Pedagogy of Accidentals with Paula Telesco

Dr. Paula Telesco walks us through some of the "gotchas" that come up when teaching accidentals, and shares some great musical examples for explaining concepts like enharmonic spelling, double accidentals, and cautionary accidentals.

 

Transcript 

[music]

0:00:21.0 Gregory Ristow: Welcome to Notes from the Staff, a podcast from the creators of uTheory, where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education.

0:00:35.4 Leah Sheldon: Hi, I'm Leah Sheldon, head of teacher engagement for uTheory.

0:00:39.7 GR: And I'm Gregory Ristow, founder of uTheory and Associate Professor of conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory.

0:00:46.5 LS: Thank you listeners for your comments and your episode suggestions, we'd love to read them, so please send them our way by email at [e-mail]. And remember to like us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

0:01:00.5 GR: We'll be taking a deep dive into the topic of teaching accidentals today, and we're delighted to have Dr. Paula Telesco with us for this. Dr. Telesco is a professor of music theory at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Her research interests include music theory and oral skills, pedagogy, analysis of classical and romantic era music, the omnibus progression and her monism and musical cognition. Her writing has appeared in The Journal of music theory pedagogy, the Journal of musicology and music theory spectrum, among others. Most recently, her chapter on the pedagogy of accidental was released in the Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy, edited by Leigh VanHandel, who we just spoke with in December. Paula, thanks for joining us.

0:01:44.4 Paula Telesco: Well, thank you, it's great to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

0:01:48.8 GR: Yeah, we're delighted to have you. Tell us a little bit about yourself. You've been teaching at UMass Lowell for some time now. What all do you teach there? 

0:01:58.8 PT: Well, I've taught many things. Currently, I'm teaching a basic music theory. I also teach the non-major music history course. The basic theory I'm teaching right now is for non-majors. Well, they're non-majors, they're also music miners or people who want to get into the Music program, but they're not quite ready.

0:02:29.1 GR: Yeah. So, what we often call Fundamentals of Music, sorts of things? 

0:02:32.8 PT: Exactly. Yes.

0:02:33.9 GR: Yeah. Excellent, excellent. And I've to say, I really enjoyed your chapter in Leigh VanHandel Routledge Companion on teaching accidental. It reminded me of some things about accidents that frankly, I myself had forgotten.

0:02:47.8 PT: Well, thank you. Yeah, there's a lot more to know, certainly than students are aware of. The students who come into my class have mostly some background, and so they already think they kinda know accidental, but they don't. They know the basic things about them, but there are all these other things, the niceties of them that they're not aware of, so I wanted to make sure that they... I tell them, "This is the best theory deal in town." And I'm trying to give them as much information as I can.

[laughter]

0:03:27.2 GR: That's great. I think, one of the things I have experienced, I'm sure you've experienced as well, and Leah certainly in your teaching with the elementary, middle and high school students, I know we've talked about this, is that accidentals can be a really hard topic for students to first grasp. What are some of the things that students struggle with when learning accidental? 

0:03:50.7 PT: Well, for my students, the basic concept is not that difficult, it immediately starts getting difficult when you add an E sharp or E flat, something like that. And I tell them throughout the semester, we're gonna see why those kinds of notes are necessary. We're not just doing it just for the sake of putting a sharp next to the note E. So the black notes are always the easiest to understand, it could be this, it could be that, and we'll see why. And I tell them, I have lots of silly little analogies that I use. And so I always pick someone sitting in the front row and I say, "Do you have sisters? Do you have brothers? Do you have parents? Do you have cousins? And so on. And I say okay, so to their parents, this is their son. To their brother, this is a brother. To their cousin. So this person has different names depending on their relationship to other people. And in the same way, this black note has different names, depending on the context, it's relationship to the other notes and what key it's in and so on.

0:05:09.1 PT: So I start off with that kind of an explanation. One of the other problems is in the notation, and that's just to constantly reinforce that the accidental have to go on the same line or space as the notes, they can't