[Editor's note: With the advent of our online journal, we now have the capability to embed video into the context of articles. We hope to include one or more articles in each issue that will use this technology as a means to model teaching strategies and ideas for the reader. We are constantly on the lookout for contributors to the Kansas Music Review who would be willing to record excerpts from their classes that demonstrate effective or unique teaching techniques. If you would like to contribute, or if you could suggest a teacher who would share their expertise with the profession, please contact Steve Oare at .]

Recent research in music literacy has emphasized the increasingly pronounced link between music literacy and the ability to play and sing by ear. According to Lehmann, Sloboda, and Woody (2007), this process of moving from sound to symbol is much the same in music as it is in language. According to Sloboda, "no-one would consider teaching a normal child to read while he was at a very early stage of learning spoken language. Yet it seems the norm to start children off on reading at the very first instrumental lesson without establishing the level of musical awareness already present."

Hiatt & Cross (2006) state that reading proficiency and meaningful musical performance are the result of clear mental images of sound. When students learn to create aural images in their heads, they conceptualize music in such a way that they can anticipate musical patterns, and picture musical contour, allowing them to sight-read more fluently. When students learn to rely on their audiation for musical information rather than on the teacher or notation, they improve their ability to play in tune and maintain a steady tempo (Liperote, 2006). Robinson (1996) also states that researchers have found positive correlations between bands receiving superior sight-reading ratings and their inclusion of vocalization activities during rehearsals. Vocalization in music classes also aid in the development of tone and intonation, consistency of tempi, and positive attitudes toward music class. Finally, Waller (2010) states that writing and reading go hand in hand. In order to be musically literate, one must be able to notate and compose music.

While music pedagogues emphasize the link between reading, notating, singing, and playing by ear, many teachers continue to spend the majority of their class time leading notation centered drill exercises in an attempt to teach music reading. One reason for this perpetuation of traditional teaching strategies is that we tend to teach as we were taught. Without having first seen sound to symbol activities in action, it is hard to imagine what these activities may look like. Teachers are in need of examples upon which to model their own teaching. NAfME's Music Educators Journal and Teaching Music have both provided a number of articles based on sound to symbol approaches, but there is still a need for examples that address the link between sound to symbol and student notation.



The embedded video provides an example of a middle school band that incorporates dictation and singing into the sound to symbol process. The Washington Middle School band program, under the direction of Greg Allison, is consistently one of the strongest programs in the northwest. The bands have been invited to play at the Washington State and Northwest Music Educators Conferences as well as the Western International Band Clinic, while sending numerous students to the all-state and all-northwest honor bands. This video is an unrehearsed, unedited excerpt of one of the band's warm-ups. When you view the video, you will see:

• Aural dictation
• Notation on the board by the teacher and into notebooks by the students (turned in at regular intervals for grading).
• Singing using solfege (movable do, la-based minor) and Curwen hand signs
• Transposition
• Discrimination of tonal and rhythm patterns

Because this video is unrehearsed and unedited, you will also see common mistakes by the students in the band and the same self-conscious singing that cause many teachers to give up on asking students to sing. You will also notice things the teacher may have missed. We all know that rehearsals seldom go exactly as planned, which is why Mr. Allison stated, "I hate even watching myself on video. There are always many things I would change." In this video, for example, some changes he may have made were to sing the whole phrase through before breaking it down into pieces, have the students sing back patterns using hand signs, and separately dictating the rhythm patterns and pitch patterns.

What Can We Accomplish?
"Conceptual understanding is imperative for intrinsic involvement."
- Americole Biasini

This quote, from his college professor provides the impetus for many of the activities seen in the Washington Middle School rehearsals. In order to develop the type of literacy needed to be an independent musician who can perform, create, and relate to music, one must have a strong understanding of the concepts that form the structure of music. Primary among these concepts are those having to do with rhythm and contour. In our email conversation, Mr. Allison stated that he chose to direct this dictation exercise because:

• Students understand notation much more deeply when encoding rather than decoding—which is why we do dictation.
• This also leads students well into the process of composing.
• Rhythm dictation helps students to relate much more deeply to ratios/proportions of pulse when defining the rhythmic information.
• Aural dictation develops, considerably, a more refined overall sense of tonality and the students self-correct at a much higher frequency.
• Students become "fluent" in far more keys.

