Misunderstood: Elements of Music
The concept that I identified as often misunderstood was the elements of music. The analogy that I thought of that may help the concept make more sense to students is the literary elements or the elements of film. Students in the course may be music majors, but if not, they also tend to be in the fine arts or beyond. Relating the elements of music to another discipline they are more familiar uses their previous experiences in order to scaffold up to the new and challenging one. Using listening examples to talk about only one element at a time is one way to break down the concept into bite-size chunks so students can more easily digest that harder-to-aquire information.
Using the elements of film as an analogy for the elements of music could be exemplified by, characterization = timbre and plot = form. The ways a film is broken down is not the exact same as the way music is broken down, but the fact that they can be broken down and looked at from different perspectives is similar. Music is broken down by different things you can hear versus film is broken down by what you see, hear and read.
Click HERE for an image of some musical symbols which correspond to different elements of music.
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