This episode introduces a simple, but powerful pedagogical exercise inspired by the short story writer George Saunders, which involves listening to a piece of music one segment at a time, describing what you noticed, and guessing what will happen next.

This episode was produced by Jose Garza along with Team Lead Jennifer Weaver.

SMT-Pod Theme music by Zhangcheng Lu; Closing music "hnna" by David Voss. For supplementary materials on this episode and more information on our authors and composers, check out our website: https://smt-pod.org/episodes/season03/

Welcome to SMT-Pod, the premiere audio publication of the Society for Music Theory. This episode introduces a simple, but powerful pedagogical exercise inspired by the short story writer George Saunders, which involves listening to a piece of music one segment at a time, describing what you noticed, and guessing what will happen next.

I’m a huge fan of the short-story writer George Saunders. I first got to know his writing when I read Lincoln in the Bardo, his wildly inventive novel set in the cemetery where Abraham Lincoln mourns his son, and where a horde of dead people wait to complete their journey to the afterlife. Since then, I’ve read almost all his short-story collections. I hadn’t read any of his non-fiction, however, until last Christmas, when my wife bought me his book about 19th-century Russian short stories, a book called A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.

In one chapter from this book, Saunders describes an analytical method that he uses with his students at Syracuse University. And he writes this (and I’m quoting him here): “I’ll give you a page at a time. You read that page. Afterward, we’ll take stock of where we find ourselves. What has the page done to us? … What are we expecting to happen next?” He goes on to say this: The basic drill I’m proposing here is: read the story, then turn your mind to the experience you’ve just had. Was there a place you found particularly moving? Something you resisted or that confused you? A moment when you found yourself tearing up, getting annoyed, thinking anew? Any lingering questions about the story? Any answer is acceptable. If you … felt it, it’s valid. If it confounded you, that’s worth mentioning. If you were bored or pissed off: valuable information. … The main thing I want us to be asking together is: What did we feel and where did we feel it? (All coherent intellectual work begins with a genuine reaction.)

So, from here, Saunders proceeds to build a complex and compelling analysis of Anton Chekhov’s short story “In the Cart,” one page, one impression, one “genuine reaction” at a time.

The “drill” that he describes is as simple as it is powerful. It encourages students to see literary form as something created through the act of reading rather than imposed as an external archetype. It gives them time to ponder how expectations are created from passage to passage and confirmed or denied by what follows. Plus, it’s a lot of fun.

I devoured Saunders’s book over that winter break, and I couldn’t stop thinking about his page-at-a-time approach. At the time, I happened to be preparing to teach a class on the analysis of contemporary music. I knew I wanted to have a unit on form, but I also knew that I didn’t want it to be overly taxonomical, partly because we would be dealing with a lot of music that didn’t fit prescribed models and also because the class was geared toward grad students not majoring in music theory; they might recoil if I inundated them with too many labels and formal archetypes. I was struggling to find a way to approach the analysis of form intuitively, and I wondered if I just might have found my approach, not from a music theory book but from a book about fiction.

So, with some trepidation, I gave it a shot. I had the class listen to several sections of a piece without the score (and I remember it was Sky Macklay’s single-movement work for string quartet, a piece called Many, Many Cadences), and after each segment I simply asked, What did you notice and what do you think will happen next? I expected befuddlement, or even mild annoyance. What I got was one of the most invigorating class discussions I’ve ever had.

There was such an explosion of raised hands that I could hardly keep up, and every single person had something to say, even students who normally held back. And what they said blew me away. It was sophisticated, creative, perceptive, and deeply attuned both to the technical and also expressive qualities of the music. I learned more about the piece—and more about the students and their ways of listening—than in any previous class discussion over my nearly twenty years of college teaching.

I’ve used the page-at-a-time method many times since—with everything from contemporary music to Baroque music, with classical and pop, with undergrads and grad students—and it has always worked. Now, granted, it has required some pre-planning. When I did the exercise with the Sky Macklay piece, for example, I had already spent a couple of weeks encouraging them to see form as something created through the act of listening rather than imposed from the outside, and I had worked hard to create a class environment where they were free to experiment and express themselves. I also made sure the segments I played from Macklay’s piece were digestible—long enough to give them a feeling for what was happening but not so long that they couldn’t remember what they heard.

But with this kind of pre-planning, with the right conditions set, the page-at-a-time exercise can be remarkably effective. For me, it has been transformative. It has become a go-to approach when I want to get students listening carefully to the tendencies of musical material, and it has fundamentally changed how I think about and teach musical form.

