Assessing aural awareness (of cadences) during a

first-semester music theory course

What is the extent to which entering students recognize cadences, aurally?

During the Fall 2009 semester I administered listening and music-writing exercises to first-semester music theory students at a once-per-month frequency. These activities focused primarily (but not exclusively) on the concept of cadence, or phrase ending in four-part, hymn-style (chorale-style) music. Classes in which these questionnaires were assigned functioned as interludes on our quest of mastering fundamentals -- the study of music's basic building blocks: pitch, scales, keys, rhythm, meter, intervals and chords.  The cadence, as musical concept, is normally introduced at a later stage but one of the ideas behind this study was to investigate the students' pre-conceived notions -- both aural and intellectual -- of a cadence, without having studied it formally.

Aural and verbal responses assessed

Four assessments were used in this study as a way of gathering information on students' aural and verbal responses to traditional phrase endings in two chorales (German hymns) by J.S. Bach (1685-1750). These assessments were designed to tackle students' ideas and competencies about cadences from multiple angles, using a variety of strategies. The tasks that constituted these questionnaires aimed to illuminate student learning  and understanding about cadences in terms of their ability to verbalize what they hear, in  making connections between a listening example and a musical score, in identifying stylistic anomalies through error detection, and through the completion of a two-chord progression on the basis of played (aural) stimuli.

Listening 01

In the first assessment (Listening 01) I played the students a chorale and, purposely omitting the technical term cadence, asked them to comment on the excerpt's "musical organization", and soliciting their thoughts on whether the piece was "sectionalized" in any particular way. My assumption was that these terms would elicit responses having to do with regularly occurring musical phrases coming to an end in a certain way, pausing, and then continuing with a new phrase.

Writing 01

In the second (Writing 01), students were given a much-simplified version of two consecutive phrases from the same chorale's melody and were asked to indicate (using a common musical symbol) which of the melody's notes (from the string given) coincided with a phrase ending. I was trying to test the students' ability to follow a music score (which is different than reading music on your instrument or voice) and make a connection between a fairly audible moment in the recording (a cadence) and a single note from a long and seemingly equal string of notes on the musical staff.

Listening 03

In the third (Listening 03, or "What's Wrong, Johann?") the cadence itself merely served as a prism through which several error-detection tasks were given. After hearing the original from Bach through a recorded example, I re-played the cadences "erroneously", making changes that involved an incorrect chord (minor instead of major) an incomplete chord (missing a crucial element) and other types of anomalies. Students had to identify the error's essence and verbally describe it as it relates to the cadential moment as a whole. 

Writing 03

Finally in the fourth exercise, conducted close to the end of the semester ("Writing Cadences with Listening"), I had the students listening to a similar chorale by Bach after which they were asked to write (compose) a two-chord cadence in four-part style with the first chord given. Although writing cadences was not a topic that was yet to be covered formally, contextual markers were provided, such as clef, key signature, chord symbols (Roman numerals), so that students could lean on what they hear but also attempt to synthesize many of the concepts that were covered throughout the semester's course.