Music Theory Pedagogy: What Paul Taught Nadia

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-254
Author(s):  
Robert O. Gjerdingen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Music Theory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Paris Conservatory ◽  
Music Theory Pedagogy ◽  
Theory Pedagogy ◽  
Nadia Boulanger ◽  
High Standards ◽  
As If

The teaching of harmony in the United States, if judged objectively, has been a massive failure, even though a dedicated corps of fine musician-scholars labors to impart the curriculum to eager if not always adequately prepared students. These students are taught "about" harmony, as if the topic were really about tonality or the imaginary desires of chords. The only students who can perform and create harmony at a professional level are those who learned such skills outside the academy. The situation was not always so bleak. Nadia Boulanger, for example, learned the art of harmony from her teacher at the Paris Conservatory, Paul Vidal. Even though she was not taught roman numerals or chord functions, she learned harmony as a performative art, as something to express what was implicit in a given melody or bass. The article describes what Paul taught Nadia, and how the incredibly high standards for crafting harmonic-contrapuntal musical fabrics at the Paris Conservatory could be mastered by students willing to memorize the intricacies of a centuries-old art.

I Want Everybody to Have the Same Chance to Find Happiness

2020 ◽  
pp. 119-140
Author(s):  
Joel Thiessen ◽  
Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Charitable Giving ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Many ◽  
Politically Active ◽  
As If

This chapter deals with political and civic engagement, once more comparing the actively religious, marginally religious, and unaffiliated. In terms of political engagement, the focus is on the many ways individuals are or are not politically active, including who they vote for. Discussion is similarly given to volunteering and charitable giving habits, such as if people volunteer or donate money (or not), how frequently and where they volunteer or give, and motivations for volunteering and giving. The chapter concludes with some possible social and civic implications on the horizon for those in the United States and Canada, should religious nones continue to hold a sizeable proportion of the population.

scholarly journals The Functions of the Spanish Approximators Como and Como Que in Institutional and Non-Institutional Discursive Contexts

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abril Jimenez ◽  
Nydia Flores-Ferrán
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Educational Levels ◽  
Qualitative Approaches ◽  
Pragmatic Variation ◽  
Speech Events ◽  
As If

AbstractThe Spanish approximators como and como que (“sort of,” “as if,” “kind of,” “seems,” “like”) serve multiple pragmatic functions. They can be employed in similar contexts to express vagueness when speakers experience uncertainty or to hedge and avoid being straightforward. Furthermore, these forms can alternate according to context since they represent two ways of saying the same thing. This study investigated the use of como and como que in two speech events: narratives of personal experience (non-institutional) and therapeutic interviews (institutional), which were generated by Spanish speakers of several varieties, educational levels, and lengths of residence in the United States. The study was informed by the theoretical frameworks of sociolinguistic and pragmatic variation, and the data were analyzed using quantitative and qualitative approaches. The findings revealed that while como was the preferred form among the speakers of the study they employed como que more often in the therapeutic interviews. Thus, both discourse and the pragmatic functions conditioned the use of these approximators.

The Usurped Powers of the Senate

1906 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Maurice Low
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Constitutional Government ◽  
Legislative Authority ◽  
The People ◽  
The Federalist ◽  
The Government ◽  
As If

A century of constitutional government in the United States has served to emphasize the wisdom of Hamilton's warning of “the tendency of the legislative authority to absorb every other.” He clearly foresaw and attempted to guard against, dangers that today are only too apparent. “In governments purely republican,” he wrote, “this tendency is almost irresistible. The representatives of the people, in a popular assembly, seem sometimes to fancy that they are the people themselves, and betray strong symptoms of impatience and disgust at the least sign of opposition from any other quarter; as if the exercise of its rights, by either the executive or the judiciary, were a breach of their privilege and an outrage to their dignity. They often appear disposed to exert an imperious control over the other departments; and, as they commonly have the people on their side, they always act with such momentum as to make it very difficult for the other members of the government to maintain the balance of the Constitution.”Never did human ingenuity devise a more nicely balanced system of government than when the framers of the Constitution allocated to the executive and to the legislature the exercise of powers not to be infringed by the other; but like many things human the intent has been perverted. Every person familiar with the Constitution, the debates in the convention, and the writings of Madison, Hamilton, and Jay in The Federalist, must know that the purpose of the framers of the Constitution was to create a system of government by which the President should become neither the creature nor the controller of the legislature; and by vesting certain exclusive powers in the popular branch and certain other powers in the Senate to provide that the line of demarcation between the two houses should not be overstepped.

Wright’s Afromodern Search for Political Freedom

2018 ◽  
pp. 26-44
Author(s):  
Lewis R. Gordon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Black People ◽  
Political Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Freedom ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
As If

Lewis R. Gordon argues that Wright’s writings cast light on the suffocating world produced by colonialism, enslavement, and racism, in which black people are treated as if they simply don’t matter. Wright showed that blacks in the United States are fundamentally historically excluded from the political, aesthetic, and epistemic institutions of the only world to which they are indigenous. By pulling readers into places “they wished never to go,” he demonstrated how the erosion of black political power in fact increased political impotence among humankind. Wright, argues Gordon, was particularly prescient about the relationship between the racist state and twentieth-century fascism. They jointly eradicate conditions of political appearance and freedom, replacing them with unilateral rule.

