Results for Listening 01:
22 total responses

In the first assessment conducted early in the semester, students listened to a Bach chorale and were asked to indicate whether the music they heard was "organized" or "sectionalized" in any particular way.

About a third of the class (32%) responded by stating that the chorale did in fact have multiple sections. They were not able to describe the kinds of differences they heard but nonetheless asserted that the chorale was not one “lump” of music. Rather, it was a series of distinct musical units. Indirectly, (although not unequivocally) this finding confirms that these students were aware and conscious of cadences. To them, the cadences were audible and significant enough to render the music as structured and containing coherent and deliberate divisions. 

A small number of students in this exercise (5%) went beyond the elementary observation that the chorale had multiple sections (phrases) and noticed that one of them was indeed repeated (with different words). This points to a keen musical memory that was able to absorb and mentally store a moderate chunk of music, then recognize that this exact same chunk has been heard a second time in identical form. It shows careful attention and an ability to follow melodic, harmonic and rhythmic elements with comfort. 

Twenty seven percent of the class responded by stating that the music played was essentially all in one section. For them, the chorale was a continuous stream of choral music that simply flowed seamlessly from beginning to end, apparently with no interruptions, pauses or any other musical markers. 

The remaining thirty six percent of the class provided answers that were not entirely coherent or that did not coalesce into any discernible patterns.

Results for Writing 01

In this assessment, students were given a a string of notes on a musical staff corresponding to the melody in two consecutive phrases from a Bach chorale (the same one used earlier). The notes on staff were not rhythmicized (they all had the same durations) and were not shown together with other voices or harmonies. They were meant to represent the chorale's most audible melodic element (the soprano voice) -- the one a congregation might sing as part of a church service. Students were asked to identify and mark the notes that coincided with a cadence, e.g. the last note in the phrase (after which a slight pause was evident in the recording). Essentially, this assessment tested their ability to follow a simplified musical score while listening to a recording and make connections between the visual contour of the line on the staff (rising and falling) and the auditory shape of the sung melody (as heard from the speakers).

The results of this assessment lend themselves more easily to quantifiable analysis whereby slightly less than half the class was able to aurally pinpoint the location of cadences from the template I provided and slightly more than half either were not able to do so or were not clear on the nature of the task.

Results for Listening 03 ("What's Wrong, Johann?")

Results for this assessment, with its multi-question format were too expansive to list fully in this space. As noted in the Background page, the exercise employed a familiar strategy -- error-detection -- with the sole aim of encapsulating students' reactions to musical cadences. Through engaged listening, students had to compare the original cadence by Bach to an erroneous one played by myself. The errors in my rendition included registral displacement (playing chords in an illogical register, distant from the preceding harmony), playing chords of incorrect quality (minor versus major), playing incomplete chords (ones that are missing a crucial component), or simply playing chords that are different (if not entirely dissimilar) than the ones Bach used.

Themes and issues that emerged from the student responses included:

1. When faced with a minor chord that should have been major (Q1), students whose responses were technically "incorrect" proved to be revealing in terms of linguistic choices. Sub-groups of students used the following words to describe the error: "lower" (as a reference chord's third being lowered from a major to minor), "diminished" (incorrect but more in line with a minor sound than a major sound because of its structure), "unresolved" as a way of describing a general sense of irresoluteness.
2. When the error involved moving some or all of the four voices to a distant register that did not -- stylistically or logically -- follow the register in which the previous chord was (Q5), students did well in describing what they heard. When I displaced only three of the four voices, however, students' language choices revealed a clumsy (yet instructive) grasp of the four-part, SATB format. Instead of saying "the soprano, alto, and tenor voices" or "the upper three voices", students used such expressions as: "top harmonies", "treble", "high harmony", and "the upper chord".
3. When I changed the last chord in the cadence (Q6) to a harmony that is different yet similar to Bach's (has common properties but a different quality and foundation), student responses illuminated their thought process: again the word "lowered" came up (pointing to the erroneous chord's minor quality and lower place in the key), the word "unresolved" appeared multiple times (the cadence I played was in fact one for which the technical term is "deceptive"), and "bass note went up" (accurately describes the difference between Bach's cadence and mine whereby the bass steps up instead of dropping down a fifth).   

Results for Listening 04 ("Writing Cadences with Listening")

This final assessment conducted at the end of the fall semester focused on three phrases from Bach's chorale "O Haput voll Blut und Wunden" ("Oh, Head Full of Blood and Wounds"). In it, students were given the notes for the penultimate chord in three cadences and were asked to transcribe the final chord through listening. In addition to listening alone, students in the class were able to rely on recent units that would have helped them complete these tasks, such as the mechanics of writing four-voice chords, a discussion of vocal register, a transcription project involving a piano accompaniment for a Broadway song and an introduction to a music-analysis system (Roman numeral analysis). After completing the musical questions, students were asked to verbally reflect on the extent to which listening aided their work.

Bach: St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244 - O Haupt Voll Blut Und Wunden

("O Head Full of Blood and Wounds")

The results of this exercise were tallied according to three criteria:

A. Answers that featured the correct pitches, the correct harmony, and stylistic (read: good) voice-leading.
B. Answers that featured the desired harmony but used incorrect voice leading (voices that were out of range, etc).
C. Answers that were partially correct (some pitches correct while other not) or altogether incorrect.

If one were to lump categories A and B together as representing a largely successful outcome for this task (answers are within a reasonable realm of accurateness), the results show that, for cadences 1 and 3, the great majority of students (70%-80%) performed well. The reason for the poorer performance in Cadence 2 may have resulted from that fact that, while cadences 1 and 3 were in one  and the same key (D major), Cadence 2 was in a different key (B minor), which apparently proved confusing to the students.

Listening had a moderate impact on students' ability to complete the tasks in this assignment. In their reflections, the most consistent comment centered on their ability to use the audio as a way of determining whether voices moved up or down from the first chord into the second. A small number of reflections revealed a more holistic process where the audio functioned as one of many clues -- visual and conceptual -- that helped them realize a correct solution.