Abstract
This paper examines a new approach to music pedagogy that disrupts the traditional lines of genre, history, and style in an effort to reimagine typical academic topics like Counterpoint and Harmony as taught to undergraduate music majors. The study takes as its starting point the design of a new course (designed and taught by the author at Cornish College of the Arts) called A Multiplicity of Voices: Polyphony in Composition. This course eschews the traditional approaches to teaching sixteenth- or eighteenth-century counterpoint as style and instead takes as its central tenet a focus on musical textures, or states. The students explore emergent polyphonic states, utilizing the techniques and tools of polyphony and counterpoint, across multiple art-forms and historical eras. As an advanced theory topic, the course posits that polyphony is not the exclusive domain (through birthright and privilege) of western civilization and classical music, but is instead a musical “state” that emerges from contrapuntal techniques in a variety of musics across cultures and genres. This approach creates space for creative and critical thinking, disrupts traditional lines of inquiry, and reveals transdisciplinary possibilities for new pedagogical methods.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Polyphony, Music, Academic, Decolonization, Disruption, Pedagogy, Curriculum, Transdisciplinarity
