Audiation Lecture 1: An Overview of the Stages

I want to start off with a disclaimer, that in this lecture, I will not dig very deeply into each stage of audiation. The purpose of this lecture is to whet your appetites for future lectures during which I will go deeply into each stage. This lecture is the first in an 8-part series about audiation, a term coined in the mid-1970s by the music psychologist Edwin Gordon. My purpose in presenting this series is to raise questions and offer insights about the audiation process that Dr. Gordon only touched on, or perhaps, didn’t consider.

I want to start my talk today by quoting the folk singer Pete Seeger who wrote this back in 1973:

“Musicians need, in the beginning, to train their ears, their vocal cords, or their hands, and to develop the sense of music that tells them when to sing what.” — from Pete Seeger’s book Henscratches and Flyspecks: How to Read Melodies from Songbooks in Twelve Confusing Lessons.

I love Pete’s insight here: This is a terrific start to understanding audiation. But it’s just a start.

So what is audiation exactly? If I told you that you audiate music when you “inner hear” it with comprehension, you’d probably tell me my definition is too broad and not much help.

Here is the way Dr. Gordon, in 2012, defined the term:

Audiation means: “Hearing and comprehending in one’s mind [the] sound of music [that is] not, or may never have been, physically present.” (Gordon, 2012).

(For clarity, I inserted the words “the” and “that is.”) This definition stresses the point that, as you listen to music, the sound in your mind is not physically present because it has already become part of the past. To which I respond: Yes, that seems to be true, but it’s trivial. (In my opinion, a more important point about audiation is that the music in our minds does not proceed at performance speed because we audiate only essential pitches and durations. You’ll hear more about essentialness in Lecture 2.)

For now, let me define the term audiation a bit differently:

We audiate a piece of music when we mentally organize its musical elements—separately and in tandem—so that we may understand how the piece develops.

This definition is pretty good, but it’s incomplete because audiation is a process – and you can’t define a process, because a process by its very nature, won’t stand still! You can only explain what happens as the process unfolds.

When I wrote my book The Ways Children Learn Music back in the summer of 1994, I included a short chapter on audiation; and I made the deliberate choice not to bog down the reader with too much detail about the stages and types. I remember thinking to myself — I’ll write a quick, early chapter on audiation; and then I’ll freely sprinkle the word audiation throughout the rest of the book because the reader will know, basically, what it means.

My goal was to explain, early in the book, what audiation is and what it’s not. It’s not inner hearing. It’s not aural imagery. It’s not memorization. And so on. Arguing those points was easy. But linking audiation with performance technique … that was more challenging. How we audiate a piece of music affects how we perform it; and our performance of the piece may impel us to subtly change how we audiate it. How was I to make that point in a way that grabbed the reader’s attention?

To cut through that problem, I turned to the book I Am Not Spock by Leonard Nimoy from 1975. Nimoy explains in this delightful memoir how artists visualize art, and how they make use of their craft to produce art. Nimoy wrote the following:

I’ve played enough roles and have seen myself enough times that I can project my performance from the time I first read the script.

I suspect that it’s similar to what happens when a block of marble arrives at a sculptor’s studio. When he first looks at it, sees the image inside the block and then starts to chip away to reveal it to the eyes of others, the ability to see it is his visionary talent. The ability to chip away the excess is his craft or technique.

I am constantly asked how I managed ‘to keep a straight face’ while playing the Spock character. In terms of actor’s craft it was easy. I’m always amazed at the speed and deftness with which a plumber fixes a leaky faucet. That’s his craft. Mine included emotional control and manipulation.

I was so thoroughly immersed in the character that my weekends were a gradual trip back to emotional normalcy. Or as close as I could get to it. By Sunday afternoon I would become aware of a lessening of the Spock presence. I would begin to relax into a somewhat more responsive state.

I am still affected by the character of Spock. Of course, the role changed my career. Or rather gave me one. It also affected me very deeply and personally, socially, psychologically, emotionally. To this day I sense Vulcan speech patterns, Vulcan social attitudes, and even Vulcan patterns of logic and emotional suppression in my behavior.

