Jason Arndt Karl Ettinger MUL2010 11.15.

11 Chapter summaries 4-6 Although not all people consider themselves to be musicians, almost all human beings learn music, and much of this learning is informal. Chapter four introduces concepts of the musical learning process. In this chapter two primary methods of learning music are presented: transmission and enculturation. Transmission refers to the passing on of a tradition from person to person or culture to culture, and enculturation is the ongoing process of learning ones cultural traditions informally throughout their lifetime. We may view informal enculturation and formal discipleship as two ends of a continuum which includes a wide variety of approaches to learning music. In many societies professional musicians have traditionally passed their knowledge on to future performance in a master-apprentice style of training. This type of training may include several hours of practice per day in preparation for the regular lessons with the expert. On the other end, informal learning occurs in a wide variety of contexts. Informal enculturation includes listening to music both actively and passively, and in some societies informal learning is the principal means of musical transmission. In Ireland, for example, many musicians talk about the importance of parents, uncles, aunts, and neighbors as the primary source of their musical influence.

One name that sticks out as historically influential in regards to the musical learning process is violinist and controversial pedagogue Shinichi Suzuki. In his late twenties Shinichi traveled to Germany to study music under Karl Klinger, and it was also in Germany that Shinichi stayed under the guardianship of Albert Einstein, and met his wife Waltraud Prange. As a skilled violinist but a beginner at the German language, Suzuki noticed that children pick up their native language quickly, and even dialects adults find challenging to learn are spoken with ease by 5 or 6 year olds. He reasoned that if children have the skill to acquire their mother tongue, then they have the ability to become proficient on a musical instrument. He pioneered the idea that pre-school age children could learn to play the violin if learning steps were small enough and if the instrument was scaled down to fit their body. He modeled his method, which he called "Talent Education" after his theories of natural language acquisition. Suzuki believed that every child, if properly taught, was capable of a high level of musical achievement. Musical learning has been transformed internationally by the spread of oral, written, and electronic media. To define: oral transmission is the process of learning through imitation directly from an exemplar of a musical tradition; written transmission involves the use of notation and/or theoretical texts; and electronic transmission involves the use of recordings and computers in the learning process. In chapter five we are presented with an introduction to the subject of rhythm. Rhythm refers to time and the organization of events in time, and is fundamental to our world. For musical purposes, the term refers to the durations of musical sounds in relation to each other.

Western musicians usually begin their formal rhythmic training by learning to count evenly spaced pulses in measures, or bars of four beats. A pulse can be defined as a steady rhythmic unit, a beat is a regular grouping of pulses, and a meter groups pulses into recurring patterns of strong and weak beats. In addition to these terms, polyrhythm is defined as the simultaneous sounding of more than one rhythmic cycle. In listening to Beethovens Fifth Symphony, we hear rhythmic pauses or interruptions in the tempo at different pitch levels and in different parts of the movement. This motif creates consistency, tension, and excitement in the music. Not all music has a regularly recurring pattern of strong and weak beats. Music may also be performed in free rhythm, or without a steady measurable beat. Music in free rhythm is often performed by a singer or instrumentalist who doesnt have to coordinate with other performers. This gives the soloist the ability to convey his or her message with more flexibility in terms of both rhythm and expression. In listening to Hifumi Hachi Gaeshi, which I found relaxing and almost zen-like, you can definitely hear the random and unpredictability of the sounds. Personally I like the technicality of music, the numeric repetition of pulse, meter, and rhythm; however, I can appreciate the working outside the box approach that free rhythm explores. Chapter six introduces us to the nature of melody. Melody is what is left after you remove the words from the music. The pitch is the raw material from which melodies are made, and melodies organize pitches into sequences which have a distinct contour and rhythm. Mozarts Sonata for Piano in A major is an excellent example of how a melody can be used to create depth and variations throughout an entire piece. This work

sounds extremely simple, but once you listen to it three, four, even five times the melodic technicality really begins to shine. This is my favorite piece so far, and the story it tells needs no words to transition from the beginning, to the plot, and finally the conclusion. It seems that the melodies existing in most European music written before the 20th century, and popular music throughout the 20th century, featured fixed and easily discernible patterns, often periodic at all structural levels, and recurrence of durations and patterns of durations. Melodies in the 20th century seem to utilize a greater variety of pitch resources than previous periods of Western music. While the diatonic scale was still used, the chromatic scale seems to be more frequent during this time period. Composers also allotted a structural role to "the qualitative dimensions" that previously had been "almost exclusively reserved for pitch and rhythm". Kliewer states, "The essential elements of any melody are duration, pitch, and quality (timbre), texture, and loudness. Though the same melody may be recognizable when played with a wide variety of timbres and dynamics, the latter may still be an "element of linear ordering".