Critique
This study was of particular interest to me
because I’ve been doing a lot of listening/music appreciation activities
this year and am constantly surprised by responses from students. I find
that they often say things that may make little sense, yet the same
responses come from different students in different classes over and over
again.
“First it went high and then it went low,” is
one of the responses I get frequently after listening to a piece. The
author of this study would likely place this sort of response in her
“elemental music descriptors” category, which was the category used by the
study subjects most often. However, I wonder in my own classroom if the
students really understand the vocabulary they are using. We regularly
review definitions of pitch, dynamics and tempo, yet they seem to have
difficulty applying those definitions when describing how the music
sounded to them. When I question a student who makes the aforementioned
comment more closely to find out if they mean pitch or volume, they are
often at a loss to give me a definitive answer.
I’ve found that asking them to respond with a
mental image sometimes evokes more creative and effective responses. When
playing Handel’s “Music for the Royal Fireworks: ‘La Rejouissance’” they
frequently mentioned that it sounded like a “king coming to court” or
struggled with attempts to relay that sort of image. When listening tests
were given at the end of a unit, the students who were able to make such
imaginative leaps faired better on the assessment.
One response that I get with incredible
frequency is “that reminds me of Tom & Jerry, the cartoon.” The study’s
author would put this response in her “extramusical associations”
category, which was the second most frequent cited in the study.
When playing pieces like “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” by Bach or “Hodie
Christus Natus est: Kyrie” by Palestrina, I would inevitably get the
response “that sounds like church music” which would also fall into the
category of “extramusical associations.” In my experience, these are the
sort of responses made more often by my general music students and perhaps
that is indicative of the fact that most of them have virtually no musical
training prior to their experience with me.
Overall this article served to validate the
experience I have had with elementary age children’s responses to music,
and it helped me to assimilate my own thoughts on their process of
listening. From this point I would like to delve deeper into
understanding how the students digest music vocabulary. As I mentioned, I
believe they have difficulty understanding concepts like pitch, beat,
rhythm and dynamics because they are somewhat abstract. The concept of
tempo seems to come more readily to them. Because of this, I continue to
seek new and different ways to introduce and reinforce these musical
concepts using various activities as well as listening exercises.
The study focused on children who already have
some musical training, yet I would be interested to see a similar study
done with children who had no previous training. I tend to wonder if the
results would show more associations to personal experience and fewer
references to musical concepts. There is no doubt that by studying how
students assimilate the music they hear, we can better understand how to
create more meaningful music listening situations in the classroom.
