Music: Embracing
the Sensory Pleasure, Unveling the Narration
Narrative
Matters: May 20-22, 2010, Fredericton, New Brunswick.
Music is My
Father's Last Link to the World
The
Globe and Mail,
January 6, 2010.
Address for the
2009 Summer Convocation
St.
Thomas University, July 2009.
Full text.
Transforming the
College Classroom
Martín
Kutnowski develops the idea
of the inner and outer circle of apprentices where all
participate, according to their levels and skills, an idea based
on that of medieval apprenticeship in guilds (Roger Moore).
Teaching
Perspectives 11
(Winter 2009).
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.
Componer música
es un trabajo de taller
("Composing
is a workshop"); interview with Mark-Anthony Turnage. For
Revista Clásica, Buenos Aires, April of 1999.
La música es
la arquitectura del tiempo
("Music
is architecture in time"); interview with John Corigliano.
For Revista Clásica, Buenos Aires, February of 1999.
Aspen y el Ensemble
de Música Contemporánea
("Aspen
Contemporary Ensemble"); interview with Gorge Tsontakis. For
Revista Clásica, Buenos Aires, December of 1998.
Sonidos de las
Américas: Argentina
("Sounds
of the Americas: Argentina"); interview with Tania León.
For Revista Clásica, Buenos Aires, July of 1998.
¿De dónde
viene la música?
("Where
is the music coming from?"); interview with George
Perle. For Revista Clásica, Buenos Aires, February of
1998.
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