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Composing Our Future is the ideal book for music teacher educators seeking to learn more about composition education. It provides resources to guide the development of undergraduate and graduate curricula, specific courses, professional development workshops, and environments where composition education can flourish.
Located at the juncture of literature, history, and anthropology, Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future charts a strategy of how one might read a traditional text of non-Western historical literature in order to generate, with it, an opening for the future. This book does so by taking seriously a haunting work of historical prophecy inscribed in the nineteenth century by a royal Javanese exile--working through this writing of a colonized past to suggest the reconfiguration of the postcolonial future that this history itself apparently intends. After introducing the colonial and postcolonial orientalist projects that would fix the meaning of traditional writing in Java, Nancy K. Florida provides a nuanced translation of this particular traditional history, a history composed in poetry as the dream of a mysterious exile. She then undertakes a richly textured reading of the poem that discloses how it manages to escape the fixing of "tradition." Adopting a dialogic strategy of reading, Florida writes to extend--as the work's Javanese author demands--this history's prophetic potential into a more global register. Babad Jaka Tingkir, the historical prophecy that Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future translates and reads, is uniquely suited for such a study. Composing an engaging history of the emergence of Islamic power in central Java around the turn of the sixteenth century, Babad Jaka Tingkir was written from the vantage of colonial exile to contest the more dominant dynastic historical traditions of nineteenth-century court literature. Florida reveals how this history's episodic form and focus on characters at the margins of the social order work to disrupt the genealogical claims of conventional royal historiography--thus prophetically to open the possibility of an alternative future.
When we think of composers, we usually envision an isolated artist separate from the orchestra—someone alone in a study, surround by staff paper—and in Europe and America this image generally has been accurate. For most of Japan’s musical history, however, no such role existed—composition and performance were deeply intertwined. Only when Japan began to embrace Western culture in the late nineteenth century did the role of the composer emerge. In Composing Japanese Musical Modernity, Bonnie Wade uses an investigation of this new musical role to offer new insights not just into Japanese music but Japanese modernity at large and global cosmopolitan culture. Wade examines the short history of the composer in Japanese society, looking at the creative and economic opportunities that have sprung up around them—or that they forged—during Japan’s astonishingly fast modernization. She shows that modernist Japanese composers have not bought into the high modernist concept of the autonomous artist, instead remaining connected to the people. Articulating Japanese modernism in this way, Wade tells a larger story of international musical life, of the spaces in which tradition and modernity are able to meet and, ultimately, where modernity itself has been made.
The Oxford Handbook of Music Composition Pedagogy presents an illuminating collection of philosophy, research, applied practice, and international perspectives to highlight the practices of teaching and learning in the field of music composition. The Handbook offers various strategies and approaches in composition for teachers, music teacher educators, and students of music education.
Hailed as "a feast" (Washington Post) and "a modern-day bestiary" (The New Yorker), Stephen Asma's On Monsters is a wide-ranging cultural and conceptual history of monsters--how they have evolved over time, what functions they have served for us, and what shapes they are likely to take in the future. Beginning at the time of Alexander the Great, the monsters come fast and furious--Behemoth and Leviathan, Gog and Magog, Satan and his demons, Grendel and Frankenstein, circus freaks and headless children, right up to the serial killers and terrorists of today and the post-human cyborgs of tomorrow. Monsters embody our deepest anxieties and vulnerabilities, Asma argues, but they also symbolize the mysterious and incoherent territory beyond the safe enclosures of rational thought. Exploring sources as diverse as philosophical treatises, scientific notebooks, and novels, Asma unravels traditional monster stories for the clues they offer about the inner logic of an era's fears and fascinations. In doing so, he illuminates the many ways monsters have become repositories for those human qualities that must be repudiated, externalized, and defeated.
Music Learning Today: Digital Pedagogy for Creating, Performing, and Responding to Music presents an approach to conceptualizing and utilizing technology as a tool for music learning. Designed for use by pre- and in-service music teachers, it provides the essential understandings required to become an adaptive expert with music technology, creating and implementing lessons, units, and curriculum that take advantage of technological affordances to assist students in developing their musicianship. Author William I. Bauer makes connections among music knowledge and skill outcomes, the research on human cognition and music learning, best practices in music pedagogy, and technology. His essential premise is that music educators and students benefit through use of technology as a tool to support learning in the three musical processes - creating, performing, and responding to music. The philosophical and theoretical rationales, along with the practical information discussed in the book, are applicable to all experience levels. However, the technological applications described are focused at a beginning to intermediate level, relevant to both pre-service and in-service music educators and their students. This expanded second edition features an all-new student-friendly design and updated discussions of recent technological developments with applications for music teaching and learning. The revamped companion website also offers a new teacher's guide, with sample syllabi and lessons for each chapter.
"Writing, Redefined asks educators to reflect critically on the kinds of writing - and the kinds of writers - traditionally valued in school spaces and offers a compelling argument for broadening our ideas around composition in order to honor the stories, the voices, and the lived experiences of all students"--
The second edition of The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology updates the original landmark text and provides a comprehensive review of the latest developments in this fast-growing area of research. Covering both experimental and theoretical perspectives, each of the 11 sections is edited by an internationally recognised authority in the area. The first ten parts present chapters that focus on specific areas of music psychology: the origins and functions of music; music perception, responses to music; music and the brain; musical development; learning musical skills; musical performance; composition and improvisation; the role of music in everyday life; and music therapy. In each part authors critically review the literature, highlight current issues and explore possibilities for the future. The final part examines how, in recent years, the study of music psychology has broadened to include a range of other disciplines. It considers the way that research has developed in relation to technological advances, and points the direction for further development in the field. With contributions from internationally recognised experts across 55 chapters, it is an essential resource for students and researchers in psychology and musicology.
Engaging Musical Practices: A Sourcebook for Instrumental Music is a long awaited compilation of best practices for instrumental music education. This unique book contains practical and pedagogically oriented chapters written by leaders in the field of instrumental music education. Designed for instrumental music teachers or for use in instrumental methods courses, the book covers a wide range of topics, such as: student readiness for instrumental music beginning an instrumental music program teaching instrumental music at the intermediate and advanced levels working with strings and orchestras motivating students incorporating improvisation into the curriculum selecting repertoire based on curricular goals engaging students in assessment marching band pedagogy and techniques integrating technology considering “traditional” instrumental music practice becoming an instrumental music teacher communicating effectively with stakeholders Contributions by James Ancona and Heidi Sarver, Kimberly Ackney and Colleen Conway, Christopher Azzara, William Bauer and Rick Dammers, Brian Bersh, Suzanne Burton & Rick Townsend, Patricia Campbell and Lee Higgins, Robert Gardner, Richard Grunow, Mike Hewitt and Bret Smith, Dan Isbell, Nate Kruse, Chad Nicholson, Alden Snell, and David Stringham.
There are as many ways of creating music as there are composers in the world, with a vast array of possible methods and practices. This book provides essential critical and practical tools for composers as they try to navigate this complex landscape, whilst also offering provocations for practitioners discovering their own voices and solidifying their place in their musical communities. Designed to be a companion in the truest sense, the book offers practical support throughout the creative process and thought-provoking insights on technical questions for a range of compositional approaches.
