Playing by Ear: Listening Games in the Music History Classroom

  • Laurie McManus Shenandoah Conservatory at Shenandoah University
Keywords: critical listening, pedagogy, classroom activities, musicology

Abstract

Teaching critical listening is often one of the main goals in the music history classroom, and a recent roundtable in the Journal of Music History Pedagogy has called for the incorporation of performers and their history into the classroom as well. This article proposes a kind of listening activity in the form of a game that addresses both these problems and makes it engaging for students to compare multiple examples or performances of music.Various versions and applications of the game demonstrate its usefulness in both general music history surveys and advanced seminars.

Author Biography

Laurie McManus, Shenandoah Conservatory at Shenandoah University
Laurie McManus’s broad interests in aesthetics, gender, and the intersection of the arts inform both her teaching and research. Her research concerns nineteenth-century music and culture, especially in relation to Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner. She completed a PhD in musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2011 and is working on a book manuscript analyzing Brahms reception in the context of nineteenth-century notions of purity and sensuality. She has presented at national and international conferences and has published in Nineteenth-Century Music, the Journal of Music History Pedagogy, Jazz Perspectives, Studi Musicali, and the American Brahms Society Newsletter. 
Published
2014-04-11
Issue
Vol 5 No 1: (Fall 2014)
Section
Reports and Practices

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