What started out as a welcome job to a hungry actor, has become a constant and ongoing influence in my thinking and lifestyle.

After I presented this lengthy quote, I then compared Nimoy’s insights about acting and sculpting with how we audiate music. Here, with a few minor edits, is what I wrote:

Nimoy writes about “projecting” a performance, that is, performing the play in his head. Haven’t you ever done that with music? Haven’t you ever “performed” a piece of music in your mind? Of course you have! What have you noticed at those moments? You may have noticed that the music in your mind was not proceeding at the same speed that it normally takes to perform it. You may have audiated a three-minute song in thirty seconds. You could do this because, when you audiate a piece of music, you don’t audiate every single note the composer wrote.

This may seem strange to you. After all, when you perform a piece of music, you perform every note, and you do so in actual time. You may even memorize every note. But you don’t process every note. Your brain chooses the important stuff, the highlights, the essential pitches and durations that make the piece what it is—in your opinion. Of course, the tonal and rhythm patterns in a piece of music that you think are essential may not be the same patterns that I think are essential.

What about the block of marble in the sculptor’s studio that Nimoy writes about? Several things are happening with that block of marble. The artist is seeing, visualizing, predicting the final product even before the actual work has begun. The same thing happens in music. If you’re actively listening to a piece of music, then you’re predicting what will happen next, even if you’ve never heard the music before!

And what are your predictions based on? Your experience. Notice that Nimoy can “project” how he will perform from the first time he reads a script only because he has seen himself so many times on the screen. Think about how this connects with music. The more music you’ve heard and the larger your vocabulary of patterns in various tonalities and meters, and the more adept you are at manipulating those patterns, the better you can audiate. (How wonderful it would be if our students reached the point where they began asking, How is the piece of music I’m hearing now like the piece I heard last week? Last month? Last year?)

Something else might be happening with that block of marble that Nimoy doesn’t talk about. Imagine the sculptor is half-finished with his work. Does he still visualize the same finished product he did at first? Probably not. In his mind, he has most likely made subtle adjustments so that his visualization is slightly different than it was when he started. As he looks at the block of marble in its constantly changing forms, he gains insight into what the work of art might eventually look like.

So it is with music. The more we listen, the more we try to discern the overall structure of the piece we’re hearing. We might find ourselves saying, “Aha! The lydian mode. Where did that come from?” or “Wow! I never expected that modulation to the submediant. Beethoven really was a genius.”

Back to Leonard Nimoy. Notice that he didn’t merely play the Spock character; he internalized it. In the same way, a musician who audiates must internalize music and not merely imitate it or memorize it. Imitation—even perfect imitation—is shallow and fleeting. By contrast, Nimoy felt the presence of the Spock character years after he finished his work on the Star Trek television series.

Finally, is audiation the same as “inner hearing”? Not exactly. Even though audiation involves “inner hearing,” it doesn’t end there. After all, Nimoy didn’t merely “inner hear” his lines and then recite them. He became a character and then spoke as that character. To audiate music, our students must do more than “inner hear” sounds: they must process musical information.

That’s what I wrote, back in the summer of 1994, 32 years ago almost to the day! Since then, no one has dived deeply into the audiation process, though there are a few helpful introductions to it available along with mine. Darrel Walters (1989) wrote an invaluable, still unsurpassed, introduction to the term and the process; and Heather Shouldice explains the types and stages of audiation in an entertaining and highly accessible manner in her marvelous podcast Everyday Musicality.

But sadly, no one has looked closely at the types and stages of audiation, to pinpoint their deficiencies, or to tease out their hidden virtues. And in this critique, I include Dr. Gordon himself! In the 1988 edition of Learning Sequences in Music, he put forth 6 stages of audiation; and he maintained that there were 6 — and only 6— stages for the next quarter century!

