I began this course with the understanding that to have musical understanding was to have some sort of comprehension of the elements of music (beat, pitch, rhythm, etc.), and how they are woven together to create music. I also believed that part of having a musical understanding was being able to recreate something that has been previously composed, as well as to compose on your own (usually with specific guidelines).
Elements of Music:
BEAT PITCH RHYTHM MELODY DYNAMICS TEMPO FORM
The first module of this course challenged everything that I thought I ever knew about music and through the readings, I was forced to reconstruct what "musical understanding" means. This reconstruction started with Renate Zenker's The Dynamic and Complex Nature of Musical Understanding. Zenker begins to clarify the nature of musical understanding by examining what understanding is and how these characteristics are evident in musical understanding. Before reading this chapter I do not remember taking a time to think about and try to explain what understanding means. The characteristics that Zenker identifies helped shape my idea of what "understanding" is. Zenker's characteristics of understanding are as follows:
- The word understanding is ambiguous in that it has different sense. That is, we say "We understand X", the statement has more than one possible meaning.
- Understanding, as a verb, belongs to a class of verbs that indicate an upshot or outcome, not an activity; we cannot "do it"; it results from us doing many activitieis. Understand as a noun is primarily a capacity to see connections and notice things that others do not, which results from having had many understanding "upshots".
- Understanding involves concepts and perception recipes.
- We can talk about internal/external understanding.
- Understanding is the basis of appreciation.
- Understanding is a matter of degree; different levels of sophistication are possible.
- Understanding has a "dynamic" quality; our understanding changes as our knowledge base and experiences change.
Zenker further elaborates her seven characteristics of understanding and applies them to musical understanding. Although all of these points helped to redefine my own perception of musical understanding in one way or another, a few of her points resonated stronger with me and had a more profound change on my thinking. In point number two, Zenker discusses the idea that understanding is something that happens when you have thought, studied or completed various tasks, and understanding can happen where no effort is involved. Understanding itself is not a task, yet instead various tasks, that need to be completed in order to understand. There are sets or groups of techniques or tasks that need to be completed depending on the object of understanding. Zenker believes that when people have a good understanding they have had a lot of upshots or outcomes through their engagement in various activities and as a result have developed many connections and "get it right". It is an epistemological state that people achieve and are able to see things that others may miss. Relating this to musical understanding, Zenker believes that we must engage in "a wide variety of musical activities like playing, singing, listening, composing, performing, improvising, reading music, and learning musical concepts. There is no single type of "understanding-know-how" to music." (Zenker, p. 35). Elaborating on this idea, our musical understanding develops through our own personal experiences with music and those with musical understanding can make connections in music and notice what they have been trained to notice.
Another point that resonated with me is Zenker's third point that understanding involves concepts and perception recipes. Zenker believes that to teach for understanding we can "make students aware of the concepts (ideas or general notions) they already possess and raise these to a reflective level" (Zenker, p.37). Zenker further explains that we can teach students the correct musical terminology for concepts that they possess and then they can demonstrate their understanding. Often as teachers we assume that students have limited experience with new concepts and this is not necessarily the case. Often students come to us with some understanding of these new concepts and our focus should focus more on providing and teaching students the correct musical terminology. This idea holds true when examining musical understanding between various cultures. The idea that students come to us with musical understanding is echoed by Carol P. Richardson in her article Eastern Ears in Western Classrooms. Richardson says "Musical understanding does not really require our strenuous efforts as educators because students come to us with it already in place, though usually without the words or images with which to express it in our expert musical language" (Richardson, p. 198). As educators we provide students with the context to express their musical understanding and we specialize in teaching them to talk about music in "our way" aiming for analysis in the language of musicians.
Another point that Zenker discusses is that understanding has a "dynamic" quality and our understanding changes as our knowledge base and experiences change. This makes me think about how entering university I felt like I knew almost everything there was to know about music and then in my last year feeling ignorant as it was at this point that I realized how much there was about music that I did not know about! Zenker discusses how we construct our musical knowledge based on our interaction with music and our acquisition of musical knowledge. We react to and interact with music based on patterns we recognize in the music and the social and cultural context of the music combined with our personal music history, experiences and theoretical knowledge. Another article that reinforces the importance of culture on musical understanding is Musical Understanding: Cognition and Enculturation by Harold Fiske and Matthew Royal. Fiske and Royal state that musical understanding means "understanding something about sound, where "something" means knowing how to produce and/or receive acoustically generated energy of a sort recognized and valued by a particular cultural community" (Fiske and Royal, p. 73). Fiske and Royal look at musical understanding in a more primitive way connected to the brain's first priority being safety and survival of its owner and survival is dependent on making sense of incoming sensory information which our comprehension is developed by identifying patterns and comparing them. This connects to the idea that different environments will produce different sounds that are specific to it like specific animal calls, geographical features (rivers, mountain, tundras, etc.), and weather conditions (rain, snow, hail, sleet, etc.), so as humans we learn to construct and identify many different environment-specific sound patterns and it is possible to view culture as the historical accretion of learned responses to environment-specific conditions followed by the subsequent altering of that environment. Therefore music from a specific culture are a response to a particular sonic or musical environment when shape and alter that environment. "The brain needs to relate incoming information to previous experiences and their former consequences or outcomes, as well as to current beliefs about the immediate social and physical environment. Social and physical-environmental culture provides a context for musical comprehension and meaning, a frame of discourse within which cognitive processes occur" (Fiske and Royal, p. 84).
Like Zenker, and Fiske and Royal, Marian T. Dura also believes that there is a connection between culture and music, and explores this connection to movement. The reason Dura's work resonated so strongly with me and my musical understanding is because of my strong connection to dance. I subconsciously am always moving when there is music on. In many ways dance has always been my first love, but to me, dance and music have always been intertwined so Dura's work brings a theoretical aspect to what I have always known to be true to my own existence, and have also observed in my students, especially in the all boys class. I will return to this idea later. The three main ideas that Dura explores are:
- Physical involvement as a component of the music listening experience.
- The body, the mind, the brain and the musical experience.
- Effects of musical elements on listeners.
Dura summarizes that "the kinesthetic dimension of the music listening experience can be described a s a product of various factors, including physical and neurological characteristics of the human nervous system, cognitive processes such as metaphor, and characteristics of tonality-based musical systems, in this case, specifically music of the European common practice period" (Dura, p. 129).
Although all of the readings have helped to shape and form my knowledge of "musical understanding" these specific points resonated the most with me and had the largest impact on my thinking.
- Dura, Marian T. Movement and Music: The Kinesthetic Dimension of the Music Listening Experience in Hanley, B. & Goolsby, T (2002). Musical Understanding – Perspectives in Theory and Practice. C.M.E.A. Publication.
- Fiske, Harold and Matthew Royal. Musical Understanding: Cognition and Enculturation in Hanley, B. & Goolsby, T (2002). Musical Understanding – Perspectives in Theory and Practice. C.M.E.A. Publication.
- Richardson, Carol P. Eastern Ears in Western Classrooms in Hanley, B. & Goolsby, T (2002). Musical Understanding – Perspectives in Theory and Practice. C.M.E.A. Publication.
- Zenker, Renate, The Dynamic and Complex Nature of Musical Understanding in Hanley, B. & Goolsby, T (2002). Musical Understanding – Perspectives in Theory and Practice. C.M.E.A. Publication.