Now, of course, what I was doing with my students—that is, hearing form processually, in time—is not new. Plenty of music theorists have advocated for the benefits of processual listening. I’m thinking, for example, of Janet Schmalfeldt’s concept of “becoming”—her idea that much Romantic music involves what she calls “retrospective reinterpretation,” where through the act of listening we discover that a section that we thought had one function (say, an introduction) comes to take on another function (say, a primary theme).

I’m also thinking of Christopher Hasty’s theory of metrical “projection,” which essentially explains how we experience meter in time. Then there’s David Lewin’s phenomenological, perception-based analyses, as well as Judy Lochhead’s book Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music, which views structure not as something pre-determined, waiting to be discovered by the analyst, but created via the act of analysis. Though these authors inhabit a different sphere from Saunders, they share a kinship with him, in that they are likewise interested in the moment-to-moment perception of artistic forms.

Still, I can’t quite shake the feeling that despite this kinship, Saunders is doing something a little different. For one thing, the act of self-reflection is even more central to his approach. He insists that students pause and describe what they have read and what they think they’ll read next; the time to reflect, and then to articulate what you have reflected on, is built into his method.

His approach also requires students to momentarily set aside labels and pre-existing models. Just before showing the first page of Chekhov’s story, he writes this: “Before we start, let’s note, rather obviously, that, at this moment, as regards ‘In the Cart,’ your mind is a perfect blank.” He doesn’t begin by introducing various plot archetypes and the terms associated with them, or by telling his students what kinds of characters and themes tend to appear in Chekhov’s stories. He just lets them read and form their own impressions.

It is these two features—stopping to articulate your thoughts and dispensing momentarily with formal labels—that make the page-at-a-time approach so effective as a pedagogical tool. Hearing musical form can be enormously challenging for students because it means processing so much information at once. Diagramming a sonata exposition, for example, overtaxes students’ “cognitive load,” to borrow a term from psychology, which Leigh VanHandel explores in a wonderful essay from her edited collection, The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy.

This is why some of the best writing on the pedagogy of musical form recommends that teachers begin by letting students discover the salient features of a work or a passage on their own, without overwhelming them with jargon. Seth Monahan’s essay on teaching Classical form, from The Norton Guide to Teaching Music Theory, is particularly strong in this regard: “Rather than simply trotting out definitions,” he writes, “you can … ask [students] to determine inductively, alone or in groups, the key features of some form or section thereof.” Listening a page at a time relieves more “cognitive load” than any other strategy I have used to help students understand musical form.

For one thing, it releases them from the burden of worrying about whether they are getting the “right” answer (Is this a period or a sentence? What kind of rondo form is this? Where are the MC and the EEC?). Instead, it merely asks them to notice what the music is doing now and what it might do next—or, as Áine Heneghan puts it in a 2020 essay about the teaching of form, to focus “less on what the form is and more on how it comes into being.” Finally, a Saunders-inspired method responds to calls to use improvisation and recomposition in the music theory classroom, since imagining what comes next in a piece of music often requires performing or notating what you hear in your head and comparing it with what actually happens.

Okay, so I can talk about the method all I want, but the best way for you to see its value is to experience it yourself. You’re going to pretend you’re a student, and I’m going to take you through a page-at-a-time analysis of a song by the French-born English composer Maude Valérie White, and the song is called “So We’ll Go No More a Roving.” So as not to influence your listening too much, I won’t tell you much about White, other than to say that she’s a great composer whose music deserves to be studied more. But if you’d like to learn more about her, you can find a link on the SMT-Pod site, directing you to a page I created about her on my own website called Art Song Augmented.

The song is based on a poem by Lord Byron, so let’s start there. I’ll read the poem aloud, and as you listen, simply ask yourself what tone you think the composer will use for her musical setting. Here’s the poem.

So, we’ll go no more a roving

So late into the night,

Though the heart be ne’er as loving,

And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,

And the soul wears out the breast,

And the heart itself must pause,

And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,

And the day returns too soon,

Yet we’ll go no more a roving

By the light of the moon.

So, I’ll pause for a moment to let you make your guesses. What kind of music do you think will go with these words? What mood will White evoke? Take a moment and ponder this question [pause].

