I have been rather blindsided by the offer from a university to accept me directly into the 4th (honours) year of a music degree with my transferred credits from elsewhere. Alongside ensemble performance and teaching modules the main thing I'd need to do is a dissertation, but because I'd be starting in the middle of nowhere (second term of the final year) I haven't given the slightest thought to the concept of what I might do, and have had no experience of the department to guide my thinking.

The last dissertation I did was extremely different, we had to do a new piece of direct statistical research based on a given body of volunteers and write up the results in the context of relevant literature, but I gather that such a specific direction is very unusual. "Music" as a topic is much, much wider than that and I'd be really grateful if people could share any titles they did or considered as part of a music degree to get my mind spinning on what might suit. My angle is probably going to be mostly music education, as my ordinary degree is a bit odd (first year is in music and Russian, years 2 and 3 are in education and I have a diploma in financial services - totally irrelevant!) but I'd be just as grateful to hear topics on performance or analysis in case that gets me thinking. I keep coming up with something that would be great if only I were planning a lifetime longitudinal project, but is no use for a single undergraduate project.

Anything anyone has done/is doing would be immensely helpful in giving me grounds for comparison.

I did an M.Mus (theory and analysis) years ago which comprised an exam and a short dissertation, and I did mine on the composition techniques in Chopin's preludes.

1) A dissertation that you complete inside two terms can't be much bigger than the extended essay that was part of my degree and got a fairly good mark despite being an attack on an analytical method that the Prof supported. You can read it here.

2) A hot topic on these forums is the usefulness of various components of the ABRSM and T/G Grade exams. How about a comparison of the various music exams, possibly including the internal ones of the conservatories, and the relationships of their components to real life musical situations, problems and skills. The grade exams impinge very directly on music education, for good or ill.

Related to Ken's idea, one that would interest me is 'Teaching Rhythm', bringing together innate abilities (pulse, eg, Dalcroze), intellectual understanding (notation/theory) etc. Remember that at undergraduate level, original research is not required, so it's really a case of demonstrating your understanding of current thinking and drawing well argued conclusions through reasoned argument.

When I did a very basic essay on teaching rhythm several years ago, it struck me that it's an area which is desperately in need of research - though there is quite a lot of 'stuff' out there, very few people have attempted to draw all the strands together in a way which is of practical use to teachers, though such an undertaking, if done in thorough detail, would be an immense undertaking, and undoubtedly the stuff of PhDs.

Wow, thanks, those are both really useful, and certainly things I already have thoughts and opinions on and an interest in, so it would not be at all tiresome to go through the materials. (Well done Chopin person, btw, I couldn't get in the same room with that essay!)

I often find rhythm methods very confusing and I am always on the lookout for something new. I haven't taught violin students before in any serious way, but I have taught voice, supported junior orchestras and taught class music in primary schools, and rhythm is always immensely hard. Those people who "get it" then try to work back the way from that and make something workable that they feel helps communicate it to other people, but few of them hit the mark for anyone who is natrually arhythmic. Popular methods like using words have cultural differences. I can't think of any directly musical just now, but I remember the spelling texts we used in my last school being a real headache for Scottish kids because they were written with English pronunciations, and the kids of course didn't understand why "sauce" and "source" were meant to sound the same! But more important is they rely on having the very sense of rhythm they intend to impart. There is one I happen to recall from a Sheila Nelson, Choc'late Treats being for quaver, quaver, crotchet. You can very, very easily say that without the implied rhythm, she's started with quaver, quaver crotchet and fitted words, the words don't force you to learn the rhythm. I know it's not exactly what she meant them to do, but it's a good example of people speaking in a rhythmic and unnatural manner and then using that as if it conveys rhythm, it's more of a mnemonic device.

