Relevance of the Current Curriculum: Teaching 'The Simpsons' and 'Monsters, Inc.' alongside Beethoven and Wagner
Movie and TV music are generally marginalized with respect
to the classical canon taught in music appreciation courses. In this lecture,
I show that analyzing the sophisticated compositional techniques found
in movie and television music helps students see why truly understanding
music (and not just passively consuming it) is relevant in their everyday
lives. TV Music allows me introduce complex notions that I subsequently
apply to the analysis of the art music repertoire: phrase structure, key
relationships, motivic development, among many others.
Paper read at the CMS
Fifty-First National Conference: “A Changing Profession in a Changing
World.” Atlanta, GA, September 25-28, 2008.
'I wouldn't have nothing if
I didn't have you.'
A commentary on the educational value of visual and
aural archetypes in Pixar's "Monsters, Inc." (2001). In: Across Cultures:
A Reader for Writers, 7th edition. Eds. Sheena Gillespie and Robert
Becker. New York: Longman, 2007. Available
through Amazon.com.
Trope and Irony in The
Simpsons’ Overture.
Using the initial sequence of "The Simpson"s as a case
study, this article analyzes the role of television music in the construction
of the medium’s total audiovisual message. The one-minute opening, a luscious
symphonic overture complete with sound effects, introduces the five family
characters plus the small-town suburban culture that surrounds them. Inscribed
within Hollywood’s cinematographic language, the music is a powerful generic
marker often projecting absurdity and irony. Notwithstanding the pantomimic
effect, these comedic contradictions address the dysfunctional life of
the Simpsons, defining the American Dream in ways distinct from other
TV shows from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Read at the 35th Annual Meeting of the Music Theory
Society of New York State. New York, April 2007. Forthcoming
in Popular Music
and Society 31/5 (December 2008).
Dramatic Expression and Form
in Mozart K. 282, First Movement.
The score of Mozart’s Sonata in Eb, K.
282, does not allude to any explicit theatrical or programmatic content.
But analysis of its melodic articulation, phrase structure, voice leading,
and tonal rhythm suggests metaphorical connections with operatic subjects.
Charles Rosen defines the relationship between aria and sonata in Mozart
as “interplay between dramatic expression and abstract form,” a connection
that goes back to an overall preoccupation with “expression” in the
eighteenth-century. A hermeneutic interpretation can only go as far as the
interpretation of a metaphor, but picturing the first movement of Mozart’s
K. 282 as an imaginary operatic scene transforms our way to experience
this sonata, both as performers and listeners. Fifth International
Conference on Music Theory. Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre.
September 28–30, 2006.
Formal Conflicts and
Metaphor in Scriabin's Op. 22.
Inscribed within the tonal language, Scriabin’s early
compositional style features interesting conflicts between harmony, voice
leading and phrase rhythm. Separate layers of structure are occasionally
out-of-phase with one another, but remain unified through hidden
parallelisms and motivic linkages. These formal conflicts project metaphor
and allusion. Fourth
International Schenker Symposium, New York. March
2006.
Learning as a dissonant
act
A
true story illustrating some of the risks and rewards of bending the
"contrapuntal rules" of student-teacher interaction. About
Campus 10:3, September 2005.
From Regis Philbin to Donna
Elvira: Using Mass Media as a Bridge to Mozart
In order to engage the kinds of
non-Western undergraduate populations that are becoming predominant in
American urban colleges, music appreciation surveys must expand their
focus to areas beyond the standard literature and integrate its findings
with those of other related disciplines. Only then the students can see
the relevance of—and make a connection between—the class contents and
their overall education. This
presentation, integrating popular culture and standard repertoire in the
music appreciation classroom, focuses on selected instances of the TV show
“Who Wants to be a Millionaire?,” examining how music is used at different
moments to enhance specific moods or emotional atmospheres. Looking at
this contemporary show familiarizes the students with basic tools for
music analysis, such as the ability to interpret tempo, melodic and
rhythmic design, harmonic language, and motivic development. Once the
students are equipped with this basic terminology, they are prepared to
deeper experience, and better understand, an aria from Mozart’s “Don
Giovanni.” Presented at the 2005 CMS International Conference, Madrid,
Spain.
Also
presented at the Seventh Presidential Lecture Series at Queensborough
Community College, City University of New
York.
Presented
as part of the interdisciplinary symposium "The Status of the Document in
the Digital Age: A Multidisciplinary Approach." ED-MEDIA 2005 - World
Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia &
Telecommunications. Co-presented with Lori Anderson-Moseman, Megan Elias, Belle Gironda,
and Ken Golden. Montreal,
Canada, June 2005. Published in the proceedings of the
conference.
Rote teaching and learning have
their place, but not in a music course and an art and design course in
which two dozen students at Queensborough Community College enrolled
together. Through a shared theme, shared assignments, and a shared
commitment to making the content relevant and the process active and
engaging, two instructors fashioned a powerful environment for learning.
Available for download at: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/110430912/ABSTRACT
This paper searches for consistent principles of formal
organization in Peter Maxwell Davies's Eight Songs for a Mad King.
The study addresses first the musical-theatrical frame created by the
composer and the words provided by Randolph Stow; later, it proceeds to
examine the relation of those two components to other aspects of the
musical structure. Presented
at the 33rd. Annual Meeting of the Music Theory Society of New York State.
Baruch College, CUNY. New York, NY, 9–10 April 2005. Published in
ex-tempore, Journal of Compositional and Theoretical Research in Music
XII/1. Spring/Summer 2004.
How can music appreciation & digital art and design be
integrated into a learning community? How can one engage a multicultural
student population? This is a hands-on forum for teachers of the
humanities who are interested in active learning and interdisciplinary
ways of knowing. Basic principles of aural and visual designed are
explored by analyzing and reinventing a segment of a contemporary anime
remake of the silent classic, “Metropolis.” Participants have an
opportunity to think about script, screen image, and soundtrack;
identifying how music (tempo, dynamics, texture, harmony, instrumentation)
and image (line, form, color, light) communicate information and help set
the tone and mood in film.
Forum lead with Ken Golden and Sarah Standing at the League for Innovation
Conference, New York, March 2005.
La Femme Fatale in Queens
Boulevard
Paper read at a CUNY Junior Faculty Research
Colloquium in Queens College, November 2004.
The Obsolete
Classroom
Paper read at QCC's Second College Conference.
November 2004
Co-authored with Dr. Eduardo
Marti, President of Queensborough
Community College, and Professor Peter Gray, of the English Department
at Queensborough Community College. Published in the Community College
Journal. Available for download at: http://www.aacc.nche.edu/Content/ContentGroups/CC_Journal/Apr_May_2004/april20_26.pdf.
Piazzolla’s Tango
Nuevo departed from traditional tango in many ways, for instance by
featuring new, more aggressive rhythmic gestures. The new style also featured
a more sophisticated phrase-structure, independent from the dance or the
words. Both aspects of the change, intrinsically related to each other,
were in fact rooted in the performance practice of singers (Gardel among
them) of the "old style" tango. This paper
was presented in the Seminar Tango, Bandoneón, Piazzolla, organized
by the Music Department of the Graduate School and University Center of
City University of New York in march of 2000. Click
here to see pictures and read more about that event. This article was
published in Latin American
Music Review, Spring/Summer 2002, 23:1.
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