Teaching Music Analysis to First-year Undergraduates with Radical Subject-specific Diversity

• Main Author: Freya Jarman
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Instituto de Ciencias Antropológicas, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Universidad de Buenos Aires) 2016-02-01
• Series: El Oído Pensante
• Subjects: análisis; notación gráfica; pedagogía; educación superior; interdisciplinariedad
• Online Access: http://ppct.caicyt.gov.ar/index.php/oidopensante/article/view/8032

<p><span>The Music Department at the University of Liverpool is unusual in its entrance requirements:<span> it does not require any formal musical background for students of popular music subjects.<span> Meanwhile, it is also home to students with high-level formal training in western classical music,<span> who arrive expecting to make use of their competence in standard analytical methods. Both groups<span> of students, and students whose skills are somewhere in between these extremes, sit alongside each<span> other in a compulsory first-year module called Music as Sound. The aim of this module is to<span> develop students' abilities to talk productively about musical detail in a very wide range of musical<span> repertoires. This article reflects on the challenges of developing the module in ways that are<span> meaningful to students with and without formal musical training, particularly because the module<span> does not aim to provide musical theory where it is absent in students’ musical language; instead,<span> it changes the very nature of the goal, by providing a new mode of analysis that challenges<span> notationally competent students to think about analysis without traditional western scores, and also<span> introduces analytical techniques to non-notationally literate students without recourse to the<span> technical tools and language of western classical music.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p>