This is the fourth episode in Alex Jonker and Peter Schubert’s five-episode mini-series on “idiomatic improvisation” as a pedagogical technique in the music theory and aural skills classroom. In this episode, students improvise a Renaissance first-species canon with Peter, teaching them to listen, think, and sing all at the same time in a simple diatonic context.

This episode was produced by Amy Hatch & Katrina Roush along with Team Lead Caitlin Martinkus. Special thanks to peer reviewers Phil Duker and Joseph Straus.

SMT-Pod’s theme music was written by Maria Tartaglia, with closing music by Yike Zhang. For supplementary materials on this episode and more information on our authors and composers, check out our website: https://smt-pod.org/episodes/

Welcome to SMT-Pod, the premier audio publication of the Society for Music Theory. This is the fourth episode in Alex Jonker and Peter Schubert’s five-episode mini-series on “idiomatic improvisation” as a pedagogical technique in the music theory and aural skills classroom. In this episode, students improvise a Renaissance first-species canon with Peter, teaching them to listen, think, and sing all at the same time in a simple diatonic context.

Hi, I'm Alex Jonker, and I'm back with my colleague and mentor, Peter Schubert. This is the fourth episode in our idiomatic improvisation series. The idiom of the day is Renaissance First Species Canons.

[Intro music – Kyrie]

Peter, this is something that you have a lot of experience with, and the way you got started with improvisation. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Sure. I think it was back in 1990 that I gave a paper at SMT about improvisation. And the technique that I was using was one I found in Lusitano's treatise, where he shows how to improvise a canon against a cantus firmus. This is actually incredibly hard, and we never ask our students to do this. But I thought, I wondered if I could teach myself to do it, and so I had to memorize 14 contrapuntal patterns. Like if I saw—this is more on the book kind of stuff—if I saw a descending step in the cantus firmus, and I was a fifth above, what could I do that could be imitated at the fourth below, a minim later?

So I taught myself to do this. It was incredibly hard, because we don't have memories anymore, really. I just thought this was just horrible. And I did it with my recent graduate student, Jim McKay. And so I made the audience make up a cantus firmus, and then I looked at the cantus firmus and figured out what patterns I should use. And I sang. I sang the line, and then Jim, we did it again, and Jim sang the answering line, a fourth below, after a half note. And there was a big discussion there. I said that I thought that musical imagination in the Renaissance was largely visual, and some people freaked out. People don't want to think that, I think, about music in general.

So there was a big discussion about that. Anyway, then I left, you know, and I went to the elevator in the hotel where the meeting was, and somebody was standing there who had been at my paper, and he said, 'You've got balls.' And I thought, that is for sure the nicest thing anybody could ever say after an SMT paper.

Absolutely. One of my favorite parts about this activity when we do it in the classroom is that it has two students or multiple students improvising together. So in our other activities, we often have our students working together, but one of them is often improvising while the other one is playing a bass line or doing something a bit more prescribed. Where in this activity, as you'll hear, both people are improvising at the same time. We have a leader that's improvising a melody, and in real time, a follower has to be listening so that they know what to sing, and improvising the response.

It's very hard to listen and sing at the same time, because while you're singing, you're singing your note, you have to remember where the leader went and what direction, what interval, and it's hard to make up the melody for the leader, but it's also hard to be the follower. And so everybody suffers a little bit.

Our student improvisers for today are Grant and Alyce. So we'll hear Grant first.

He does only steps in thirds. So there's a way to restrict this for the beginner. Actually, it was Julie Cumming who came up with this idea that you only do, stay on the same note, or go up a step, or go down a third, and that simplifies life for everybody, because the follower also knows that those are the only intervals that they will have to sing.

So let's listen to Grant doing this.

I'm Grant Kane. I am a cello performance major in second year.

So in the Renaissance, they could improvise little canons, and there are simple rules for what the lead voice can do. And to even simplify them further, I'm going to tell you that from any note, you can sing the same note again, or you can go up a step, or you can go down a third.

Okay.

From any note. So it's not like scale degrees. It's just like from any note. And then I can do, if you do that, I can do the same thing a fifth lower, and it will sound great all the time. It's going to be consonance, consonance, consonance. Everybody's going to be happy. So sing a note.

[Grant sings]

Okay. That's very good. Now sing a tune that only goes up steps, or stays on the same note, or goes down thirds, and has a very regular rhythm.

What note did I even sing.

It doesn't matter.

[Grant sings]

Oh, hold on. I think you're not following the rules.

No, I'm not.

What intervals did you just sing?

Three, two, one, three...

So you went down two steps.

Yeah. And you can only go up a step.

Oh.

You can only go up a step or dig down a third.

Oh, you can’t go down a step, okay, oh, I see.

So your intuitions will tell you I would like to sing down a step. And the rules say, no, I’m sorry, you can’t do that because it won’t make a good cannon.

[Grant sings]

Okay, let's do that, let's do that. My first note is gonna be

Music

[Peter sings]

Okay here we go.

[Grant and Peter sing together]

No you have to you have to get moving.

Yeah, so he's gonna be a beat after you so it's a canon one beat later and down a fifth.

Oh, I see, I see. Okay.

I guess I forgot to say that.

[Grant and Peter sing together.]

I'm right with you. You don't like what I sang?

No, no. It's good, because mine ends. That's it, I think. Should I go on?

Of course, if I can follow you, that’s all that matters.

Okay, okay.

[Grant and Peter sing together.]