I believe there’s a 7th stage of audiation that Dr. Gordon did not consider. Last summer at the GIML conference, I gave a presentation about audiation. During my talk, I made a case for that 7th stage. With this series of lectures, I’m hoping to make that case to a wider audience.

Before writing this lecture, I took my book off the shelf to reread the audiation chapter. Seeing my words again, after so many decades, reminded me just how much fun it was to write that book. In the film Citizen Kane, the business tycoon Charles Foster Kane (played by Orson Wells) said, “I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.” And maybe this was the young Orson Wells breaking the 4th wall, saying to the audience and to the world, “I think it would be fun to make a movie!” That’s how I felt, all those years ago: “I think it would be fun to write a book about Music Learning Theory!”

Orson Wells is on my mind now, for good reason: I think the best way, nowadays, to talk about the stages of audiation is to talk about Orson Wells.

1a.

If you’re a fan of his—like I am—you won’t want to miss a fascinating radio program called Theatre of the Imagination – History of the Mercury Theatre on the Air (Maltin, 2016). During the program, actress Geraldine Fitzgerald describes the stormy relationship between Orson Welles (pictured on the left) and his collaborator John Houseman (pictured on the right). Back in the 1930s and 40s, Welles was an undisciplined creative genius, whose ideas were like water from a busted water main that gushes all over the street; Houseman was the disciplined collaborator with the thankless job of chasing after the water with buckets. I’ll stop there and let Geraldine Fitzgerald tell it better.

1b. Geraldine Fitzgerald on Welles/Houseman

The uneasy truce between Welles and Houseman is a metaphor for what these lectures on audiation will be about: the rivalry between musical form and fluidity.

On the surface, the next 7 lectures will be about the stages of audiation. But more deeply, these lectures will cover the following topics:

* The elusiveness of clock-time;

* The pecking order of essential pitches, durations, and musical patterns;

* The process of mentally compressing music as we compare one piece of music with another;

* The process of expanding and deleting music as we hone our musical creations;

* The relationship between musical order and conflict;

* Ambiguity within and between musical elements;

and finally …

* The speciousness of musical form itself.

During the rest of this lecture, I want to take you through all the stages of audiation briefly, so that, in future lectures, I can loop back around to each stage in more detail.

I’ll start by presenting Dr Gordon’s descriptions of each stage, and I’ll offer a running commentary as I go.

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Stage 1: Momentary retention

Basically we start the process of audiating music by remembering it, not memorizing it necessarily, but by simply recalling it. What follows is Dr. Gordon describing what takes place during stage 1.

2. Dr. Gordon describing stage 1:

The main idea I take from this audio clip is that audiation is a fragile process that begins inauspiciously, with simple memory. Dr. Gordon summed up the precariousness of Stage 1 this way (and you can find this quote on page 19 of his book Learning Sequences in Music):

Unless we give conscious meaning to the aftersound within a few seconds, what we have retained in Stage 1 is lost.

Basically, Stage 1 of audiation comes down to two things: 1) retaining an aftersound, and 2) staying awake! Audiation must be an active process if we expect it to work at all.

Let’s listen to the singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock perform part of a piece, simply called “Fulani Chant.” I’ll just play the first minute of it, even though the work goes on for a glorious 10 minutes. Mostly, I want you to sense just how challenging it can be to keep your focus on a piece with so much repetition.

3. “Fulani Chant” performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock

Stage 2: Imitating and audiating tonal patterns and rhythm patterns and recognizing and identifying a tonal center and macrobeats.

Here we see just how difficult it is to describe a process — a continually shifting thing — in a single sentence fragment. It’s a long journey from mentally imitating the sounds we just heard, then subjectively choosing essential parts of what we’ve heard, then organizing those parts into tonal and rhythm patterns, and then discerning the macrobeats, and at least a rudimentary sense of how the harmonies gravitate around a pitch center. I treat the 4 events I just described as 4 distinct substages; and in lectures 2 and 3, I’ll talk about each substage.

Now let’s listen to music that many of us in the MLT community are quite familiar with.

