Two criticisms wafted about my general vicinity of late. One came from me. It was directed towards a student who has a tendency to think mostly note-to-note when she is sightsinging, taking down dictation, or writing harmonic progressions. Each musical phenomenon is heard in a constant now in which the melody begins anew from each of its notes in turn. Such thinking produces a multitude of unfortunate effects. Sightsung melodies tend to be devoid of shape, direction, or determination as they just plod along from note to note, perhaps with dynamic changes as notated but otherwise lacking interest, idea, or imagination. Dictation tends to be correct insofar as it goes but falls flat when the listening need be holistic rather than pinpoint—as, for instance, taking down a harmonic analysis of a melody’s accompaniment without using notation. Worst of all, harmonic progressions typically devolve into downright nonsense as chords march along without awareness of harmonic syntax, grammar, and direction. Voice leading and chord constructions may be technically correct, but the progression will be incoherent as music. It was just that all-trees-no-forest approach common amongst Viennese theoreticians that led Heinrich Schenker into re-imagining musical grammar along contrapuntal lattices of harmonic and melodic prolongations, at both the micro- and macro-level.
Criticism Number Two came from the opposite direction, when a chap had an issue with the sightsinging and dictation placement exams we give to incoming students. Given that both exams are arranged in increasing levels of difficulty, the student asked why the written dictation exam did not culminate in an atonal melody after the most challenging exercise, the taking down of a Bach chorale excerpt, complete with harmonic analysis, in four hearings. It was a good question, but it impressed me as appropriate to a departmental discussion rather than being bandied about with a new student. Therefore I declined to answer. Here’s what I would have said.
The notion that Western music has evolved progressively is as pernicious as it is false. Musical growth, rather tracing out a tidy rising curve, has been branchlike, sometimes moving upwards, sometimes sideways, sometimes turning back on itself, sometimes even devolving in one aspect or another. While a stepped dictation test might seem to reduplicate broad aspects of Western musical history—from single-line melodies to polyphony to homophony, with chromaticism appearing towards the end—the issue isn’t as simple as all that. Consider what we’re actually measuring in a dictation and sightsinging test. It isn’t what you think. Piddly minutiae such as right notes at the right time or plausibly notated dictations are mostly penny-ante scrip. For all but the greenest sightsinging professors, determining a student’s placement in a four-semester eartraining sequence is duck soup. Overall musical culture is on the table, and sizing that up is a matter of a moment.
One aspect of an evolved musical mind is an ability to hear past the now, to listen both internally and externally to music over the long span. The developed musician will be mentally far ahead of the current place in the score, hearing and filtering and imagining not only what’s coming up, but what to do about it. That’s especially critical in writing a musically compelling harmonic progression, which must move steadily through basic prolongational zones of tonic, predominant, dominant, and (usually) tonic again, each chord in the progression playing its part in shepherding the musical line along to its destination. But it’s also critical when it comes to hearing music in dictation, since successful dictation depends much less on the individual notes being heard as it does about the overall idea of the thing, the phrase in its beginning, middle, and end, its harmonic implications (or actual harmonies) and its unfolding over time. A person who hears horizontally, harmonically, and syntactically like that is immune to the typical ills that befall at-the-moment listeners, particularly that well-known failing in which a single misplaced note pushes the rest of the melody off track by the same amount thereafter, no matter how incoherent the result or Dadaist the harmonic syntax.
Exclusively note-to-note hearing is clear evidence of rudimentary musical culture. But where hearing a truly atonal melody is concerned, note-to-note hearing is often the only viable possibility, absent the chokehold of perfect pitch. Start here. Up by a diminished fifth here, a perfect fourth there, down a minor sixth there. A textbook in atonal sightsinging and dictation is organized by intervals—a chapter on 2nds, another on 3rds, another on 4ths, and so forth, each presenting artifical melodies that are manufactured largely out of the interval under examination. Sightsinging such music is far from easy and is best restricted to one’s most advanced students. But why do it at all? Atonal note-to-note singing and dictation rewinds the aural clock back to primitive ways of thinking. It’s like regressing to Big Chief Tablets and crayons and Palmer hand. Why work on enhancing thought processes that were best left back in childhood?
One way out of the imbroglio is to impart a faux-tonal scheme to an atonal melody and use that to guide the ear instead of toddling along by intervals. It’s a solution, but not a very good one. It reminds me of the stand-up comic who ranted about expensive and exotic foods that “taste just like chicken.” So why not just eat chicken? he bellowed. Why not just sing tonal music in the first place? I would ask.
Then there’s that business of perfect pitch. If you can sing atonal music via perfect pitch, then bully for you. Or bully for your perfect pitch, since it usually manifests all by itself as an inherent attribute. Perfect pitch is not evidence of a developed ear. I know any number of student musicians who enter my class with rock-solid perfect pitch but who haven’t the faintest notion of the music they’re actually singing or playing. They’re like idiot savants who can name the day of the week for August 23, 4352 but cannot hold up their end of a simple conversation. Just as freak skills are not intellectual accomplishment, laser-perfect-pitch folks may be actually less musically sophisticated than kids who are still struggling to grok basic solfège. (For the record, I have both perfect pitch and pronounced synaesthesia—two attributes often linked.)
Now then. For this paragraph I shall play—ever so briefly—the role of Snidely the Devil’s Advocate. Consider a highly evolved musical ear that arcs effortlessly over phrase structures, hears harmonic implications and their syntax, and grasps the totality of a musical passage as it is read, performed, or heard. Would it be of value for a musician in possession of such a sophisticated ear to practice atonal music via note-for-note intervals, homing in with an aural microtome, as it were? Perhaps such jewelwork might have some value, but only as petty tweaking and certainly not as a goal in and of itself. But I’m not sure it’s even possible. (Snidely exits in a puff of smoke.) Highly evolved musical culture is by definition restricted to fully mature musicians. It is almost unthinkable that a mature musician would not instinctively provide a hypothetical tonal overlay to even the most aggressively atonal passage, due to that evolved ability to conceptualize harmonic and melodic tonal language with rigor and depth. Such ability cannot be turned on or off at will. I have only my own reasonably evolved ear to use as a reference, but I can state with conviction that any atonal melody I encounter automatically acquires a faux-tonal wrapping complete with tonic, predominant, and dominant prolongations, cadences, extensions, sub-phrases, and the like. I may be making it all up, but it appears full-grown whether I ask for it or not. I would not be able to make any meaningful sense of an atonal melody otherwise. Oh, I suppose I could learn it note-by-note, but why bother?
So that’s why I don’t include an atonal melody on the dictation placement exam. It doesn’t tell me anything I need or want to know.