solid. Bruner called Miss Orcutt, "a rarity among teachers, a human event rather than a transmission device (p.127)." Immediately after my first encounter with Miss Orcutt's science lesson I began to reflect upon essential basic musical learnings for pianists that are just as barrenly factual, just as potentially dull as 32 degrees Fahrenheit. I came up with things like the five-finger position, scales, major and minor, and cadence progressions like tonic to subdominant to dominant seventh to tonic again. Then I remembered musical events that exemplified these basic elements in imaginative and arresting ways, such as the opening of Beethoven's "Emperor" Piano Concerto where it seems as though we are hearing that I - IV - V7 - I progression for the first time in our lives or, the first pages of Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" which reveals the conflict between major and minor as new and elemental once more.
Narrative thinking embraces the particular, the concrete, the here and now, where the horizon of possibility expands, and the familiar seems new again (Bruner, 1990, 1996). Truth, in the rational, scientific sense is the province of paradigmatic thinking where higher and higher abstraction transcends the particular (Bruner, 1986, pp.11-14).
Last spring at the University of Georgia I had occasion to describe the C-sharp Major Prelude from the first volume of J. S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier in narrative terms. I said it was lively and frolicsome due its three-eight meter and the invertible counterpoint in which the left hand chases the right through a well-contrived maze of related major and minor keys. Alternatively I might have described the piece this way. In three-eight meter the subject begins with the right hand in the tonic key followed by its imitation by the left hand in the dominant, as the right hand takes the countersubject over from the left hand. Then the right hand repeats the subject in D-sharp minor, the subdominant of the relative minor. Continuing the process the left hand imitates the subject etc., etc., etc.
Now, in no way do I wish to minimize the value of this type of analysis and the paradigmatic thinking it requires. But, I don't think it provokes much excitement when introducing or trying to revive interest in a piece of repertoire. Narrative thinking and language like that used in my first description can awaken curiosity and fascination, which can generate the energy needed to find out what it means that the left hand chases the right, and to explore that maze of related keys to see where it leads with all its turns and cadences along the way. Students may then find the motivation to do the hard work needed for objective analysis and diligent practice.
Narrative thinking induces a use of language that creates gaps in meaning or action that recruit the reader or listener to fill. In my description of the Bach Prelude there is a gap between imitative counterpoint and the prospect that the left hand should chase the right hand as if one person were chasing another. Furthermore setting the chase in a maze is some distance away from the key changes the composer made. According to Jerome Bruner (1986, pp. 22-23) there is an interplay between vertical and horizontal axes. The vertical is a selection or substitution among individual words or expressions, such as, using the Bach example, "counterpoint, inversion, imitation etc.," or substitutes like "chase, follow, mimic, parrot, ape" as metaphors (Figure 1).
Figure 1
APES
PARROTS
MIMICS
FOLLOWS
HORIZONTAL L. HAND CHASES THE R. HAND AXIS
IMITATES
INVERTS WITH
MAKES COUNTERPOINT WITH
A
X
I
S
The horizontal axis is the sequential arrangement of expressions into a syntax that produces some sense of meaning. From the context the reader or listener fills the gap by finding implicit meanings, and multiple perspectives. Because there is not time to get into more technical analysis of narrative, let it suffice to say that the reader or listener receives narrative by re-composing it for him or herself in the context of the here and now.
In piano instruction students often encounter folk or other melodies and the challenge to harmonize them. To illustrate the vertical (Figure 2) and horizontal (Figure 3) axes available at one cadence point in the song, "O When the Saints Go Marchin' In" we will use the portion that says "...Oh, How I Want to be in That Number..."
Figure 2.
Figure 3.
