Composition of Song Accompaniment as a Form of Developing Future Music Teachers’ Harmonic Hearing

Abstract

Harmonic hearing, just like any other kind of musical hearing, functions on different levels: music perception, music making and creativity. The creativity of harmonic hearing involves not only the ability to freely operate with musical auditory perceptions and a harmonic structure, but also with consonance criteria, expressiveness, principles of creating forms, and a proportional distribution of musical time. A well-developed music teacher’s harmonic hearing provides the opportunity for creating original compositions: accompaniments for songs and arrangements for choirs, etc. One of music teachers’ creative competences is composing accompaniments for songs which, during its formation and developmental process, requires a base of previously gained musical perceptions, logic of harmonic functionality of chord sequences as well as previously developed basic skills of playing some musical instrument. The process of composing the accompaniment activates the auditory control, which is related to the logic of the development of harmonic hearing and helps to create perceptions about the musical material. The problem of melody harmonization and choosing the accompaniment has been dealt with by many researchers. However, in their studies, scientists have not defined specific skills which are required for learning to choose the accompaniment, and kinds and the specificity of types of piano accompaniment have not been analysed as well. On the basis of a long pedagogical experience, in this research, the formation and developmental stages of the skill of composing the accompaniment for songs have been defined and characterized within the context of the development of future music teacher’s harmonic hearing.