Teaching musical meter to school-age students through the ski-hill graph

This thesis, Teaching Musical Meter to School-Age Students Through the Ski-Hill Graph, aims to demonstrate the “pedagogability” of modern meter theory, that is, that new scholarship on meter can translate into a coherent and practically implementable instructional curriculum, with various advantages for school-age students. The curriculum model developed in the thesis is derived from Richard Cohn’s work on and approaches to meter theory, the first comprehensive theory and approach to teaching and learning meter which focuses on the embodied psychoacoustic experience of sound and graphic representations of meter through mathematical music theory rather than notation-based understandings. The materials set out in the thesis demonstrate ways students might be taught to articulate their experience of meter. A unified approach, it incorporates Cohn’s ski-hill graph and other instruments of mathematical music theory such as the SkiHill app (Milne, 2018) and XronoBeat app (Milne, 2019) numbering for counting meter, cyclic graphs, and beat-class theory. The thesis demonstrates how traditional Western music theory has evolved due largely to non-Western influences to now possess the capacity for analyzing music from around the world. In addition, the outcomes it anticipates is a deeper engagement with music in classroom settings.