Introduction
At a moment when inclusivity is being recognized as an urgent issue throughout academia, keyboard proficiency sticks out as a part of music curricula that can be particularly exclusive. Many college music programs have stories of students who delayed graduation or dropped the music major because of a piano exam—students who often had considerable talent in other styles, instruments, or modes of musical work. Part of the problem is that traditional keyboard proficiency instruction often places an unfair burden on students without previous piano lessons, a disparity that was described by Joan M. Wildman forty years ago:
Keyboard harmony is probably the most frustrating course taken by the college music major. For the beginning pianist the initial difficulty of applying theoretical concepts through the use of an unfamiliar instrument is understandable. (Wildman 1982)
When keyboard instruction focuses solely on European classical idioms, this burden is doubled for students who must come to terms with a new style of music and a new musical instrument at the same time. This dimension of the problem clearly resonates with the broader “White racial frame” in music theory that Philip A. Ewell has described, an exclusionary and disproportionate focus on the music and theories of White people, especially German speakers from 1700–1950 (Ewell 2020, 2.4). Keyboard study thus often represents a combination of barriers, from race and repertoire to learning a new instrument—which can be further compounded by unaccommodating methods of teaching and assessment.
Nevertheless, keyboard studies remain an important requirement in many college music programs. Michael R. Callahan describes a growing recognition that music theory students are more successful and more positive about the subject when it is taught through playing music, not just reading about it and writing exercises on paper (Callahan 2015, especially 6.15 and Figure 2). Callahan advocates for instruction on piano specifically because of "its capacity for polyphony and its symmetric topography, which allows patterns to be heard, seen, and felt simultaneously" (Callahan 2015, 1.4). Further, schools that are accredited by the National Association for Schools of Music must require keyboard competency for all undergraduate music degrees (NASM 2021). In this context, how can we make keyboard pedagogy requirements more inclusive and accessible to students with a wide variety of backgrounds and interests?
Scholarship on inclusive pedagogy argues that an inclusive curriculum can frame students’ differences as reasons they succeed rather than obstacles they must overcome (Addy et al. 2021). Two familiar terms from discussions in academia about how to accommodate and welcome students’ differences are “representation” and “access” (Kachani et al. 2020). I follow several recent music theory publications (Covach 2017, Palfy and Gilson 2018, de Clercq 2020, Ewell 2020) by advocating the de-centering of classical music to increase representation of more diverse musical traditions in the keyboard curriculum and create more robust and diverse outcomes for our students.
In this essay I argue that a keyboard curriculum can also facilitate greater access by using student-centered strategies (O’Neill and McMahon 2005) for learning and assessment—founded on the principle that keyboard skills should be taught as a means for students to explore and understand music. I describe a student-centered keyboard skills format I call weekly multi-level challenges, in which students find their own level of appropriate difficulty from a list of keyboard activities provided by the instructor. Students present the results of their work at the end of the week in a 5-minute audio or video recording. In my all-in-one theory/musicianship courses at the University of Richmond during which I developed this format (2019–2022), these activities were derived from (and clearly linked to) the same pieces and concepts we analyzed in music theory lectures and discussions—teaching students that the purpose of keyboard skills is to help them engage with music more deeply and begin to develop their own musical expertise on their own terms. Those teaching an independent keyboard skills course might draw on the repertoire of their coordinated theory course, or on independent objectives planned for the keyboard class, as long as this material is relevant to students’ desired careers and provides opportunities for them to begin using the keyboard to explore their own interests and ideas.
Teaching More Diverse Music and Theories
Several theorists have called for expanded diversity in the repertoires and music-theoretical methods we teach, in order to address long-standing racial disparities in the field. Cora S. Palfy and Eric Gilson (2018) argue that the overrepresentation of Western European men in music theory is a “hidden curriculum” that can make students of other genders, races, and origins feel unwelcome in the field. Philip Ewell (2020) makes a broader argument, describing a “White racial frame” that undergirds the entire field. Ewell argues that representation is not enough; the problem is not only the underrepresentation of people of color as composers on syllabi, but also a nearly exclusive focus on ideas and methods derived from classical music and developed mostly by White theorists. Trevor de Clercq argues that the overrepresentation of European classical music contributes to problems of accessibility as well as representation. De Clercq proposes that the entire first year of core music theory be dedicated to popular music to make the fundamental concepts of music theory more accessible to populations “beyond the traditional student” (de Clercq 2020). He also emphasizes that this will require teaching popular styles on their own terms rather than just adding popular examples to existing curricula.
