History of Music Theory
Videos that explore how music theoretical ideas have been developed and communicated in the past.
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10.1: L. Poundie Burstein with Quynh Nguyen and Jennifer Roderer, “The Best Laid Plans . . . and Others: An 18th-Century Compositional Outline” - explores how an 18th-century music theorist attempted to distinguish essential material from elaboration in a contemporary composition; would be suitable for the study of phrase structure and small forms, for considering melodic construction, and for exploring the history of music analysis
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7.1: Stephanie Probst, “Music Appreciation Through Animation: Percy Scholes’s ‘AudioGraphic’ Piano Rolls” – discusses piano rolls with music-analytical overlay; includes a visual analysis of Bach’s B-flat major fugue from WTC I; suitable for introducing students to different visual models for analyzing form and for introducing fugue
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4.2: Carmel Raz, “Anne Young’s Musical Games (1801): Music Theory, Gender, and Game Design” and 4.3: Carmel Raz, “Anne Young’s Introduction to Music (1803): Pedagogical, Speculative, and Ludic Music Theory” – discusses an educational board game for teaching music fundamentals and the connection to contemporary speculative music theory; suitable for students studying music and gender, the history of music theory, and music theory pedagogy
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3.2: J. Daniel Jenkins, “Schoenberg’s ‘Advice for Beginners in Composition with Twelve Tones’” – shows how Arnold Schoenberg teaches how to generate inversionally combinatorial twelve-tone rows, drawing from his pre-broadcast sketches; suitable for post-tonal music theory courses; demonstrates how one might use an archive in a music theoretical context
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3.1: L. Poundie Burstein with Quynh Nguyen, “Parenthetic Aside in a 1789 Analysis of Mozart’s K. 284” – introduces a historically informed way to understand the two-part exposition (the exposition with the secondary theme) in a Classical sonata form; suitable for upper-level music students and students composing a Classical-style sonata first movement; discusses performance implications of treating the secondary theme as a “middle passage”