These materials are for a one-week long study of musica ficta suitable for advanced undergraduates or graduate students. I taught this class online in Spring 2020, with one asynchronous class day and one synchronous meeting; these materials can be easily adjusted to two 75-minute in-person sessions or one two- or three-hour seminar. If we had been…[Read more]

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.

A number of unusual signs appear in the notation of west European polyphonic musicin manuscripts from the first seventy-five years of the fifteenth century. Though theyresemble mensuration signs, these signs behave as signatures, and are used to indicateproportions and other tempo relationships in music. Beginning with an examinationof ‘double s…[Read more]

Certain unusual figures in the notation of Senleches’s music have determinate relative duration. Their forms were based on French, not Italian, principles. The figures are context dependent, being directly linked with the mensuration in effect. Senleches’s notation shares some characteristics with that of Rodericus, which suggests that there was a…[Read more]