But such curricular revision is arguably necessary even when racial or gender diversity are not institutional priorities: music theory teachers need to expand the repertoire taught in order to equip our students for the diversity of styles they will encounter in today’s musical careers. Ethan Hein has argued that “the conventional teaching of music theory serves practicing musicians pretty poorly” (Hein 2014). Despite four years of intensive study, many music school students graduate without practical skills like reading pop and jazz chord symbols, voicing pop and jazz chords, or performing and arranging in non-classical styles—even though many performers and teachers must regularly work with popular music and jazz repertoire. Any core music theory curriculum, even at a classical conservatory, should strive to teach students about the styles they are likely to encounter in today’s careers.
Of course, popular music can have its own “White racial frame” and only represents a (relatively recent and commercialized) part of the world’s music traditions. Twenty-first century music theory curricula should arguably include more non-Western music, both to challenge and re-frame students’ assumptions about how music works, and to cultivate what the widely-read 2014 “Manifesto” of the CMS Task Force on the Undergraduate Music Major described as “a genuine global artistic identity” (Campbell et al. 2014, 5). Philip Ewell describes non-Western music as a critical part of de-centering the White racial frame of music theory, arguing that “the music theories of non-Western cultures—from Asia, South America, or Africa, for instance—can and should be part of basic required music-theory curricula, from freshman music theory classes to doctoral history-of-theory seminars” (Ewell 2020, 3.5).
In short, I advocate de-centering classical music within music theory; but I want to be clear that de-centering classical music is not the same thing as removing it. Students still need to know basic concepts of structure in classical music to navigate most current research in music theory and to understand the history of the field; even jazz and pop theory publications by the Berklee School of Music often use classical music as a point of reference. And, especially in America, the university is one of the primary places where classical traditions are kept alive and handed down. Classical music should continue to be an important part of music theory curricula, and university music education more broadly, but it should be only a part. Borrowing language from Thomas L. Friedman’s bestseller The World Is Flat, John Covach describes the present as “a flat musical world in which classical music is no longer seen as the only music worthy of being considered art” (Covach 2017). Music theory curricula should encompass this whole flat world, including classical music alongside popular music and non-Western traditions.
Teaching Keyboard as a Tool for Discovery
Traditional keyboard curricula teach professional piano skills specific to classical music, which today are only directly useful for a small category of students. Most musicians today will never need to play the capstones of my undergraduate keyboard training: Bach chorales, simple piano sonatas, and figured-bass realization. Other skills that would be more relevant to today’s musicians might include transposition, reading lead sheets and contemporary piano-vocal scores, and improvising simple accompaniments based on pop-style chord symbols. But the ever-increasing availability and accessibility of music streaming services, pre-recorded backing tracks, synthesizers, etc. means that fewer and fewer music jobs specifically require playing piano, even if it often remains an attractive added-value skill. So why ask students to learn piano at all?
I argue that professors seeking to make keyboard pedagogy more inclusive and student-centered should consider presenting keyboard skills as a tool for understanding music and music theory, rather than as a professional skill. This is similar to Timothy Chenette’s argument that part-writing can be more student-centered if we “teach part-writing not as an end in itself but as a key that unlocks exciting abilities” (Chenette 2018). With respect to piano skills, Michael R. Rogers expressed this idea almost forty years ago, and it only becomes more important when decentering classical music:
From the standpoint of a theory program, however, the central justification for a keyboard component is not learning how to play the piano—essential as this is for any musician—but as reinforcement of conceptual skills. (Rogers 1984, 69–70)
From this perspective, piano is a tool for transforming knowledge on paper into fluency with real-time musical structures and possibilities, which deepens conceptual understanding of musical structure. In other words, the goal of keyboard skills should be empowering students to learn new things about music, rather than performance proficiency with one specific style (classical music).
By framing piano skills as a tool to explore music and build understanding of musical styles and concepts, we can foster intrinsic motivation (Amabile 1998) by encouraging students to pursue their own interests—rather than the extrinsic motivation of abstract keyboard exercises, or genre- and period-specific professional skills like figured bass realization which have less practical value to students whose interests lie elsewhere.
Giving Students More Agency and Flexibility
Traditional conservatory-style musicianship classes revolve around in-person, on-command performance. Some instructors assess students during class while their peers watch, while others meet students outside of class for one-on-one “performance checks.” While this approach helps students practice performing under pressure, it can be intimidating and discouraging to some students, especially those seeking non-performance music specializations. Further, in a traditional keyboard classroom, all students are given the same assignments, and what seems trivial and boring to some students can appear impossible to others.
