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The Piedmont Highlander

The Piedmont Highlander

AP Music: more than notes and compositions

AP+Music%3A+more+than+notes+and+compositions

A dainty flick of a stick from the conductor holds an army of instruments at his attention. Another flick and the jarring blast of timpanis shatters the silence, fading into a low rumble. Trumpets ascend from the deep percussion, stately and clear. Soon, the timpani joins back in, then horns, then trombones, until the concert hall is echoing in a soaring melody of brass and drums.

All this projected on a wall in the music building. AP Music Theory teacher Joseph Piazza pauses the video. He then explains the piece, “Fanfare for the Common Man,” as his students would.

“Well it starts with a solo timpani followed by a solo trumpet line. That would be on a monophonic line: it’s unaccompanied,” Piazza said. “They would say ‘It’s rather unmeasured. There’s an ascension of notes from a third to sixth to a fifth to all the way to a tenth, so there’s this expansive range of melody that seems to be calling out, and then the timpanis, in an antithetical manner, echo back in a dactylic rhythm.’”

And he’s not just throwing fancy words around: he expects this of his students, even when the AP test only requires identifying different aspects of music theory through visual and oral comprehension. Piazza takes it a step farther.

“I want that ‘5’ to mean something beyond a number and knowing, you know, a major scale, a minor scale, a perfect fourth, a perfect fifth. Anyone can figure that out,” Piazza said. “That’s knowledge of low meaningfulness until it’s attached to the understanding of a composer’s intent and why we feel the way we do when we listen to a piece of music.”IMG_1647

In fact, Piazza’s favorite part of the class, teaching students to verbally analyze music, is not part of the AP test.

“To me the most important thing is that people can learn to talk about music in an intelligent manner,” Piazza said. “I want kids to go beyond saying, ‘Hey, I really liked that piece. It was cool.’”

In addition, he covers in depth what is known as the “common practice period” of music, which spans from medieval and renaissance periods all the way through the twentieth century.

So what does a normal day of class look like, I ask? In response, Piazza laughs.

“There’s no such thing as a normal day in AP music,” Piazza said. “It’s everything. You lecture to the students. You have them get up and demonstrate and sing and sight read, and they have to come to the piano. It’s listening to music. It’s writing. It’s compositional skills as well.”

As a matter of course in such an all-encompassing class, it presents a big workload.

“It’s a college level class,” Piazza said. “It’s a busy year. It’s a lot of rigor.”

Because of this difficulty, a select few enroll in the class, even when it is only offered every other year.

“It’s for kids that do have a background and a real deep interest in music theory and competition,” Piazza said.

Senior Sarah Chin took the class to learn more about analyzing and writing music. She felt ready to go in music and has found the class challenging but manageable.

“Some aspects are more challenging than I expected,” Chin said. “I definitely don’t know as much about music history and certain composers as he probably expected us to.”

Junior Melissa Quantz, who joined the class to supplement her flute playing, has always taken a keen interest to music.

Junior Taylor Scofield, a pianist and bassist who joined the class to learn about the technical aspects of music, said Piazza’s lectures are the highlight of the class.

“Music theory is super fun so anyone who likes music and has way too much time on their hands should definitely take it next time it’s offered,” Scofield said.

After all, the class is about music. To Piazza, this is what it comes down to.

“I think the more you understand the components of the music, the more you can appreciate the intent and how this composer has made this art form an aesthetic idea,” Piazza said. “It’s something we can latch onto and say ‘I know why I feel that way.”

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