In 1960, W.W. Norton published Donald J. Grout’s first edition of A History of Western Music. It proved to be an epochal book, not only in sales but in influence over the field of musicology pedagogy as well as, since that time, it (and its subsequent revisions) has come to define what US undergraduate music students learn. In the 1990s, however, musicology pedagogy entered an evolutionary period as trends in higher education and American society buffeted its coursework. The result has been five areas of intense concentration and change that have defined musicological coursework since that time: canons and content, engagement, technology, information literacy, and contexts. This essay explores how those five areas have shifted the experience of music history for undergraduate music students as well as how pedagogues have responded to them in innovative ways.

No abstract

No abstract

Scholarship on American composer Harry Partch (1901–74) has long focused on the composer's use of Greek musical ideals as the basis of his aesthetic, but little attention has been paid to China, a nation with which Partch had familial ties and with which he claimed an affinity. Using Partch's published writings, along with unpublished manuscripts, letters, and interviews, this article repositions China's role in the development of Harry Partch's music and aesthetic. By surveying his early experiences with Cantonese opera, his early expositions of his theoretical thinking, and his first full-scale composition, a setting of seventeen poems by Li Po, it demonstrates that China symbolized an alternative path. China's musical traditions were tied directly to the spoken word and featured integration of the arts through ritual, and thus for Partch presented a way to renew Western music. Through the Chinese musical quotations that reside in several of his works, the article also shows that, despite his later protests to the contrary, Chinese music both informed and shaped his music. Finally, it suggests that only by exploring the implications of China in his music can we fully understand Partch's compositional aesthetic.

In his short-lived television show Firefly, Joss Whedon created a future clearly rooted in the present through melded Asian and American influences. Since one of Whedon's overriding concerns in his art is identification of and with his characters, Firefly offers a rich tapestry to explore the ways music, particularly non-Western music, is used in formulations of identity. Exploring the visual and audible representations of the exotic permeating Firefly, this article finds that the show reverses standard musical depictions of non-Western elements and creates new patterns of identification that aid in viewer attachment.On 20 December 2002, the Fox network aired the pilot for Joss Whedon's scifi/western show Firefly. While the airing of a television show's pilot is not usually a strange occurrence, in this case the pilot aired as the final broadcast of a show that had been canceled eight days earlier. It was the eleventh and final episode broadcast out of fourteen episodes produced and drew the show's lowest ratings.The story should have ended that Friday evening as the show faded into memory, but surprisingly it did not. Firefly had developed a cult following over its three months of broadcast life, and its fans began inundating networks from UPN to Sci-Fi trying to find the show a second home. 1 Their efforts did not result in new life for the show on television, but did give Fox a reason to release a DVD box set of the complete series, including the unaired episodes, on 9 December 2003. The set sold well enough that the following March, Universal Pictures acquired the rights to the property and announced that Whedon would write and direct Serenity, 2 a feature film version of the series featuring the entire original cast.While devotion to a media work is a common feature of contemporary fandom, the level of devotion Firefly has inspired and the results of that devotion are nothing short of astonishing. Observing the phenomenon led me to question why viewers identified with the show and its characters so strongly and what role, if any, music played in the