4. Excerpts from Dr. Gordon’s Tonal IMMA test.

Many of you probably recognize that as a portion of the Tonal IMMA test. The final pitch you heard is a C, and it’s the keyality of C that anchors the test. Dr. Gordon designed this test so that it featured not an objective tonality, but an objective keyality so that young children could audiate the test items at stage 2. I’ll say more about how Dr. Gordon constructed this test in Lecture 3.

Stage 3: Establishing objective or subjective tonality and meter.

We in the MLT community love this stage. During a lesson, we might stop singing a song at the end of a phrase, and then ask the kids to perform the resting tone, just to make sure they’re audiating the tonality. During a rehearsal, we might stop a performance of a piece and then ask our students to perform macro and micro beats with their voices, hands, and feet, just to show us that they’re audiating the meter of the music.

I’m not disparaging these choices: They’re signs of good music teaching. But I think we in the MLT community value stage 3 too highly, as if our students’ understanding of a piece of music ends when they name its tonality and meter.

Here are some excerpts, just to highlight what I mean. I’m sure you’ll be able to audiate the tonality of these pieces at stage 3.

Here is an excerpt of liturgical music from the 11th century

5. Liturgical music from the 11th century

And what about meter? Here is an excerpt from the 1960s TV show Room 222.

6. Theme music of the TV show Room 222

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Our students may answer with pride, “This piece is in the dorian mode,” or “This piece is in uneven unpaired meter.” But even if their answers are correct at a given moment, such certainty represents shallow and immature thinking about music. The word “in” implies that a piece of music can stay still long enough for us to take its measure.

Fortunately we teachers and adult musicians have more advanced stages of audiation to remind us that a piece of music is always developing, always in motion, always in flux; and therefore, it can never be “in” anything.

And that brings me to …

Stage 4: Retaining in audiation tonal patterns and rhythm patterns that have been organized.

This stage arrived late to the party. Gordon mentioned it in the 1988 edition of his textbook, 4 years after the other stages were in place. And thank goodness he did! During this stage, we do far more than “retain patterns.” If you’re listening to a polyphonic piece, you decide: Are the contrapuntal voices showing only brief flashes of imitation, or is the work a full-blown canon. Is the work I’m hearing in binary form, or ternary form, or rondo form, or variation form, or sonata form? Basically, at stage 4, you try to wrap your arms around the form of the work. At the very least, you hear if a modulation has taken place, and what kind of modulation it was.

For instance, can you audiate what tonal modulation is taking place in the following piece by Bach? You’ll hear me play the A section twice.

7. Bach: Gavotte from English Suite # 3 in g minor, performed by Eric Bluestine

I think of it this way: At stage 3, we’re certain about a work’s tonality and meter; and at stage 4, our certainty is challenged as we try to understand the larger formal structure of the piece.

Stage 5: Recalling tonal patterns and rhythm patterns organized and audiated in other music.

This is the “Where have I heard that before?” stage. Sometimes two pieces are so strikingly similar that they make you want to cry out … Fowl! … Plagiarism! In the case of the 2 pieces you’re about to hear — a movement from Bach’s Magnificat, and a movement from Handel’s opera Partenope — no thievery occurred.

Bach composed an early version of his Magnificat in 1723; and it included an E flat major version of the aria you’ll listen to in just a moment. It was performed only once, for Christmas, and then shelved for 10 years, at which time Bach revised it by removing the movements specific for Christmas, and by transposing it to D major, a better key for trumpets. Long story short: There’s no way Handel could have heard it!

The vocal ensemble piece by Handel comes from Act 3 of his opera Partenope, which he composed in 1730. It was staged and performed 14 times that year, and then it disappeared into obscurity. In short, there’s no way Bach could have heard it! Let’s listen first to the bass aria “Quia Fecit Mihi Magna” from Bach’s Magnificat.

8. Bach - Magnificat, “Quia Fecit Mihi Magna”

And now, let’s listen to the vocal ensemble “Non è incauto il mio consiglio” from Handel’s opera Partenope.

