Thinking In... An Unfamiliar Language

MUSIC THEORY ASR

When Senior Reece Scyphers first set foot on the campus of Colorado Academy as a Ninth Grader, he thought it was the next step on his way toward law school. The now Twelfth Grader recalls with a laugh, “I was sure I was going to be a trial attorney.” Still, he joined CA’s music program anyway, signing up for Concert Choir and Chanteurs, thinking it might be a “nice hobby” in high school and a way to continue with the semi-serious voice lessons he’d begun years earlier.

Skip ahead to December of that Ninth Grade year: Alone, Scyphers walks nervously onstage during the annual Upper School Talent Show, right before the December holiday vacation; spirits are high, and Seniors and Juniors have already shared incredible performances with appreciative classmates and peers. Seemingly out of nowhere, in a powerful bass voice, Scyphers proceeds to stun the audience in the Leach Center for the Performing Arts with an a cappella rendition of the country ballad “Travelin’ Soldier,” by The Chicks. As he finishes the final verse of this heart-wrenching tune about being in love and facing the possibility of dying in war, an amazed second of silence is broken by applause that’s almost deafening.

“The more I took music classes in Ninth and Tenth Grade,” he says, “the more I started thinking, ‘This is so much fun!’”

Now, as he submits applications to top undergraduate music programs around the country, Scyphers states without hesitation, “I don’t know exactly what discipline or what type, but I definitely know my future’s going to include music.”

 

In all likelihood, he’ll have his pick of schools, programs, or anything else he might aspire to: In addition to anchoring the bass section in numerous CA choral groups, Scyphers has excelled in the school’s musical theater productions, pursued classical voice training, taught himself piano, taken additional lessons in guitar, drums, and double-bass, and, perhaps most impressive, enrolled in CA’s yearlong Music Theory ASR (Advanced Studies and Research) course not once but twice.

According to Vocal Music Director and Instructor Dr. Kevin Padworski, Scyphers has even assumed the role of unofficial teaching assistant, helping less-experienced students with Music Theory’s steep AP-level learning curve, while working on his own second full year of college-level theory. (He scored a 5 on the AP Music Theory exam after his first, indicating a student who’s “extremely well qualified, demonstrating excellent mastery of the course material.”)

“You learn so much more when you have to teach this material,” explains Padworski, “especially if it’s one of your peers asking you, ‘I don’t get this—can you help me?’ That’s a different kind of student relationship, a new, more nuanced way of interacting with one another while having to say with grace and humility, ‘I do know more than you, and I would love to help you.’”

ANOTHER LEVEL

Unheard of as a recurring Music Department offering at a school of CA’s size, Music Theory ASR—which encompasses the traditional AP Music Theory curriculum while challenging students with additional historical units and a culminating composition project—got its start just a few years ago, when one talented music student approached Padworski wanting to explore the AP curriculum. CA’s Vocal Music Director, himself a professional composer and conductor with a resume that includes performances at New York’s Carnegie Hall and other venues worldwide, devised a yearlong course to cover the college-level material, and a handful of students looking to delve into theory signed up for a trial run.

“The course speaks to the fact that in music, talent can only get you so far.”

–Dr. Kevin Padworski, Vocal Music Director

This year, the roster for the expanded and refined ASR course is full, with 12 Juniors and Seniors enrolled, and Padworski has had to implement a readiness assessment to help manage the steadily increasing demand.

 

“The course speaks to the fact that in music, talent can only get you so far,” he says. “We have a huge number of talented performers at CA, of course—but theory takes musical education to a whole other level.” Students are tasked with understanding the centuries-long development of Western music—including the origins of musical scales and written notation, chords and chord progressions, conventions of music composition, key contributors to the Western tradition, and the physics and neuroscience underlying humans’ relationship to musical forms. Students even undertake a “side quest” to investigate the uniquely American harmonies of jazz by arranging an original piece in the style of Duke Ellington.

Notes Padworski, some are drawn by sound; others are intrigued by the intricate mathematical structures that underlie Western musical tradition. All, he says, share an “immense pride that they are ‘doing’ music theory. They’re the ones who have signed up for this tremendously difficult course of study, aspiring to reach the same level of proficiency they’ve already demonstrated as performers.”

There is a competitive element to Music Theory ASR, he adds: Just as with performance, “Every one of these students wants to be the best at it.” At the same time, they all struggle, they all are challenged—12 students who would not normally be together in one classroom, united by a deep and genuine curiosity about music.