I am already trying to devise things like graphic scores to get across the whole business that if you clap one for a crotchet it has to stay "closed" all the way to the hair's-breadth of being about to count 2 else it's a quaver and a quaver rest (or other subdivisions). And how to explain concepts like equal halves to children who don't know fractions from the back of their arm. Best I managed so far is you have to fit exactly 2 notes in between the two clicks (metronome) and you can't be finished too early and be waiting for the click, but both your claps have to be fair that they are the same size. It's not ideal!! There are many ways to fit 2 claps between 2 clicks of the pulse, and only one of those ways is by using 2 equal and correctly sized quavers. It's hard for those of us with well developed sense of rhythm to understand why anyone would fit 2 claps in by effectively choosing one semiquaver, one dotted semiquaver and a quaver rest, but they do!

We have a Steiner school just down the road from the university where they teach Eurythmics so I could look into that angle, and they do Kodaly classes at the Saturday morning music school.

The role of exams one is also huge, especially how they compare to other examined subjects, and the concept we now have of a piece being objectively of a particular standard. I mean, I don't play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star the same way as a beginner pupil, and not just in terms of techincal skills.

(Rose on a mission...)

Excellent proposal by Briantrumpet (as usual). UK rhythm teaching is overdue for a shake-up. French rhythm teaching is much more thorough. Why are so many (non-conservatory) music students and amateurs in this country unable to read the time values of rests? This could be tested in grade exams more directly than it is at present by including unbarred passages in sight reading, with simple pitch changes but complicated rhythms.

I am already trying to devise things like graphic scores to get across the whole business that if you clap one for a crotchet it has to stay "closed" all the way to the hair's-breadth of being about to count 2 else it's a quaver and a quaver rest (or other subdivisions). And how to explain concepts like equal halves to children who don't know fractions from the back of their arm. Best I managed so far is you have to fit exactly 2 notes in between the two clicks (metronome) and you can't be finished too early and be waiting for the click, but both your claps have to be fair that they are the same size. It's not ideal!! There are many ways to fit 2 claps between 2 clicks of the pulse, and only one of those ways is by using 2 equal and correctly sized quavers. It's hard for those of us with well developed sense of rhythm to understand why anyone would fit 2 claps in by effectively choosing one semiquaver, one dotted semiquaver and a quaver rest, but they do!

lego bricks on a board are good for this! it's easy to see half beats and quarter beats using different coloured brioks!

RoseRodent, I use rhythm names (an adaptation of the Gallin-Paris-Chevé originals) and find them simple and hugely effective.

I have an ex-student of mine currently in her second year of reading music at Cambridge, and she is going to do a short second-year dissertation on Suzuki and Kodály (being two approaches that she is very familiar with). I can't remember the exact angle she's taking as we discussed it and came up with lots of ideas and I can't remember which one she actually chose in the end!

She is VERY fired up...

I've been trying to find the essay I did for the AB CT course. No luck ... must have been on an earlier PC, though I think I'd have archived it somewhere.

Anyway, I broke rhythm learning/teaching into four distinct areas - I think this was it:

1) Sensing/maintaining a regular pulse, and being able to subdivide and add together pulse. This is a natural ability, albeit one that is very well hidden is some cases. This is also probably the area which receives the least attention as a distinct activity in normal music lessons - most of us are prone to taking this for granted. Cyrilla obviously does not fall into this trap. How many of us really practise pulse away from notated music in one-to-one lessons on a regular basis, or do we just do it when things go wrong in a particular piece?

2) Relating previously learnt regular pulse and simple body rhythms to notated equivalents.

3) Having an intellectual understanding of notated rhythm principles.

4) Being able to combine 1), 2) and 3) to turn notated but previously unheard or unimagined rhythms (from the reader's point of view) into a bodily rhythm (i.e where the pulse and all its subdivisions are sensed internally and into which the notated rhythm slots.)

Only if all four areas are properly addressed will rhythmic mastery be achievable.

If I had to say which element of music was the most important to teach, I would, of course, struggle to find an answer...but if I was forced to identify just one, that one would be pulse.

The development of pulse is an ongoing issue and elements of pulse should be present in all lessons. Even more important is the connection between pulse and rhythm (something that 11 years of piano lessons never taught me). And the only way to develop pulse/rhythm is to MOVE in some way - one reason why Dalcroze is so brilliant for teaching this, along with all the work it does on subdivisions of the beat.

I think there is often too much emphasis on EXPLAINING musical concepts. It's much more effective to DO them...

