A new approach to post-tonal ear training
Michael Berry, Texas Tech University
Most approaches to post-tonal ear training teach students to sing and identify set classes. While the notion of set class (which is bound up with the notion of octave equivalence and inversional equivalence) facilitates comparison of otherwise disparate elements on paper, set class and octave equivalence unnecessarily complicate the pedagogy of post-tonal ear training. In this paper, I propose a new approach to post-tonal ear training which is rooted in pitch space, not pitch-class space, and relies only on transpositional operators, not inversion. I call the approach "octave framing."
Octave framing takes the notion of maximal evenness as its starting point (Clough and Douthett 1991). In this approach, students first learn five octave frames, which originate in the two-, three-, four-, five, and six-note maximally even divisions of the octave. Other sonorities are determined with reference to a particular octave frame, and discussed in terms of their deviance from the evenly divided octave. The paper introduces the octave frames, provides some analytical examples that demonstrate the system in action, and offers some preliminary exercises for use in the classroom.