Psychomusicology—Perceptual/Cognitive Research with Implications for the Composer and Performer

01 October 1982 Stimulation of interest in the study of music as a sensory experience has generally been attributed to Helmholtz. But the scientific and technological advances of the past two decades, coupled with concentrated research efforts by music researchers,...

Towards the Acceptance of a Bachelor of Music Degree in Popular Music Studies

01 October 2007 Despite the enormous impact popular music has had on our culture since the 1950s, there is not one NASM1 accredited institution of higher learning in the United States that has a bachelors degree program in popular music studies2. In this paper, I will...

Musical Pattern Perception

01 October 1979 How the human mind structures its complex environment is a topic that has been explored for generations by individuals from a wide variety of disciplines. Musicians now seem to be generally aware that pattern perception is highly relevant to their...

"Broadway the Hard Way:" Techniques of Allusion in the Music of Frank Zappa

01 October 1995 Frank Zappa might be described as a cultural guerilla. He sees that the popular arts are propagandistic in the broad sense—even when they masquerade as rebellion they lull us into fantasy and homogenize our responses. So he infiltrates the machine and...

Appreciation Without Apologies

02 October 2006 Admit it: music appreciation is square. In the recent film comedy School of Rock, when a bumbling rocker somehow gets a job teaching at a stuffy prep school and begins teaching classes in "rock history and appreciation," what's funny is how the film...

Music as Life-Saving Project: Venezuela’s El Sistema in American Neo-Idealistic Imagination

28 April 2014 Abstract The U.S. reception of El Sistema has been, for the most part, enthusiastic, as reflected in numerous media articles and the literature of prominent advocates such as Tricia Tunstall. An analysis of these sources points to a tendency on the...

[i]Ethnomusicology Scholarship and Teaching[/i] - Blurred Genres: Reflections on The Ethnomusicology of Jazz Today

26 August 2014 Abstract The study of jazz has been part of ethnomusicology since the 1940s, contributing meaningfully to the discipline's core theories and methodologies. In turn, ethnomusicological studies have profoundly colored jazz scholarship at large. This...

The Core Commitment in Theory and Literature for Tomorrow's Musician

01 October 1970 When we speak of the responsibilities of the music theory and music literature programs in a college or university curriculum, we are concerned with singular parts of a greater educational process. All reputable educational processes have networks of...

Music Theory in Re-Transition: Centripetal Signs

01 October 1977 This article was originally delivered as part of a unified group of papers entitled Music Theory: The Art, the Profession, and the Future, which was read at a plenary session of the national conferences of The College Music Society and the American...

The Beethoven Symphonies in London: Initial Decades

01 October 1985 Innumerable history textbooks record Napoleon's 1799 overthrow of the French Government. Five years would elapse before historians could begin to record Admiral Horatio Nelson's victory at the western entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar, a British...

Approaching Musical Classicism—Understanding Styles and Style Change in Eighteenth-Century Instrumental Music

01 October 1980 I Historical/stylistic periods in music are both useful and perplexing concepts; they simultaneously clarify and hinder one's perception of a given period and a given work. Part of the difficulty arises from a general lack of agreement as to what...

Music and the Public Good: Can Higher Education Fulfill the Challenges and Opportunities (Privileges and Responsibilities) of the 21st Century?

01 October 2010 From its beginnings in the seventeenth century, American higher education has had a somewhat uneasy and self-conscious relationship with the world beyond the academy. Through the years, critics have sometimes invoked terms such as "real world" and...

Open-Access Music Journals and the Possibility of Global Dialogue[sup]1[/sup]

15 November 2021 Abstract Musicians increasingly operate in a global community connected by the internet that has affected performance, composition, and listening habits. Similarly, there is a growing trend of publishing scholarly research “open access,” meaning it is...

Narration as Drama: Wagner's Early Revisions of [I]Tannhäuser[/I] and their Relation to the Rome Narrative

01 October 1984 Tannhäuser is virtually unique in Wagner's output. If he did indeed make the oft-quoted remark ascribed to him by Cosima, "I still owe the world a Tannhäuser,"1 we can only assume that even in his last years, Wagner felt that this much-revised opera...

Peeking Over the Fence: An Academic Eavesdropper at Nea's Art-21

31 August 1994 "Art gives us the opportunity for stillness in the midst of chaos." "Artists close their eyes in order to see." "Art challenges despair." "Art saves lives." Statements such as these energized Art-21: Art Reaches Into The 21st Century, the first...

Finding Your Own Music: A Case for Free Improvisation

01 September 2002 My goal in this column is to convince those of you who have never experimented with free improvisation to try it. In earlier columns, I have mentioned that improvising is an absorbing part of my musical life, and I relish this opportunity to help you...

Needs for Research in Black-American Music

01 October 1973 Traditionally, the American musicologist engaged in historical research has concentrated upon the scientific study of art music in the western European tradition, focusing his attention primarily upon the "great musical work" produced by great masters...

An Ethnomusicologist's Reflections on "Complexity" and "Participation" in Music

01 October 1977 I. "One of the distinctive facts about contemporary history is that it is world history and that the forces shaping it cannot be understood unless we are prepared to adopt world-wide perspectives; and this means not merely supplementing our...

Causes and Cures of Poor Intonation: Applications of Audiological and Psychological Research

01 October 1986 To deal with a student's poor intonation appropriately, a teacher must know the specific cause of the problem. Many causes exist, most of which can be fairly easily detected (if not always so easily eliminated). These include lack of practice, lack of...

Emergent Dissonance and the Resolution of a Paradox

01 October 1996 Our explanations of music over the centuries have not lacked for their perplexities, their mysteries and even contradictions. One of the most persistent anomalies of our history has managed to embody all three: the conceptual duplicity surrounding the...