Teaching Electronic Music by Stevens, Blake;

Short description:

Teaching Electronic Music: Cultural, Creative, and Analytical Perspectives offers innovative and practical techniques for teaching electronic music in a wide range of classroom settings. An array of contributors reflect on the challenges of teaching electronic music while highlighting pedagogical strategies.

Long description:

Teaching Electronic Music: Cultural, Creative, and Analytical Perspectives offers innovative and practical techniques for teaching electronic music in a wide range of classroom settings. Across a dozen essays, an array of contributors—including practitioners in musicology, art history, ethnomusicology, music theory, performance, and composition—reflect on the challenges of teaching electronic music, highlighting pedagogical strategies while addressing questions such as:

• What can instructors do to expand and diversify musical knowledge?


• Can the study of electronic music foster critical reflection on technology?


• What are the implications of a digital culture that allows so many to be producers of music?


• How can instructors engage students in creative experimentation with sound?

Electronic music presents unique possibilities and challenges to instructors of music history courses, calling for careful attention to creative curricula, historiographies, repertoires, and practices. Teaching Electronic Music features practical models of instruction as well as paths for further inquiry, identifying untapped methodological directions with broad interest and wide applicability.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Narrative Histories, "Real" Music, and the Digital Vernacular (BLAKE STEVENS) / PART I: Analytical, Descriptive, and Creative Strategies / 1. Then and Now: A Practical Guide for Introducing Electronic Music (ROBERT McCLURE) / 2. Parametric Analysis: An Early Tool for Analyzing Electronic Music (ANDREW SELLE) / 3. Analyzing Electronic Music: Uncovering the Original Conditions of Production (MARC BATTIER) / 4. Sound Design and Compositional Process in Skrillex: From Minimalism and FM Synthesis to Dubstep (RISHABH RAJAN) / 5. Teaching Principles of Interactive Sound: A Practice-Based Approach (LUCY ANN HARRISON) / 6. Algorithmic Composition: Implementations in Western Tonal Art Music, Video Games, and Other Music Technologies (V.J. MANZO) / PART II: Unifying the Curriculum / 7. It’s Not (Just) about History and, by the Way, Which History? (LEIGH LANDY) / PART III: Critical Interventions and Methods / 8. Posthuman Sound Design: Describing Hybridity, Distributed Cognition, and Mutation (PATTI KILROY) / 9. Composing by Hacking: Technology Appropriation as a Pedagogical Tool for Electronic Music (RAUL MASU AND FABIO MORREALE) / 10. Listening to and Sampling the Land: On the Decolonization of Electronic Music Pedagogy (KATE GALLOWAY) / 11. Technological Mediation and Traditional Culture in Chinese Electroacoustic Music (ANNIE YEN-LING LIU AND YANG YINUO) / 12. Sound and Image in New Media Art (MARIAN MAZZONE)