Well, considering the almost sing-song poetic meter (So we’ll GO no MORE a ROV-ing / So LATE in-TO the NIGHT), you might imagine a musical setting with a relaxed and even light-hearted tone, a lilting rhythm perhaps, maybe a gentle, twinkling piano accompaniment. You might even imagine that the scene here is a party that has ended, and you’re picturing the party fading into the distance.

On the other hand, you may have picked up on some wistful, even melancholic undertones. On the face of it, the poem describes the end of a nighttime romantic encounter. But there are clearly other layers of meaning here. The fading of day has been interpreted by some critics as the loss of pleasure in general, the fading of youth, or even the coming of death. If you read the poem in this way, you might have envisioned a somber setting, with a lower-register accompaniment, for example, with more chromaticism, with a slower tempo and a greater sense of expansiveness. Or maybe you picture a musical setting that captures both of these feelings, a song that is wistful and gentle, bitter and sweet.

Let’s hear what Maude Valérie White does with these words, and let’s do so one section of the song at a time. I’ve broken the song into five segments. I’ll play each segment, drawing from a wonderful recording of this song by soprano Felicity Lott and pianist Graham Johnson. As you listen to each section, as yourself, What do you notice and what do you think will happen next?

So here is segment 1 of the song.

[segment 1 of the song]

So, I’ll give you a moment to think about your answer to the first question: what did you notice? [pause].

Well, you might have noticed the slow tempo—relaxed, a little drowsy, even as the music is carried onward by the bah–BAH–bah—bah–BAH–bah rhythm that you in the piano once the vocal melody enters. White seems to be going for the bittersweet solution that I mentioned a moment ago. I certainly don’t hear a party fading into the distance. I hear night descending slowly, and a touch of sadness that this is happening, with the many gentle dissonances.

A lot of those dissonances happen in the long piano introduction, which sets this nighttime scene and starts with right hand and left hand rather close together, and then they drift apart, right hand moving upward, left hand moving downward, and then it settles onto a dominant pedal, above which we hear floating ant sometimes dissonant right-hand chords. You may also have noticed that the second melodic phrase is a varied repetition of the first, and that the second phrase ends in a minor key—more bitter than sweet.

[the music to “and the moon be still as bright”]

So, that’s what we noticed. What do you think will happen next? Here, too, I’ll give you a moment to ponder [pause].

We’ve heard two similar phrases, one for each of the couplets in the opening stanza. And those two couplets again are “So we’ll go no more a roving / So late into the night / Though the heart be ne’er as loving, / And the moon be still as bright.” The next stanza goes like this.

For the sword outwears its sheath,

And the soul wears out the breast,

And the heart itself must pause,

And love itself have rest.

Maybe White will give us a longer, more continuous phrase, because of the many and’s in this stanza (“And the soul wears out the breast, / And the heart itself must pause, / And love itself have rest”). You might also wonder what will happen with the piano accompaniment. Will it change, becoming more dramatic and active, with the reference to “sword” perhaps as the inspiration? Will it cease the bah–BAH–bah—bah–BAH rhythm when we get to words like “pause” and “rest”? And what about the harmony? Perhaps we’ll return to a major key and end with a restful cadence in that key.

Well, let’s hear what happens. Here’s the next segment of the song. And again, as you listen, ask yourself, what do you notice and what do you think will happen next?

[segment 2 of the song]

So, What did you notice? Take a moment again to answer that question for yourself [pause].

This is not at all what we were expecting. White doesn’t move on to the second stanza; she repeats the last two lines of the first stanza, and she does so not just once but twice. We hear “Though the heart be ne’er as loving, / And the moon be still as bright / Though the heart be ne’er as loving, / And the moon be still as bright / And the moon be still as bright.” The repetition swells to a climax (on “though the HEART”) and then decays, before settling onto an authentic cadence in the home key.

[the music to “though the heart be ne’er as loving, and the moon be still as bright”]

Here, if I were actually doing this exercise with a class and they commented on the surprise repetition of the text, I might ask a follow-up question: why do you think White chose to do such a thing? In my mind, the repetition suggests that the speaker of the poem doesn’t want this nighttime encounter to end—or, if we read the poem a little more metaphorically, doesn’t want youth to fade.

Okay, next question: What do you think will happen next? Will White set the next stanza—the one about the sword that wears out its sheath and the soul that wears out the breast—to similar music, or will she use new material? If new material, how might it change? Will she create a moment of musical rest that responds to “And the heart itself must pause, / And love itself have rest,” and how might this moment compare with the authentic cadence that we heard at the end of the previous section? You may have your own predictions, but let’s hear what White does next. Here is segment 3.

