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Improvisation is a
skill all student musicians may wish to benefit from, but the
narrow-band focus on idiomatic modern jazz in most college-level
improvisation classes can be an impediment to widespread learning. This
article identifies the reasons for this and suggests other ways to
incorporate improvisation in college music curricula.
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We " play music " :
the English language uses this notion to characterize musical practice.
Pure chance? As Johan Huizinga underlines it in Homo ludens, the
semantic concordance of play and music is no English exception: German
uses spielen, French uses jouer (whereas other romance languages don't:
Italian uses suonare, Spanish, tocar), and this reference can also be
found in Arabic, as well as a few Slavonic languages. According to
Huizinga, this fact appears as the " deep-rooted psychological reason
for so remarkable a symbol of the affinity between play and music " 1.
We could add a more...
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Theories of
metrical structure postulate the existence of several degrees of beat
strength. While previous work has clearly established that humans are
sensitive to the distinction between strong beats and weak ones, there
is little evidence for a more fine grained distinction between
intermediate levels. Here, we present experimental data showing that
attention can be allocated to an intermediate level of beat strength.
Comparing the effects of short exposures to 6/8 and 3/4 metrical
structures on a tone detection task, we observe that subjects respond
differently to beats of intermediate...
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