Popular Music in Higher Education: Finding the Balance

20 September 2019 Robert. “Popular Music in School: Remixing the Issues,” Music Educators Journal, 93, no. 4 (2007): 32-37. authors: Robert Larson author_ids: 265940 authors: Robert Larson author_ids: 265940

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...

Tracing as an Analytical Approach in the Music Theory Classroom: Exploring Chopin's Mazurka in A-flat Major, Op. 17, no. 3

01 May 2020 Abstract This article explores tracing as an analytical method and a pedagogical tool. I define “tracing” as following a singular event throughout a work, tracking its evolution, and placing it in an overall narrative context. I use Chopin’s Mazurka in...

"Integrated Music Learning" and Improvisation: Teaching Musicianship and Theory Through "Menus, Maps, and Models"

01 October 1995 This paper describes "integrated music learning" as a desirable way of combining different ways of learning musical relationships and shows how "menus, maps, and models" can be used to teach musicianship and theory through improvisation.1 Integrated...

The Crystallization of the New, New Music at UCSD

01 October 2011 1. Ever-New California In 1966 work began on widening the road leading from a sleepy San Diego beach community, La Jolla Shores, up to the area where an infant university, the University of California San Diego (UCSD), was quickly developing. The road...

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...

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...

Composers' Words, Theorists' Analyses, Ravel's Music (Sometimes the Twain Shall Meet)

01 October 2003 Last year a graduate student in musicology at the University of Connecticut took an independent study with me on the music of Maurice Ravel. While in the end his work was insightful and successful, he was quite frustrated and discouraged at the...

The Topic of the Sacred Hymn in Beethoven's Instrumental Music

01 October 2007 Religious scenes in eighteenth-century opera are embedded within secular plots. To be dramatically effective it was necessary for composers, as well as librettists, costume designers, and set designers, to accentuate and magnify the religious nature of...