Posts Tagged ‘close’
MASTER OF MUSIC DEGREE
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
The purpose of Master of Music degree work is to hone performance skills and/or capabilities in
writing music or writing about music. There are five fields of study within the Master of Music
program: composition, conducting, musicology, performance, and performance and pedagogy.
Various options are available in conducting (choral conducting, choral conducting with voice,
orchestral conducting, and wind symphony/band conducting), in performance (harpsichord,
organ, piano, piano with accompanying and chamber music, string instruments [including guitar
and harp], voice, opera, voice with choral conducting, brass, woodwind, and percussion
instruments), and in performance and pedagogy (brass, piano, string instruments, voice and
woodwind instruments).
All plans of study for the Master of Music degree meet National Association of Schools of Music
recommendations: a minimum of 30 total semester hours, a minimum of 10 semester hours in an
NASM-approved major, and a minimum of 10 semester hours in other studies in music. The
performance and pedagogy programs are double majors; they meet the minimum requirements
for an NASM-defined major in both areas. Other options include a secondary emphasis of at
least eight semester hours. The Master of Music degree requires a minimum of thirty graduate
credit hours. Music courses applicable to this degree must be numbered 5000 or above.
Nonmusic courses must be taken at the 4000 level or above. The usual time for completion of
the master’s degree is two years. Degree work must be completed within four years of first
registration.
The required Introduction to Music Bibliography and Research and a three-hour course each in
musicology and music theory are intended to lend scholarly support to performance as well as to
strengthen competency for research. Introduction to Music Bibliography and Research should be
taken either the fall or spring semester of the first year. Students must be taking the second of, or
have completed, the required history and theory courses at qualifying examination time.
The Master of Music thesis consists of two projects, for two hours credit each; these projects
vary according to the emphasis. Specific requirements are listed for each field of study on the
degree-plan descriptions.
A minimal full-time course load is five hours of graduate-level work per semester; registration
for eight or more hours is expected. Students taking individual applied-music or composition
lessons must also carry at least one other course in that semester in order to show adequate
progress toward the degrees.
PRELIMINARY EXAMINATIONS. The exams are given at the beginning of each semester;
exact dates are posted on the graduate bulletin board. Students should take the “prelims” at the
beginning of their first semester of study and complete the requirement by the end of the first
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year of study. The theory exam, approximately 1½ hours long, covers written theory and aural
perception. For some emphases, exams in analysis and counterpoint are also required. The
history exam, about two hours long, contains questions based largely on Western art music. The
exam in the major field is a written exam scheduled for a three-hour period. Candidates who fail
parts of the exams should retake those parts the following semester or take remedial course work,
on the advice of the evaluator. The preliminary exams must be passed completely before the
student may take the qualifying exam or complete the thesis projects.
QUALIFYING EXAMINATION. This exam, a written one, is taken after students are well into
their programs, normally the third semester of study or the semester or term before the one of
expected graduation. The exam is given on a Saturday at approximately the middle of each
semester or term; dates are posted on the graduate bulletin board. The exam is formulated by the
student’s advisory committee, which consists of the major advisor (or a substitute), another
professor from the major area, and a third professor from outside the major area. Questions in
the major take approximately three hours to answer; questions outside the major area take
approximately one hour to answer. Students should consult with their committee members about
preparation for the qualifying exam.
APPLICATION FOR ADMISSION TO CANDIDACY. Before taking the comprehensive-final
oral examination, masters degree students should file an application for admission to candidacy.
On this form are listed all of the courses and other requirements for the degree. The student’s
committee chair and the Associate Dean for Graduate Studies must approve the application
before it is sent to the Graduate School for approval. The application for admission to candidacy
must be filed at least ten weeks prior to the comprehensive-final exam.
COMPREHENSIVE-FINAL EXAMINATION. This exam, an oral one administered by the
student’s committee and taken in the final semester, is usually an hour in length and is based
upon the student’s course work, thesis projects, and work done on the qualifying exam. This
exam should be scheduled within a two-week period close to the end of each semester. Students
must arrange the time and place of the exam with their committee members and must notify the
Associate Dean three weeks in advance of the examination. The Dean’s office then notifies the
Graduate School to prepare the form on which the committee certifies the student for graduation.
Consult separate sheets for specific course requirements in each of the above specialty areas.
Further information on the Master of Music degree is found in both the Graduate School and
College of Music sections of the University Catalog as well as in the Graduate Studies in Music
Handbook.
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Final Steps in the Dissertation Process at Musicology
Sunday, September 13th, 2009
The procedure for completing the dissertation is as follows:
1. The full text must be submitted to the members of the dissertation committee for suggestions, corrections, changes, etc. Candidates are encouraged to discuss drafts of individual chapters with all members of the dissertation committee.
2. The candidate should check with the Director of Administration to be sure that all degree requirements have been met.
3. The application for the degree must be submitted to the Registrar by the date published in The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Handbook for the November, March, or May degree.
4. After the committee has approved the dissertation in its final form, an unbound copy must be submitted to the department at least 45 days before the Registrar’s deadline. During this 45-day period the members of the department are free to examine the completed dissertation.
5. For musicology students, a public colloquium on the dissertation is required shortly before or after it has been approved.
6. Copies: one copy bound and one copy boxed and unbound for the Registrar; one copybound for the Music Library. The library copy must be submitted to the department office before the dissertation acceptance certificate can be signed. The department administrator will obtain signatures from the committee. At this time, the university microfilms and RILM forms must be completed. The Registrar’s Office requires the dissertation certificate (one original, one copy), the university microfilms form, and its copies of the dissertation.