On the vertical axis we see that the closest related harmony is the IV chord. Moving further away we find that numerous substitutions are available. How shall we deal with such an array of possibility? In his discussion of Miss Orcutt's science lesson Jerome Bruner (1986) posits that a teacher's option is either "to open up a topic to speculation and negotiation," or "to close it down by declarations of flat factuality, (p.127)." How did the first musician ever to use the Neapolitan Sixth chord arrive at his discovery? How then should we lead our students to understand various harmonies and the choices among them? May they experiment? May they make a few mistakes? May they evaluate those mistakes on their own for a while before the heavy hand of the teacher pronounces the stern benediction with red pencil? In consideration of the developmental level and advancement of a student the teacher may or may not open up much of that vertical axis. Indeed, the pupil's own invention and experimentation will reveal which parts of it are appropriate for trial and discussion. Certainly labels or terminology can wait until there is some fluency and awareness of pattern indicating the possiblity of transferring that understanding to a new situation. The key to involvement with narrative thinking is to delay paradigmatic cataloging and allow some opportunity for unfettered exploration and creativity (Gardner, 1982).
Improvisation may take many forms, but the same process is followed in dealing with options in musical vocabulary, whether improvising melody and rhythm to a verse of poetry, improvising melody to pre-established chord sequences, or improvising after the style, texture or other features of a particular composition.
Over the Fall Semester as this paper has been taking final shape I have found myself increasingly alert to statements from, and incidents with students that show evidence of narrative thinking, and have started a diary to collect them. In one lesson a student and I were discussing problems of pedaling when she suddenly said, "It sounds like a change from 'stereo' to 'mono' when the pedal is lifted here and here." Such a statement helps me to understand more candidly how she is thinking about the music and how she perceives her playing. In another lesson a student launched into a dry recitation of wrong pitches and other missed details upon my asking him to comment on his performance of the first two pages of Debussy's "Hommage a Rameau". Because I knew his missed pitches as well as he did, I interrupted and asked if he would please give me something more "global." After thinking silently for a moment he gave a wonderfully intuitive account of how the density of the piece increases from the opening unisons to a climax and returns again to the thin unisons, and how his performance partially succeeded in communicating that, and how he might do better. He can correct the few wrong notes by himself. One of my pedagogy students reported this about the difference between ritardando and ritenuto. One of the children he teaches said that ritenuto is when you "hit traffic." One of my colleagues, Dr. Martha Thomas, related how one of her students modified Rebecca Shockley's (1997) ideas on mapping. Instead of taking the more customary visual orientation, she assigned characters, as in a drama, to all the themes in the final rondo of a Mozart Sonata, and made a simple visual representation of each character. Her "map" was this decidedly operatic narrative used as a tool for secure memorization of the movement. For the Spring Semester undergraduate piano pedagogy course I am making plans to use Marilyn Zimmerman's (1984) excellent address, "Psychological Principles Applied to Piano Pedagogy," as the basis for an in-class skit in which class members will take on the roles of the connectionist, behaviorist, pragmatist, cognitivist, gestaltist, and developmentalist. Scripted by the students, the action will center on a charming and eager piano student, who will be aggressively recruited to submit herself to the type of musical and pianistic education each character will promote.
In this brief paper we have seen examples of how narrative and narrative thinking might be used to clarify expressive and structural content in music, to define musical terminology, to assist in the solving of musical and technical problems, to provide a sense of "magic" when harmonizing or improvising, to enhance motivation, and to contribute to secure memorizing. Moreover, narrative thinking facilitates and enriches communication between students and with the teacher. The happy result should include heightened individuality in performance if the attitude and application of narrative thinking extends habitually into individual practicing. Besides all this, pedagogy classes can benefit not only from study and discussion about narrative thinking, but also from experiencing it when dealing with pedagogical subject matter and in laboratory and intern teaching. These, of course, are only a few examples, and are intended to encourage imagination and invention. In summary we can find a fitting conclusion in recalling Jerome Bruner's (1996) "Three P's" of teaching, namely the Present, the Past, and the Possible, (pp. 86-99).
References
Bruner, Jerome S. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
__________. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
__________. (1996). The culture of education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gardner, Howard. (1982). Art, mind, and brain: A cognitive approach to creativity. New York: Basic Books.
Shockley, Rebecca P. (1997). Mapping music: For faster learning and secure memory: A guide for piano teachers and students. Madison, WI: A-R Editions, Inc.
Zimmerman, Marilyn P. (1984). Psychological principles applied to piano teaching. In Chronister, R. & McBeth, T. (Eds.). Proceedings: National conference on piano pedagogy. Princeton, NJ: The National Conference on Piano Pedagogy, 82-87.
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