Do You Have It?

After several weeks of studying a new musical element, my students and I re-enact the dictation scene from Amadeus—I exhort them to write more quickly; they protest I go too fast. We’re not working from my deathbed, but there is a sense of urgency, and I think it really must be so.

The scene is fictional, but nonetheless a depiction of two great musicians fully conversant with notation. Mozart sings; Salieri scribbles—in ink—struggling to keep up with the flow of musical ideas. When he sings himself, and writes musically, he is successful. A student who takes dictation this way will be truly musically literate.

Salieri takes up the pen; I am a firm believer that musicians taking dictation should likewise work without an eraser. The great composers wrote in ink, not only of necessity, but of purpose. They knew already what must be written. Their pens were as sure an instrument of musical expression as a voice or a piano. Mistakes happened, just as they do in performance. And just as in performance, there was no time to stop the music to make corrections. Mistakes could be crossed out and corrected in later copies.

Though perhaps less sure of ourselves than the Masters, we do not need an eraser to take dictation. Indeed, we have no time to use them. Even the brief second it takes to flip a pencil and erase a mark is enough to derail musical thought. The sound we had hoped to notate is lost and our musical endeavor is reduced to a frustrating abstraction.

We should mark the page in rhythm, the sounds of the pencil approximating the rhythm of the phrase. Use slashes in place of noteheads; stems will follow. It is usually necessary to write at a slower tempo, but it is better to maintain some momentum, even if the result is a seemingly meaningless string of slash marks.

In making rhythmic slashes, we rehearse the phrase aurally, express it physically, and represent it visually. We will remember it well enough to make second pass, adding stems and flags, solfa letters or other symbols to complete the notation. Unlike Salieri, we have the luxury of repeated hearings as we work.

Following Mozart’s example, we should keep up the pressure. I think a good dictation session should be almost conversational in pace. Someone should always be singing; the teacher precisely, the students silently.

Is this stressful? (In the film, working this way killed Mozart, but not Salieri…) It is important to choose the right material for dictation, and to monitor the students’ efforts; it should be joyful work. It is also important to approach dictation differently than a leisurely crossword puzzle. Write in ink, write in rhythm; make dictation a musical exercise.

Eric Sennett, Youth Chorus Musicianship Teacher