[segment 3]

So again, this drill is by now getting familiar: What did you notice? Once more, I’ll pause again for a moment and let you think [pause].

Well, you probably noticed the louder dynamic (there happens to be a sforzando and a risoluto expression marking in the score), as well as the more propulsive accompaniment. We no longer hear the bah–BAH–bah—bah–BAH rhythm but instead a steady pulse. I’m also struck by the sudden cessation of motion on the words “must pause” (on a diminished seventh chord, no less), placing us in a state of suspended tension.

[the music to “must pause”]

I notice, too, that after this, the melody moves to a high tonic pitch on the word “rest,” but a pitch that doesn’t occur over a tonic chord.

[the music to “and love itself have rest”]

White provides us with a moment of musical rest, with that long tonic pitch, but it’s not a moment of rest in the tonic key, and as if to underline this point, the piano even returns to the music from the song’s introduction, the same melody we heard at the beginning, but it’s now been transposed from E major (the tonic) into A major (the subdominant). We’re home, in other words, … but not really.

[the brief piano interlude that follows]

So, next question: based on what we’ve heard, What do you think will happen next? [pause].

White has returned to the opening material but in the “wrong” key, and the melody is in the “wrong” part (that is, the melody is in the piano rather than in the voice). How will that affect what comes next? Byron’s poem has one more stanza, and it goes like this.

Though the night was made for loving,

And the day returns too soon,

Yet we’ll go no more a roving

By the light of the moon.

Will the piano continue with the tune, or will the vocal melody take it over? Giving the melody solely to the piano might suggest that the beloved goes a roving in a different direction from the poetic speaker—if, that is, we imagine the piano’s melody as representing another character in the drama of the song. If, on the other hand, the singer wrests control of the melody from the piano, maybe even bringing it back to the home key, that might suggest that the speaker of the poem is trying to hold on to this blissful, fleeting moment.

Even aside from what happens in the melody, you might have predictions, guesses about what will happen to the harmony. Presumably, the song will end in the home key, but will it return to it easily or with difficulty, and will the final couplet (“Yet we’ll go no more a roving / By the light of the moon”) echo the music of the opening couplet, which is similar (“So, we’ll go no more a roving / So late into the night”), as if to suggest that the night lingers in memory. Or will the music change radically, implying that this moonlit experience has vanished irrevocably?

Let’s find out, by listening to White’s setting of the first half of the final stanza of the poem.

Though the night was made for loving,

And the day returns too soon,

Yet we’ll go no more a roving

By the light of the moon.

[segment 4]

What did you notice about this passage? [pause].

If you thought White would give the opening melody once more to the singer, you were right. Good for you! But if you thought that would happen in the tonic, you were wrong. The tonal fluidity of this passage is what strikes me most. The first line of this stanza (“Though the night was made for loving”) is in a distant key, and that key happens to be C major, so bVI in relation to the E-major tonic; as a teacher, you might ask your students to try to determine the key relationship or merely note that it sounds like we’re far from “home.” Another thing you might have noticed is that White swerves into a striking deceptive cadence on the words “light of the moon.” And here, just to underline the expressiveness of White’s choice, I’ll do a little recomposition. I’ll first play this passage with an authentic cadence and then as it is written with a deceptive cadence.

[recomposition and actual version of this passage]

Why would White do this? Well, the music’s reluctance to lead to an authentic cadence becomes a kind of metaphor for the speaker’s reluctance to face the light of day.

So, what do you think will happen next? We’re not yet done with the song—we can’t be, because we’ve just landed on a deceptive cadence, even though we’ve finished the words of the poem. Will White repeat the last two lines of this stanza as she did with the last two lines of the first stanza? Will the song finish dramatically or quietly? Will there be a final cadence at the end, and what will it be like? Will the piano introduction return? Well, take a brief moment to make your guesses … [pause] … and now let’s hear the rest of the song.

[segment 5]

So, this is the last time I’ll ask you this question: What did you notice? Take a moment and ponder that [pause].

The biggest surprise, to my mind, is that White repeats not the second half of stanza 3, the last stanza of the poem, but the second half of stanza 1. She repeats the words that she repeated previously in the song. Why she does this, I have to confess, I’m not quite sure. You may have your own ideas. I only wish this were an actual class and I could ask you face to face—and if I were doing this activity in a classroom, I’d obviously ask the students what they think.

