Meter Symposium 2 Keynote Lecture - Professor Richard Cohn

Musical Meter as Imagined and Experienced: Pedagogical Implications
This lecture introduces a new method of teaching meter, based on forty years of intensive research in music psychology and music theory. Modern researchers consider meter primarily as an element
of heard and imagined sound, only loosely modelled by music notation. This conception is quite different from the 18th century score based one currently taught in Western curricula at all levels.
Modern metric research encourages performers, improvisers, and listener/analysts to treat meter, like tonality, as a dynamic, pliable, form building aspect of musical structure and experience. It is
applicable not only to classical scores, but also to the partly improvised, aurally transmitted repertories that saturate the soundscape. It thus fulfils a set of ethical and pragmatic pedagogical
criteria, at the same time as it invites musicians to think systematically about a central element of their art.
Richard Cohn received his PhD from the Eastman School of Music in 1987, with a dissertation on transpositional combination in atonal music, under the supervision of Robert D. Morris. Early articles focused on music of Bartók and Schenkerian theory. He taught in the Music Department at the University of Chicago from 1985, where he served as Department Chair from 1998 to 2001. In 2004, he founded Oxford Studies in Music Theory, which he edited for Oxford University Press for ten years. In 2005 he was appointed Battell Professor of the Theory of Music at Yale University. He is currently Executive Editor of the Journal of Music Theory.
24 February, 2017
Recital Hall West