There are further benefits to activities such as this. First, kindergarten teachers help their students to discriminate between b's and d's by asking them to draw b's and d's. By writing, students gain a deeper understanding of notational structure, thereby improving their ability to discriminate between subtle differences in notation. We can do the same type of thing in music. For example, students often can be found drawing pairs of eighth notes that look like two half notes with a beam across the top. Other students may draw notes on a staff that are unrecognizable or they may compose rhythm patterns with too many or too few beats in each measure. These notational errors demonstrate a lack of understanding that inhibits reading, but they can be assessed and corrected through notation exercises. Second, the use of solfege helps students learn to understand note function, which is a key ingredient to intonation within a key. This understanding of note function also aids in transposition. Further, by playing passages such as the one created by Mr. Allison, students learn that music is constructed using scales and arpeggios. Students learn the value of knowing their scales because they learn to connect the scale patterns they learn in warm-ups to the scales they identify within the context of songs.

What's the Sequence?

Obviously, the band in this video did not start off by dictating phrases and playing them in twelve keys. As Bruner points out in describing the concept of the spiral curriculum, "We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development." (Bruner, 1960, p. 33). The students in this video gradually developed the skills seen in this video. Bruner's spiral model can be used as a model for understanding the process by which Mr. Allison developed the type of musicianship seen in this video. This slow sequence begins in fifth grade beginning band, as students learn to sing back patterns using mi, re, and do and then learn to transfer those patterns to their instruments. Concurrently, students learn to copy rhythm patterns in the same manner. Once pitch patterns and rhythm patterns are learned separately, then the students learn to associate the sounds with their symbols. Then they combine rhythm and pitch to create melodies. As students learn to read these basic mi-re-do and quarter note, half note, whole note patterns, they begin to be aurally introduced to more pitches and new rhythms in order to prepare them for reading. This process of learning new pitches and rhythm patterns first by ear and then by eye continues in an ever-increasing spiral.

Each day, students see a new, short melody written on the board that they play as part of their warm-up. As new keys are introduced, they are asked to play the melody in all the keys they know. Transposition is made easier by the use of solfege. Some days, when new notes or rhythms are being introduced, warm-ups include "play after me" exercises in which the teacher plays a pitch or rhythm pattern that the students must sing back in solfege and then play by ear. Other days, when the goal is to reinforce established note and rhythm patterns, students are asked to notate patterns or melodies performed by Mr. Allison in their notebooks. After they notate the patterns, they perform them—often in multiple keys.

It is important to remember some basic pedagogical tenets when working through this process. First, remember to introduce rhythms and pitches separately. Otherwise, students will tend to confuse the two. This is why some students think a filled in note head and an empty note head on the same line are two different pitches. Next, remember that reading and dictation skills tend to lag behind technical skills. Therefore, it is appropriate to provide the students with a balance of music that may be beyond their reading level but appropriate for technical development and other music that may be at their reading level but slightly below their technical skills. This is why the students in this video only dictated a phrase using five notes and no more than a dotted quarter-eighth note pattern, even though they were technically capable of performing grade 4 literature.

Conclusion

The development of conceptual music understanding takes a great deal of time. Because of the pressures of performance requirements, it is easy to fall into a mode of simply teaching songs for the concerts. We all need to remember that the music we play is not the end goal in our classes. They are the means to the goal of life-long musical understanding. The songs we play and the concerts we perform are the materials we use to teach students to understand and appreciate the language of music. Teaching for conceptual understanding is time-well-spent.

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