A summary of the structure and objectives of Arnie Cox’s “Music By Ear” program, a complete system of aural skills pedagogy rooted in memorization and dictation of a variety of repertoire. Music by Ear can be executed, with some modifications, asynchronously and online in response to COVID-19. (Note: this document and this method are the work of…[Read more]

A graduated packet for practicing sight singing in the aural skills curriculum. Repertoire is drawn from Medieval and Renaissance favorites, some of which students are likely to encounter in their music history courses. Begins with simple two- and three-voice diatonic homophony and works up to eight-voice highly chromatic music in four clefs…[Read more]

Instructions for a final project for an advanced (chromatic harmony-focused) aural skills course. Students select a film cue and design a transcription and performance project that helps them make progress toward their musicianship goals.

How does history sound? What kind of historical document is music? What does it mean to study past music as music, and what do we learn when we think of past music as sound? In this seminar, we will take up these questions together, applying them to the sounds of Europe—musical and otherwise—in the two centuries between 1550 and 1750. While mus…[Read more]

What were the sounds of war in the early modern period? What were the sounds of peace? The period between 1570 and 1750—roughly coincident with the cultural era known in Western contexts as “the Baroque”—was characterized by almost continual conflict in Europe. Whether caught up in the French Wars of Religion, the English Civil War, the Thirty…[Read more]