I have been teaching at NYU for eleven years. For most of that time, I taught music tech and pop songwriting to music education majors. Recently, the music theory program did a hard pivot from the traditional Eurocentric sequence I went through as a grad student, and they started offering a diverse range of classes on pop and non-Western music. This change was driven by the chair, Sarah Louden, who put a heroic amount of work into it. It meant that I was suddenly qualified to teach music theory. At the same time, the music ed program entered a crisis that it hasn’t yet recovered from, so now I’m finding myself mostly teaching theory and aural skills.
I have taught theory before and am confident about it, but I had some imposter syndrome going into aural skills teaching because I had a terrible time with those classes myself and am generally not a strong music reader. However, the pop classes are more about aural analysis of recordings and improvisation, and those are areas where I am rock solid. I even started working on a pop aural skills textbook with my colleague Samantha Bassler, and our proposal is currently working its way through the review process, so, fingers crossed.
Continue reading “Advanced Pop Transcription at mid-semester”
