28/2/2018 Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy

Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy,

vol. 2
Table of Contents
Bibliography
Contributors

Cultivating Creativity in the Music Theory

Classroom: Telling Tales with Texture and
Timbre
Deborah Rifkin, Ithaca College

How well do we foster creativity in our music theory classrooms? I think about
traditional and ubiquitous activities in our subject, such as gured-bass realizations,
dictation exercises, and chord-spelling drills, and I question whether we are doing all
we can. I fear that music theory is commonly regarded as an antithesis to creativity
among undergraduates because there is a prevailing focus on rote learning for
beginning tasks such as voice-leading rules, chord spelling, and chord recognition. I
would wager that most music majors think that music theory is not their most creative
class.

But, it could be.

In this essay, I describe an analysis activity that was designed not only to promote
creativity, but also to highlight timbre and texture—aspects of music that should,
arguably, receive more attention in our undergraduate core curriculum. Gary Karpinski
also advocates for better inclusion of timbre and texture in our classes and describes
some activities that could serve as warm-ups for the one described here. As timbre
and texture ascend in signi cance in 20th and 21st-century music, it is important to
incorporate activities that not only cultivate creativity, but also develop strategies to
approach, understand, and interpret timbres and textures in unfamiliar repertoires.

Fostering creativity
One means of fostering creativity is to provide a supportive environment that allows
personal creative traits to thrive. In her 35 years as a scholar on creativity, Teresa

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Amabile has identi ed essential personal traits that are conducive to creativity. When
designing exercises and activities for our classes, we can foster creativity by
consciously promoting and rewarding these traits. Amabile identi es the following
personal traits as necessary and emblematic of creative processes:

Perceiving in a exible manner

Suspending judgment
Keeping response options open as long as possible
Exploring new cognitive pathways
Remembering accurately
Using wide categories and remote association skills
Breaking out of performance scripts
Exhibiting ideational uency
Ability to use productive forgetting

In addition, we can minimize environmental conditions that inhibit creativity. Some of

the circumstances that scholars have identi ed as inhibitors include: (Rogers,
1954; Crutch eld, 1962; Osborn, 1963; Amabile, 1979,  1995, 2000.)

Surveillance while working

Competition
Lack of self-determinacy
Constrained choice
Expected evaluation of one’s work
Contracted for reward (money)

A Case Study: Jennifer Higdon’s blue cathedral

With these traits and criteria in mind, I designed a series of in-class and outside-of-
class activities intended to encourage and reward creativity, while also prioritizing
timbre and texture in a musical analysis. I inaugurated these activities in a junior-level
course on 20th-century music, but in retrospect I would like to include it much earlier
in the curriculum. I chose Jennifer Higdon’s orchestral tone poem, blue cathedral as the
basis for our inquiry and exploration. (To listen to the linked Spotify track, you need a
free Spotify account.) Higdon (b. 1962–) is a Pulitzer-prize winning composer, who
wrote blue cathedral in 2000. The work has been performed by over 400 orchestras
since its premiere, achieving a level of popularity that is extraordinary for a
contemporary concert piece. It is beautiful, accessible, contemporary, and written by a
woman composer. For many reasons, it is a good choice for this exercise.

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blue cathedral
Jennifer Higdon, Oberlin …
10:27

When I rst heard the piece, I was struck by its vivid sound colors, contrasting imagistic
gestures, and visceral and immediate appeal. I was also struck by how ill-suited these
initial reactions were for building an interpretation based upon traditional tools of
analysis. Whereas my reactions focused on timbre, texture, and ephemeral gestures,
traditional analysis would subordinate these events to a grander, overarching system
of sustained coherence based upon pitch and form. Whereas my reactions featured a
perspective based upon immediately perceived events, traditional analytic techniques
tend towards valuing hidden structures revealed by prolonged study. Based on these
initial impressions, I thought blue cathedral would be an ideal piece to explore
alternate, creative methods for building musical interpretations.

I introduce the work in class by playing the rst two and half minutes. During repeated
hearings, I ask students to write down a few sentences of prose descriptions of the
timbral gestures that they hear. I encourage them to use metaphors, and to come up
with multiple metaphors for each gesture they choose to write about. The work begins
with quiet entrances of a triangle, vibraphone, crotales, chimes, and celeste. Given the
title of the piece, many students relate this opening to an assortment of church bell
chimes. About 15 seconds later, the lower strings enter with the second gesture, a
descending line of planed triads that begin and end on C. Because of the extreme
contrast in register and the tutti forces, students often relate this gesture to the
ground, or to a community. The grouping of the triads into twos is often represented
in student descriptions as steps of a journey. In the remainder of this rst excerpt, the
contemplative mood and registral extremes of the opening give way to a section that
features solo ute and clarinet melodies supported by a lush orchestral
accompaniment. Students typically relate the solo melodies to characters of a story.
After students have had su cient time to write several metaphors, they trade papers
and read what their partner has written. If necessary, they elaborate on the metaphors
they chose. In pairs, they discuss the similarities and di erences between their
descriptions. So far, this exercise has encouraged creativity by allowing for:

Perceiving in a exible manner

Remembering accurately
Using wide categories and remote association skills
Breaking out of performance scripts
Exhibiting ideational uency
Suspending judgment

