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Written for music educators from K - 5 onwards, First Instruments is a practical guide to teaching musical ideas through the first instruments we develop in early childhood, laying the foundation for how the collective creativity the book presents can sustain a lifelong commitment to music-making: voice and hand gestures. Founded on the belief that all children are musical, the book gives music teachers the necessary tools to develop students' confident understanding of pitch relationships through improvisation and composition. Author Nicholas Bannan, a veteran pedagogue and children's choir director, accomplishes this in a classroom-tested system that combines Kodály hand signs with extend...
It is a truism in teaching choral conducting that the director should look like s/he wishes the choir to sound. The conductor's physical demeanour has a direct effect on how the choir sings, at a level that is largely unconscious and involuntary. It is also a matter of simple observation that different choral traditions exhibit not only different styles of vocal production and delivery, but also different gestural vocabularies which are shared not only between conductors within that tradition, but also with the singers. It is as possible to distinguish a gospel choir from a barbershop chorus or a cathedral choir by visual cues alone as it is simply by listening. But how can these forms of ph...
This book breaks new ground in drawing on evolutionary psychology in support of advocacy for music education, and the presentation of innovative musical pedagogy. The book adopts the perspective that musical experience is the birthright of all human beings through the decisive role it played in the evolution of our species, the traces of which we carry in our genes. The author draws on scientific developments in acoustics, neuroscience, linguistics, archaeology and anthropology to examine theories that have emerged powerfully during the last twenty years and which argue for the significance of the practice of music as foundational to human culture. This position is examined in parallel with research into how children learn musically, and the role that creative decision making plays in this. A series of strategies is presented that explores collective creativity which draws on vocalisation, the use of gesture, and instinctive responses to harmony to develop musical imagination.
Useful work has been done in recent years in the areas of music psychology, philosophy and education, yet this is the first book to provide a wide assessment of what practical benefits this research can bring to the music practitioner. With 25 chapters by writers representing a broad range of perspectives, this volume is able to highlight many of the potential links between music research and practice. The chapters are divided into five main sections. Section one examines practitioners? use of research to assist their practice and the ways in which they might train to become systematic researchers. Section two explores research centred on perception and cognition, while section three looks a...
Music is central to human cultural and intellectual experience. It is vitally important for the welfare of human society and - this book argues - should become more widely accepted in our community as a mainstream educational and therapeutic tool. This book explores the importance of music throughout human evolution, and its continued relevance to modern-day human society. Throughout, the emphasis is on the origin of music and how (and where) it is processed in our brains, exploring in detail the genetic and cultural evolution of modern, loquacious humans, how we may have evolved with unique neural and cognitive architecture, and why two complementary but distinct communication systems - lan...
Understanding the evolution of language within the context of deep human history requires interdisciplinary work between linguists and scientists from a wide range of academic disciplines (e. g. archaeology, molecular biology, anthropology, genetics, biochemistry, etc.). The book aims to calibrate work on human evolution with current linguistic theory in an attempt to trace out a scientific story of how human language emerged and developed that has plausibility while remaining open to change through new linguistic and non-linguistic research.
How is it that humans are able to organize seemingly random sounds into the captivating sonic structures we call music? In this volume, Lawrence M. Zbikowski argues that humans' unique ability to correlate sounds with dynamic processes provides the basis for the construction of meaningful musical utterances - that is, a foundation for musical grammar. Building on a framework for grammar developed by cognitive linguists over the past three decades and the pathbreaking research set out in his earlier book, Conceptualizing Music (OUP 2002), Zbikowski explains how the ability to draw analogies between widely differing domains allowing humans to connect sequences of musical sounds with emotion pr...
What makes a classical song a song? In a wide-ranging 2004 discussion, covering such contrasting composers as Brahms and Berberian, Schubert and Kurtág, Jonathan Dunsby considers the nature of vocality in songs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The essence and scope of poetic and literary meaning in the Lied tradition is subjected to close scrutiny against the backdrop of 'new musicological' thinking and music-theoretical orthodoxies. The reader is thus offered the best insights available within an evidence-based approach to musical discourse. Schoenberg figures conspicuously as both songsmith and theorist, and some easily comprehensible Schenkerian approaches are used to convey ideas of musical time and expressive focus. In this work of scholarship and theoretical depth, Professor Dunsby's highly original approach and engaging style will ensure its appeal to all practising musicians and students of Romantic and modern music.
What is the origin of music? In the last few decades this centuries-old puzzle has been reinvigorated by new archaeological evidence and developments in the fields of cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary theory. In this path-breaking book, renowned musicologist Gary Tomlinson draws from these areas to construct a new narrative for the emergence of human music. Starting at a period of human pre_history long before Homo sapiens or music existed, Tomlinson describes the incremental attainments that, by changing the communication and society of prehuman species, laid the foundation for musical behaviors in more recent times. He traces in Neanderthals and early sapiens the accumulatio...
Aspects of Teaching Secondary Music provides a practical illustration of the skills, knowledge and understanding required to teach music in the secondary classroom. Musical concepts and ideas are discussed and a critical examination of key issues is given. This encourages the reader to engage with these thoughts and consider their views and beliefs in terms of how they will influence their potential to teach music in an inspired and effective manner.