Abstract
How many times has this happened in a rehearsal: Students play a passage of music requested by their teacher, the performance falls apart, and the teacher responds by saying, “You just need to listen more to each other!” Then the teacher starts the orchestra again, same thing happens, the teacher gets frustrated and moves on. Sound familiar? I know I have been guilty of making that request of my students in the past. Why do students, when prompted to listen to one another, seem to not succeed in doing so? The answer may lie in how we approach teaching so many other skills in developing string players, such as practicing, tuning, or advanced technique—students need to be taught in an intelligent and sequential way how to listen to one another while playing. Learning how to execute a skill such as listening in the large ensemble requires students to be placed into situations that prompt their listening in ways they are unaccustomed to in the daily rehearsal environment.
“Learning how to execute a skill such as listening in the large ensemble requires students to be placed into situations that prompt their listening in ways they are unaccustomed to in the daily rehearsal environment.”
The book Dimensions of Musical Thinking (Boardman 1989) outlines specific applications of research in thinking grounded in the principles of Bloom’s taxonomy. The author calls for music teachers to engage their students in increasingly higher-level thinking skills, which includes critical listening skills. Scholars in music education have written extensively about teaching active listening in music classrooms (Bell 2018; Byo 1990; Cavner and Gould 2003; Johnson 2012; Madsen and Geringer 2000; Prichard 2012; Todd and Mishra 2013). However, many of the concepts in these articles revolve around teaching students to listen critically to recordings of themselves or professionals. While students are learning a valuable skill by drawing comparisons between recordings, this skill does not necessarily transfer to the task of listening to one another during active playing and adjusting during a rehearsal or performance.
Based on their findings, researchers suggest that listening activities are useful when supported by classroom dialogue (Bell 2018) and peer interaction in a collaborative ensemble setting (Johnson 2012), which may promote greater student engagement. In a study examining music teachers’ use of listening strategies in secondary ensembles, Prichard (2012) found that teachers reported incorporating teacher modeling and student or section modeling as a part of daily instruction, yet they placed less focus on guided listening. Furthermore, many of the strategies outlined involved a more traditional, top-down approach from the podium. Only Johnson (2012) advocates a more democratic approach to listening instruction, but even then, within the structure of traditional ensemble seating arrangement. Few suggestions are available for directors who want to teach their students active listening skills while they are playing in a large ensemble.
The present article will outline several strategies to relocate and rearrange your orchestra’s seating arrangements to put the students off their comfortable, daily listening environments and prompt them to listen to their peers in a different light. Before moving into strategies for teaching students to listen to one another, here are a few caveats. These exercises can be done with students of any developmental level. I have had good success with both beginners and university students alike using these strategies. Furthermore, students need to have individual technical proficiency on any given piece before undertaking any of these listening strategies. I often stress to my students that technique precedes musicianship, and that a higher musical function such as listening cannot occur until a student can be a good steward of their own part. Finally, it is advised that you attempt these exercises later in a rehearsal cycle, perhaps a week or two prior to a concert. I have found these strategies work best when a group has stalled on a piece, where they can play the notes, rhythms, start, and stop with one another, but there is more work to be done to make music.
Alternative Spaces
We know from results of research (e.g., Mishra 2002; Pearce and Wiggins 2006) that music is often learned in a context-dependent state. Put another way, this means that the space in which music learning happens often prompts correct musical performance. This is why when you take your well-prepared orchestra to festival, they might fall apart performing on an unfamiliar stage. The room you play in matters. I once played under a conductor who would say that in addition to the four instrument families in the orchestra (strings, winds, brass, percussion), the hall must be considered as a fifth section when preparing a for concert. Many professional ensembles have the luxury of rehearsing in their performance space, but others, particularly in school ensembles, rehearse in a room separate from the performance venue.
One strategy to help your students improve their ability to adapt their listening skills is to try taking them to different locations within your school. Check with the master schedule and see if any larger rooms are available during your class period. Possible options include the library, cafeteria, or an auxiliary gym. Students can spread out in a larger space, forcing them to listen more intently across the room than in your classroom. If the weather permits, you might consider taking your students outside. A courtyard area or parking lot have far different acoustics than classrooms, gyms, or auditoriums.
While the acoustics of these spaces will reveal plenty of novel musical nuances to your students without any teacher input, you can also prompt their listening to promote further transfer. Try suggesting that they listen for a musician on the other side of the space while playing, someone who is not playing their same part, or simply listen and observe how their own sound is different from playing in the regular rehearsal space. This may also be a good opportunity to discuss the concept of phasing with your students, as they may have a more difficult time staying together than in their regular space, and experiencing the challenges associated with listening to one another in different environments.