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Once students have developed, discussed, and compared their metaphors, I present
the composer’s program notes for the piece, which present some of her own
metaphors for the work. Higdon writes that she wrote blue cathedral around the one-
year anniversary of the death of her brother, Andrew Blue. She imagined a journey
through a glass cathedral in the sky and wanted the music to sound celebratory,
soaring upwards. Class ends with a group discussion comparing their metaphors to
hers, which invariably leads to a conversation about authorial intent and an
opportunity to debunk the popular idea (among students) that the composer’s
intention is the only worthy interpretation. Nonetheless, I have been struck by how
closely students’ description of the ute and clarinet melodies adhere to Higdon’s
description, correlating the ute to a female character and the clarinet to a male, and
further associating their intertwined melodies as sibling (or sometimes romantic)
interaction.

Continued Creativity and Discovery Outside of

Class
Building upon the class activities and discussion, students continue their metaphoric
interpretations of timbral gestures in a homework assignment. The assignment
spotlights several more excerpts, and asks students to repeat the descriptive activities
we did in class. I encourage them to not only create metaphors for what they hear
within each excerpt, but also to relate their metaphors between sections, in order to
represent the journey that Higdon describes in her program notes. In other words, I
tell them to construct a story based upon the development of timbral and textural
metaphors. For our purposes, I will skip to the last of the excerpts of the assignment,
which is the nal minutes of the piece, in order to show how the at-home work builds
upon the in-class activities.

For the nal excerpt, (8:12–10:28 on the Spotify track), I ask students to think about
closure, in particular to attend to di erences between musical closure and narrative
closure. I explain that musical closure typically requires some type of circularity or
repetition. Musical repetition is an important means of creating form, yet it seems
antithetical to the linear, goal-oriented trajectory of a story. As Peter Kivy explains,
musical closure involves repetition and a sense of unity, whereas narrative closure is
more linear, a storyline. In blue cathedral, the nal section reiterates gestures from
earlier in the piece creating a sense of musical recapitulation, yet there are also
signi cant timbral changes. I ask students to describe how these timbral changes
create closure in light of the metaphors and story they’ve described earlier in the
assignment. Asking students to construct a story from the accumulated e ect of their

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timbral metaphors utilizes the remaining creative traits that were not addressed in the
classroom exercise. For example:

An at-home assignment allows for keeping response options open as long as

possible.
Focusing on the di erence between musical and narrative closure emphasizes
exploration of new cognitive pathways.
Asking students to prioritize timbre and texture in their interpretations invokes
productive forgetting of the usual emphasis on pitch, rhythm, and form.

In the last minutes of the piece, all of the gestures from the opening have been muted
and toned down compared to their rst iterations. The sustained tutti string chords of
the opening have been replaced with a lone sustained and eerie fth created by
rubbing wet ngers across crystal glass; the chimes of the introduction are
represented in this nal section by Chinese re ex bells. One by one, orchestral players
put down their instruments and gently shake Chinese re ex bells, creating a very
gradual diminuendo into a muted and exotic chime e ect. Many students interpret this
muted e ect at the end as a representation of distance. In addition, they hear the nal
solo clarinet melody as Andrew, alone in the nal stage of his journey. His community,
however, is united. By the end, every orchestral player either shakes a Chinese re ex
bell or rubs a wet nger around a crystal glass, creating a quiet, tranquil shimmer
reminiscent of distant ringing bells. This last gesture combines two important timbres
and textures of the piece. The rst is the sustained, tutti string chords of the rst
section, which represents the grounded support of the community; and the second is
the chimes and bells heard throughout, which symbolize the passage of time. It’s a
poetic moment, in which a single timbre is associated with previous gestures of
support, community, time, and groundedness, creating a nal impression of tranquility
and acceptance.

Using vivid musical gestures, innovative sound colors, and a diverse palette of
orchestral textures, Higdon creates compelling musical stories. In an email exchange
we had in 2007, Jennifer Higdon con rmed in words what already seemed apparent in
the music:

I do compose with communication in mind. . . . I became so tired of pieces that didn’t engage
the performers and the audiences that I started to wonder what the point is. . . . I achieve
whatever I achieve by constantly asking myself in the composition process, “Is this interesting
to play and listen to?”, which is not an easy thing to guess. I don’t actually know what achieves
or defeats this purpose in the music . . . but I do want the music to communicate. . . . if it’s not
doing that, it’s not achieving its purpose.

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Higdon tells us that the purpose of music is to connect—to communicate—with our

audiences. More than ever, 21st-century musicians need to be able to write and talk
about the music they perform and compose, helping audiences relate to their art. Our
students need storytelling skills; they need to be creative not only in their
interpretation of music, but also in explaining it to others. The theory classroom is an
ideal arena for cultivating these skills. The activities and assignment described here
not only promote creative engagement with a contemporary piece, but also provide a
model of how to invite listeners into a more meaningful rapport with modern music.
Although blue cathedral is an ideal rst assignment in creative storytelling, the activities
presented here can be extrapolated not only to other repertoires, but also to other
aspects of music.

This work is copyright ⓒ2014 Deborah Rifkin and licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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