Beyond the Staff: Pedagogies and Practices
AMS Study Group for Music Notation, Inscription, and Visualization
NB: For those who cannot join the AMS/SMT annual meeting, please consider this call for papers as a Call for Proposals for a special journal issue.
For the 2023 meeting of AMS/SMT in Denver, CO, the Study Group for Music Notation, Inscription, and Visualization is soliciting papers for a session titled “Beyond the Staff: Pedagogies and Practices,” focusing on the advantages and limits of oral, staff and non-staff music notations when teaching music history and theory in a post-canonical, decolonial, and global classroom.
While undergraduate and graduate instructors are increasingly interested in finding alternatives to the limits and epistemologies imposed by staff notation, they do not always have the training or resources to design new materials for the classroom (e.g. graduate students, adjunct and non-tenured faculty, professors with heavy teaching loads). By bringing together the research and pedagogical expertise of those who are currently addressing this problem, the panel’s ultimate goal is to create a special journal issue that would work both as a go-to reference for undergraduate and graduate assignments, and as a model for future efforts with similar objectives.
“Beyond the Staff: Pedagogies and Practices” invites talks that feature a diverse range of Western and non-Western notations, broadly defined, prompting our speakers:
- to show through specific case studies how certain notations can change the implicit narratives we bring into the classroom, helping us rethink the ways in which we do music history and analysis.
- to share original methods and practical solutions for familiarizing students without any previous knowledge to both staff, non-staff notations, as well as modes of music visualization and manipulation afforded by new technologies (e.g. music production softwares)
- to bring in critical perspectives targeted at classroom discussions about notation/transcription systems and their entanglement with (settler-)colonialism, capitalism, and structural racism.
To expand the scope of our inquiry beyond musicology/music theory/ethnomusicology, and stress the relevance of these issues in a broader cultural context, we have invited Dr. Olufunmilayo Arewa as keynote speaker. Dr. Arewa is currently the Murray H. Shusterman Professor of Transactional and Business Law at Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. In her work, she has shown how the visual bias towards staff notation in copyright disputes disproportionately marginalizes improvisation and non-Western music practices. Viewed through the lens of music pedagogy, Dr. Arewa’s work sheds light on what might be the consequences at a legal level of an educational system that uncritically naturalizes Western standard notation.
We encourage submissions from scholars affiliated or who will be affiliated with any of the three societies (AMS/SMT/SEM). Please submit anonymized abstracts (350 words max.) in pdf or doc form to notation.studygroup [at] gmail.com by the end of the day, March 10th. Please include your affiliation and position (if any) in the body of your email.
In your submission, please indicate whether you would like your abstract to be considered for a live paper presentation, as an article for the special journal issue, or for both. As there is limited capacity for the live presentations at AMS/SMT, some submissions may only be considered for the journal. In this case, we will contact selected authors to submit a more detailed abstract at a later date.
Giulia Accornero (PhD Candidate in Music Theory, Harvard University) accornero [at] g.harvard.edu
Ginger Dellenbaugh (PhD Candidate in Musicology, Yale University) ginger.dellenbaugh [at] yale.edu