Critical Thinker

Critical Thinking through Reevaluating Music Notation

This listening map was designed to assist our students in responding to the piece The Comedians. The purpose of this listening map is to be an outlet of expressing music, an aural art, in a concise, visual way. My peers and I created this map by listening to The Comedians over and over again through thinking about the simplest, most comprehensive method of expressing what we were hearing visually. In this map, we used the doorway in articulation by showing the staccato notes as dots and the legato notes as lines. We also showed a secondary doorway in form by labeling the map with traditional form notation, including lettered sections, repeat signs, and the term da capo. By combining traditional elements from Western printed music and symbols that are easily recognizable, the students are able to understand the music with both familiar and musical symbols.