Saying Something Else: Improvisation and Music-Play Facilitation in a Medical Ethnomusicology Program for Children on the Autism Spectrum

01 October 2008 Studies of social and interactive processes in music improvisation constitute an important dimension of contemporary ethnomusicological research.1 The range of topics, issues, and traditions addressed is vast, yet one may identify across this...

[i]Reflections on American Music: The Twentieth Century and The New Millennium[/i], edited by James R. Heintze and Michael Saffle

01 October 2003 Reflections on American Music: The Twentieth Century and The New Millennium, edited by James R. Heintze and Michael Saffle. CMS Monographs and Bibliographies in American Music, 16. Michael J. Budds, series editor. Hillsdale, New York: Pendragon Press,...

The Pedagogy of Early, Twentieth-Century Music: Ideas for a Classroom Discussion based on a Multi-Faceted Analysis of Scriabin's Op. 31, No. 4.

29 November 2016 Abstract The literature of the early part of the twentieth-century poses a unique set of pedagogical challenges when introducing it to the undergraduate population. On the one hand, there are elements that continue in the common-practice tradition,...

Not Without a Grievance: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Suffrage Movement, and the Reception of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel

01 October 2024 Abstract In an 1882 article in the American suffrage newspaper, The Woman’s Journal, Thomas Wentworth Higginson expressed outrage that the Mendelssohn family had discouraged Fanny Hensel from composing and that her music had been published under Felix...

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...

Motivic Continuity in the Instrumental Suites, Sonatas, and Partitas of J. S. Bach

01 May 2020 work, the imagination of the listener fills out the harmony, and as such, differences of interpretation abound. Michael Baker explores this idea of tonal ambiguity and perception in the Cello Suites through the premise of a tonal pun that occurs when a...

Transformation vs. Prolongation in Brahms's "In der Fremde"

01 October 2008 at the expected structural dominant to support an Urlinie descent. See "Text-Music Relationships," 298-358. authors: Michael Baker author_ids: 429 authors: Michael Baker author_ids: 429

Improvisation in the Aural Curriculum: An Imperative

01 October 1997 Improvisation has long been a part of the music curriculum, at least in certain areas of study. It is a staple of jazz studies where students learn the skill through ensembles and specific courses. Organists are taught improvisation as a means of...

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...

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...

Teaching Rap: Musings at Semester's End

01 October 1997 Teaching Rap: Musings At Semester's End1 Hip-hop and its musical vehicle, rap, have become ubiquitous on college campuses in the United States in the 1990s. Among the college set, hip-hop's influence transcends boundaries of race, ethnicity, class, and...

Musical Borrowing—Grand Larceny or Great Art?

01 October 1978 On January 16, 1964, David Merrick produced in the St. James Theatre in New York City a new musical comedy based on Thornton Wilder's play The Matchmaker. The principal character of the play and the musical is a professional busybody named Dolly...

Business and Music in Peacebuilding Activities: Parallels and Paradoxes

30 November 2018 Abstract The goal of this article is to share five crucial ways of thinking about the most effective ways to apply music in peacebuilding activities. It is based on the presentation I gave for the online summit on Music, Business and Peace on May 12,...

“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...

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...

Introducing Musical Meaning through Popular Music

20 September 2018 Abstract When analyzing challenging texted art music, all too often the act of labeling a concept (for example, “common-tone modulation”) can mislead students into thinking that the label is the end of the story. Several factors, such as difficulty in...

A Theory of Pitch-Class-Set Extension in Atonal Music

01 October 2001 Over years of teaching pitch-class-set theory and analysis as part of undergraduate twentieth-century theory courses, I have often reflected (and heard perceptive students remark) on an apparent shortcoming of the system. At that stage of their...

Spioraid an dochais, Spirit of Hope: Imagining a Scottish Gamelan

01 May 2020 Abstract Frederick Lau and Christine Yano’s edited work Making Waves (2018) notes that while music travels from culture to culture, “There is always a backstory behind each movement . . . [.] [A]ny piece of music or an instrument can become [a resource...

Carissimi’s [i]Jephte[/i] and Jesuit Spirituality

01 April 2019 Abstract The lament that ends Jacomo Carissimi’s Jephte is frequently anthologized and taught in undergraduate surveys, and is justly famous for its emotional impact. Although it is generally thought to have been composed for performance at the...

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...