A dense but revelatory treatise and guide to musical time and rhythm.
It’s time to change the way we teach and talk about musical meter, according to this intricate primer.
Calilhanna, an Australian musicologist and music teacher, argues that conventional time signatures—3/4, 4/4, and so forth—fail to convey important information about the metrical nuances of music. To correct this, she has adapted the theories of Yale musicologist Richard Cohn into a practical handbook for teaching meter to kids. Her system has students listen carefully to pieces of music, clap and tap out all the metrical “pulses” they can hear, and then map them in several graphical formats, including a “ski hill” graph that arranges all the combinations of basic 2:1 and 3:1 meters in a pyramid; a linear graph that layers different pulses on top of each other; and a circular graph inscribed with polygons that represent the pulses. (An analysis of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” identifies four metrical pulses.) The author illustrates her process with several pieces of music, from simple tunes to more complex hemiola (3:2) meters, African tresillo meters, and syncopated swing meters. Calilhanna backgrounds all of this with an engaging tour of musicology, acoustics, and cognitive science, attributing many benefits to her method of understanding meter—it helps kids understand math, develop critical-thinking skills, and gain confidence in performing, she contends, asserting that it also captures the metrical complexities of world music better than Western time signatures do. Aimed at music teachers, Calilhanna’s prose often has a dry, academic feel, but she sometimes conveys a stirring passion for the subject. (“How can meter theory with inaccurate representation of music, be inclusive or ethical? It cannot.”) Her approach does make explicit a wealth of complex information that can’t be derived from a simplistic time signature, and that will aid learners in comprehending music. Instructors and students will be intrigued by her insights.
A dense but revelatory treatise and guide to musical time and rhythm.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9798369490082
Page Count: 160
Publisher: XlibrisAU
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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