Teaching Intervals

David Newman and Greg Ristow chat about four ways to teach intervals in music theory, as well as how to overcome some of the challenges of teaching intervals.

 

Transcript

[music]

0:00:20.8 Greg 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.

0:00:33.4 David Newman: Hi, I'm David Newman, and I teach voice and music theory at James Madison University and I create content and code for uTheory.

0:00:42.0 Greg Ristow: Hi, I'm Greg Ristow, founder of uTheory and Associate Professor of conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory.

0:00:47.8 DN: Thank you listeners for your comments and episode suggestions. We love to read them, send them our way by email at [e-mail] and remember to like us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

0:01:00.1 GR: Today we'll be talking about teaching intervals, teaching reading and writing intervals more so than teaching the oral side of intervals, which we'll save for another episode and this David, I find to be one of the most challenging things to teach in fundamentals of theory.

0:01:17.0 DN: There's certainly a lot of approaches to use and picking one is hard.

0:01:22.5 GR: Yeah.

0:01:23.1 DN: And doing them all is also hard.

[chuckle]

0:01:24.8 GR: Yeah, for sure. For sure. And there's just a lot involved too, right? I mean, it's like you've got the generic interval size. You've got the specific size or quality, you've got the inversions, you have the compound intervals, consonance and dissonance. It just adds up and it's one of those concepts that it seems like, I often forget to budget enough time for because there's almost always a next step.

0:01:56.0 DN: And it's one of those foundational concepts that if you are struggling with it, you're gonna struggle with everything else.

0:02:02.7 GR: Yeah, for sure. For sure. And I find it's also one that can be hard to motivate students to learn, because if you're not careful, it feels really like a terrible set of math problems.

0:02:13.2 DN: Yeah. Also, it's really easy to do if you have plenty of time but it's, you need to know it better than that. You need to know it so well that it doesn't take you time.

0:02:26.2 GR: Yeah and I think for a lot of us who are teaching it there's also that challenge that both Leigh VanHandel and Melissa Hoag talked about of we already know it so well, it's really hard to conceive of what it's like not to know it.

0:02:40.2 DN: Yeah. And there's all these extra concepts involved, the letter names and...

0:02:46.2 GR: So I guess one of the things that I think about a lot is this challenge of how do we keep the teaching of intervals musical, right? 

[laughter]

0:02:55.6 GR: I think I'm gonna be really honest here and say, I think the first 15 times I taught intervals it was the dullest thing. I remember saying to classes, I'm sorry, this is gonna seem really boring, but it's really critical. As like a motivator, and I guess it's an okay motivator but there may be better ways the more I've taught it recently I've focused a lot on ways to keep it musical and make it musically relevant.

0:03:25.3 DN: Yeah. Yeah. And of course we've also had... We've talked to people this just recently about other ways of making it fun, but making it fun is not necessarily the same thing as making it musical. And making it musical is certainly more compelling.

0:03:40.4 GR: Yeah. Yeah. And if you can do both, all the better, right? Yeah.

0:03:44.5 DN: Right.

0:03:45.2 GR: Yeah. So I guess I don't know. I'd be curious your take on this. For me, I spend a lot more time teaching when I teach intervals now than I used to talking about consonance and dissonance really early on and talking about intervals as a way to get into how notes work together or work against each other.

0:04:06.3 DN: Ooh. I think that's fabulous. Yeah. And I think we we're... We said, we're just gonna talk about the written theory of things today, but the intervals that are most fundamental to our physical world are those early low notes in the Harmonic series. So the octave and the fifth and the fourth. Well arguably not well. Yeah. But the fourth.

[laughter]

0:04:36.4 GR: Yeah, certainly before the third on the Overton series.

0:04:38.9 DN: Right. And those intervals are those Pythagorean, those things that are closest to the Pythagorean ideal.

0:04:49.6 GR: I feel like we should unpack some of these things, right? Like, so...

0:04:53.1 DN: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

0:04:54.0 GR: So when we say the Pythagorean ideal, we're talking about the, that these intervals come from ratios of frequencies or ratios