This is the third 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. This episode is the only one in the series where the improvisation uses notation, asking students to harmonize a chant melody with a very limited set of rules in order to introduce unfamiliar sounds, like parallel perfect fourths.

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 third 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. This episode is the only one in the series where the improvisation uses notation, asking students to harmonize a chant melody with a very limited set of rules in order to introduce unfamiliar sounds, like parallel perfect fourths.

Hi, I'm Alex Jonker, and I'm back with my colleague and mentor, Peter Schubert. This is our third episode of our Idiomatic Improvisation series. Today's episode focuses on Fauxbourdon.

[Intro music]

This is our one activity of the set that uses notation as part of the improvisation activity.

Yeah, so in the Renaissance, one of the, I think probably the most common form of improvisation was singing on the book. And the book is a book that contains lots of Gregorian chants, and the way they improvised on it was one person sang the chant, and another person kind of looked over their shoulder and made up a line based on what they saw in the chant.

And there's lots of different ways to do this, but the simplest is Fauxbourdon, where the person looking over the shoulder basically does parallel motion with the cantus firmus. But it does get more difficult at the beginning and ends of phrases. You can make a cadence, so forth. Plus, it's actually a three-part exercise. And I've found that it's very useful to have the student responsible for all three parts. So what you'll hear is the student eventually plays the cantus firmus and doubles it at the fourth below, so at the piano playing parallel fourths, and then singing the tenor part, which is the one that basically goes in parallel motion.

This activity, then, is a little bit less free than the other ones that we've done.

Oh my god, it's completely unfree. Like, everything, every note is accounted for. There's a rule for every note. The beginning has to be an octave below, the end has to be an octave below. There's a cadence that you make that you have to add to the chant if it doesn't already have one. So this offers absolutely no freedom, but it allows the student to do, to improvise harmony according to a formula in real time.

I think one of the best things about this activity is it introduces students to sounds that they haven't really heard before or are not super familiar with. The idea of hearing perfect fourths, a lot of them have a big reaction to this. This is kind of a weird sound to them. And they like it, but it's not something that they're used to.

Right. It's a good thing. They've probably heard of fauxbourdon in their history class, but really getting inside it is an entirely different experience. And it's very rich. Every chord has, almost every chord has three pitch classes. So it's a very rich sound.

Our student improviser for today is Grant.

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

Okay. So Grant, in front of you there, you have several little tunes, and they are sort of like hymn tunes in the 15th century. So it's sort of Gregorian chant time. And in the 15th century, they improvised in a style called fauxbourdon. Do you know what fauxbourdon is?

Ah vaguely, from music history.

From history, right. That's where they would teach it. Okay. So I'm going to show you you how to put together a fauxbourdon on this tune. So first, why don't you just play the first phrase of number one there.

[Grant plays piano]

Okay, good. And in order to make a good cadence, they would add two notes at the end, which would be F sharp and G, tacked on to the end. So why don't you play that?

The whole thing?

Yeah.

[Grant plays piano]

That's it. And now, what you get to do is sing in parallel sixths all the way through. So you have to find the note that's a sixth below the first note, and then you have to just imitate the contour. While you play, yeah.

[Grant sings and plays]

Oh geez

Okay, you've got the right idea, except you're singing in the wrong octave. I think it would be easier for you to sing that one, that F there. That A. Oh. No. This. That one, yeah, that's it. Now you're not singing it. That's the one.

[Grant sings and plays]

Keep going. You've got to get cadence. That's it. And so then, the final adventure is, it's not really the final one, but is to have an octave below the first note, and an octave below the last note. So you're going to, other than that, it's all sixths all the way through, but the first one, you're going to start an octave below the first note, and when you get to the end, you'll be an octave below the G.

So. Go up. Okay, yeah. [sings and plays]

That's it, that was great, so do it again like put it together, yeah,

and can you sing it with your open mouth rather than having just so we can hear it a little better, yeah, thanks.

[Grant sings and plays]

It's hard to go back to the G.

Exactly. It's hard because you're so used to going in parallel, and suddenly you're going in contrary, and you have to decide how far to go. You did very well at the beginning because you knew that if the cantus drops a step, you go up a step to get to a sixth. That was really good. Okay, so finally, the coup de grace here is to play the tune with an alto part that's always a perfect fourth below the melody.

Okay.

So you can do that first. Why don't you just play the parallel fourths?

[Grant sings and plays]

That was great. And I can see from your face that you think these are the weirdest noises you've ever heard. And it's true because 15th century harmony is not like our harmony. It's cool, but it's very different. Okay, so now you get to put all those things together. You get to sing the tenor part that you sang, starting on F, and you get to play two voices in your hands.

[Grant sings and plays]

No, you're not following. Just follow the contour of the upper line.

Yeah.

[Grant sings and plays]

Oh no

that's it; that was so great, but do it again, so you really put it all together, now that you know to go down at the end.

[Grant sings and plays]

Yeah! That was excellent!

Bravo! That was really good.

One of the biggest adventures I think with this activity which you heard Grant struggle with is differentiating between singing in parallel motion and singing in contrary motion. They really get stuck in this loop of singing everything in parallel motion, and then when they get to the cadence, it's often very hard for them to switch their brains and then sing in contrary motion to get to that tonic note again.

Another difficulty a lot of students have here is this calculation at the very beginning so the endings are hard, but beginnings are hard too where they have to kind of make this mental calculation of I'm starting at an octave below this pitch and I need my next sung pitch to be a sixth below so the calculation they're doing in real time is what interval do I have to sing and in what direction so that I can sing the note under the next pitch. Peter, you mentioned there's other ways to do this activity. So we heard Grant walk through a very strict set of procedures here how else could we have our students do this activity?

Well, one of the other techniques that I use in my advanced improvisation classes is something called contrapunto fugato which is where you look at the chant but instead of singing in parallel in homorhythm you actually try to put a florid motive against the cantus firmus and I've had some success with that but it's terribly difficult.

Once Julie Cumming, my colleague here, and I gave a paper at the AMS and about contrapunto fugato and improvising on a long note Cantus Firmus, and at the end of it, Richard Taruskin, who is actually an old friend of both of us, came up to us and said, 'This is great what you're doing.' He said, 'We should have been doing this years ago, but we were too afraid.' And I think one of the problems with doing improvisation is the teacher who's the one who's scared. I think the students are actually much less afraid, but for the teacher to be willing to enter this vulnerable state is pretty scary.

In our next episode, you'll hear another historical improvisation technique from the Renaissance period: improvising First Species canons. So, join us next time to hear about that.

[Outro music]

[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!