IPWMT - Day 2

V. Levine's session on teaching transcription was an eye-opener in terms of the range of learning benefits possible - besides developing aural analysis and dictation skills, students are also challenged to think of fundamental issues of musical representation (aural vs visual), cultural values embodied in notation systems, transcription decisions as well as attendant scholarly processes (finding concordances, writing critical transcription/editorial notes, etc). Most of all, her idea of transcription as part of the process of music analysis (the students really get to know the music intimately) appeals to me.

Münir Becken (UCLA) has drawn very interesting inspirations from David Cope's work. He designed a course that uses a compositional approach to world music theory. Nice idea of getting the students to do various forms of aural analysis to identify relevant stylistic elements. His idea of getting students to then write a compositional manifesto (without writing the piece) is worth trying out. His afternoon session, getting everyone to sing Turkish traditional songs, opened up a new whole of pitch concepts and subtleties for me.

Paul Humphreys shared his teaching ideas based on getting students to make a panpipe. Quite cool! Had my first experience blowing a panpipe--wow, not easy at all! Very clever of him to design it such that pitch tunings can be easily adjusted, the simple instrument is thus capable of rendering different tuning systems.