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
At the 1999 MTNA convention in Los Angeles John Perry spoke frankly about his perception that while pianists - students and performers - perform at high technical levels, there is a growing sameness, a declining individuality in their performing. In company with other factors including pressures associated with judging advanced-level competitions Perry noted the double-edged advantages and disadvantages of so-called "urtext" scores and the subtle "tyranny" their popularity exerts over teachers, students, and performers. A central problem as he defined it is how to find the music in all that objective, sterile detail. He observed that perfection has not been an object of art. Communication is.
His insight causes me to reflect on the potential value of narrative modes of thinking. At the World Piano Pedagogy Conference in St. Louis I presented a paper which made some applications to piano pedagogy that I believed could effect greater sensitivity to the poetic and expressive content in music, enrich and facilitate student - teacher communication, and encourage individuality in performance. It is now published by permission in Piano Pedagogy Forum (Frazier, 2001).
In his writing over 1980's and 90's the highly influential psychologist and educator, Jerome Bruner (1986), has coined the term "narrative thinking" to describe the cognitive functioning involved in the creation of narrative, whether within the play of children, or poetry, or stories and novels. In operation narrative thinking embraces the particular, the concrete, the here and now, where the horizon of possibility expands, and the familiar seems new and strange once more (Bruner, 1990, 1996). Crucial to activating narrative thinking is the creation of gaps in meaning or action, which recruit the listener or reader to fill by finding implicit meanings, and multiple perspectives. A pivotal point here is Bruner's assertion that we accomplish this by recomposing narrative for ourselves as we receive it in the context of the here and now (1986, p.24). Leonard Bernstein framed the phenomenon in musical terms much like Bruner during his series of Norton Lectures at Harvard University in1973. One of the lectures was titled, "The Beauties of Ambiguity." In it he described "gaps" in compositions where the composer challenges the listener to bridge the distance between the expected and the unexpected. Listen to the opening three chords in Beethoven's Sonata, Op. 81a, where the dominant unexpectedly resolves to the relative minor. We compose the expected tonic chord internally, while receiving the unexpected, and recompose a new perspective for ourselves.
One of my piano concentration majors and I were discussing in his lesson problems of pedaling in the Pastorale movement from the Trois Pieces (Three Pieces) by Francis Poulenc. He created an arresting gap by asking, "Could the pedal want to change?" I suggested that we had created a metaphor from the riddle that asks, "How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?" For those who need the "punchline," the answer is "Only one, but the light bulb has to really want to change." We were asking, "Does the pedal really want to change?" This idea unfolded a wide horizon of possibilities for pondering and experimenting with the prospect that the instrument might motivate the pedaling. Most of all it challenged both of us to listen to those passages much more intently than before.
This brings us to a very important point. The effort to bridge the gaps opened by narrative thinking activates intent in the student, the teacher, and in the performance. Uncovering a composer's intent from the blueprint of the musical score is impossible without activating intent. Intention drives the quest for musical meaning. Performance, how we teach it, and its traditions make an absorbing history of this quest.
The score itself cannot tell us everything, nor can it be entirely neutral. Even the most cautiously conservative urtext edition must fill some gaps for us. I tell my students that the ultimate urtext edition would be a photocopy of the composer's handwritten manuscripts! The line where the editor's "helpfulness" crosses over into artistic decision making may at times be difficult to see. However, as John Perry reminds us, this helpfulness can be beneficial if it provides some insight into the performing tradition represented by the composition and its composer. Musical performance skills, which include improvising, playing-by-ear, transposing and playing-at-sight are avenues through which musical narrative is received and composed. Even improvisation begins with an existing inventory of melodic and rhythmic motifs, which are recombined into fresh syntax, much the way an extemporaneous speaker uses his reservoir of words, phrases and definitions. Robert Weirich in the 1998 World Piano Pedagogy Conference conducted a masterful interactive session in which he promoted the use of improvisation as a means of developing skills needed to "speak" the language of music.
All of this in the light of narrative thinking persuades us that these four skills form a continuum with many parallels in function rather than a group of separated tasks. Such continuity may well be an inborn human trait. Howard Gardner (1982) observes that a five to seven year old child "sings while drawing, dances while singing, tells stories while playing." He calls it a golden age of creativity, "sparkling with artistry," exhibiting great expressivity (pp. 86, 128).
In this connection I am reminded of three experiences with my mentor, Guy Duckworth, in company with other doctoral students at the University of Colorado in the 1970's. All three illustrate connections among these skills.
First, during a seminar discussion Duckworth said, "If I wanted to increase my sight-reading skill, I would spend time transposing at the piano. If I wanted to increase my transposing skill, I would do some playing-by-ear, and if I wanted to play-by-ear more fluently, I would practice improvisation. (see figure 1)"
Figure 1.
KEYBOARD SKILLS
IMPROVISATION
PLAYING-BY-EAR
TRANSPOSING
SIGHT-READING
His statement recognizes that a principal barrier to fluent reading is the habit of focusing the eye on individual notes one at a time. Each step up this hierarchy shifts awareness away from individual details toward the relationships among them. Flexibility, fluency, and confidence are enhanced along the way.
Second, improvising after the style of a particular composition reveals as in no other way a student's grasp of the musical elements operating in that piece. I recall that Guy often would take the score away from me in a lesson order to, as he put it, "find out what it meant to me." Even though I was in that precarious zone between playing from memory and playing from score, he and I and the others in my lesson group learned from my improvisational bridges across my memory gaps precisely what I understood and how. The experience of working the piece in this manner revealed vividly the extent that I had integrated understanding, meaning and intent.
Third, I also remember from those days the best advice I every received for developing both an attitude and an intentional state for sight-reading. Duckworth simply said, "Improvise a piece like the one you see before you." I decided to test the idea with the third movement of Prokofieff's Seventh Sonata (a work on my DMA repertoire reading project). I was determined that rhythm and steadiness of tempo would be the top priority. The "notes," I thought, would be but a similitude of pitches on the page. While I did in fact play many wrong notes, I found myself most pleasantly surprised by the number of correct notes I did get. I felt very much "in the moment," my new attitude helping me maintain physical fluency. Pressure for detail relaxed as patterns, registers, chord shapes and silhouettes of phrase units emerged as more relevant priorities.
In my role as a teacher I need to be alert to opportunities where narrative modes of thinking may be invited. I continue to keep my log of experiences with students where narrative thinking is evident. So that I don't forget to do it - such moments are illusive - I take time to tell students why I occasionally open the diary and jot down key words and phrases right then. These short discussions are some of the most valuable moments I have shared with students. A teacher's role can be one of modeling and facilitating the application of narrative thinking skill in the three ways summarized by Jerome Bruner (1996): (1) Cultivate and use it; (2) Analyze and nurture it; And, (3) Cease taking it for granted.
I can think of no better conclusion to this paper than to quote Shelly Berg (1999), an eminent jazz pianist and educator at the University of Southern California who wrote," When I play I reach through the keys to find hidden worlds below. Like Alice, I disappear through the looking glass when I practice, where each solo can be a journey of discovery. I love the hours spent practicing, because practicing is where I receive the keys to those other worlds."
REFERENCES
Berg, S. (October, 1999). Master class. Keyboard.
Bruner, J. 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.
Frazier, I. (2001). Narrative modes of thinking applied to piano pedagogy. Piano Pedagogy Forum, 4(2).
Gardner, H. (1982). Art, mind, and brain: A cognitive approach to creativity. New York: Basic Books.
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