Studying music theory through a scientific perspective has virtually never been done before, to say the least. Up to this time, people have approached music theory the same unilateral way, which involves all the stuff about notation, the harmonic keys and the commonly used musical terminology like cadences, themes and sequences. In the case with my future course, the approach that is being practiced is a completely different practice from what student musicians usually work with. As such, the students participating in this course may not be so accustomed to this new particular practice for the first three weeks or so. Therefore, for instance, I may talk about a basic science concept and how its big picture plays out, then give the students the chance to digress whatever I just lectured them about via discussions amongst each other; that way, they can better understand how that science concept works and use that outline to analyze a musical piece.
There certainly is a majority of the world’s entire population that has taken a gigantic favor to all those scientific discoveries and advances occurring lately, yet they don’t quite fully understand the processes involved, not to mention that some of them are experts at studying music. At the same time, there are countless people that are proficient in the sciences but haven’t had much experience in music. Since my future course is designated to suit these types of students and put them together, I was thinking of establishing a starter activity where student musicians are paired with students with expert knowledge on the sciences and they share and write down things that they know in their respective fields. Through this activity, students that bear musical expertise can learn some science-oriented things and vice versa. The only drawback to this activity is that some of the students may hail from a completely different major from music or the sciences, but I’m quite confident that everybody has watched enough science stuff from TV or high school to know how some of the most basic science concepts work. After all, as Kay K. Stephens puts it in Elements of the Lesson Plan, ” Connecting to the student’s own experience and prior learning is the best strategy”.
References
Elements of the Lesson Plan byKay K. Stephens.
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/pte/lessonplan.htm
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