Music

Music is a natural intuitive phenomenon operating in the three worlds of time, pitch, energy, and under the three distinct and interrelated organization structures of rhythm, harmony, and melody.

Education

Training

Many people, including entire cultures, compose, perform, and improvise music with no training and feel no need for training. Other cultures have traditions of rigorous formal training that may take years and serious dedication. Sometimes this training takes the form of apprenticeship. For example, Indian training traditionally take more years than a college education and involves spiritual discipline and reverence for one's guru or teacher. In Bali, everyone learns and practices together. It is also common for people to take music lessons, short private study sessions with an individual teacher, when they want to learn to play or compose music, usually for a fee. A famous private composition teacher is Nadia Boulanger.

Related Topics:
Indian - Guru - Bali - Music lessons - Nadia Boulanger

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Secondary education

The incorporation of music performance and theory into a general liberal arts curriculum, from preschool to postsecondary education, is relatively common. Western style secondary schooling is increasingly common around the world, such as STSI in Bali. Meanwhile, western schools are increasingly including the study of the music of other cultures such as the Balinese gamelan, of which there are currently more than 200 in America.

Related Topics:
STSI - Bali

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Study

:Main articles: musicology and music theory.

Related Topics:
Musicology - Music theory

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Many people also study about music in the field of musicology. The earliest definitions of musicology defined three sub-disciplines: systematic musicology, and comparative musicology. In contemporary scholarship, one is more likely to encounter a division of the discipline into music theory, music history, and ethnomusicology. Research in musicology has often been enriched by cross-disciplinary work, for example in the field of psychoacoustics. The study of music of non-western cultures, and the cultural study of music, is called ethnomusicology.

Related Topics:
Musicology - Systematic musicology - Comparative musicology - Music theory - Music history - Ethnomusicology - Psychoacoustics

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In Medieval times, the study of music was one of the Quadrivium of the seven Liberal Arts and considered vital to higher learning. Within the quantitative Quadrivium, music, or more accurately harmonics, was the study of rational proportions.

Related Topics:
Medieval - Quadrivium - Liberal Arts - Harmonics

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Zoomusicology is the study of the music of non-human animals, or the musical aspects of sounds produced by non-human animals. As George Herzog (1941) asked, "do animals have music?" François-Bernard Mâche's Musique, mythe, nature, ou les Dauphins d'Arion (1983), a study of "ornitho-musicology" using a technique of Ruwet's Language, musique, poésie (1972) paradigmatic segmentation analysis, shows that birdsongs are organized according to a repetition-transformation principle. In the opinion of Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1990), "in the last analysis, it is a human being who decides what is and is not musical, even when the sound is not of human origin. If we acknowledge that sound is not organized and conceptualized (that is, made to form music) merely by its producer, but by the mind that perceives it, then music is uniquely human."

Related Topics:
Zoomusicology - Jean-Jacques Nattiez

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Music theory is the study of music, generally in a highly technical manner outside of other disciplines. More broadly it refers to any study of music, usually related in some form with compositional concerns, and may include mathematics, physics, and anthropology. What is most commonly taught in beginning music theory classes are guidelines to write in the style of the common practice period, or tonal music. Theory, even that which studies music of the common practice period, may take many other forms. Musical set theory is the application of mathematical set theory to music, first applied to atonal music. Speculative music theory, contrasted with analytic music theory, is devoted to the analysis and synthesis of music materials, for example tuning systems, generally as preparation for composition. See "Common Terms" above.

Related Topics:
Common practice period - Tonal music - Musical set theory - Set theory - Atonal music - Speculative music theory - Analytic music theory - Tuning systems

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