“Oh My Son!”: The Musical Origins and Function of King David’s Lamentation

01 October 2009 Introduction In his 1981 article “Prince Henry as Absalom in David’s Lamentations” Irving Godt examined a group of seventeenth-century English settings based on King David’s laments for his son Absalom and his friend Jonathan.1 On the basis of the...

Misconceptions in Linking Free Jazz with the Civil Rights Movement

01 October 2007 This article deals with two misunderstandings that intertwine to confuse students, teachers, and commentators of jazz history if they study American history at the same time that they study the music itself. The first misunderstanding is that during...

Union Musicians and the Medal of Honor During the American Civil War

08 July 2014 Abstract The sound of fifes, drums, and bugles are recognized as a commonplace yet significant part of the Civil War soundscape. Those who performed this music, however, have drawn less attention than the pieces they performed. This is unfortunate, as...

The Fairbank Collection

01 October 1976 The Newberry Library, Chicago, contains a distinguished music collection, rare book, manuscript, and print holdings, and archives relevant both to the United States (and its Indian populations) and to the city of Chicago. Thus it is understandable that...

Robert Schumann's Album for the Young and the Coming of Age of Nineteenth-Century Piano Pedagogy

01 October 2001 In 1843, Robert Schumann noted that his highly original if slightly bizarre piano cycles of the 1830s had not endeared him to the public or to his publishers. He regretfully conceded that the financial responsibilities of supporting a wife and family...

Concept-Based Pedagogy and its Application in the Private Clarinet Studio

01 April 2019 Abstract Educators are no longer the keepers of content. With the increase in accessibility to technology and the internet, teachers need to show students how to think critically and use facts to influence their own independence and creativity in the...

More Than A Drummer Boy's War: A Historical View of Musicians in the American Civil War

01 October 2002 Introduction Although making music and making war may seem incompatible, the two endeavors have been inextricably linked throughout recorded history. There is, perhaps, no better example of this powerful pairing than the American Civil War, often...

Harmony in the Solo Piano Works of Olivier Messiaen: The First Twenty Years

01 October 1983 50. 4In measure 99 the highest tone of both the seventh chord and ninth chord must be enharmonically respelled. authors: John M. Lee author_ids: 1282 authors: John M. Lee author_ids: 1282

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...

Stephen Foster and His Publishers, Revisited

01 October 1988 More than fifty years have passed since John Tasker Howard's biography Stephen Foster, America's Troubadour and his article "Stephen Foster and His Publishers" appeared.1America's Troubadour remains—half a century after it was written—the authoritative...

Civic Pride and Musicology

16 April 2014 Boston, 30 December 2013. At about noontime, a service van stopped near an office building in busy Bedford Street. Two gentlemen stepped out of the vehicle and, without much ado, affixed a plaque to the façade of the building as tourists and locals on...

A Taxonomy of Sentence Structures

07 August 2014 Abstract In his 1967 Fundamentals of Musical Composition, Arnold Schonberg described the sentence as a basic tool for organizing themes. Over the past thirty years, a growing number of scholars have been reexamining Schoenberg's concept of the sentence...

Faculty Role and Academic Leadership in the 21st Century Music Department

01 May 2011 Academic Freedom and Institutional Vitality In its first year of existence, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), led by a special committee appointed by its President, John Dewey, issued the landmark 1915 Declaration of Principles...

Preface to a Graduate Course in the History of Music Theory

01 October 1982 As a doctoral degree certifies (among other things) to a breadth of knowledge in the field, one requirement for the Ph.D. in music theory should be a scholarly course surveying the history of theory. To decide on this requirement, however, is easier...

Writing About LGBTQ Issues

01 March 2009 These days, it seems everywhere one turns, issues and themes related to sexuality are in evidence. Movies from the unlikeliest of sources are circulating the country on gay themes—A Jihad for Love—that deals with the problems faced by gay men and...

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...

Paideia con Salsa: Charles Keil, Groovology, and the Undergraduate Music Curriculum

14 September 2015 Despite being a professor in American Studies at SUNY-Buffalo for most of his academic life, Charles (Charlie) Keil’s (b. 1939) career was dominated by an interest in music and music education. His scholarly contributions took many forms, such as...

Composing a Sound: Giacinto Scelsi’s L’âme ailée / L’âme ouverte for violin solo

22 December 2017 As philosopher John Dewey has noted: "The moral function of art itself is to remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and custom, perfect the power to perceive. The critic's office is to...

Applications of Feminist Pedagogy to the College Music Major Curriculum: An Introduction to the Issues

01 October 1996 Preliminaries In the 1990s, college music is undergoing radical curriculum reform in response to various calls to diversify subject matter and repertoire. Traditional programs of study are being challenged, and classical canons of repertoire broken...

The Origin of Armstrong's Hot Fives and Hot Sevens

01 October 2003 It has been almost fifty years since Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of 1925-19281 were first recognized in print as a watershed of jazz history and the means by which the trumpeter emerged as the style's first transcendent figure.2...