9. Handel - Partenope, “Non è incauto il mio consiglio”

I had known and loved the Bach bass aria for years. But when I heard the Handel piece, I nearly fainted! The fact that these two musical geniuses composed essentially the same piece independently is one of the most jaw-dropping coincidences in all of Western music history!

It’s at this stage of audiation — Gordon’s stage 5 — when we discern their shared features.

And now we finally arrive at …

Stage 6: Anticipating and predicting tonal patterns and rhythm patterns.

And here, I must compliment Dr. Gordon: He used exactly the right words.

There’s a difference between “expecting” something to happen, and “anticipating” that something will happen. When we expect a future event, we do nothing to prepare for it; when we anticipate a future event, we take action ahead of time. If we expect rain, we still leave the house in our regular clothes; but if we anticipate rain, we wear a coat and take an umbrella.

So then, “anticipating” is exactly the right word. When we listen to familiar music, we don’t just expect a cadence; we anticipate it by the way we move and breathe.

The word “prediction” seems to speak for itself, but it’s actually more nuanced than it seems. When we’re listening to unfamiliar music, we may expect a certain type of cadence to occur in the near future, at a particular time. But what if the cadence is deceptive? What if it’s delayed? These are the “wow” moments in our music listening. At Gordon’s stage 6, we may experience some of the most thrilling moments in our musical lives.

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I feel that Gordon’s descriptions of each stage are in need of an upgrade. And because I’m a glutton for punishment, I decided to rewrite his descriptions. As you read and listen to the ways I talk about each stage, you’ll notice that I keep Dr. Gordon’s main ideas intact. What follows are my descriptions of each stage of audiation — all 7 of them.

Yes, 7.

Making its way into the world is a new stage of audiation! I place it right after Gordon’s Stage 4. You’ll hear me talk about it as stage 5. What Gordon called stage 5 is now stage 6. And what he called stage 6 is now stage 7. If that sounds a bit confusing, please bear with me. I think that as I read my descriptions of each stage, things will become clearer for you.

With the help of ChatGPT, I’ve put together a chart of the 7 audiation stages. Here they are:

10.

Stage 1: In our minds, we hear an “aftersound” of the music we just heard.

Stage 2:

* a. We mentally imitate all the pitches and durations we just heard;

* b. Then we extract from those pitches and durations the ones we think are essential;

* c. Then we group those essential pitches and durations into tonal and rhythm patterns;

* d. And finally, based on the patterns we just organized, we discern macro beats and a pitch center.

Stage 3: We discern the tonality and meter of the music we are hearing.

Stage 4: We reassess the formal structure of the music we’re hearing based on the following: 1) repeated or varied phrases and sections; 2) modulations of tonality, keyality, tempo, and meter; and 3) changes in texture, timbre, and dynamics.

Stage 5: We discern how musical elements develop in tandem — sometimes in cooperation, and sometimes in conflict — in ways that affect how we understand the phrase structure, sectional structure, and overall form of a piece of music. The elements may include tonality, keyality, harmony, melody, tempo, meter, melodic rhythm, dynamics, articulation, phrase structure, sectional structure, texture, register, and orchestration.

Stage 6: We compare formal elements (tonality, meter, etc.) in the music we are hearing with those same elements in pieces we have heard before.

Stage 7: As we listen to music, we foresee musical events such as phrase endings, modulations, and sectional changes. If we’re hearing familiar music, we anticipate such events; if we’re hearing unfamiliar music, we predict such events.

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An important point I want to make — and it’s a point my chart does not reveal — is that the audiation process is not a one-and-done. It’s cyclical. If you’re hearing a piece of music, and you’ve already determined, at stage 4, that the piece has modulated from major tonality to minor, your job of listening isn’t over. As you keep listening, you absorb new information at stage 1, and you compare it with the content you’ve already processed.

Now, let me highlight a few things this chart does reveal. First, stages 6 and 7 are qualitatively different from the others.

Stages 1 through 5 are cumulative.

