Rhythm, Melody, Harmony

Next fall, Columbia’s undergraduate musicianship program will move to a topics-based approach that will focus on in-depth exploration and development of rhythm, melody, and harmony as separate, though interdependent, courses. This semester in my Ear Training III class I piloted the approach, devoting one third of the semester to an all-encompassing inquiry into each of the three topics.

I assess learning outcomes by what students come to say and do spontaneously, of their own accord, rather than through prompted examination. My approach is experiential; often, in the course of a given day’s work, usually in the second session of the week, I observe students independently arrive at and lucidly formulate conclusions that, to me, are so deeply foundational to music making that I come away with pure delight at how superbly the work is unfolding. As often, the following week, I observe that students have no conscious recollection of the milestones they achieved the previous week and which to me were so significantly memorable. It is that this kind of learning—or organic growth—involves a different kind of integration than what examinations can obtain. In late April I asked them to reflect inwardly on the work we had done thus far and to put the pieces together in their own way. One response was noteworthy and proved that the learning has been potent and surpasses what traditional methodologies hope for. I quote verbatim:

“This semester in Ear Training III has been a deepening of musical awareness—not only of what we hear, but of what we feel, intuit, and know in our bodies.

We began with rhythm—not as a grid, but as breath and space. The rhythm of silence taught me to listen between the sounds, to feel presence in absence, to sense time not as a ticking metronome but as an expanding field. The body became our metronome. The breath, our downbeat.

Melody emerged not as a series of pitches, but as emotion given shape. In our weekly work, we were pushed to stop thinking and instead feel—to trust the gut over the brain. Melodic dictation became less about notes and more about flow.

Harmony entered gently. We explored not just chords, but relationships between overtones—the tension between tones and the pull of resolutions. We embodied these experiences by singing them, by feeling them resonate, clicking into place, gradually crescendoing—just by feel.

The idea of “believe the gut” was our undercurrent through all three parts: rhythm, melody, and harmony. As a class, we listened more deeply to each other. I began to sense when someone was trying to adjust, to resonate. These were musical truths discovered through doing, not saying.

I leave this semester with a sense that music is not separate from me. It is of me. What we trained was not just the ear—but the full self: the feeling, the trusting, the risking self. That’s the real harmony.”

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