Taking your students to different locations in the school also has ancillary benefits, the most salient being increased visibility of your ensemble in your school community. Too often we are tucked away in our classrooms, only to emerge for concerts, and even then, there is no guarantee that our administrators will hear and see our hard work. Moving your ensemble around the building is built in advocacy for your group and increases your presence in the school community. Taking the orchestra beyond the rehearsal and performance venues also shows your school colleagues the versatility of your students. A social studies teacher who only sees one of your students in the context of a student at a desk will learn from seeing them in the orchestra that the student has varied interests and abilities, and may use that information to further connect with that student in their own classroom.
Scrambled Pegs
Perhaps you do not have access to an alternative space. What can you do to promote listening among your students within your classroom space? One strategy I have employed is called “scrambled pegs.” This is a situation where students are asked to take their instrument, stand, and music, and relocate somewhere else in the room. The only rule is that they cannot sit next to anyone who is playing their part. This can be accomplished with a traditional seating arrangement, or to really mix things up, students can face any direction. The latter option also removes the conductor, which prompts students to listen and engage in a more peer-driven listening environment in a similar context in which chamber musicians listen in order to stay together (e.g., Johnson 2012; Saccardi 2023). This activity is versatile in that it can either be teacher- or peer-driven depending on the age, ability, and experience of your group. Younger and less-experienced groups may benefit from your presence in the room guiding the scrambling process, but older, more-experienced musicians can be trusted perhaps to lead the activity on their own.
The scrambled pegs strategy can be done effectively with beginner and intermediate students to help with ensemble cohesion and establish basic listening skills. It can work equally well with more advanced students to help them navigate pieces that have shifting meter, changes in tempo, or complicated transitions that are typically led by a conductor. It is also effective in breaking up the “typical” classroom routine. When students are in scrambled pegs, you may ask students what they noticed about a different instrument’s part that was close to them or how the orchestra sounds different from their new placement in the room. If more-experienced students do not perceive this activity as challenging, have them read from copies of the score rather than their individual parts. Reading the score will allow string students to see all the parts as they play their own, which will promote a wholistic understanding of listening to the ensemble. It will also allow you to prompt students to connect the differences they hear in scrambled pegs with the other parts they see in the score.
Attack Formation
Another alternative seating arrangement you could use is what I call “Attack Formation.” This rehearsal seating arrangement is borrowed from big band jazz ensembles, where the four sections of the band (saxes, trombones, trumpets, rhythm section) form a grid or square pattern facing inwards toward one another. This can easily be transferred to string ensembles by arranging first violins, second violins, violas, and cellos/double basses into the four sides of the box. The advantage to rehearsing in this formation is that it allows students to face toward members of the ensemble they might not otherwise see or interact much with in rehearsal, especially on the corners of the box. How often does a first violinist get to sit next to a double bassist while looking across at the second violin section?
This setting still has the conductor involved in rehearsing the ensemble, at least at first. You could either place yourself in the center of the grid, as demonstrated in Figure 1, or you could walk around the perimeter of the ensemble, counting off and providing feedback while you observe individual student posture and technique. Either way, it is a chance for you to get off the podium and hear the ensemble from a different perspective just like the students are. As before, this works well with beginner and intermediate orchestras, keeping individual sections intact. A challenge for your more advanced students would be to vary the seating of the ensemble while in attack formation, such as placing one to two members from each section on each side of the box, resulting in students being placed in both a different configuration and next to peers playing different parts.
Diagram of attack formation.
As students mature in their skills, you might gradually remove yourself from the attack formation grid. An easy way to begin removing yourself from the grid is by allowing them to play “big chamber music,” mimicking the motions and the more democratic organization of a string quartet. Allowing students the space to figure out how to start and stop together, navigate transitions, and adjust tempi will sharpen their listening skills and prompt them to rely on one another more. Students could be asked about the bow direction or articulations of the students they see across from them or engage in what I call “spotting.” This is where you might designate a member of the group to call out “SPOT!” at random points in the rehearsal and when called, students need to make eye contact with another musician and regain their position in the music. This helps develop musical literacy skills for developing players by forcing them to remove their eyes from the page and find their spot again as the music moves along, and fosters non-verbal musical communication among your more advanced students.
Socratic Seminar for Strings
Many high school students engage in the Socratic seminar method of questioning and discussion in their academic courses. Sometimes referred to as “fishbowl method” or “Socratic circles,” this pedagogical approach is a structured, dialogic, and student-driven discussion that takes place with the teacher as guide and facilitator rather than as a “sage on the stage.” The method places students in a circle facing inwards toward one another seeking a deeper understanding of a single text (or piece in our case) through thoughtful conversation.