Sorry, I think we've strayed !

Well, I think if RoseRodent does go along this route, this is right on-topic, as the lack of explicitly musical rhythmic body activities is at the heart of many ongoing problems with individual musicians' learning, and the best and most fun way to learn internal rhythm is through whole body movement.

There is a cultural problem that Western societies value the mind over the body, and we progressively lose the innate instinct to dance and sing, through being instructed to "sit still and be quiet" through most of our education. We should be dancing and singing our way through school. We are taught that the musical score is the central part of our musical culture, whereas it should be the process of 'musicking' with our fellow humans that we should celebrate, whatever the musical idiom.

Despite much of what I have read, I still find it difficult to believe that rhythm is in any way natural. I think that by a process of regular exposure to song and dance with western regular beats we become accustomed to it, and can use that immersion in music to learn the concepts from what now appears to be naturalised. There is a common flaw in any educational principle, from Dalcroze to phonics, that if the method is good enough it will suit everyone. I just don't think this is a premise you can work from, you can only ever hope to increase the percentage of people for whom a method will succeed.

Most educational research obviously happens through the educational medium of choice in Western countries, i.e. schools, where finding one thing you can deliver to 30 pupils is the ideal. But there's always at least one child who doesn't get it, no matter what you do, if you only do one thing. Even on an education degree course I repeatedly heard "children love..." and "children will understand..." as if children are a species. I remember hating those very things with an absolute passion at school. I'd hate maths dressed up as a game, why bother the silly ritual of throwing dice and moving counters around the board when the learning was times tables? I instantly stripped the learning from an activity and wondered why we had to do other things. A majority of kids would prefer the board game, but it's a bit rich to say all children love it, and even on a teacher training placement when a child very like me has visibly groaned and thrown her head in her hands at the idea of playing a game I was again told that "everyone loves" them.

Back to rhythm, I still struggle with it. I can't dance or do aerobics classes. I can work out rhythm through a logical approach of knowing that half of this is one of those, but I cannot understand conceptually why we need 3/2 time when we have 3/4, I just have to learn that this is the case. And I think that crying is a quite appropriate response to a page of Andante or Largo written in a thousand subdivisions of quavers - why oh why could we not just have crotchets at a faster metronome mark rather than hemi-demi-semis? So it's a sit down with a metronome and a mental calculation that two of those is one of those and three of these make 1 of those, drawing the pulse on the music, counting in subdivisions of bars, anything I can do to make this music make sense, it's like musical dyslexia. Actually that makes me think of something else, that a lot of methods are trumpeted as "must be really effective" because they work with kids with learning disabilities. I find those children can be among the sharpest on the uptake of creative concepts, it's the really logical children with a 'classic' maths and language intelligence profile who look at you like you've sprouted two heads when they have to clap a rhythm.

When she was a baby my younger daughter used to bob up and down in time with music and would do an extra big bob on the first beat. This was before she could crawl so she must have only been about five or six months old. She still does have a very good sense of pulse (much better than her sister although both heard the same sort of music as babies). So I think a sense of rhythm is probably at least partly innate but like everything else it is stronger in some people than in others.


I agree and what's interesting having grown up in one country and living in another is how certain each country is that their ideas are right.

There are natural repetitive processes: years, lunar phases, days, breathing, walking (especially marching), running, heart beat, brain alpha-rhythm (I'm not sure how regular the other brain rhythms are). All of these vary in period, with the astronomical ones more nearly constant than the biological ones.

This is one of my present obsessions, so the remainder of this post is definitely OT.

UK state education makes an assumption that most other educational activities do not: that a collection of persons chosen by age are sufficiently uniform to be taught the same things together by one teacher; that there is a set of facts and skills that each will have acquired by the September (usually) following any particular birthday that will enable them to follow the next year's activities. The facts are otherwise, and are, perhaps, most clearly illustrated by the number of children, variously estimated at 25% to 40%, who are forced into secondary education without the literacy to follow the curriculum. Other educational courses, both at universities and in industry and commerce, usually have prescribed knowledge, skills and abilities that a student will need before entry and may have intermediate tests to control entry to a later phase of the course.