You can’t audiate a meter at stage 3 until you have grouped durations into rhythm patterns and discerned macro beats at stage 2; you can’t audiate a tonal modulation at stage 4 if you haven’t audiated a tonality at stage 3. And so on.

Stages 6 and 7 are not cumulative, but adjunct.

Imagine you’re listening to a piece of music. Let’s say that you’re audiating, at stage 2d, a harmonic progression in the music that leads you to discern the work’s pitch center. Maybe you recognize a IV - I - V- I progression that’s majorish, and you’re audiating G as the pitch center..

11.a the b

But you’re still not quite ready to sign on the dotted line that the work is in the major mode at stage 3. You’re still audiating a pitch center at Stage 2d. Even at this early stage, you could compare the piece you’re hearing now with other works you’ve heard that have the same harmonic progression and pitch center.

Now imagine that you’re audiating the rhythm of the piece at stage 2c. You’ve decided – even before you’ve discerned the meter – that the following rhythm pattern is essential to the music you’re hearing:

12.

Even at this early stage, you could predict, at stage 7, that the same rhythm pattern will repeat.

What I’m getting at is that you don’t need to audiate a piece at stage 5 before you compare it to other pieces of music at Stage 6, and before you predict future musical events at stage 7. You can proceed to stages 6 and 7 from as early as Stage 2c.

And what about the earlier stages? Can you jump from, let’s say, stage 1 to stage 6 or 7? I don’t think so. The aftersound in your mind simply doesn’t provide you with enough information to allow you to start comparing or predicting. Stage 2c seems to me to be the moment when bridging to stages 6 and 7 can reasonably start. And it makes sense that you can bridge to stages 6 and 7 – in other words, you can start comparing and predicting – at any stage from 2c onward.

At this point I want to pause for QUESTIONS.

When you get down to it, audiation is about musical multi-tasking. What I’m driving at is that the music, in our minds, moves not only at various rates of speed, but also backward and forward in time. Simply put, our musical minds are not locked into inexorable, second-by-second clock time; and when we mistakenly believe our minds are restricted this way, we end up sounding ridiculous.

Back in the mid-1980s at Temple University, I took my first general music methods class. I’ll never forget that the professor—who loathed MLT, and whose name I will not mention—made us write lesson plans according to a script, which included, as a course requirement, that we end every objective with the tag-line — “as the music moves forward in time.” And so, despite how idiotic we were made to sound, we wrote objectives like these:

13. —Students will be able to perform a steady beat while they sing “Skip To My Lou” as the music moves forward in time.

—Students will be able to perform an ostinato on percussion instruments while they sing “Sandy Land” as the music moves forward in time.

I wouldn’t have minded attaching this phrase — as the music moves forward in time — if it made sense; but in light of how we audiate, it’s complete nonsense. Music does not move “forward in time” only, but it also moves backward, taking us back to musical moments we heard seconds, minutes, even years before. And the “forward in time” sentiment leaves me believing that music proceeds at performance speed. But no. In our minds, we can slow the music down or zoom ahead; we can compress the music by choosing essential pitches, durations, and patterns; we can predict or anticipate what may happen in the music before we hear it acoustically.

I’m almost ready to bring this lecture to a close. But before I do, I have to talk about the new stage 5 in a bit more detail. The challenge is that Stage 5 is all about development, conflict, and the violation of expectations; and in order for me to sell this stage to you, I have to give you a chance to audiate a long piece of music — preferably a long section, or an entire movement — and we just don’t have the time for that. So instead of using a piece of music as an example, I thought I’d analyze a poem by the American poet Robert Frost. It’s a poem that many of you probably read in high school. It’s called “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

14.

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

There’s something hypnotic about this poem — the way it telegraphs its rhyme scheme, its meter, and its line length. At first glance it comes across like a jingle. “Whose woods these are I think I know / His house is in the village though.” It’s clearly in iambic meter, which means that the syllable stresses follow a pattern of weak-strong, weak-strong. And there are 4 of those syllable patterns per line — weak-strong, weak-strong, weak-strong, weak-strong, which means the lines are in a verse form called tetrameter.

