Kenneth Williams directs the graduate programs in piano pedagogy and coordinates the class piano program at The Ohio State University in Columbus. Recent articles by Williams are published in Update: Applications of Research in Music Education, College Music Symposium and Keyboard Companion. He received the 2002 Article of the Year Award from the Music Teachers National Association for his article in American Music Teacher titled "Cross-Cultural Communication in the Music Studio." He has presented lectures and recitals for state and national meetings of the Music Teachers National Association, the 2000 meeting of the European Piano Teachers Association in Budapest, Hungary and the 2002 meeting of the International Society for Music Education Seminar on the Education of the Professional Musician in Norway. He holds the Doctor of Music degree in Piano Performance and Pedagogy from Northwestern University.
Kenneth Williams
Schoolof Music
The Ohio State University
Columbus, OH 43210
614.292.8961
williams.1679@osu.edu
Integrating theoretical studies in piano pedagogy and practical teaching experiences into a curriculum that prepares pianists for effective teaching is a formidable challenge for any pedagogy instructor. Yet theory and practice are both essential in coursework for piano pedagogy. Structuring observation and intern experiences presents logistical problems such as matching pedagogy students with master teachers and laboratory students at the appropriate levels. The availability of resources for intern teaching experiences varies from one institution to another. Valuable information on structuring intern teaching experiences appears in the reports of the committee on intern teaching of the National Conference on Piano Pedagogy. While there is no substitute for the benefits of live teaching experience, coursework in piano pedagogy can develop essential competencies in students even when opportunities for intern teaching are limited. In teaching graduate level pedagogy courses, I include activities designed to develop critical listening skills through structured listening to recorded performances in which students describe in very specific terms the differences between two performances of the same work. I have found that projects in directed listening provide one solution to the dilemma of developing practical competencies for teaching when intern teaching experiences are limited. Furthermore these activities focus on perhaps the most essential competency for effective teaching -- the ability to listen critically and to effectively describe what the performer is doing.
Critical listening for teaching differs from other types of listening and hearing in both intensity and purpose. Critics, adjudicators and audience members listen in distinct ways. When the piano teacher listens to a student perform, she is continuously making judgements and comparisons between what she hears and what other sound alternatives are possible. Critical listening is an intense process that simultaneously involves both acoustical hearing and auditory imagination. Even before the teacher learns to decide what to change in a performance or how to bring about change in a student's playing, it is crucial that the teacher has developed finely tuned habits in critical listening. Developing skill in critical listening is analogous to developing critical thinking skills and should not be overlooked in the process of training piano teachers.
The primary objective for projects in critical listening is for students to become aware of exactly what artistic decisions the performer has made with regard to the interpretation of a particular work. Even when listening carefully to recorded performances, it is easy for students to confuse observations about the composition itself with interpretive decisions made by the performer. In assigning listening projects, I choose standard repertoire at the late intermediate or early advanced levels for which several recordings by famous artists are easily available. Movements from Baroque keyboard suites are especially valuable since there are so many possibilities for variety in touch and articulation and in ways to vary the repetition of sections in the piece. Slow movements from sonatas in the Classic style offer insights in the different ways performers handle balance in typical textures with melody and accompaniments. Waltzes and preludes by Chopin offer opportunities to detect differences phrasing, voicing and rubato.
In order to focus on interpretive details rather than features of the composition, the student must first become very familiar with the piece. I provide students with multiple copies of an urtext score for the work and instruct them to practice the work enough to understand the structure and the musical and technical challenges and to get a sense of how they would interpret the piece. It is especially effective to do a stylistic analysis as a class by discussing the melody, harmony, form, rhythm and timbre of the work itself. After becoming thoroughly familiar with the piece, the student listens to two recorded performances. I instruct the students to mark each urtext score to indicate all of the dynamics, articulation and phrasing, rubato, voicing, ornamentation and other interpretive details that are apparent in the recorded performances. By adding expressive markings to the urtext score, the student is essentially creating an edited score based on what she hears in the recorded performance. The student then writes a detailed comparison of the two performances addressing all of the aspects of musical interpretation. The written portion of the listening project is a valuable exercise in technical writing; that is, using precise terminology to describe what a performer is doing. Ideally the clarity of thought required for effective written communication will transfer to the teaching situation so that the teacher has a command of language for teaching. The written exercise affords the pedagogy student the luxury of time to choose words carefully - a luxury that is not available in an actual lesson. Honing language skills can be especially important for pedagogy students who speak English as a second language. Even native English speakers benefit though from the attention to communicating effectively about musical performance.
After describing all of the interpretive details observed through listening, the student must identify how the overall impression of each performance is different. The type of language required for this part of the exercise is more descriptive than technical. Whereas listening for particular details of interpretation challenges the students to listen analytically, identifying the overall impression of a particular performance challenges the students to synthesize the various details into an artistic whole.
The critical listening project is not a simulated teaching experience, but an exercise that develops some of the most important components of the teaching process. The exercise differs from the actual lesson in many ways. Unlike a real piano lesson, the pedagogy student can listen to the recordings over and over like the instant replay of a football game. The pedagogy student is not listening to detect errors since the performers are esteemed artists rather than struggling pupils. The student is not required to recommend strategies for solving technical problems such as improving voicing or balance. Some students tend to make judgements about aspects of a performance that they consider stylistically appropriate or inappropriate. I emphasize that these judgements are not part of the exercise. Students are instructed to restrict their comments to observations of what they hear. The exercise simply focuses on critical listening in an unusually intensive way and therefore isolates the type of thinking required for the first step in the teaching process.
This exercise in critical listening requires the pedagogy student to engage in a type of listening that tends to be neglected in other parts of the music curriculum. Courses in aural skills train students to listen for intervals, chord qualities and rhythmic subdivisions. Through applied piano study, students learn to listen to their own playing and what effect particular adjustments in technique have on tone production. In preparing performances, students often listen to multiple recorded performances of a work and decide which aspects of the interpretations they might want to incorporate into their own interpretation. But that is a selective process that is closer to modeling and imitation rather than analysis and description. The tremendous advantage to exercises in critical listening within the piano pedagogy course is that the exercises encourage students to synthesize the aural skills that they develop in other parts of their training and apply them to practical situations. Score study based on visual observations tends to focus on features of harmony and form, but teachers must develop skills in aural observation that focuses on interpretive details.
The great learning outcome from exercises in critical listening is that students gain awareness of their own tendencies in listening. Students have often remarked that they had never listened so intently before for specific details such as voicing or articulation. Some students tend to offer a general impression of a performance without understanding how it was achieved. Others can give detailed accounts of minute details but struggle to articulate how those details comprise an artistic product. This kind of self-awareness as it relates to listening is essential in developing effective teaching. Listening projects in pedagogy courses are especially appropriate for students who have had some intern teaching experiences that involve primarily error detection and correction. Comparative listening develops the skills that pedagogy students will need in teaching beyond the elementary level. Students often remark that they enjoy the challenges in critical listening and find the process itself to be inspiring and enlightening. Teaching begins with listening, so learning to listen is a valuable step in the process of learning to teach.
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