Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum My students is so confused...

half step
half note
half cadences
eight note is half a beat

They are not the same thing, but somehow some of my students keep thinking they are related.

Any tips when deliver these concepts?

How are you presenting them presently, and in what manner are they confused?

I've never encountered this problem before. I've seen kids who confuse finger numbers with beat numbers (counts).

Hold off on explaining note values and beats until the kid has had learned division and fractions in school.

You don't have to explain all the concepts if the student struggles. One can still play the piano fine without knowing what a half cadence is. In the grand scheme of things, it's really no big deal if the student doesn't know what a half step is.

This might be a problem with understanding multiple denotations. Some kids automatically shut down when they get overwhelmed with too much information.

For once I'm grateful for UK-speak.

What's a half-cadence then?

Students will confuse anything, given half a chance.

Wikipedia says a half-cadence is "any cadence ending on V" and says an alternate name is semicadence.

What do you call it in the UK?

I had to look it up because I have never yet succeeded in memorizing all the cadence names (apart from plagal), partly because every time I try, I soon find another source which uses a different set of cadence names. I think what I need to learn is the function and significance of different cadence patterns, regardless of names, and then it would be easier for me to hang names on them.

It's generally referred to as Imperfect Cadence or Half-close.

Where I am it's:

Semitone
Minim
Imperfect cadence
quaver is half a (crotchet) beat

No worries. (well, not the same worries, anyway)

If a student is unsure about what is a half-step, or that a 1/8 note is half a beat (but not in 6/8 or 12/8 time!), then the concept of a half cadence is too advanced for them. For them it is rocket science.

Stick with the fundamentals until they are well established.

As has been said, if a cadence ends on V, it is imperfect.

I'm with rocket, surely by the time they are on to cadences, they have internalised the rest?

As has been said, if a cadence ends on V, it is imperfect.

I'm with rocket, surely by the time they are on to cadences, they have internalised the rest?

Nobody has talked about this, which concerns me:



An eighth note is NOT a half beat. No note in and of itself is any proportion of a beat. That depends on the time signature.

What happens is that students get music in the beginning that always has 4 in the signature: 4/4, 3/4, 2/4 They learn that the "quarter note gets the beat", and they associate the quarter note with the beat. They think the quarter IS the beat. Then when they get 3/8 etc. it is mass confusion.

An eighth note is half of a quarter note. Two eighth notes fit in the time of one quarter note. If the quarter note gets the beat, then two eighth notes will fit into that beat, but the relationship is with the quarter note, not with the beat.

Rocket addressed it above.

I see what you are referring to - this:


But this involves compound vs. simple time. Also, the same kind of terminology is being used, that equates notes with beats. When teaching rudiments I make very sure that the student makes a difference between relationship between note values, and beats. They tend to fuse, and they shouldn't.

I didn't get into a thorough dissertation about the fact that a note is not a beat because that is not the topic of this thread. (Good catch, though, Keystring!)

The topic as I see it is that a teacher appears to be teaching a somewhat advanced concept (half cadences) to students who are so ungrounded in the basics that they are confused about elementary things such as a half-step and a half-note, and perhaps also with whatever other musical terms happen to begin with the word "half".

If the student confuses half notes with half beats, then this simple vs. compound meter stuff will just fly over her head. I steer clear of explaining simple vs. compound meter until the student is in the 4th or 5th grade (or later).

Well, "perfect" vs. "imperfect" cadence means a totally different thing here in the states. You want to look that up, too?

Wikipedia gives definitions using the set of terminology where perfect and imperfect refer to types of voicing of a V-I cadence. Unfortunately, the article doesn't seem to talk about the different sets of terminologies where the same words mean completely different things. Here is a page using the set of terms where perfect vs. imperfect refers to V-I vs. I-V, but it doesn't say if there are any terms in that set to describe the voicings of V-I cadences, in particular to distinguish the bass & soprano = tonic from the other voicings.

My point was that compound vs. simple meter was being stressed, but that is not the problem. The problem is in stating that a NOTE VALUE EQUALS A FRACTION OF A BEAT. It doesn't. (emphasizing - not shouting )

Good to know, thanks for alerting me. According to this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadence_(music)
and imperfect cadence can be a kind of 'authentic' cadence (which I would have called a 'perfect' cadence).

Confusion abounds!