Week 14 — Drill Plan · Embellishment and the Outer Voices

Course: MUS 155 Aural Skills I · Kenosis College
Instructor: Professor Hemsworth
Unit: Learning Unit 14 of 15 (Week 14) · two sessions per week
Objectives: SLO 1 · SLO 2 · SLO 3 · SLO 5
Sessions: session 1 · session 2 (Skills Check 14 in the last quarter hour of session 2; the break maintenance protocol is issued this week — the break sits between this unit and the final)

Instructor-facing. Excluded from the student cartridge. Every stimulus named below is notated, with its performance script, in _keys/KEY-stimulus-sheet-week-14.md; the plain frame, the printed flowered frame, and the suspension lean live in the student P file (fences 1–3) — nothing musical is spelled out here.

Named in Music Theory I: contour, step vs. leap, climax; the six non-chord tones, the suspension figured 4-3; the augmented-second trap in harmonic minor; embellishing a two-voice frame.

First time teaching this

The point of the LU: the last new-material week, and it closes the loop the course opened in Unit 1 — sound before symbol, one final time. Students sing a plain frame they understand completely, then hear it flowered; they must describe each extra note (walks through, dips and returns, hangs on and falls) before the theory names attach. Three NCTs get drilled — passing, neighbor, suspension; the other three of the morning's six stay named-only, and that is deliberate scope, not an omission.

The one thing that must land: the suspension lean, in the body. A student who has held a note while the bass walked out from under it, felt the fourth lean, and released it down to the third owns the concept forever; a student who only heard it defined owns a flashcard. Protect the lean drill's minutes.

The most common way it goes wrong: naming too early. The instinct is to say "that's a passing tone" the moment someone points; the design is to collect descriptions first and attach names after. Second trap: under-protecting session 2's last ten minutes — the break maintenance card is the break mitigation and it must be issued out loud, warmly, not discovered in Canvas.

The do ritual

Every key change starts with the ritual — play I–IV–V–I, sing do, the class sings do–mi–sol–mi–do back (minor: do–me–sol–me–do). Defined in full in Unit 1's plan. This week it runs in C, G, F, D, a minor, and d minor as the stimuli move.

Drill sequence

Session 1 — the frame, the flowers, the lean.

Session 2 — outer voices, climax, the lurch, the card, the check.

When they miss it

Escalation path

Drop one layer, never the week: frame-then-flowers falls back to ONE flower per hearing (play FL1 bar by bar); the lean falls back to oblique holding — class holds do while you play the moving bass alone (Unit 1's hold-your-do, final form); NCT-ID falls back to N1 vs N2 only (through vs back); outer-voice dictation falls back to bass alone, two bars. Re-establish tonic the same way every time: stop, run the do ritual in the working key, resume. Abandon criterion: a segment still failing after two escalated attempts gets banked — say "the final doesn't test this in isolation; your ear has the seed" — and log it. The named pick-up hook: Unit 15 re-enters everything here — the climax and contour hearing returns inside the at-sight final prep, the outer-voice texture returns in the Nashville bass-line drills, and the prepared-set polish assumes the break card kept voices warm. Nothing is lost; Unit 15 is built to collect it.

Tempo table

Rotation note (P states it to students): solo hearings run inside the frame and lean segments — 6 to 8 students per session hold a line alone against the piano, keeping the rotation that reaches every voice about every two and a half weeks at 36; in a small room, everyone, both days. The ledger should now show every student heard solo at least five times this term; Unit 15's hearing schedule assumes it is current.