A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Road Maps as Analytical Tools

Abstract

I. Initial Considerations My experience with road maps began fifteen years ago, when I was teaching an upper-division course on 20th-century music. Sarah Z, a senior, was simultaneously pursuing degrees in violin performance and studio art. She chose to analyze for her final project Arvo Part's Fratres (1977). A week before the project was due, Sarah came to see me during an office hour. She told me that she had spent nearly two months studying Fratres, comparing performances, modeling the small-scale and large-scale form, and learning about Part's musical language, including his use of plainchant and tintinnabuli. (1) Yet she was experiencing (for the first time in her academic life) a debilitating case of writer's block. Frustrated and nearly distraught, she wanted to analyze a different piece for her final project. I said no--it was much too late in the semester to re-start the entire process--and then brainstormed with her until we found a compromise: rather than write an essay, Sarah would submit an annotated score and a painting of some sort. While I wasn't entirely thrilled with this solution--how would a music theorist assess a work of art?--it far better than scrapping the project altogether and beginning anew. One week later, Sarah submitted an annotated score and an exquisite two-foot by three-foot watercolor. Much to my surprise, she also handed in a seven-page analytical essay. She explained that, once she had finished the artwork, her writer's block vanished; the paper seemed to write itself. Her paper was not only musical and insightful, but more compelling than her previous essays. Sarah's epiphany inspired me to investigate the literature on multiple intelligences, left-brain versus right-brain processing, and learning theory. (2) Encouraged by these readings and emboldened by Sarah's breakthrough, I made a conscious decision to have every student do a road map the following semester. I've continued this practice, without regrets, ever since. A road map is a representation or documentation of how one hears a work unfold in time. In its simplest form, a road map can be a time line or flow chart. But it can also be an elaborate landscape of observations, correspondences, and associations, with text descriptions, symbols, staff notation, rhythms, colors, and shapes. A road map can be teleological or non-linear; literal or abstract; monochromatic or multi-colored; sparse or dense; small or large; hand-drawn or created with a music notation program such as Sibelius or Finale. I would argue that a road map--like any piece of writing--is provisional. There is no right or wrong way to create one, although some maps are definitely more compelling, thoughtful, and musical than others. The idea behind a road map is to capture the important characteristics of a work and represent them in some way that makes sense. For this reason I occasionally ask students to re-map the same work later in a semester. The results often reveal (to student and instructor alike) significant refinement in hearing and sophistication in modeling. A map can trace the history of pitches, pitch-classes, set-classes, rhythms, gestures, themes, registers, dynamics, articulations, texture and other parameters; it can highlight phrase structures, structural upbeats and downbeats, and climaxes; and it can model formal organization and energy flow, character, compositional strategies, and narrative. Road maps facilitate deeper engagement with music, foster critical listening skills, and provide a creative outlet for students, especially those who are visual learners. Over the years my students have created road maps of compositions by Ablinger, Ades, Aperghis, Babbitt, Bartok, Berg, Cage, Carter, Cassidy, Chopin, Crumb, Debussy, Eckhart, Feldman, Ferneyhough, Glass, Gubaidulina, Harbison, Harvey, Hurel, Lang, Messiaen, Merzbow, Reich, Riley, Saunders, Schoenberg, Scelsi, Sciarrino, Stravinsky, Xenakis, Webern, Wolpe, and Yi among others. …