Engaging Students’ Verbal, Visual, and Kinesthetic Responses

A preponderance of teachers’ pedagogical strategies rely on verbal interactions between their students and themselves. This is the case with discussions that ensue at the conclusion of music listening experiences, when students are invited to respond to a focus question that the teacher had posed. Teachers use student verbal descriptors to gauge the degree of students’ musical understanding and perceptual acuity. Likewise, music teachers spend substantial energy helping students refine their written musical descriptions (i.e., standard musical notation and vocabulary).

The education profession values students’ linguistic abilities because of its link to the rational, logical mind. Yet written words and spoken language are mere metaphors for the vastness and depth of thinking (Vygotsky, 1986). Words and symbols cannot convey the nuanced emotion and the repleteness of understanding embedded within them. Furthermore, student speakers consciously or unconsciously determine the extent of that which they verbally share about their music listening experience. Therefore, relying only on verbal musical description, especially when asking children to describe what they are thinking, feeling, and hearing during music listening, warrants caution. What other forms of description, in addition to verbal descriptors and standard music notation, could encourage students to be actively engaged during music listening?

Student composers might try drawing music listening maps—graphs, pictures, shapes, words, and lines—to represent that which they are thinking, hearing, and feeling as they listen to musical examples, including their own compositions. In addition to describing verbally “what about the music” they have depicted in the representations included in their music listening maps, it is beneficial for teachers to observe students “perform” their maps (i.e., pointing to the mapping symbols while they listen to the music). In that way, teachers witness the performance and can infer musical understandings that are not apparent in students’ verbal descriptions.

Students might wish to create the scores for their compositions using alternative music notation as well, using representational markings similar to those included in their music listening maps. As student composers seek to invent the form of notation most effective in communicating and preserving their compositional ideas, they might consult musical scores using alternative notation created by Cathy Berberian’s (“Stripsody”), John Cage (“Fontana Mix”) or Brian Eno (“Ambient 1: Music for Airports”), Pauline Oliveros (“Sonic Meditations”), or Nelson Howe (“Fur Music”) as inspirations. An interesting activity would be for students to listen to these pieces while viewing their musical scores and discussing what about the music was evident in the score. While learning standard musical notation can be an important skill to learn, the process of using an unfamiliar, standard symbol system can also be intimidating and cumbersome to people who want to perform and compose.

Implementing another mode of response, student composers might create physical gestures, or movement, to represent what they are thinking, feeling, and hearing during music listening. Movement provides students the opportunity to demonstrate not only what they hear perceptually, but it is especially effective in conveying affective responses that defy verbal description (Ebie, 2004; Kerchner, 2000, 2009, and 2014). Again, teachers will want to observe students “perform” these movements as the students listen to the musical excerpt in order to extract meaning that might not have otherwise been described verbally in spoken descriptions or visually in the listening maps.

Whether describing musical excerpts or their own compositions verbally, visually, or kinesthetically (i.e., physical movements), teachers must meet the students “where they are” in terms of the vocabulary they use to convey information about their music listening experiences. Having observed students coordinate their movement or mapping performances to the music to which they are listening, teachers can try to determine what about the music students are describing, and then offer students alternative words (inclusive of musical vocabulary) to describe those musical events or characteristics. The manner in which students describe their music listening experiences is valid, as it is their personalized representation of musical and experiential meaning. It is up to their teachers, then, to try to understand inferentially what students are trying to convey.

Repeated Listening. Focusing students’ attention during music listening experiences by posing questions or directives brings the opportunity for enhanced musical awareness and expansion of cognitive constructs. Yet, music moves quickly throughout time and space, making it impossible to experience in a single music listening occasion all that the music has to offer. Leonard Meyer (1956) wrote:

Because listening to music is a complex art involving sensitivity of apprehension, intellect, and memory, many of the implications of an event are missed on first hearing. It is only after we come to know and remember the basic, axiomatic events of a work . . . that we begin to appreciate the richness of their implications.” (46)

Therefore, repeated exposure to a piece of music, perhaps even their own compositions, facilitates familiarity. With repeated opportunities to listen to a piece of music, people listen from different cognitive perspectives, find musical sounds and elemental relationships they might not have heard before and, accordingly, allow for new body- mind-feeling-spirit responses (Kerchner, 1996). These different responses to the experience prompt listeners to reformulate, reshape, and revise their prior musical mental representations. Students’ initial impressions and neural mappings during music listening become more sophisticated and replete during repeated listenings. Similarly, repeated listening and its concomitant familiarity can lead to increased enjoyment. Therefore, repeated, and focused listening are essential in helping students develop “deep” music listening skills (Shehan Campbell, 2005).

Along with listening to diverse styles and genres of music, students practice their critical thinking skills by listening to multiple performances of the same piece of music. Inviting student composers to compare and contrast the different versions opens their eyes to possibilities for variation and stylistic nuance, and the subsequent musical and affective effects, within their own compositions. For example, students might initially consult a recording of “My Funny Valentine,” sung by Frederica von Stade. To explore other arrangers’ and performers’ musical choices, students might also listen to “My Funny Valentine” performed by Miles Davis, Sting, Kristin Chenowith, and Ella Fitzgerald. For a different comparison, students might listen to Frank Sinatra’s 1953 and 1962 recordings of “My Funny Valentine” and compare these iterations to his duet of “My Funny Valentine” with Lorrie Morgan (1994). To encourage critical thinking and potential composer application, teachers might ask students questions indicative of the “analysis” level of the Bloom’s Taxonomy (see Figure 10.1) to engage students in considering composers’/arrangers’/performers’ choices for musical interpretation, including the comparison of the song performed by singers in comparison to instrumental-only arrangements.

Listening in the compositional process must include diverse styles and genres of music created by underrepresented composers and performers, particularly people of color. Jenkins (2020) stated that while African-Americans’ influence on jazz and the blues has been well documented, “the history and aesthetics of ‘classical’ music compositions by African-American composers have enjoyed less robust inquiry” and that there is “no single description [that] could adequately capture the variety represented in this canon” (p. 1). Composers and performers of color have always been a part of music history, yet their stories and contributions to music have remained intentionally oppressed and concealed throughout the centuries. Student composers must have the opportunity to see themselves in composers and performers having the same color skin. This, too, is an inspiration and affirmation for budding composers who are exploring how to express their own personal creativity through music.

Music listening examples must also move students to encounter music beyond Western musical paradigms. Three of many free online resources that are particularly useful resources for finding popular and global soundscapes are the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (https://folkways.si.edu/), the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (https://www.rockhall.com/education), and Carnegie Hall’s Resources for Music Educators (https://www.carnegiehall.org/Explore/Learn/Music-Educators). Encourage students to explore recordings of global musical performances, focusing on timbres of indigenous instruments and voices, rhythms, melody construction, and tonalities. Have students note particularly interesting moments in the recordings. As a class or in small groups, discuss why these moments of interest have captured the students’ attention and how the composer/performer created those moments of interest. Prompt student composers to consider how those identified points of interest might inspire and inform their own compositions. In order to facilitate musical and cultural sensitivities, teachers are encouraged to nurture collaborative investigations and discussions of the performers’ and composers’ cultural contexts, the spaces in which the music might be performed, and the everyday functions of the music when encountering unfamiliar musics.