I tried something new yesterday in post-tonal theory. The topic du jour was harmonic structures in early 20th-c. music. I split the class in half (6+6) and gave six of the students a slip of paper with a concept and definition (i.e., Quartal/quintal harmony consists of stacked fourths/fifths. They can be augmented or diminished) and I gave each student in the other half a piece (Ives songs, Stravinsky, an early Scriabin prelude, some Debussy preludes). One "term" student was paired with one "piece" student, and they had two minutes to determine if they were a "match." After two minutes, they had to move on to the next person. In some cases, there was overlap: Ives's song "Majority," for instance, contains tone clusters, quintal harmony, and some non-functional triads as well. We then went over the material as a class, ensuring that everyone had definitions for all of the terms and an example to go with it.
My TA Megan suggested doing something similar as an error detection exercise: give each of the students in one half a specific part-writing error to look for and have the other half examine their counterpoint or partwriting exercise for that error.
My TA Megan suggested doing something similar as an error detection exercise: give each of the students in one half a specific part-writing error to look for and have the other half examine their counterpoint or partwriting exercise for that error.