We can make keyboard pedagogy more inclusive by giving students more agency and flexibility in how they build and demonstrate their expertise. In this section, I will discuss how I put these principles into action in weekly multi-level challenges, using the two sample assignments linked here and here. From 2019 to 2022, I developed this format while teaching at the University of Richmond, a small liberal arts college in Virginia where incoming students have a wide diversity of backgrounds, ranging from students already signed with record labels to students with no prior lessons or performance experience. At that time, the theory and musicianship teaching occurred in integrated courses which met for 75 minutes twice a week, so most of my students’ keyboard practice occurs outside of class, either in practice rooms on campus or at home. (I recommended that all students purchase a small electronic keyboard or a melodica, and all required tasks were limited in range to two octaves.) My keyboard assignments often included singing and some analysis due to the integrated nature of these courses, but the same student-centered strategies could easily be implemented in a separated keyboard skills class.
In my weekly multi-level challenges, I presented students with a sheet of 4–8 activities ordered by approximate difficulty. These activities explored concepts covered that week in class through multiple modes of cognition and action, including playing chord progressions on piano, transposing easy chord progressions at sight, playing chords while naming them out loud, singing a melody while playing the bass, singing harmonies as Solfége arpeggios, and playing a reduction or full arrangement of an excerpt.
Normally, these courses were taught in the piano lab, and at the end of Monday’s class I would demo the week’s tasks and give students a few minutes to try the tasks for themselves while I walked around answering questions. This gave me a chance to observe students’ work and recommend techniques or strategies that would make the week’s tasks easier for them—or offer extra coaching outside of class if they are struggling to play (usually all that is needed is one or two brief lessons to provide additional orientation to the keyboard). I asked students to try all tasks at least once, then determine a number of levels they will be able to prepare well, practice for 10–15 minutes each day, and make a 5-minute recording at the end of the week with as few errors as possible to show their progress.
Each task uses chord progressions, melodies, and excerpts adapted from the pieces studied in class that week. The first task is always presented as a warm-up featuring a minimal realization of an idea or pattern that is at the heart of the other tasks, and the first 2 or 3 levels are usually playable with only one hand on the keyboard. For example, in Sample Assignment #1, which is from a unit about harmony in R&B, Level 1 contains plagal and double-plagal progressions (see Biamonte 2010, 98) spelled as parallel root-position triads. Level 2 asks students to loop one of these progressions and compose their own melody. Levels 3 and 4 contain adapted excerpts from songs featuring these progressions. The higher levels contain more difficult keyboard parts, or more multitasking, and build up to playing full piano arrangements of music from in-class discussions and activities. (Level 5 uses the term “reverse extension,” defined in Hudson 2023.)
The main objective of these exercises is to get students actively engaged in music and build their knowledge of specific idioms in a given style. In class, I often compare musical styles to verbal languages, and I teach musical concepts and patterns as style-specific idioms, usually focusing on a single musical style for multiple weeks. While I encourage my students to make comparisons between genres and traditions, I warn them that no rules, concepts, or idioms are universally applicable. Tasks and examples are chosen to demonstrate some of the ways in which a particular idiom or idiomatic strategy can be used within that style.
This approach resonates on many levels with Cora S. Palfy’s recent publication on “objective-focused and skill-scalable” methods (Palfy 2020). Both approaches are motivated by a need to give appropriate assignments to students with a wide variety of backgrounds and skills, and each approach adjusts the power dynamic of the classroom by giving students more choice. One minor difference is that Palfy suggests making every activity scalable to fit each student’s level, which “ensures that students are all getting the content of the class but are able to achieve it at their individual level of experience” (Palfy 2020, 377). I, on the other hand, have emphasized allowing students to choose within a range of different activities, which provides students more self-directed choice but does not necessarily ensure that every student completes the same types of tasks.
However, these approaches can be varied between assignments or even combined within the same assignment, depending on the needs of the material. For example, I include some skill-scaling within some of the individual tasks in my Sample Assignment #1, particularly in Levels 2 and 6 but also in other levels through language like “If possible, say the Roman numerals out loud as you play.” I also invite students to compose and bring in their own music in Level 6 and compose their own melody in Level 2, and this freedom combined with the skill-scaling can lead to diverse student experiences. But in Sample Assignment #2, which is drawn from a short unit on Hindustani classical music, I give students fewer options. This is because I want all students to complete the same tasks, since the theory and idioms of this music will be new to almost everyone and some of the tasks build on each other. (Two good starting points for readers wishing to teach Hindustani classical music in an American college program are: a YouTube video about Raag by Anuja Kamat, which I cite in the sample assignment, and an introductory chapter about Taal by Anjni Amin; see Amin 2020.)