The contemporary practice of state recognition: Kosovo, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and their aftermath

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (5) ◽  
pp. 661-676 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikulas Fabry
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Society ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Care ◽  
State Recognition ◽  
South Ossetia ◽  
The World ◽  
New States ◽  
Contemporary Practice ◽  
As If

This paper assesses state recognition, the practice historically employed to regulate membership in international society, since the United States–led recognition of Kosovo and the Russian-led recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Its main goal is to succinctly examine the question of whether these two controversial episodes have signaled change in the existing norms of recognition of new states. The paper argues that there is not enough evidence for the claims of some observers and governments that unilateral secession is, as such, becoming legitimate internationally. The leading recognizing powers took great care in all three cases to reject the applicability of their decision to other situations of unilateral secession, and they have since approached those other situations as if no acknowledgment of the three territories had taken place. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that the deeply contested nature of these cases has introduced confusion and uncertainty into the practice and that this has had, and will have, important implications elsewhere in the world, in terms of both re-invigorated claims of statehood and the potential for unilateral recognition decisions by powerful outsiders. In fact, it is extremely unlikely that Russia's recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in August 2008 would have ever occurred without the prior US-led recognition of Kosovo in February 2008.

Paul Hindemith's Contribution to Music Theory in the United States

1998 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Forte ◽  
Paul Hindemith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Music Theory ◽  
The United States

Melodic Dictation Instruction

2015 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan O. Buonviri ◽  
Andrew S. Paney
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Advanced Placement ◽  
Music Theory ◽  
Relevant Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Instructional Time ◽  
Aural Skills ◽  
Instructional Resources ◽  
Test Taking ◽  
Melodic Dictation

Based on relevant literature and recent qualitative findings, the purpose of this survey research was to identify pedagogical approaches to melodic dictation employed by Advanced Placement (AP) Music Theory teachers across the United States. The researcher-designed survey questions focused on pitch and rhythm skills, instructional resources, dictation strategies, test-taking skills, and characteristics of successful dictation students. The survey was distributed online to a stratified random sample of 875 AP Music Theory teachers across the United States. Of these recipients, 398 participants from 49 states and the District of Columbia completed the survey, yielding a 45.5% return rate. Results indicated that teachers preferred pitch systems that emphasized scale degree function and rhythm systems that emphasized the meter. Participants also reported the influence of the AP exam on their dictation teaching and described their need for additional instructional time and better preparation for teaching aural skills. Suggestions for further research include similar studies of other populations, including high school teachers of other theory courses and college theory instructors.

Variety into Vaudeville, The Process Observed in Two Manuscript Gagbooks

1978 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Laurence Senelick
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Private Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
The One ◽  
Original Songs ◽  
As If

“As a jester among jesters,” Jack Point commends himself to a would-be mountebank in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Yeoman of the Guard, “I will teach thee all my original songs, my self-constructed riddles, my own ingenious paradoxes; nay more, I will reveal to thee the source whence I get them.” The “source” in this case is a tome entitled The Merry Jestes of Hugh Ambrose, a compendium of asthmatic wheezes, Gilbert's thrust at not only Elizabethan jestbooks but their Victorian counterparts. At times it must have seemed as if printing had been invented only to enable aspiring comedians to plunder the wit of the past from cheap chapbooks, like the one that gave Joe Miller to the vernacular. In the United States, dissemination of these storehouses of “gags” began as early as 1789, and by the 1860s they were a staple of the bookstalls; the intended market for them was either the laugh-loving churchgoer who wouldn't be caught dead in a theatre, or the parlor entertainer, the “clown of private life,” ready to make unwilling interlocutors of his nearest and dearest. In the 1870s, however, publishers aimed at the professional; Henry J. Wehman's 25¢ paperback Budget of Jokes was meant to fill a need of the evergrowing number of variety performers.

“Everything Had to Change”: Nadia Boulanger's Translation of Modernism in the Rice Lecture Series, 1925

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 363-381
Author(s):  
KIMBERLY FRANCIS
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Lecture Series ◽  
Musical Traditions ◽  
Nadia Boulanger ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Gain Access

AbstractFrom December 1924 to January 1925 the influential French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger undertook her first concert and speaking tour of the United States of America. The end of January found Boulanger in Houston, Texas, where she had agreed to present three talks as part of the Rice Lecture Series. The stenographer's transcript of her lectures, which differs greatly from the articles she later published in the Rice Pamphlets, provides the earliest evidence of Boulanger's nascent trans-Atlantic pedagogical work. Further details reside in Boulanger's letters home to her mother, offering intimate insight into Boulanger's impressions of the United States and its contemporary musical traditions. I borrow Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of a “minor language” to theorize how Boulanger adroitly manipulated her status as a foreigner, as a prodigious virtuoso, and as a woman to circumvent American prejudices about women's involvement in music making and gain access to “authority.” Thus events from Houston 1925 serve both as a means to document Boulanger's first recorded English lectures and as a case study in her development of a specialized pedagogical language, developed out of an experience with Franco-American translation in the southern United States.

Three Models of Secular Constitutional Development: India, Israel, and the United States

1996 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Jeffrey Jacobsohn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
First Amendment ◽  
Comparative Research ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
Constitutional Development ◽  
As If

As a subject for serious investigation, constitutionalism in faraway places seems finally to have come of age. To appropriate the famous metaphor from the First Amendment arena that is the concern of this paper, it is as if, until relatively recently, a “wall of separation” had shielded both scholarly and judicial analysis of American constitutional issues from the experience of other polities. As a result, too often constitutional inquiry has been denied the illumination and insights of comparative research. My specific aim in this article is to explore the concept and practice of the secular constitution within three nations that are committed, albeit in different ways, to the principle of religious liberty.

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