LEARNING A NEW LANGUAGE

To argue that Music Theory ASR epitomizes the depth and rigor that attract the genuinely curious to CA’s Upper School curriculum merely hints at the level of difficulty that makes AP Music Theory one of the College Board’s most notorious challenges, with a pass rate on par with that of Physics C: Electricity & Magnetism (perhaps not coincidentally, itself a popular course of study for CA’s advanced science and engineering students).

Enrollees may well have a sense of the demanding workload and high expectations ahead of them when they sign up for his course, says Padworski, but they are often surprised to learn that, in addition to 75 multiple-choice questions and several free responses on harmonization, dictation, and music notation, the AP Music Theory exam also requires sight-singing. Test-takers receive about a minute to look at a pair of unfamiliar diatonic melodies, and then they must sing them accurately, in person, for a proctor.

“I want every day in class to have its own ‘Aha’ moment.”

–Dr. Kevin Padworski

“My students get it when I tell them that I expect high scores on the AP exam,” he explains, “but they are shocked when I ask them to sing individually in class with me right now. It’s a whole new way of thinking about how you demonstrate knowledge.”

Singing on the spot is just one of the many skills Music Theory ASR students must develop quickly. For most, learning to interpret a musical score or performance and to create their own written music is like trying to master speaking and transcribing an entirely new language in a single year.

 

“They may have the performance experience to know that a given major key has three sharp notes, but they’ve never before understood the why,” Padworski says. “Why does our musical scale span A to G? Why have we decided that A is 440 Hz? How does a part of our brain called Heschl’s gyrus process that pitch? My job is to expose them to everything that goes into the music they appreciate so they can make the connection between what they hear and how we represent it. I want every day in class to have its own ‘Aha’ moment.”

A HUMAN STORY

After a first trimester spent ascending historical and technical “scaffolding” intended to give this diverse group of scholars a shared understanding of the basic building blocks of music—pitch, scales and key signatures, rhythm, and meter—students by the second trimester are ready to begin experimenting with their own compositions, specifically grounded in the conventions of American jazz.

“They learn the distinct set of rules jazz inherited from Jewish and Black communities,” Padworski says, “and that, more than any other compositional style, these are rules that can be broken. So here are the types of chords you can use, here’s the voicing, or layering of notes, and here are the ways you can make it sound the way you want.”

 

When spring arrives, the class turns its attention to the analysis of complex works, a central component of the AP exam they will take at the end of the third trimester. As the College Board’s test preparation materials explain, “Students will use symbols and terms to describe and apply harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic procedures of 18th-century voice leading in notated music; describe formal features and relationships, including motives, phrases, and phrase relationships; describe aspects of musical design, including texture, timbre, and instrumentation, and expressive elements, including dynamics, articulation, and tempo.”

In other words, says Padworski, “This is a full analysis of a random score—perhaps an excerpt from Mozart’s Requiem or a Brahms piano sonata. I’ll give them a complete movement or a particularly difficult section, and they’ll have to produce a Roman numeral analysis,”—the method traditionally used to notate chords and harmonic progression within a key.

“There’s something fundamental about our desire for another human being to create something that we can connect with—precisely because it’s a human story.”

–Dr. Kevin Padworski

 This is a real challenge, he emphasizes. “They have to be able to analyze every single note on the page—what is the ‘data set’ they’re being presented with, what musical form was the composer trying to achieve, what kinds of structural features stand out?”

Then the students need to be able to defend their analysis: Does the piece do something atypical? Is it original, or is it convention-bound? “They can argue with me about anything they want,” he continues, “take any position, as long as they can argue it. It is a cumulative gesture encompassing an entire year’s worth of learning.”

This is why, in music, Padworski is confident, new tools such as artificial intelligence will never entirely replace human intuition. “There’s something fundamental about our desire for another human being to create something that we can connect with—precisely because it’s a human story.”

TURNING MUSIC 'ON ITS HEAD'

For Clare Henry ’23, the story up until arriving at CA in Ninth Grade had always been about performing. “I knew I wanted to continue singing and acting in high school, but I couldn’t read music to save my life; I wanted to be able to understand the basics of what I was doing in choir and in theater,” she recalls.

Immediately making her mark as a standout on the Leach Center’s Mainstage and in CA’s Upper School choral ensembles, Henry enrolled in Music Theory her Junior year, and immediately realized it would mean almost “starting from scratch. I had very little traditional musical background, and I found Music Theory incredibly difficult—it completely turned everything I knew about music and performing on its head.”

