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Instructor

Hi, I am the instructor for this course. My students can reach me by:

email
Phone: (928) 523-8929
Office Hours: MWF 9:10-10:00

Since 1980, when I began teaching Form & Analysis, there have been big changes in the way we teach music, but especially this course. When I began my teaching career the computer didn't exist. Today it is hard for me to imagine teaching without it. So, I'd like to say some words about technology, and change, that will help to put us in a proper frame of mind for this version of Form & Analysis.

I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have lived at the turn of the century, when the first automobiles, airplanes, radios, and many other devices we take for granted, were being invented. What an exciting time to have been alive! Yet we often forget that people living in the "good ole' days" were often frustrated by the new-fangled things intruding into their lives. Sixty years ago you couldn't drive to Phoenix without getting a flat tire...you planned on it, and built extra time into your trip to compensate.

I remember taking this course as an undergraduate and our semester project was to create a timeline of Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun." Most of the semester was spent drawing staff lines on twenty-foot-long rolls of shelf paper. Before we could get to the analysis, we had to wrestle with the technology. It was a pencil and paper technology, but frustrating nonetheless.

It was out of that experience as a student, I determined to try to make Form & Analysis the profitable learning experience it ought to be. The new technologies are providing the tools to do this. The secret is to bring together high quality sound with score study (and I define "score" as any graphical representation of musical structure). Digital audio and animation facilitate this type of study...and the World-Wide Web is a good way to deliver it. My goal to make the technology as transparent as possible, so that you can get to the content early and not spend the semester drawing lines. While this is not a course in technology, some instruction in the tools will be necessary. But these skills will repay themselves as we'll be able to cover more material than we could have in the "good ole' days."

To be sure, there will be moments of frustration--system crashes, missing plugins, misconfigured browsers, lost projects with no backup, simple inexperience with how to operate computers. When you are at your wit's end, play the Bad Day movie and try to maintain a sense of humor. Remember that you ARE living in the 21st century! It is your century and these gizmos are here to stay. They will change not only the way you do things, but also the way you think, and there will be no turning back. We can't imagine today what we'll see in the next five years. Some changes will make our lives more complicated, and some for the better. So maintain a sense of humor and curiosity.