Satisfactory Progress
A student in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences must be making satisfactory progress in order to be eligible for any type of financial aid. The following nine items provide a general definition of satisfactory progress that has been adopted for this purpose by the Music Department. It is hoped that this requirement will have a healthy effect on students’ academic progress, and that it will enable us to preserve resources for those most deserving of financial assistance.
1. During the first two years of graduate study any student who is permitted to register is considered to be making satisfactory progress.
2. A prospective third-year student must have achieved the minimum grade-point average required by this faculty (B).
3. A prospective third-year student must have passed general examinations.
4. A prospective fourth-year student must have obtained approval of a dissertation prospectus.
5. A prospective sixth-year, or more advanced, student must have produced at least one acceptable chapter of the dissertation or its equivalent for each year beginning with the fifth.
6. Requirements 2-5 shall be cumulative.
7. A student who fails to meet a requirement may, upon the department’s recommendation, be considered to be an “exception” —and remain eligible for financial assistance —for a grace period of up to one year. At the close of the grace period, in order to be considered to be making satisfactory progress, the student must have met both the requirement missed earlier and the requirement that would normally be imposed at that time.
8. No student may have more than one such year of grace during his or her study.
9. In addition, the requirements of this calendar may be deferred by a department during one year of departmental approved leave. A department may, if it wishes, defer requirements for a more extended period of approved leave in order to facilitate a student’s obtaining a professional degree.
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Music Education Can Help Children Improve Reading Skills
Thursday, September 3rd, 2009
Children exposed to a multi-year programme of music tuition involving training in increasingly complex rhythmic, tonal, and practical skills display superior cognitive performance in reading skills compared with their non-musically trained peers, according to a study published in the journal Psychology of Music.
According to authors Joseph M Piro and Camilo Ortiz from Long Island University, USA, data from this study will help to clarify the role of music study on cognition and shed light on the question of the potential of music to enhance school performance in language and literacy.
Studying children the two US elementary schools, one of which routinely trained children in music and one that did not, Piro and Ortiz aimed to investigate the hypothesis that children who have received keyboard instruction as part of a music curriculum increasing in difficulty over successive years would demonstrate significantly better performance on measures of vocabulary and verbal sequencing than students who did not receive keyboard instruction.
Several studies have reported positive associations between music education and increased abilities in non-musical (eg, linguistic, mathematical, and spatial) domains in children. The authors say there are similarities in the way that individuals interpret music and language and “because neural response to music is a widely distributed system within the brain…. it would not be unreasonable to expect that some processing networks for music and language behaviors, namely reading, located in both hemispheres of the brain would overlap.”
The aim of this study was to look at two specific reading subskills – vocabulary and verbal sequencing – which, according to the authors, are “are cornerstone components in the continuum of literacy development and a window into the subsequent successful acquisition of proficient reading and language skills such as decoding and reading comprehension.”
Using a quasi-experimental design, the investigators selected second-grade children from two school sites located in the same geographic vicinity and with similar demographic characteristics, to ensure the two groups of children were as similar as possible apart from their music experience.
Children in the intervention school (n=46) studied piano formally for a period of three consecutive years as part of a comprehensive instructional intervention program. Children attending the control school (n=57) received no formal musical training on any musical instrument and had never taken music lessons as part of their general school curriculum or in private study. Both schools followed comprehensive balanced literacy programmes that integrate skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening.
All participants were individually tested to assess their reading skills at the start and close of a standard 10-month school year using the Structure of Intellect (SOI) measure.
Results analysed at the end of the year showed that the music-learning group had significantly better vocabulary and verbal sequencing scores than did the non-music-learning control group. This finding, conclude the authors, provides evidence to support the increasingly common practice of “educators incorporating a variety of approaches, including music, in their teaching practice in continuing efforts to improve reading achievement in children”.
However, further interpretation of the results revealed some complexity within the overall outcomes. An interesting observation was that when the study began, the music-learning group had already experienced two years of piano lessons yet their reading scores were nearly identical to the control group at the start of the experiment.
So, ask the authors, “If the children receiving piano instruction already had two years of music involvement, why did they not significantly outscore the musically naïve students on both measures at the outset?” Addressing previous findings showing that music instruction has been demonstrated to exert cortical changes in certain cognitive areas such as spatial-temporal performance fairly quickly, Piro and Ortiz propose three factors to explain the lack of evidence of early benefit for music in the present study.
First, children were tested for their baseline reading skills at the beginning of the school year, after an extended holiday period. Perhaps the absence of any music instruction during a lengthy summer recess may have reversed any earlier temporary cortical reorganization experienced by students in the music group, a finding reported in other related research. Another explanation could be that the duration of music study required to improve reading and associated skills is fairly long, so the initial two years were not sufficient.
A third explanation involves the specific developmental time period during which children were receiving the tuition. During the course of their third year of music lessons, the music-learning group was in second grade and approaching the age of seven. There is evidence that there are significant spurts of brain growth and gray matter distribution around this developmental period and, coupled with the increased complexity of the study matter in this year, brain changes that promote reading skills may have been more likely to accrue at this time than in the earlier two years.
“All of this adds a compelling layer of meaning to the experimental outcomes, perhaps signalling that decisions on ‘when’ to teach are at least as important as ‘what’ to teach when probing differential neural pathways and investigating their associative cognitive substrates,” note the authors.
“Study of how music may also assist cognitive development will help education practitioners go beyond the sometimes hazy and ill-defined ‘music makes you smarter’ claims and provide careful and credible instructional approaches that use the rich and complex conceptual structure of music and its transfer to other cognitive areas,” they conclude.
Complete sentence: With superior cognitive development, children may grow into fine students later in their life who can apply to any first-class california business schools they wish.
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