Teaching

The final week of my semester at TU Dortmund University is over, having reached an intriguing (and literal) climax in the examination of Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy, and finishing with the workshop concert of my historical composition seminar. Eleven pieces, created during the last months, were performed by the students themselves: Renaissance-style partsongs, Lutheran choral settings in Schütz’s and Bach’s idioms, and Romantic folksong adaptations in various four-part realisations. The vocal ensemble consisted of twelve dedicated students from the BA programmes in music education and music journalism, the latter of who contributed a number of written and spoken work introductions. This was quite a rewarding experience—many thanks to everybody involved!

Some people think that analysing music means to add harmonic figures to a bassline, to make a form diagram or graph, to compare motivic relations at different positions, or to examine the instrumentation. While any of the above may be used as a means of analysis, neither of these is sufficient to grasp the essence of a musical work. As long as you study an individual piece without incorporating its multiple historical, social, and aesthetic contexts, its examination will remain incomplete.

Music analysis, as a multi-faceted activity with artistic, performative, and scholarly components, is impossible to be carried out without a thorough knowledge of the repertoire. The ability to view a piece of music in terms of its time and place of origin, the biographical situation of its creator, and other music composed in its environment, is of crucial importance to make substantial observations. A central question is: What makes this particular artwork appear special in relation to others? So, every time we approach written music or performances with an analytic intention, we need to take into account its superordinate contexts and relevance. Analysis is research.

»The score is not the music itself, just like the recipe doesn’t make a meal.«

In an intriguing session of my History of Music Theory seminar at Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf, two Asian students presented a short panopticum of Chinese music theory. One gave an overview of the theories and writings of Ming dynasty scholar and polymath Zhu Zaiyu, who developed an approach to calculate equal temperament more accurately than ever before. The other presentation focused on the structure of traditional Chinese modes and the adoption of numbered notation which, originating from the Galin-Paris-Chevé system, is used as an alternative solfège method. Such a piece of luck when, as a lecturer, one gets the opportunity to gain considerable new knowledge from one’s own teaching activity!

It is my pleasure to announce that I will begin teaching as a visiting professor in music theory at TU Dortmund University, Department of Music and Musicology, as of next week. Very happy to accept this new challenge and collaborate with a diverse and proliferous faculty, and glad to be involved in what I consider the most relevant field in professional music education: the training of future music teachers.