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Friday, April 5

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05
Apr

Music Scholars Series: Dr. Megan Lavengood

Arts/Entertainment

What is "our music"? As an institution in the intermountain West, USU is located in a place associated with many different kinds of music. The decisions we make about which of these we foreground have profound implications. What do our students deserve to learn? Which faculty have the responsibility—or the right—to teach each repertoire? And how, as a university, do we define the collective “us” we seek to serve? Dr. Megan Lavengood is an Associate Professor and Area Director of Music Theory at George Mason University, where she teaches undergraduate core theory and graduate courses in advanced theory topics. Her research primarily deals with popular music, timbre, synthesizers, and recording techniques. She has also published on video game music, music theory pedagogy, and public music theory.

4:00 pm - 6:30 pm | Family Life Building |
05
Apr

Music Scholar Series: Dr. Megan Lavengood

Arts/Entertainment

Topic: I Want It That Way: Good Practices for Pop Music Pedagogy

This talk gives an overview of some prominent scholarly methods for analyzing popular music, and discusses issues surrounding the inclusion of pop music in music curricula. I discuss two common forms of pop music inclusion—through token examples that fit neatly into a classical-music-based curriculum, and through upper-level electives—and show how these approaches undercut popular music’s potential to be inclusive. I advocate instead for pop music to be included early in the curriculum as its own distinct repertoire, and present my own syllabus for a pop music theory course as a model. As time allows, I will elaborate on the analytical and compositional approaches students learn in that course, with the goal of giving audience members an idea of the tools they might use in their own future work with popular music, whether that be analyzing, composing, or teaching to young musicians.

5:00 pm - 6:00 pm | Family Life Building |