So then. If you were to analyze the prosody of the poem, you would say right off the bat, that the poem is in iambic tetrameter. (The word prosody is a catch-all term that basically means anything musical about a poem — its rhyme scheme, syllable stresses, consonant and vowel sounds, etc.)

There seems to be no deviation from that pattern of 4 iambic feet per line. But wait! Take a look at the 3rd quatrain starting with “He gives his harness bells a shake.” Something is clearly going on with lines 3 and 4 of that quatrain. If I were to read them as written, they would sound like this:

The only other sound’s the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake.

The problem is that, as story-telling, it makes no sense to read it like that. To make sense of the line, you have to insert a punctuation mark — a dash, or perhaps a colon — after the word “sound’s” so that the reader knows to pause after the word “sound’s.”. And then you have this:

The only other sound’s: /

The sweep of easy wind and downy flake.

Changing the line length this way — creating one trimeter line with 3 accented beats, and then a pentameter line with 5 accented beats helps to clarify the meaning. But it’s not what Robert Frost wrote! So then. Which way is correct? Do we want to maintain Frost’s hypnotic effect with two lines of 4 beats + 4 beats, or do we want these lines to have greater semantic clarity by reading them – and audiatiing them – as two lines of 3 + 5? My answer is that both ways are correct simultaneously. We have an ambiguity where two distinct (but equally valid) ways of understanding that verse affect how we audiate the musical qualities of the poem.

And this folks, is what my new stage 5 is all about. Two different ways of looking at the phrase structure affect not only how we perform the poem, but also how we audiate its phrase structure. And Stage 5 works the same way in music: Musical elements may develop in conflicting ways that challenge us to rethink how we understand phrase structure and form.

In broad terms, here is how I think of the Stages of Audiation. Stages 1 and 2 lead us to a sense of certainty at stage 3. We’re certain of the tonality; we’re certain of the meter. The dorian mode. I got it. Uneven paired meter. It’s obvious. That’s stage 3.

At Stage 4, our certainty is challenged as we start to hear modulations, and changes in texture and orchestration, and other musical elements. But if we listen long enough at stage 4, then we audiate the overall formal structure. And form becomes our new certainty. Rondo form. I got it. Sonata form. It’s obvious. That’s stage 4.

But occasionally in music, we audiate two elements of music developing in ways that contradict each other (like in the Robert Frost poem) and these contradictions challenge our notion not only of a fixed phrase structure, and not only of the form of a given work. These ambiguities may cause us to question whether form itself is something we can reliably count on.

In his book The Infinite Variety of Music, Leonard Bernstein summed up the new stage 5 perfectly when he wrote,

15. “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.” More about this in lecture 7!

I’ll bring this lecture to a close by asking, why is it so important to look at these audiation stages, to take them apart and reassemble them? Because they’re too important to gloss over, as I find myself doing so often when I read Dr. Gordon’s texts. These stages are about how music students learn to understand music; and by extension, they guide us in how we think and teach.

Bernstein, Leonard. 1966. The Infinite Variety of Music. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Bluestine, Eric. 1995. The ways children learn music: An introduction and practical guide to music learning theory, 1st edition. Chicago: GIA.

Gordon, Edwin. 1977. Learning Sequence and Patterns in Music (revised edition). Chicago: GIA.

Gordon, Edwin. 1988. Learning Sequences in Music: Skill, Content, and Patterns. Chicago: GIA.

Gordon, Edwin. 2012. Learning Sequences in Music: Skill, Content, and Patterns. Chicago: GIA.

Maltin, Leonard. 2016. Theatre of the Imagination – History of the Mercury Theatre on the Air – Youtube, uploaded by Marc Baroni, 8 Sept.

Myers, Jack, and Don C. Wukasch. 2003. Dictionary of Poetic Terms. University of North Texas Press.

Nimoy, Leonard. 1975. I Am Not Spock. California: Celestial Arts.

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