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RichardCohn
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I've always thought that this was an amazing article that could be used in such a course. Zemp, Hugo, and Vida Malkus. "Aspects of'Are'are musical theory." Ethnomusicology 23.1 (1979): 5-48. This is also probably worth looking at: Feld, Steven. "…
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One of two major systems in the human brain that regulates the intrepretation of sound patterns. Tonality regulates the interpretation of pitched sounds; the other system, "meter," regulates the interpretation of sound patterns in time. The tonal s…
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Hi Mitch, maybe taking students through exactly this line of thinking and then inviting responses/discussion, or asking them prompting questions that would promote their own reflections as you assign the reading and then discussing the issues, would…
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I would recommend David Lewin's extended 1974 essay on Morgengruss (co-edited by David Bard-Schwarz and me, OUP 2015). It offers several distinct and explicitly conflicting approaches to a short Schubert song, and is also an extended position-stakin…
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Addendum, I believe that Piston advocated for a more general use of secondary functions .
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I teach it, although not systematically; that is, as an option that students should be aware of, and might seek to use creatively. IV/IV (especially in minor, iv/iv) and iv/ii are particularly useful. For the former, consider the Ab-minor chord at…
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David is too modest to mention it, but standing behind this deep and brilliant provocation is his 2017 MIT Press book, Voice Leading: The Science Behind the Musical Art, an exquisitely slim piece of book-making and the music writer-researcher's craf…
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I have found this to be a useful introduction for students: Satyendra, Ramon. "An Informal Introduction to Some Formal Concepts from Lewin's Transformational Theory." Journal of Music Theory 48.1 (2004): 99-141.
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Peter Westergaard's keynote address, "Geometries of Sound in Time," in 464 rhyming quatrains and sestets, set a standard that will never be matched. The combination of artistry and erudition is a thing of beauty to behold, and learn from. The imagi…
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In response to Keith's two short questions: 1. What to teach, based on research in music theory and research psychology: (a) A new definition of meter. The current consensus definition, "a regular pattern grouping strong and weak beats," has not bee…
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A few methodological points. 1) Who put the harm in harmony? Let's grant that harmony "is not the most significant musical feature" in hip-hop. Let's even push this to an extreme view and say that harmony, or tonality is "nothing but a secondary p…
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I'm in the number camp, with a preference for zero-indexing. Even your most math-phobic readers somehow managed to pass out of third grade, when they learned their times tables up to the level of 4 x 4 = 16. They can tell whether or not a number in …
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The question "do you feel the beat as quarter = 120 or half = 60" is equivalent to the question of whether Lite Beer tastes great or is less filling. It sets up a false opposition. Meter requires at least two beats. Why does one of these need to th…
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Many 18th century theorists argued that "essentially there are two kinds of measures to which all others are related — the duple and the triple" and that "The measure of four beats is nothing but a two-beat measure doubled." (Monteclair, quoted i…
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Hi Stan, thanks for this response. Certainly music theorists have understood that there are many levels to the meter hierarchy, all the way back to John Holden in 1770 Glasgow. Let me ask the question in a more provocative way. Every musician kno…
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Mitch, my recent article in MusMat, the new Brazilian journal, lays out some of the basics of non-majors course that Andrew Jones and I taught at Yale in 2014, and I taught solo at University of Sydney in 2015. https://musmat.org/wp-content/uploads…
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You might look at the finale of the e-minor Razoumovsky Op59/2. Although that begins on the tonicized VI. You could also look at the finale of Brahms String Quintet Opus 111, which starts in B minor and then tonicizes G major (which is the "actu…
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Haydn's "The Seasons," number 38: "Knurre, schnurre, knure, schnurre, Rädchen schnurre"
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Steve, thanks for sharing that story about Lewin and Tufte. There is a significant precedent for the setting of music and graphics inline: the books of Victor Zuckerkandl, published by Princeton U.P. starting with Sound and Symbol of 1956. The thir…
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