 

The course, Henry acknowledges, was a yearlong struggle. At the same time that she was starring as Mary in the Upper School’s spectacular musical production of Mary Poppins, “It was so hard for me to remember different intervals, spacing, and all the rules about how writing and performing music work. I remember sitting with Dr. Padworski almost daily to complete the homework because I was so lost.”

Known as much for his rigorous standards as for his generosity in supporting students, Padworski, says Henry, “was so patient with me, even when I had no idea what I was doing! While he expects a lot, Dr. Padworski also deeply cares for his students and more than anything wants to see them succeed.”

The experience, she recounts, “truly shaped who I am today.” After performing in six shows a year for all four years of high school, “Being involved in music theory helped me hone my love of music and made me want to continue pursuing a career in music.” Applying to college for both acting and singing, Henry says, “CA taught me more than just music and performing. It allowed me to feel confident in myself, speak in front of people, think on my feet, and be incredibly flexible when situations don’t go to plan.”

GOING DEEP

It was during his own initial, Junior year go-around in Music Theory ASR, Scyphers explains, that he was surprised to discover his passion for composing and arranging for voice. “I had been a vocalist most of my life, and had been an instrumentalist for a long time as well—but when we were given an assignment to re-arrange a simple song using jazz conventions, I found out something about myself I never would have learned otherwise.”

“CA allows students to explore things that are deep in their hearts,” he observes.

If there’s one factor in his Upper School experience that Scyphers would point to as essential in that kind of exploration, it’s what he describes as the approachability and receptiveness of CA faculty.

“When I first got started with arranging and composing, I had finished a voice lesson with Dr. Padworski and asked him, ‘Here, I tried arranging something—would you take a look?’ After a minute, he said, ‘I could see a choir singing this.’ Up until that point, I didn’t actually think composition was a thing; I never thought about how music was made.”

 

With Padworski’s help, as well as that of CA Guitar Instructor David Bailey and Middle and Upper School Theater Instructor Maclain Looper, Scyphers has now branched out into scoring for musical theater, and intends to make composing an original musical a big part of his second year of Music Theory ASR. He’ll also be honing a final project of original work in what he calls a “classically-inspired minimalist” style, potentially to be performed by CA’s Chanteurs or Chamber Orchestra.

But in the meantime, notes Padworski, Scyphers will find himself sharing knowledge from his year’s head start with his fellow students, all while working to get through his own second year of college-level theory. “Yes, even Reece learns something new every day,” he insists.

This is perhaps the most surprising outcome Padworski has witnessed over three years of offering his music theory course: Just as in Henry’s case, “These high-achieving students will, maybe for the first time, struggle, and I love that for them,” he says.

A COMMUNITY OF THE CURIOUS

What is even better, according to Padworski, is that they will be in good company as they do so. He creates a unique seating chart for every class meeting, ensuring that students will spend time learning with, and from, someone they might not know very well. Every student, too, will get the chance to sit beside Scyphers, the teaching assistant and music theory enthusiast-par-excellence.

“They are surprised when they find themselves interacting with someone on an academic level outside of their familiar social circle,” explains Padworski. “They don’t expect to become as close with each other as I think they do over the course of the year.”

 

Their interests and tastes in music evolve throughout the year, as well: “Their playlists definitely change a lot after they finish my class,” Padworski says. “We have so many kids here at CA who crave that—going deeper in a subject area that has no end, and doing it all while challenging themselves and their peers to be better, to be more curious about the world.”

Just as with his Middle School music students, with whom he’s been debating the merits of Taylor Swift’s new release, Padworski seeks in his Music Theory ASR class to educate “good global citizens, who are intelligent about music. It’s not enough to say, I like something. I want them to be able to understand why they like it—why that chord progression? Why that change in rhythm? By the end of my class, they will hear music differently; they will be able to judge when a song they love is also worthy of timelessness.”

For Scyphers, who, admittedly, has pushed his musical pursuits at CA to the limit, Music Theory ASR keeps him grounded, both among his fellow students and within the other academic areas that intrigue him. Enrolled in the AB Calculus AP course this year as well, Scyphers says that learning about the mathematical relationships at the heart of Western music has inspired curiosity about the numbers he’s figuring in math class. “Just like math applies to music theory, can music theory be applied to math?” he wonders.

CA is just as good at fostering connections between people, he says. “Over the years, I’ve definitely found a community of students who are committed to music. Now I’ve found more: a bond with anyone who loves learning deeply.”