How can the studio teacher teach a lesson so as to instill refined artistic sensibilities, ones often thought to elude language? How can the applied lesson be a form of aesthetic education? How can teaching performance be an artistic endeavor in its own right? These are some of the questions Teaching Performance attempts to answer, drawing on the author's several decades of experience as a studio teacher and music scholar. The architects of absolute music (Hanslick, Schopenhauer, and others) held that it is precisely because instrumental music lacks language and thus any overt connection to the non-musical world that it is able to expose essential elements of that world. More particularly, for these philosophers, it is the density of musical structure-the intricate interplay among purely musical elements-that allows music to capture the essences behind appearances. By analogy, the author contends that the more structurally intricate and aesthetically nuanced a pedagogical system is, the greater its ability to illuminate music and facilitate musical skills. The author terms this phenomenon relational autonomy. Eight chapters unfold a piano-pedagogical system pivoting on the principle of relational autonomy. In grounding piano pedagogy in the aesthetics of absolute music, each domain works on the other. On the one hand, Romantic aesthetics affords pedagogy a source of artistic value in its own right. On the other hand, pedagogy concretizes Romantic aesthetics, deflating its transcendental pretentions and showing the dichotomy of absolute/utilitarian to be specious.

Kevin Korsyn is a renowned music theorist, musicologist, and pedagogue who has taught at the University of Michigan since 1992. He has published widely and influentially in areas as diverse as Beethoven and Brahms studies, chromatic tonality, disciplinarity and metatheory, history of theory, musical meaning and hermeneutics, poststructuralism (deconstruction, intertextuality, etc.), and Schenkerian theory and analysis. Because of the scope and caliber of his published work, and also his legacy as a pedagogue, Korsyn has had a profound impact on the field of music theory, along with the related fields of historical musicology and aesthetics. This book, a festschrift for Korsyn, comprises essays that constellate around his numerous scholarly foci. Represented in the volume are not only familiar music-theoretical topics such as chromaticism, form, Schenker, and text-music relations, but also various interdisciplinary topics such as deconstruction, disability studies, German Idealism, posthumanism, and psychoanalysis. The book thus reflects the increasingly multifaceted intellectual landscape of contemporary music theory.

How can the studio teacher teach a lesson so as to instill refined artistic sensibilities, ones often thought to elude language? How can the applied lesson be a form of aesthetic education? How can teaching performance be an artistic endeavor in its own right? These are some of the questions Teaching Performance attempts to answer, drawing on the author's several decades of experience as a studio teacher and music scholar. The architects of absolute music (Hanslick, Schopenhauer, and others) held that it is precisely because instrumental music lacks language and thus any overt connection to the non-musical world that it is able to expose essential elements of that world. More particularly, for these philosophers, it is the density of musical structure—the intricate interplay among purely musical elements—that allows music to capture the essences behind appearances. By analogy, the author contends that the more structurally intricate and aesthetically nuanced a pedagogical system is, the greater its ability to illuminate music and facilitate musical skills. The author terms this phenomenon relational autonomy. Eight chapters unfold a piano-pedagogical system pivoting on the principle of relational autonomy. In grounding piano pedagogy in the aesthetics of absolute music, each domain works on the other. On the one hand, Romantic aesthetics affords pedagogy a source of artistic value in its own right. On the other hand, pedagogy concretizes Romantic aesthetics, deflating its transcendental pretentions and showing the dichotomy of absolute/utilitarian to be specious.

Featuring twenty-three essays by outstanding teacher-scholars on topics ranging from Schenkerian theory to gender, The Norton Guide to Teaching Music Theory covers every facet of music theory pedagogy. The volume serves as a reference for theory teachers and a text for pedagogy classes.