Volume 11 (2025)
Tessellated Tonics: Zuckerkandl’s Toy for Music Fundamentals
Daphne Tan, Alexis Millares Thomson, Tegan Ridge, and Emma Soldaat (University of Toronto) Volume 11.3 (May 2025)
In the early- to mid-twentieth century, many music educators were concerned with creating engaging and effective approaches to teaching music fundamentals. This video-article brings to life a pedagogical device from 1946 that was invented by the music theorist Victor Zuckerkandl but never produced. We demonstrate how this “small toy” can be used to learn major and minor keys, as Zuckerkandl intended, as well as intervals, modulations, and more. We also connect this device to manipulatives in mathematics education.
Keywords: Music fundamentals, music theory pedagogy, tonality, Victor Zuckerkandl, key signatures, manipulatives
“‘Why Can’t I Just Do It Straightaway?’ Bluey, Joff Bush, and Accumulation”
Derek J. Myler (East Carolina University School of Music) Volume 11.2 (March 2025)
Like many kids’ TV shows, Bluey frequently repurposes classical music. In designing Bluey’s soundscape, lead composer Joff Bush has frequently favored an end-oriented approach to revealing classical themes, engaging a formal process that productively interfaces with Peter Burkholder’s (1995) idea of thematic growth via cumulative form and Mark Spicer’s (2004) extension of the concept, textural growth via accumulative form. In this video, I generalize both kinds of growth into a holistic process of accumulation, and I show how Bush and his creative team often apply this process to support Bluey’s narrative goals. Three analytical vignettes demonstrate how Bluey’s audiences are often taken on a journey of discovery in the seven to nine minutes each episode encompasses—themes are initially hinted at, gradually assembled, and finally revealed in their full splendor at the episode’s narrative climax.
Keywords: Bluey, TV music, Joff Bush, children’s music, narrative, accumulation, melody;
“Music as Movement in Signed Song: Analyzing Rosa Lee Timm’s ‘River Song’”
Anabel Maler (University of British Columbia) Volume 11.1 (January 2025)
Music created and performed primarily in a visual-kinesthetic or tactile modality, such as signed music, presents important challenges for our existing methodologies and paradigms in the field of music theory. The existence of music that does not necessarily involve sounds prompts us to reconceptualize music in terms of organized movement, and to consider how musical parameters such as vocal quality, melody, and rhythm can emerge in a visual-kinesthetic musical medium. This video considers these parameters through a detailed analysis of the original signed song “River Song,” composed and performed by Rosa Lee Timm. The video uses music analysis and video interviews with Timm to reveal the meaning of a purely signed piece of music.
Keywords: Deafness; Sign language; ASL; Movement; music analysis, musical meaning, performance and analysis), music perception and cognition