Rhythm and Meter
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9.5: Yi-Cheng Daniel Wu, “Poetry and Musical Organization in JIA Guoping’s The Wind Sounds in the Sky (2002)” - shows how JIA Guoping derives his rhythmic structure from aspects of Chinese poetry; suitable for post-tonal music theory courses, discussions of text-music relations, and classes exploring cultural exchange
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9.3: Rachel Short, “Interactions Between Music and Dance in Two Musical Theater Tap Breaks” – explores scenarios where metrical patterns in music and dance conflict (metric dissonance); suitable for students at all levels, ranging from introducing musical meter and its elements to advanced study of metric dissonance
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9.1: Chelsea Oden, “‘We are dancing, We are flying’: The Feeling of Flight in Dance Scenes from Recent Popular Film” – discusses visual, metrical, and timbral aspects of dance scenes in film; introduces the distinction between duple, triple, simple, and compound meters in an embodied context, suitable for music fundamentals and beginning students; introduces the “sound envelope” (ADSR) and connects timbre to embodied experiences, suitable for students at all levels developing a vocabulary for describing timbre
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8.6: Ben Duinker, “When Hip-Hop Accents Collide (They Create Syncopation)” – discusses the distinctive accent patterns at different levels of a hip-hop track (lyrics, delivery, and accompaniment) and discusses potential meanings of syncopation in this repertoire; suitable for students at all levels learning about rhythm and meter, syncopation, metric dissonance, and text-music relationships
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7.2: Kara Yoo Leaman, “Dance as Music in George Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco” – addresses conflicting patterns in music and choreography and connects this metric dissonance to a melodic motive in Bach; suitable for students at all levels, especially study of metric dissonance
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3.3: Stephen Rodgers, “Music, Poetry, and Performance in a Song by Maria Schneider” – introduces how poetic declamation and the sound of recitation might influence compositional decision and the performer’s interpretive choices; suitable for student singers and composers
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2.1: Harald Krebs, “The Influence of Clara Schumann’s Lieder on Declamation in Robert Schumann’s Late Songs” – This video could be used to teach several rhythm and meter topics. The main focus of the video is on the differences between poetic rhythm and Schumann’s music-metrically irregular settings of these text-metrically regular poems. Teaching topics that may come up include Lerdahl/Jackendoff dot arrays, hypermetric numberings, and recompositional analysis; the video could also be used to talk about text-music relationships (especially in terms of expressive meaning), or in a discussion of historical questions about influence.