Perhaps it’s that White wanted to end with something more sweet than bitter. Byron’s poem ends with the lines “Yet we’ll go no more a roving / By the light of the moon”—pretty grim. But White’s version of his poem ends with “Though the heart be ne’er as loving, / And the moon be still as bright”—much more hopeful, with the reference to love and the image of the bright moon. She emphasizes the brightness (and this is something you may have noticed as well) with a leap to a high note—it happens to be scale-degree 1, an E, on the final word, “bright,” and now at last it’s supported by tonic harmony.

[the music to “be still as bright”]

But it’s brightness that’s tinged with darkness: the harmony before the high tonic pitch is not a dominant seventh; the bass may go scale-degree 5–1, but above the scale-degree 5 is a dissonant diminished-seventh chord. And what I’m going to do here, again, is a little bit of recomposition. I’ll first play what White might have done: I’ll play a V7–I authentic cadence. And then I’ll play what she actually does.

[recomposition and actual version of this passage]

What better way to encapsulate the bittersweetness, the wistfulness and melancholy, that has animated so much of this song.

The last thing I notice—and one of the last things that we hear—is a motive in the piano that descends, and it sounds like this.

[motive at the end of the song]

We’ve heard this before. It happens at the end of the introduction—here it is.

[motive at the end of the introduction]

And we hear it first in the voice on the words “to the night,” the latter part of the phrase “into the night,” and it sounds like this.

[motive in the voice]

But now White repeats the motive in succession, connecting each statement to the next in a kind of musical daisy chain. Here, too, you can engage your powers of imagination and speculate about the reasons for this compositional decision and the effect that it has on you—and I’d like to think that if students were asked this question after taking part in this exploratory activity, where, as Saunders says, “any answer is acceptable,” they’d be full of ideas. And you may be as well. For my part, it sounds like night disappearing, all the more so if I recall the words first associated with this motive. These are the words I hear repeated in my head as the piano plays.

[motive with the words “into the night,” and then the song’s ending]

This has been just one demonstration with one piece—a piece of tonal music, a song with a text that can give students a starting point for their imaginative flights of fancy, a work by an unjustly neglected composer whose music they almost certainly won’t know. But, as I said earlier, my first foray into “listening a page at a time” was with a contemporary piece for string quartet, and the exercise was just as fruitful. I’ve also used it with a Classical sonata form, with top-40 pop songs, and with a host of different repertoire. And this, I think, is one of its main strengths of the method: because it is so open-ended and flexible, and because it asks simple questions that are applicable to different genres, styles, eras, and levels of experience, it can be adapted to almost any teaching situation.

It can also be paired nicely with other methods of analyzing form. It need not take the place of, say, form-functional analysis or Sonata Theory; it can supplement them, and allow students to better gauge the utility of these different analytical tools. Just to give an example of this kind of pairing: in a course on the analysis of tonal form, I had the class analyze Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s song “This is the Island of Gardens” from two different perspectives. I split them in groups, and one group listened to the song in its entirety and created a formal diagram on the board, based on Bill Caplin’s theory of formal functions, and another group listened a section at a time and captured their reactions and predictions with a kind of branching musical map that they drew on the board. We all came away with a vivid sense for the aims, the strengths, and also the strange compatibility of both approaches.

But over and above these specific benefits of listening a page at a time is something much more general: it has given my students confidence in their ability to do music analysis: to listen critically, to link the sounding material of a piece with its expressive effect, to trust their own intuitions, to better understand why composers make the choices they do, and to see that analyzing music is not just labeling it and describing it but playing with it. What’s more, the Saunders method has helped them to broaden their view of what music analysis can be. And I have to say that it’s done that for me as well.

Analysis, he writes, and I’m quoting him here, “is not some inscrutable, mysterious process. It’s just a matter of: (1) noticing ourselves responding to a work of art, moment by moment, and (2) getting better at articulating that response.” That process, he goes on to say, is “empowering” because it allows us to trust our inner detector, a detector that all of us possess, which knows when a work of art is surprising, hackneyed, pleasing, befuddling, or simply mind-blowing. And how do we know this about a work of art? Well, Saunders says it best: “We watch the way the deep, honest part of our mind reacts to it.”

Visit our website smt-pod.org for supplemental materials related to this episode and to learn how to submit an episode proposal. Join in on the conversation by tweeting your questions and comments @SMT_Pod. SMT Pod's theme music was written by Zhangcheng Lu with closing music by David Voss. Thanks for listening!