Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
-
Hi everyone, Thanks for bringing this up and I’m sorry we won’t get to see all of you in the session! However, Laura and I checked with Jennifer Diaz, and all sessions will be recorded and archived for later viewing. I hope some of you will also consider participating in the discussion here on HC before or after the conference!
I’d like to follow up on Bob’s initial post, not by answering any of the questions he posed, but by adding some more questions/issues that I hope we might discuss, both of which also came up in the Eastman forum:
I’d love to hear how others have balanced the ethical and aesthetic imperative to teach non-notated musics with the practical difficulties in doing so. Those difficulties involve not only increased preparation time on the instructor’s part, but also limitations due to students’ aural skills/memory and time constraints, since listening to pieces enough to remember them takes much longer than looking at a score. I find transcriptions or other visual diagrams extremely useful on all these counts, but sometimes worry that in using them I am simply reinscribing a score-based mentality or encouraging students to do so.
I’m also curious to hear how others define the scope of these classes, or even title them! By convention, these classes are based on a distinction between art music and popular music that is somewhat problematic, or at least, difficult to define. I include some jazz and improvised music in my post-tonal classes, but this music is still very much on the art music/”difficult” side of that division, as least as far as my students are concerned. I think everyone in this group agrees on the merits of teaching modernist/experimental/avant-garde music, but how do you go about framing that for your students?
-
-
-
Hi Amy, thanks for your thoughts! To clarify, this isn’t for the interest group meeting itself—this would be for a special session proposal that would go through the normal SMT proposal process. If accepted, it would be a normal paper session that is “sponsored” by the IG. This is something a few of the IGs have done in recent years. The special session could be in an alternative format (a workshop, lightning talks, etc.) or in the standard SMT format of three or six thirty-minute slots with twenty-minute papers.
Speaking for myself, I really like the idea of a session on undergrad post-tonal pedagogy—perhaps inviting a series of papers reconsidering/reframing the goals/methods of that course (these papers could address diversity issues like our 2021 workshop, but also issues such as whether/how we should still teach canonic topics like pc-set theory and serialism, how to historicize different -isms, theory vs. analysis, etc.) I don’t recall any sessions on post-tonal pedagogy in recent years and I could see a session like that attracting broad interest and many proposals from outside of our group. It’s not specifically a post-1945 topic, but I think members of our group would bring an interesting perspective to it.
On the other hand, the composer/analysis focused topics recommended above are all very exciting too! Xenakis seems an obvious choice. And I like the “New Rhythmic Issues” theme because it’s broad enough to attract a variety of proposals, although it might be challenging to unify them under a session rationale.
-
Hi Josh,
There was some discussion of this section on draft 2, and the consensus seemed to be that the language was adequate as it is now, which is why we left it that way in the next two drafts. Since we’re already voting, let’s see how the vote turns out, and if it becomes a problem, we can always revise it in the future.
Thanks!
Tara
-
-
Good point! We had 21 responses last year. That’s 29% of our HC membership, and I would guess the average attendance at meetings is lower. (Although I suppose if we are going to use attendance numbers as a metric I had better make sure we can find those numbers… using the HC membership would certainly be a bit easier!)
-
-
Hi everyone,
Thank you so much to those who weighed in on this. Based on this small sample, it seems like we’re split between those who would like to shut the group down and those who would like to keep the group going as a space for sharing research.
I tend to lean toward Amy’s position… I avoid posting on Facebook in general, and am not inclined to share research or initiate dialogue in a large public internet forum anyway. We all know how friendly those spaces are to professional women.
Here’s a compromise: What if we left the site up for those who are enjoying it, but officially severed it from the SMT interest group, and stopped posting our interest group announcements there? (One recent comment from a group member even expressed irritation at these announcements!)
Tara
-
Hi Leandro, as a starting place we are hoping to use HC to post our group announcements and potentially share files. It could also be a place for online discussion if that develops! That may be more likely once we have more people. I’ll be sending out another reminder to folks in our old Google group that this is our new platform.
-
