Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy

Teachers in Liminal Spaces: From Solitude to Solidarity

Clare Eng — 2022-02-14

Any consideration of how global musics are organized and experienced in non-Western ways must also grapple with liminalities that exist between "Western" and "non-Western" spaces. My essay focuses on the liminal condition of foreign-born teachers. Drawing on personal experience, I write to complement existing calls for greater diversity in music education and theory, and to allow America-born educators to better understand international peers. I also write to support internationals in meeting certain language-related teaching challenges.

Ten Anti-Racist Strategies for Music in Higher Education

Travis Stimeling — 2022-02-14

This essay outlines specific anti-racist strategies for higher education music programs, ranging from curricular reform to policies regarding policing on university campuses.

"This Class Was Highly Useless": Reformulating an Unpopular Music Theory Course for Non-music Majors

Igor Coelho A. S. Marques — 2022-02-14

This essay first examines how a course of music theory for non-music majors at the University at Buffalo experienced a serious drop in popularity between 2016-2019, suggesting the following as contributing factors: snowballing complexity, overtaxing homework expectations, reliance on non-relatable repertoire, and lack of in-class music-making. Then, it recounts in detail how the adoption of a new syllabus addressed these particular issues and how the students reacted to these new methodologies, hoping to provide the reader with an example of an emerging inclusivity-focused paradigm in music theory pedagogy.

Teaching the Cultural Commitments of Musical Structures and their Theories

Anna Yu Wang — 2022-02-14

While most undergraduate music theory classes are not overtly political, they often convey highly socialized convictions about musicality—that is, what counts as a "coherent," "well-formed," or "expressive" musical utterance—which can shape assessments of worth ascribed to individual composers, musical traditions, and ethnic and national identities. This essay advocates for an approach to music theory pedagogy that deliberately holds the inscribed socialized frameworks of musical structures up for critical examination. Through a lesson plan on the pentatonic scale in huangmei opera, I model several strategies for rendering the cultural commitments of familiar and unfamiliar musical structures palpable to students.

Can We Learn to Hear Multi-metrically?

Chris Stover — 2022-02-14

While certain strands of music-cogition studies suggest that we can only entrain to one metric stratum at a time, I contend that not only can we entrain to two or simultaneously, but that certain musicking practices (particularly from African and the African diaspora) require that one do so. This essay explores some scaffolded introductory activities for learning to do so through stepping, clapping, and singing.

Using Turkish Aksak Rhythms To Teach Asymmetrical Meter

Adem Merter Birson — 2022-02-14

Ear training courses often treat the topic of asymmetrical meter (5, 7 beats) as uncommon in Western music. This causes musical examples in the subject to be less idiomatic than those which deal with more "normative" meters, in 2, 3, and 4 beats. Turkish music, on the other hand, often organizes beats asymmetrically, a feature known as aksak or "limping." This paper discusses strategies for incorporating both Turkish musical examples and pedagogical practices in aural skills class in order to teach the topic of asymmetrical meter.

Dance as a Means of Introducing Asymmetrical Meter

Daniel Goldberg — 2022-02-14

In this essay, I offer resources for teaching two contemporary folk dances from southeastern Europe, taking advantage of students' capacity for imitation and embodiment to introduce skills and concepts connected with asymmetrical meter. After a few preliminary notes about meter, I describe how an instructor could go about teaching pravoto, a dance from North Macedonia, and then suggest several options for continuing the lesson.

Tones and Tunes: Melody and Part-Writing Exercises based on Ìgbò and Yorùbá Lyrics

Aaron Carter-Enyi — 2022-02-14

This essay explores text-setting in two Nigerian tone languages through composition and re-composition exercises. Writing music based on indigenous language texts remains an essential aspect of maintaining artistic and cultural continuity with pre-colonial musical traditions.

Stepping Out: The Case for Free Jazz

Michael Bruschi — 2022-02-14

This article considers the pedagogical value of teaching free jazz in the undergraduate music theory classroom. It argues that free jazz challenges several foundational premises of Western musical thought, making it an effective tool to challenge music theory's longstanding Eurocentrism. I discuss how I have used certain recordings by Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra in the classroom for this purpose.

Beyond Western Shores: A Dialogue

Daniel Stevens — 2022-02-14

Integrating musical and sonic forms and materials from world music into music theory classes steeped in Western musical concepts raises challenging questions and pedagogical conundrums: How might instructors engender interest in students with no training or background in non-Western musical materials? Could non-Western music (NWM) stimulate deeper thinking and understanding about the broader contexts of music production, such as its culture, religion, politics, and history, as well as indigenous musical terms and concepts? To what extent should critical contextual consideration be given prior to the study of non-Western sounds, musics, or performances? How might students and instructors alike engage NWM without extending the troubling histories of colonialism, western hegemony, and privileged, white perspectives? To address these and other questions from multiple viewpoints, this article takes the form of a dialogue between two students and two music professors, the latter representing the disciplines of music theory and ethnomusicology. As these four interlocutors explore the questions above, they also consider and revise a "Pin Drop" assignment, in which music theory students explore the musical culture found at various locations selected around the globe. Rather than offer any final conclusions, the dialogue itself demonstrates how the productive tensions that arise when studying and teaching NWM in Western music classrooms, when examined from multiple disciplinary angles, can be mutually beneficial and enriching, making possible new musical insights, methodological syntheses, and pedagogical priorities.

Editorial & Review Board

Philip Duker — 2022-02-14

No abstract available.

Introduction: Beyond Western Musicalities

Maya Cunningham — 2022-02-14

It has become increasingly clear that the way we teach music theory is not only incomplete, it is insufficient, even irresponsible. This introduction elucidates some of the key issues around diversifying and decolonizing music theory classrooms. Following a brief framing of the issues, a triptych of short thought pieces examines the contexts and implications of such questions. Dylan Robinson locates core curricula as a "ground" upon which music programs are built and which might be "given back" to BIPOC scholars to re-define; Anna Yu Wang advocates for classroom methodologies which center diverse modes of listening as foundations for music theorizing; and Maya Cunningham considers how Western music theory systems and training are historically colonial and continue to be driven by cultural and economic bias and inequity. Finally, in an ambitious co-authored work, Chris Stover, Leslie Tilley, and Anna Yu Wang organize, synthesize, and extrapolate from survey responses by twenty-four music scholar-pedagogues to offer a panoramic view on diversifying and decolonizing efforts. The essay addresses challenges, disagreements, goals, and possible ways forward, and through its explorations encourages sustained reflection, accountability, and change.