It was this writer's problem to determine which of these two contentions is correct; i.e., to find out whether or not it is possible for a person to perceive a difference in 2/4 and 4/4 meters by listening to the accents. It was felt that a large group of college music students and faculty members should provide satisfactory subjects for this experiment. If, as a result of this experiment, it was found that these trained musicians could actually discriminate between the simple meter and its compound with any marked degree of consistency, it would then be admitted that the difference in the two meters is important. If, however, it was found that even musicians, who knew the technical distinctions between 2/4 and 4/4, could not really hear the difference in the two when the music was played by competent performers, it would then be contended that no important difference exists.

Metric dissonance in Brahms’s music is not an unfamiliar topic. Hemiola, offbeat accents, and syncopations are Brahms’s common metric strategies. These metric manipulations often facilitate a displacement between the audible and the notated downbeats, leading many scholars to question the importance of Brahms’s notated meters and notated barlines. However, Brahms does not hesitate to change the notated meter when he wants a new one to prevail, especially in his solo songs. Out of 194 songs for solo voice with piano accompaniment written and published during Brahms’s life time, 41 of them involve notated meter changes. This dissertation offers a new perspective on the function and expressive effect of notated meter changes in Brahms’s songs—a topic that has gone largely unexplored in current scholarship on rhythm and meter. I outline three types of meter changes: (1) the brief appearance of a new meter or meters; (2) different meters for sections with different affects; (3) the quick and regular alternation of triple and duple/quadruple meters, a technique typical in Slovakian and Bohemian dances, which Brahms employed to preserve the composite rhythm in folk or folk-like poetry. A close analysis of the notated meter changes in Brahms’s songs reveals how much his careful attention to the notated meter reflects his sensitivity to the pacing of music and words. Drawing upon poetic prosody and metric analysis, this dissertation shows how this pervasive but underexamined aspect of Brahms’s songwriting style relates to both the sound and sense of the poems he sets.

This thesis addresses the matter of convention in Broadway songs of the song and dance era. Composers worked with implicit, regular procedures in the commercial aesthetic of the 1920s and 1930s New York theater industry. However, discussions of formal convention in this repertoire have not gone much beyond the identification of AABA and ABAC forms. I explore how hypermeter and conventional formal layouts act as schemata. Through this lens, I advocate for an in-time, listener-based approach to form, attending to the stylistically learned projections and anticipations. Later on, I unpack many of the conventional patterns underlying the ABAC form. I argue that the ABAC form provides a template for climactic musical narratives, which places climaxes near the end of the form. Lastly, I focus on AABA form where I highlight many salient conventions of the AABA form and draw historical connections to AABA forms in rock and jazz.

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The purpose of this study is to present a personal interpretation of progressive education and its function in "teaching" primary music. A few supplementary aids are provided to correlate with the Amarillo, Texas, Course of Study for Primary Grades to lend aid and encouragement toward a rhythmic approach to child learning.

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No description available.