The Art of Teaching Music Literacy to Develop Independent Musicians

ChorTeach is ACDA’s quarterly online publication, designed for those who work with singers of all levels but specifically K-12 and community choirs. A full annotated ChorTeach index is available online at acda.org/publications/chorteach. Over 160 articles are organized into seventeen categories. For more information, email  or visit acda.org/chorteach. Following is an excerpt from an article in the Summer 2022 issue titled “The Art of Teaching Music Literacy to Develop Independent Musicians” by Janel Huyett.
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In the context of language, literacy is about the relationship between words, the functions of punctuation, and the meaning of a whole piece in context. As music educators, we’re familiar with the concept of literacy in the musical sense, but often, the ability to identify letter codes (A, G, B flat, C, E, D sharp, etc.) as notes on a music staff and produce the corresponding notes in your voice is confused with music literacy. To know and feel the location of those symbols in your voice does not necessarily equate to understanding them, their relationship to other notes on the page, or their meaning in the context of the piece being sung. There are four components to being musically literate:

• Audiation: hearing it in your head
• Improvisation: spontaneously expressing musical ideas
• Dictation: translating sound into notation
• Reading: translating notation into sound (most people teach this step only, skipping the other three)

Just as literary understanding is not simply the ability to perfectly echo the sound of one word at a time, so it is with understanding musical meaning. When a student is handed a piece of music to sing, their fi rst impulse is to ask, “How does this go?” Meaning, “Can you sing it to me so that I know what it sounds like?”

As music instructors, we often do just that—sing or play it on the piano for them. Ultimately, a student can learn a piece in this way, by mimicking what they hear or reading the text from the score, but they will likely not develop any broader understanding of musical concepts and language. Our objective in teaching music literacy should be to inspire students to go beyond the point of wanting to hear it from someone else, and to develop in them the ability to become independent musicians, where what’s written on the page is part of their musical vocabulary, and they can open a piece and hear it in their heads.

This means if I perform a rhythm or a melody, not only can you sing it back to me, but you can write it down and/or improvise on it. To use the language analogy, imagine that you only speak German, and someone asks you to read a sentence in English. They teach you how to pronounce the words phonetically, and you eventually get it right. But you still don’t know what the words mean or how they relate to each other in a sentence. You can repeat the sounds, but you are not fluent.
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The rest of this article includes sections on Sound Vocabulary, Embracing New Methods, Methodology with example games, and Conclusion. Visit acda.org/chorteach and choose the summer 2022 issue. You must be logged into your ACDA member account on the website. If you have trouble, try closing your browser and opening a new sessions, or clearing your “cache”/browser history.