The First Year Music Major

Designed to address the many challenges that first-year undergraduate music students often encounter, The First-Year Music Major: Strategies for Success provides concrete approaches that will help anyone embarking on a degree in music develop the knowledge and skills needed to complete their first year successfully. The chapters demystify the path of majoring in music, and address key topics including: Planning a road map for the degree Developing needed musical, academic, professional, practice, and performance skills Building financial, mental, and physical well-being strategies Written by a group of experienced professors and advisors in roles across the faculty of music, this book offers a comprehensive resource for first-year music students that will help them develop foundational skills to pursue music degrees and careers. An online e-resource accompanies the book, providing downloadable worksheets and materials referenced in the chapters. Rooted in research and extensive practical experience, The First-Year Music Major is suited to use both in introductory music courses and by individual students and advisors.

(Meredith Music Resource). This book details the fundamental knowledge, skills, and attitudes that prospective music majors need in order to make a successful transition from high school to college. Specific exercises are offered, along with supporting online resources. It also suggests steps that parents, high school guidance counselors, and music teachers can take to identify, encourage, and guide future musicians and music educators.

One of Oprah Daily's 20 Favorite Books of 2021 • Selected as one of Pitchfork's Best Music Books of the Year “One of the best books of its kind in decades.” —The Wall Street Journal An epic achievement and a huge delight, the entire history of popular music over the past fifty years refracted through the big genres that have defined and dominated it: rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance music, and pop Kelefa Sanneh, one of the essential voices of our time on music and culture, has made a deep study of how popular music unites and divides us, charting the way genres become communities. In Major Labels, Sanneh distills a career’s worth of knowledge about music and musicians into a brilliant and omnivorous reckoning with popular music—as an art form (actually, a bunch of art forms), as a cultural and economic force, and as a tool that we use to build our identities. He explains the history of slow jams, the genius of Shania Twain, and why rappers are always getting in trouble. Sanneh shows how these genres have been defined by the tension between mainstream and outsider, between authenticity and phoniness, between good and bad, right and wrong. Throughout, race is a powerful touchstone: just as there have always been Black audiences and white audiences, with more or less overlap depending on the moment, there has been Black music and white music, constantly mixing and separating. Sanneh debunks cherished myths, reappraises beloved heroes, and upends familiar ideas of musical greatness, arguing that sometimes, the best popular music isn’t transcendent. Songs express our grudges as well as our hopes, and they are motivated by greed as well as idealism; music is a powerful tool for human connection, but also for human antagonism. This is a book about the music everyone loves, the music everyone hates, and the decades-long argument over which is which. The opposite of a modest proposal, Major Labels pays in full.

Music education today requires an approach rooted in care and kindness that coexists alongside the dismantling of systems that fail to serve our communities in higher education. But, as the essayists in Sound Pedagogy show, the structural aspects of music study in higher education present obstacles to caring and kindness like the entrenched master-student model, a neoliberal individualist and competitive mindset, and classical music’s white patriarchal roots. The editors of this volume curate essays that use a broad definition of care pedagogy, one informed by interdisciplinary scholarship and aimed at providing practical strategies for bringing transformative learning and engaged pedagogies to music classrooms. The contributors draw from personal experience to address issues including radical kindness through universal design; listening to non-human musicality; public musicology as a forum for social justice discourse; and radical approaches to teaching about race through music. Contributors: Molly M. Breckling, William A. Everett, Kate Galloway, Sara Haefeli, Eric Hung, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Mark Katz, Nathan A. Langfitt, Matteo Magarotto, Mary Natvig, Frederick A. Peterbark, Laura Moore Pruett, Colleen Renihan, Amanda Christina Soto, John Spilker, Reba A. Wissner, and Trudi Wright

Announcements for the following year included in some vols.

The Oxford Handbook of Preservice Music Teacher Education in the United States identifies the critical need for change in Pre-K-12 music education. Collectively, the handbook's 56 contributors argue that music education benefits all students only if educators actively work to broaden diversity in the profession and consistently include diverse learning strategies, experiences, and perspectives in the classroom. In this handbook, contributors encourage music teachers, researchers, policy makers, and music teacher educators to take up that challenge. Throughout the handbook, contributors provide a look at ways music teacher educators prepare teachers to enter the music education profession and offer suggestions for ways in which new teachers can advocate for and adapt to changes in contemporary school settings. Building upon students' available resources, contributors use research-based approaches to identify the ways in which educational methods and practices must transform in order to successfully challenge existing music education boundaries.