Structure, Context, & Style

My Tuesday class is called Structure, Context, & Style. It's essentially the music theory course for all graduate music students. Since it's for all music students, a third of the class are SRT grad students (five of us) while the rest are all music education grad students. (Pop quiz: How many music grad students are there?) I feel a little special in that I'm the only one in class with a foot in both camps kinda. I know I'm not pursuing a Masters in music ed, but at least I know what they went through at one point. And they appear to be your typical run of the mill music ed people. I'll just leave it at that.

The professor of this course is Dr. M. He doesn't go by that but I fear if I type his whole name my blog will show up on his google alerts or something. It's cool he's teaching the course because he's the coordinator of the SRT program so it's nice to get to know him some. He speaks very softly, which can be tough since kids are shredding on guitars in the class across the hall. But it does make it seem like everything he's saying is important. Or a secret.

I like this class for the reason I like most music theory classes. It feels educational. Everyone sits around discussing ideas and there are "Aha!" moments. Most of the concepts are abstract and require some higher order thinking, which is good because I haven't done any of that in a while. It reminds me a lot of my favorite undergrad class, 20th Century Composition Techniques. Plus it helps when your professor is wearing a blazer with elbow patches.

The big project in this class is that we'll work in groups of 3 to study a major work of Western art music. (More commonly referred to as Classical music. (Since Classical is a period of time in music history, we don't call it that because some of the pieces may be Baroque, Romantic, or even Impressionistic!)) I don't know my group partners or my piece yet but I'm guessing they'll play a big part in my final impressions of this class.

Today's T: bass. on brown