Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom
musictheory.pugetsound.edu
Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom
1–10 of 60 posts
Re: Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom
#2Entire text as a 53 MB PDF: https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/hw/MusicTheory-Aug-2020.p... (from https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/)
Re: Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom
#3This looks like a very thoughtful and well laid out introduction to theory for anyone who wants to teach themselves. Well done.
Something like this should probably still be supplemented with an instructor who can provide the student with some immediate, fun, and practical exercises to make the process more exploratory and engaging, though. Something that will get them thinking musically right away.
Re: Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom
#4Good to see solid info on 20th C techniques of serialism and minimalism. Extra content to flesh it out might be aleatoric, atonality and electroacoustic/computer music and 21st C digital and interactive scores and composition methods.
Re: Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom
#5Is halfstep and whole steps common academic practice?
Not being from the US I was always taught with semitones and tones. Whenever I saw YouTube videos with half steps and whole steps I thought they were dumbing down for the audience.
Re: Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom
#6Is halfstep and whole steps common academic practice? Not being from the US I was always taught with semitones and tones. Whenever I saw YouTube videos with half steps and whole steps I thought they were dumbing down for the audience.
Half step and whole step is really standard in US. I spent my entire childhood studying instruments, but I don't think I saw the "semitone" nomenclature until I started studying music theory directly in high school.
Re: Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom
#7Is halfstep and whole steps common academic practice? Not being from the US I was always taught with semitones and tones. Whenever I saw YouTube videos with half steps and whole steps I thought they were dumbing down for the audience.
aren't they synonymous (at least in a 12-tet system)?
a tone is whole step. a semitone is a half step.
Re: Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom
#8Good to see solid info on 20th C techniques of serialism and minimalism. Extra content to flesh it out might be aleatoric, atonality and electroacoustic/computer music and 21st C digital and interactive scores and composition methods.
I find serialism to be akin to throwing letters (or characters including the blank space) and expecting poetry (or really any intelligible text) to come out
Re: Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom
#9May be it is just me, but I am yet to find a single book of music theory that really starts from the basics. Most pretend to, but start talking about famous clefs and what not, quickly moving on to examples that for the life of me I cannot follow the relevance of. In this book for example, in the basics chapter, he talks about .. oh there are only 7 named notes, so why does piano have 88 keys?.. I really don't think there was an explanation after.. I can grok science and math in all flavors just fine from most books, but music theory.. stumps me every time :(
Re: Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom
#10I've always had trouble drawing practical benefit from music theory. Once you go beyond simple scales, it always feels like it quickly devolves into "all these different things can also sound good", and every "rule" can also be broken to spice things up. As long as it sounds good. Conversely, there appears to often be many ways to "explain" a certain composition in terms of music theory.
To be clear, I have seen first-hand that people well-versed in music theory can "understand" and also create (e.g. improvise) music more readily. But I can't seem to find joy in approaching music analytically...