The Socratic seminar method can be incorporated into the orchestra, with students seated in a circle by section as seen in Figure 2 or seated randomly, scrambled pegs-style. You may choose to begin by listening to a recording of a piece being prepared while students follow along in their parts. Less experienced students might have a discussion about the roles of different sections (melody, accompaniment, etc.), while more advanced students could discuss musical details such as how to shape a phrase or when to begin a crescendo. Allowing students to discuss these details without instruments may promote a more democratic approach to learning and music making.
Diagram of Socratic strings seating.
Should you choose to use include the Socratic seminar method with students playing instruments, many of the tenants of chamber music rehearsal can be employed in this setting, including intra-group cueing and shared generation of musical ideas. Section leaders could further be deputized to discuss musical ideas with one another while trying to navigate a section of music. This might look like the concertmaster guiding a section of music with the ensemble, then section leaders soliciting input from their individual section members to then report back to the whole group in an effort to create shared meaning and support student leadership and student-led music making. Less experienced ensembles could try this with a short, eight measure phrase, while more advanced players could do this with larger sections of music, such as the exposition from a Classical-era piece.
Socratic seminars may be particularly effective for more-experienced students with more confident sight-reading and listening skills as well as stronger ensemble cohesion. Try selecting a piece slightly easier than the concert music currently being prepared (perhaps one grade level lower) so the focus of learning is on the Socratic seminar and not notes or rhythms. Then, instruct the students that this piece will be on the concert and that they are to prepare it on their own (with your supervision). During an initial session you could start and stop the group, but I advise you allow students to eventually take ownership of all the aspects of their music making. You may be surprised how quickly students, when given agency over their own music making, dive right into the rehearsal process and create shared meaning with one another.
The quality of a Socratic seminar is determined by the level of inquiry and the quality of discussion among students. While the spirit of the Socratic seminar is one of student dialogue, you could step in as the teacher to guide the conversation should it become stale or get off track. Much of the existing research in listening for music classrooms gets at the concept of critical listening (e.g., Bell 2018; Todd and Mishra 2013), defined as the merging of a musical listening exercise with critical thinking skills as students explore and expand their “critical ears.”
While much of the critical listening literature centers around listening to recorded music, the concepts of question and dialogue can be applied in this setting as well. You as the teacher or a designated individual or group of student leaders might prompt critical listening prior to a repetition of music in the circle, and following the performance, more open-ended questions may be asked, leading to a more focused discussion, and creating a sense of shared musical identity in the ensemble. Some sample questions could include:
What did you notice about the second violin part in measure 26?
Look at your music—what about the phrase on page three? How did they perform it?
Why do you think Mozart wrote that phrase that way, or
Who do you think is playing the melody at measure 8? What about at measure 32? Who is playing the accompaniment during that time?
For a comprehensive list of questions and discussion prompts, I recommend reading Bell’s (2018) article on critical listening.
Debrief
The ideas I presented are only as effective as the way they are introduced. If you simply rearrange the students, you might not promote the listening skills you are hoping to teach, and it is unlikely that the experiences students have listening to one another in these different configurations will automatically transfer to a more traditional seating arrangement. Upon returning to a more traditional seating, whether during the same class or the next rehearsal, solicit some student input on what they heard when they were rearranged. These ideas can help structure your next rehearsal to help students transfer what they have experienced and heard in alternate seating into their standard seating arrangement.
Whatever configuration you choose, it is likely that once you return to your standard seating arrangement, your students will listen to their peers in a deeper and more meaningful way and play with more confidence within the ensemble, resulting in a more satisfactory performance experience. Critical listening within the large ensemble is a crucial skill in a young musician’s development, and providing students with active experiences to develop that skill is incumbent upon us as their teachers. With some creative rehearsal planning, students be guided into listening critically to their peers and developing a deeper understanding of their musicianship.
Footnotes
Author’s Note
Special thanks to the A.M. Barbe High School Orchestra, Lake Charles, LA, and their director, Mr. Christopher Gunter for providing photographs for the article.
David Saccardi currently serves as Assistant Professor of Music Education at Louisiana State University, where he teaches courses in string pedagogy, music teacher preparation, and directs graduate research in experimental design and the psychology of music. Prior to moving into higher education, Dr. Saccardi taught middle school and high school orchestra in Colorado. He works as an orchestra clinician and guest conductor across the South and continues to perform and teach double bass. Dr. Saccardi holds a PhD in Music and Human Learning from the University of Texas at Austin and lives with his family in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.