By Daniel DeJoseph
Imagine a painter's palette having only 12 colors. "The artist
could create an infinite number of paintings, but the paintings
would be limited to those 12 colors. In the same way," says Scott
Heffner, "almost all of Western music consists of only 12 tones."
As a result, according to Heffner, a music education major, most
students come to class with a rigid concept of what music should
sound like. "Just about everything composed during the last 300
years, from pop music and ad jingles to Beethoven, follows the same
structural principles."
Western
tradition organizes major and minor scales around a central key.
This key can be any one of the 12 different tones, or notes, of
the Western octave (counting both the traditional do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti
— the white keys on the keyboard — and five additional
tones represented by the black keys). So a piece composed in the
key of C uses the basic scale, do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do, with C
as the "do." All the other tones in the piece are heard in relationship
to C.
At the start of the 20th century, some musicians began challenging
this tradition. Music, like painting, became more abstract and individual.
One new type of music that arose was atonality. Atonal music is
composed without a key, giving each note in the scale equal importance
and allowing the composer to choose the relationship between the
tones. It and other novel arrangements have had a hard time gaining
acceptance. "Once our ears become accustomed to particular sound
patterns, anything different does not sound right," says Heffner.
"This is the case with a lot of the classical music of the 20th
century, which poses a problem for the music teacher." How can students
be motivated to listen to unfamiliar music?
Heffner designed a study to test the role repeated listening played
in how willingly students accepted unusual forms of music.
"Finding the right music for the experiment was tricky," said Joanne
Rutkowski, associate professor of music education and Heffner's
adviser. "Scott couldn't just play music from different cultures,
such as African or Asian music, since they now serve as influences
for pop. He needed something completely alien." Heffner decided
on a form of music that uses "just intonation," instead of typical
tuning techniques.
The idea of how to tune an instrument goes back thousands of years.
The Greek mathematician Pythagoras observed in the sixth century
B.C. that harmonious tones are produced when the lengths of vibrating
strings are whole number ratios. Further, he realized that these
ratios could be applied to other musical instruments to produce
similar harmonies. To produce the note A, a plucked string must
vibrate with a frequency of 440 Hz. To produce the note E the string
must vibrate at 660 Hz, or three-halves A. The ratio of three-halves
produces the perfect harmony between the two notes. Due to the limitations
of instruments, a perfect ratio is not always possible to achieve,
and therefore most instruments are tuned a little off. Tuning in
just intonation keeps the notes in perfect ratio, and therefore
perfect harmony.
"It's different," says Heffner, "the students are unlikely to
have heard it before, and it is the kind of music I like. If a casual
listener were to compare just intonation to normal tuning methods,
they might not notice the exact details of the pitch variations,
but they would notice that the just intonation had more energy."
Heffner had a group of freshman music students listen to "just
intonation" compositions 20 minutes a week for eight weeks. "I tested
a student's motivation to listen to a form of music by having them
answer a series of questions, such as, 'On a scale of one through
five, would you listen to this music in your free time? Would you
buy a CD of this music?'" The test subjects answered these questions
after the first and last times they listened.
Heffner expects the group to become more open to the music after
the sessions, and is already looking to build on the results. "What
I eventually want to know is if there is a peak level of exposure
at which students become most receptive to unusual forms of music.
I'm assuming there is also a point of diminishing return, beyond
which there is no appreciable change in one's opinion of a particular
piece."
Why is this important? "The purpose of music is to create a response
in the listener," says Heffner. "There are certain things which
we, as listeners, tend to associate with music. For example, the
major tonality is often thought to be happy, and the minor sad.
When we allow ourselves to become open to new sounds, then we have
opened the door to new forms of expression."
Scott Heffner graduated in August 2000 with a B.S. and honors
in music education from the Colleges of Arts and Architecture and
the Schreyer Honors College. Joanne Rutkowski, Ph.D. is associate
professor of music education, 206 Music Bldg., University Park,
PA 16802; 814-863-0419; rvi@psu.edu.
Writer Daniel DeJoseph is a pre-medicine major with a minor in English
who will graduate with honors in English in May 2001.
