Paying Attention to Music and Baseball: Listening to the Savannah Bananas

13 May 2026 In 1956, Ford Frick, the Commissioner of Major League Baseball, tried to woo music fans to pay more attention to baseball. Writing in Music Journal, Frick hoped that his “comparison of music and baseball should be of interest to devotees of both of...

[i]Music of the Middle Ages: Style and Structure[/i], by David Fenwick Wilson

01 October 1991 Music of the Middle Ages: Style and Structure, by David Fenwick Wilson. New York: Schirmer, 1990, xxii + 403 pp. ISBN 0-02-872951-X. In recent years professors of medieval music have had the good fortune of being able to choose from among several...

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...

Music Therapy in Handel's England: Browne's Medicina Musica (1729)

01 October 1985 The development of contemporary uses for music in therapy is generally attributed to the twentieth century or even the late nineteenth century; however, a text on the subject was published in 1729. The book, Medicina Musica, or, a Mechanical Essay on...

Defending Music Theory in a Multicultural Curriculum

02 October 2006 Defending Music Theory in a Multicultural Curriculum1 Music theory has served as the foundation for undergraduate music curricula in the United States for much of the past century. Within many music departments, it has been used to introduce students...

The Zitterbart Collection—A Legacy Unevaluated

01 October 1979 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, like so many other cities in the United States, seems to have lately come to a realization of the necessity for determining and preserving the contributions of its outstanding citizens. The unprecedented success of Stefan...

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...

Connecting Music to Ethics

30 November 2018 Many features of music contribute to its positive potential for promoting social harmony. But music’s influence on human interaction is not entirely benign. I consider features of music that enable it to serve such contrary projects, beginning by...

Musicians as Authors: Teaching the Art of Writing Program Notes

01 October 2004 Ensemble directors devote enormous attention to programming concerts.1 When selecting pieces and deciding on program order, consideration is given to musical and textual themes, cultural and historical origins, tempos, keys, forms, durations, and many...

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 Center for Black Music Research Forum

01 October 1989 THE CBMR FORUM CONCEPT CBMR Forum, a program of the Center for Black Music Research, is comprised of thirteen Chicago-area scholars and the professional staff of the Center for Black Music Research—a coterie of thinkers who address concerns and issues...

Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues: Fashioning Identities, Representing Relationships

02 October 2006 Mark Mazullo, with Chloe Kiritz and Adam Nelson1 The "Loyal Son" Some thirty years after Stalin's Minister of Culture Andrey Zhdanov ushered in the era of Socialist Realism in the Soviet arts by pronouncing, at the Writer's Congress of 1934, that "the...

The Mind's Ear: I Hear Music and No One Is Performing

03 October 2005 "He is a good musician, who understands the music without the score, and the score without the music. The ear should not need the eye, the eye should not need the (outward) ear."1 Hearing music in the mind's ear, without any sound source present, is a...

The Contemporary Chamber Ensemble in Residence at Rutgers University

01 October 1966 Peter S. Odegard (Toronto, Canada) Robert Stewart (Washington and Lee; Virginia) Romulus Franceschini (Pennsylvania) Richard Wilson (Rutgers; New Jersey) Joel Chadabe (Albany, New York) Elliott Schwartz (Bowdoin; Maine) Kenneth Dorsch (Rutgers; New...

Beyond "Bach-Centrism": Historiographic Perspectives on Johann Sebastian Bach and Seventeenth-Century Music

01 October 1993 Beyond "Bach-Centrism": Historiographic Perspectives on Johann Sebastian Bach and Seventeenth-Century Music1 In connection with the preparation of an article on Bach's early works,2 I recently have examined books and essays of all kinds, some intended...

Students Evaluate Music Theory Courses: A Reddit Community Survey

20 September 2018 Abstract Undergraduate music programs are currently reexamining the place and value of theory study. While some have argued for this core subject to be dissolved and absorbed by related courses, others defend that music theory is a non-negotiable core...

The Teacher's Guide to Recent Recordings of Music by Black Composers

01 October 1973 This discography is restricted to "concert" music by composers of African ancestry, regardless of the country of their birth. I acknowledge immediately that several of the figures listed are represented on recordings by works in other genres (e.g.,...

The Princeton High School Choir

01 October 1965 In high schools throughout the country, orchestras, bands and choirs flourish; not unreasonably, we might expect to observe a consequent flowering of music itself. But even a casual glance at the great majority of these school playing organizations...

Pygmalions of Pop: Reinterpreting Jazz and Rock Standards

01 October 1989 Pygmalions of Pop: Reinterpreting Jazz and Rock Standards1 The pop musician's practice of reinterpreting a tune previously recorded by another artist is common to both jazz and rock. Jazz musicians traditionally look to the vast reserves of the Tin Pan...

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...