Holy smokes. That was like the longest canon I ever heard.

You didn't know how to end.

I was like, kept going up and then.

Wow.

One thing students often struggle with in this activity is differentiating between successive melodic motion and scale degrees. So, when we say you can go up a second or go up down a third for them, a lot of the time they're like kind of locked into a key and they want to think like scale degree two, scale degree three, and that's not the case here. They can sing from any pitch that they're on; they can sing up a second or down a third, and that is a whole adventure for, for the leader to kind of wrap their brain around. For the students who catch on to this quickly, you can increase the challenge a little bit by getting out of first species and adding in some passing tones. So let's listen to Alyce do this now.

My name is Alyce Renaud. I am a second-year student at the Shulich School of Music, and I am an Early Music Voice Performance major as a soprano, I also do organ on the side. I have no experience improvising. I'm definitely a note-reader type of girl.

Go ahead and make up the tune.

[Alyce sings]

Nope, you can’t go down a step.

Oh! No going down a step, sorry sorry.

Up a step or down a third.

It's actually very hard because your intuition, mour melodic sense, you're going to want to do that sometimes but I'm sorry you can't if you want to make a canon with me.

[Alyce sings]

That's perfect, that's perfect, can you remember it?

Yes.

Okay, here we go. You start.

[Alyce and Peter sing together]

That was great!

That was beautiful!

And you can hear that it sort of sounds vaguely Renaissance-y.

Yeah, vaguely Renaissance-y.

So we're going to skip ahead to something more difficult. Why don't you start by doing a repeated note and then go down a third and then see what happens?

[Alyce sings]

Okay, I like it. Now I want you to, every time you sing a third descending, put in a passing tone. Yeah.

Okay. Are the passing tones supposed to be like—

In between the beats.

Okay, so it really is. Okay, that was right.

Yeah, it’s really, in the weak part of the—

[Peter sings]

Okay, okay.

And if you want to go up a fourth, you can go—

Peter sings

Oh, I like that. Okay, okay.

[Alyce and Peter sing together]

Oh, I did a step down.

You went down a step.

I wanted to go down a step so bad.

And I heard that fourth, and I freaked out.

Sorry. That was so good.

That was excellent.

So one thing that's interesting about improvising canons is that you can do it without actually knowing what mode or key you're in. Like when I improvise canons, I sing a third, and I actually don't care which size third it is or where it might lie in the diatonic. I just sing some third, and then the other person sings the same size third because they have to imitate me. And that means that there's no mode. There's no key. It's completely free, and you could modulate around the circle of fifths.

This actually happens all the time, that as you introduce new fourths, maybe you introduce some flats, and the next thing you know, you're in C-flat major. That can happen. And so in the next improvisation, that you hear, I encouraged Alyce to start with a different size second. And I think in her case, the visualization, she was visualizing actual white notes on the piano, and you don't need to do that.

You know, there are different ways to do this. And I have a colleague, Catherine Motus, who's in Basel. And when she teaches it, she teaches first you sing the scale of the keys, which is exactly what you're thinking. And then you sort of fit your improvisation into that. And I don't do that at all. I just say, just start singing, and sing in the Phrygian mode if you want. You want to do that?

No.

Here's what you do. Seriously. So we're going to start on C. No, we're going to start on A. And your second note, you can go up a step, has to be B-flat.

Okay.

Sing something like that, and repeat your first note.

Okay.

[Alyce and Peter sing together]

That was nice, and it was in a different mode, and it had a totally different feel, and I thought it was good. Except we didn't have any descending thirds with passing tones.

Oh, no, I just did the—

Could you do that?

I can try.

Yeah, no, I think you can do it. Let's start here again.

[Alyce sings]

Is that wrong?

No.

That was lovely.

Oh, sorry. I thought my fourth was wrong.

No, it was good.

In Europe, they use improvisation a lot more than they do in North America, but it's really restricted to the early music crowd, And the question is, 'Is this really useful for the general population?' What do you think, Alex?

Yeah, this is something that we get all of our students to work on, and I think there's so many valuable things that they learn here about melodic motion and listening while they're singing and working together and creating these like nice consonances. I think they're getting a lot out of this experience that they don't get in a lot of our other traditional activities, and it's totally worthwhile for everybody to try.

And they like it, right?

They love it. And I feel like this one also, because when you first introduce it, a lot of the time it sounds like something that's going to be completely impossible for them to do. When I first teach it, I do it out of time, like I have somebody make up a melody first and then we all repeat back that melody and then we repeat it down a fifth and then we figure out how that sounds and then we put it together as a canon. And when we do it that way, they're like, 'Okay, I can do this.'

And then I tell them after we try that a couple times, “by the end of this, you'll be able to do this in real time.” And they think, 'No way.' And then by the end of the semester when they can actually do it, they're so excited about it, like “I remember first learning this and thinking I could never do this in real time” but they can and I think that's such an exciting accomplishment for them.

Yeah that's great. So tune in soon for the next episode of our series which is the last one.

Yeah, our last one is on classical phrase continuations.

Okay.

[Outro music – Fama Malum by Josquin]

[Outro Theme by Yike Zhang.]

Visit our website, smt-pod.org, for supplemental materials related to this episode and to learn how to submit an episode proposal. You can join in the conversation by tweeting us your questions and comments to @SMT_Pod. SMT-Pod’s theme music was written by Maria Tartaglia, with closing music by Yike Zhang. Thanks for listening!