The multi-level challenge format allows for student “differentiation” (Kallick and Zmuda 2017, 6), in that students select their own path through the content. This invites students to set their own goals and to make their own choices about what kind of skills they are most interested in pursuing. This can be compared to an approach known as “contract grading” (Melzer et al. 2019), in which students pick their intended final grade at the beginning of a course, and based on their choice are contracted to complete different amounts of work during the term. But in this case, instead of choosing between grade outcomes, students are choosing which skills and ability levels they wish to pursue. I do require a minimum number of levels each week to make sure students are developing their keyboard skills, but this minimum is quite easy and I regularly challenge students to voluntarily complete more.
This self-directed format also creates “individualization,” because it allows learning to happen at any time or place the student chooses. Students determine their own practice schedule and manage their own recording time, so each student “controls the pace of the topic as well as when to demonstrate their own mastery” (Kallick and Zmuda 2017, 5–6). In a traditional command-performance assessment, a student who performs badly does not get a chance to improve. This can lead to what Carol Dweck calls a “fixed mindset” in which a student believes that they are deficient (Dweck 2008). Changing the assessment to a recording that the student completes on their own time allows them to redo and self-correct, encouraging a “growth mindset” in which a bad performance is something that can be improved upon rather than a sign of a deficiency.
I regularly emphasize to my students that the primary goal of these weekly challenges is simply to foster active engagement with music, not to force all students to achieve the same standard of performance proficiency. This is reflected in a grading policy that prioritizes completion over perfection. I grade generously out of 10, with 7 points given automatically to any submission that follows directions, and the remaining points assigned based on the number of errors, not number of levels or impressiveness of performance. The mistakes I count as “errors” are incorrect pitches, halting or having to restart, and incorrect solfege syllables; but more performance-oriented programs may want to grade for intonation, articulation, subtler rhythm inaccuracies, and dynamics. A student who records the minimum required levels with many wrong notes will receive a 7, while a student who completes the minimum number of levels perfectly but then makes many mistakes on the next two levels will also receive a 7; this encourages students to listen critically to their own work as they choose which levels to submit. If a student receives several 10s in a row, I will talk to them individually and ask them to complete more difficult levels. Recordings are submitted through our online course management system, where I give feedback to encourage musicianship and teach basic technique. But a student with no prior experience who plays haltingly or slowly can still get a good score! Just by having completed the assignment, students have already fulfilled the primary goal of this curriculum, which is to get them to turn to the piano to explore music covered in class, actively constructing their own musical understanding and improving their capabilities as musicians. Consequently, institutions (especially conservatories) who still want to require students to acquire particular keyboard proficiencies as professional skills may want to retain some elements of traditional instruction, like in-person performance checks, while looking for opportunities to incorporate more individualized assignments and diverse repertoires alongside them.
By making their own choices about how many levels to complete and when to record or re-record, students are directly engaging in “metacognition,” or awareness and evaluation of their own abilities. According to an interview between James M. Lang and the psychology professor Stephen Chew, faulty metacognition is a pitfall that particularly plagues weaker students, who often don’t realize how shallow their understanding of a topic is until an exam. According to Chew, the best way to counter this problem is to use “formative assessments,” which are “[…] brief, low-stakes activities that students do in order to give both themselves and the teacher feedback about their level of understanding” (Lang 2012). The 5-minute recordings I describe above are exactly this type of low-stakes activity, allowing students to realize their mistakes, correct them, and learn from them. This learning cycle can be further encouraged by allowing students to revise and resubmit recordings, in situations where the professor has time to grade a second version.
Conclusion: Empowering Students to Seek Expertise on Their Own Terms
This multi-level assignment format provides a challenge for students who want one, while keeping the assignments accessible to beginners—all without the complexity of multiple concurrent assignments or rubrics. Additional differentiation can be created by tracking students’ scores and teacher comments across the semester in a spreadsheet, and encouraging students to reach for more and higher levels by the end of the term than where they started in week one. I often don’t have to say much; many students are already eager to expand their skills and demonstrate growth.
An empowering music theory curriculum is structured in a way that helps students build towards their own interests and futures, rather than simply requiring them to replicate their professors’ expertise. A multi-level challenge format can branch into truly “personalized learning” (Kallick and Zmuda 2017, 5) by asking students to bring in chord progressions and melodies from pieces they are interested in, or by asking them to develop and start implementing an action plan for learning new styles on their own. One could also include more improvisation or composition tasks like Level 2 in Sample Assignment #1, in which students exercise their own creativity to compose their own music in styles they care about (see Alcalde 2018). With these student-driven activities added to a multi-level challenge format, students learn that the ultimate purpose for their keyboard training is self-actualization—pursuing their own interests on their own terms, beyond the boundaries of the required curriculum.
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