Expanding The Music Theory Canon

Featuring music by sixty-seven historical women and/or people of color, Expanding the Music Theory Canon is designed to supplement any introductory Western classical music theory curriculum. At a time when many academics are focused on increasing diversity and inclusion, this book provides the means to seamlessly incorporate works by underrepresented composers into music theory core courses. The anthology’s 255 musical examples are organized topically and include excerpts as well as nineteen complete pieces for analysis. Each chapter begins with guided analysis questions aimed at students approaching these concepts for the first time. Notably, this anthology provides a biography and image for each composer, which is particularly significant since works by these individuals have rarely been included in previous textbooks or anthologies. A related website, www.expandingthemusictheorycanon.com, provides additional examples and links to recordings when available. All musical examples in the anthology have been classroom-tested with music majors and minors at a major conservatory, at private and public universities, and at community colleges. Detailed tables provide suggestions for using this book in conjunction with the major introductory theory textbooks. A special set of online exercises has been prepared by the book's author using the Auralia & Musition software programs; you can find further information here: a href="https://www.risingsoftware.com/expanding-the-music-theory-canon"https://www.risingsoftware.com/expanding-the-music-theory-canona. Additional examples and a blog offering teaching suggestions may be found at: a href="https://www.expandingthemusictheorycanon.com"https://www.expandingthemusictheorycanon.coma.

The first music theory anthology to provide 255 topically arranged examples by 67 historical women and people of color

Directly addressing the underrepresentation of Black composers in core music curricula, Expanding the Canon: Black Composers in the Music Theory Classroom aims to both demonstrate why diversification is badly needed and help faculty expand their teaching with practical, classroom-oriented lesson plans that focus on teaching music theory with music by Black composers. This collection of 21 chapters is loosely arranged to resemble a typical music theory curriculum, with topics progressing from basic to advanced and moving from fundamentals, diatonic harmony, and chromatic harmony to form, popular music, and music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Some chapters focus on segments of the traditional music theory sequence, while others consider a single style or composer. Contributors address both methods to incorporate the music of Black composers into familiar topics, and ways to rethink and expand the purview of the music theory curriculum. A foreword by Philip Ewell and an introductory narrative by Teresa L. Reed describing her experiences as an African American student of music set the volume in wider context. Incorporating a wide range of examples by composers across classical, jazz, and popular genres, this book helps bring the rich and varied body of music by Black composers into the core of music theory pedagogy and offers a vital resource for all faculty teaching music theory and analysis.

A classic in gender studies in music Marcia J. Citron's comprehensive, balanced work lays a broad foundation for the study of women composers and their music. Drawing on a diverse body of feminist and interdisciplinary theory, Citron shows how the western art canon is not intellectually pure but the result of a complex mixture of attitudes, practices, and interests that often go unacknowledged and unchallenged. Winner of the Pauline Alderman Prize from the International Alliance of Women in Music, Gender and the Musical Canon explores important elements of canon formation, such as notions of creativity, professionalism, and reception. Citron surveys the institutions of power, from performing organizations and the academy to critics and the publishing and recording industries, that affect what goes into the canon and what is kept out. She also documents the nurturing role played by women, including mothers, in cultivating female composers. In a new introduction, she assesses the book's reception by composers and critics, especially the reactions to her controversial reading of Cécile Chaminade's sonata for piano. A key volume in establishing how the concepts and assumptions that form the western art music canon affect female composers and their music, Gender and the Musical Canon also reveals how these dynamics underpin many of the major issues that affect musicology as a discipline.

"Queer Ear brings together for the first time a collection of music theorists who issue queer challenges to both music theory and musicology. To queer musicology, which has often presumed that music theory has nothing valuable to contribute to queer music studies, we demonstrate how music theory can be appropriated for queer ends. We show that queerness is integral to our music-theoretical practice, and can change the field of music theory. Queers have always listened widely, repurposing straight sounds for the "queer ear," a concept which stands in contrast with queer soundings, by queer composers, who are also investigated in this volume. Privileging provisional, idiosyncratic, and nonnormative listening practices, a queer ear enables us to counter music theory's hoary and continuing tendencies towards rationality, unity, unilinearity, teleology, and logical certainty. What unites the investigation of queer ear and queer soundings is the repurposing of "hard" music-theoretical apparatuses, as well as "soft" apparatuses like narratology and cultural theory, for queer ends. These repurposings contribute to the search for general principles-or a "theory"-of queering that counters mainstream music theory's proclivities, encouraging everyone to experiment with queer ways of listening instead. But ultimately, the queer ear is an expression of what queers have always had to do, often learning from a young age to collect scraps from our families's heteronormative table, recycling and reusing bits and pieces of an often hostile world to build habitable futures for ourselves. Through the lenses of queer temporality, queer narratology, and queer music analyses, we examine a wide variety of sounds from Sun Ra to Cowell, Czernowin, and Henze, as well as Schubert and Schumann; theories ranging from Schenker to queer shame, disability studies, and posthumanism; and writings from Edward Cone to Edward Prime-Stevenson"--

"This volume advances understanding of the nature of current inequalities in the field of classical music production in the Global North, exploring why inequalities continue to exist, and asking what can be done to tackle ongoing exclusions. It constitutes an urgent intervention into these contemporary debates, drawing together ongoing and emergent analyses from scholars, activists and musicians in a variety of countries across Europe and North America to foreground both scholarly examination of these inequalities, alongside discussion of strategies and catalysts for change. Academic accounts investigate inequalities in higher education and the classical music industry, exploring racial, class and gender inequalities, 'authenticity', disability representation, changing the canon, and neoliberalism. The book also includes interviews with those working in the classical music industry where they reflect on issues of diversity and share insights and inspiration as well as good practice, putting into dialogue scholarly and industry-based accounts. Themes of the book include institutional legacies and possibilities for change; racial, gender and class inequalities and marginalised voices; and strategies for activism whether reflective practices, informal networks, or larger organisations leading change"--

Music Theory operates with a number of fundamental terms that are rarely explored in detail. This book offers in-depth reflections on key concepts from a range of philosophical and critical approaches that reflect the diversity of the contemporary music theory landscape.

David Lewin's Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations is recognized as the seminal work paving the way for current studies in mathematical and systematic approaches to music analysis. Lewin, one of the 20th century's most prominent figures in music theory, pushes the boundaries of the study of pitch-structure beyond its conception as a static system for classifying and inter-relating chords and sets. Known by most music theorists as "GMIT", the book is by far the most significant contribution to the field of systematic music theory in the last half-century, generating the framework for the "transformational theory" movement. Appearing almost twenty years after GMIT's initial publication, this Oxford University Press edition features a previously unpublished preface by David Lewin, as well as a foreword by Edward Gollin contextualizing the work's significance for the current field of music theory.