Up to the present, the best way to avoid the school straitjacket has been home education, most particularly the variety known as autonomous education, in which the child chooses activities and areas of study and the carer facilitates the learning process. If that is not possible, the best option would be a Montessori School, in which children have a sort of guided autonomy, or possibly a school organised on what is known as the Joplin* Plan, with setting for the foundation skill of reading, so that those who flounder and those who already know everything that is being taught can be moved elsewhere.

* after the Joplin, Missouri, school district, where this method (invented elsewhere) was tried in the early 1950s.

Unfortunately, the Secretary of State for Education, Ed Balls (recently described as "a bit of a bully" by the Labour MP who chairs the Select Committee for Children, Schools and Families, and as a control freak by many other people) seems set on a course that will prescribe school-like methods for home educators. His policy, if implemented, will cause nugatory extra work for all home educators and difficulties for most. In particular, it will cripple autonomous education in so far as carers conform with it.

That's an absolutely valid point. We don't need 3/4 and 3/2. Beethoven scherzi could often be written in 12/8, or, conversely, 12/8 pieces could be written in 3/4. Unfortunately we have a system of notation which carries all the baggage of history - so, for instance, I suspect the use of moveable type in music printing in Gabrieli's time is one reason why he used 3/2 and 4/2 much more than 3/4 and 4/4, as quavers and smaller are a nightmare to read in moveable type.


It was interesting that when A Common Approach was being promoted for instrumental learning, one of the authors of the brass section pointed out the two contrasting models of education: the state-led age-dictated model of the National Curriculum type, and the model of practical music exams, which allows learners to take exams when they are ready. As so often, music learning is a very enlightening model to study, as it draws on so many different intelligences and abilities: the speed of learning varies so greatly because of this, and is one reason why the idea of straightjacketing instrumental learning into an age-based system is absurd and unworkable. Of course, something's being absurd and unworkable never put off a politician with a ideology to pursue...

Interesting thread, I don't think I've got much to add to RoseRodent's original request because my degree was far away from music, but there were quite a few points people raised that made me want to comment


I do it in every lesson with my current teacher and set aside part of every practice session for it (in the same way as I set aside part for long tones to keep my sound up to scratch). How I wish I'd been taught like this as a child though, then maybe I wouldn't be doing it in my 40s!

But to add to the "it's something inborn" point, it maybe with some people, but it's definitely possible to improve rhythmic skills when you're not born with that innate ability (or haven't had it developed as a young child). Although the work I'm doing is sometimes painful it is definitely paying off.




This is very often how I feel on Corporate training days. I dread the announcement of a "breakout session" with a task to complete in your groups...



I know someone who used to be a secondary school Chemistry teacher in quite a deprived part of Liverpool. I remember one year he decided that it was completely pointless trying to teach Chemistry to one form he had because so many of them were struggling with reading and writing. So he started teaching them how to read and write instead and started up handwriting lessons at lunchtimes that were surprisingly popular.

I'm sure you're right that the characteristics of moveable type were a constraint, but IMO rather more for the printer's benefit than the performers'. The Gabrielis needed the long (square head with stem) as a conventional note for the final pause, which each player holds until the leader indicates the end. The breve was still in use, and the semiquaver was not often required, so his printer would have had fewer of the latter than of semibreves, minims and crotchets. I suspect that a composer could easily have written a page of semiquavers that a small printer could have set only by carving a lot of new ones, and he would have had no thanks from his singers and players for using notes with which they were less familiar. Also, the black notes take longer to write and use more ink, both in writing and in printing.

The advantage of modern notation is the use of beams, and especially the convention that semiquavers and smaller notes can have partially broken beams indicating the smaller subdivisions.

In my experience, reading quavers in the Gabrielis' typical notation are no more difficult than reading the longer notations if you play or sing the latter at the right speed. Players familar only with modern notation often have difficulty playing dotted breves in perfection (fast 3/1) at the same speed as minims in imperfection (2/2), this being the usual convention from c. 1550 to 1625 (possibly longer). After many years playing barless music with both transitions, I usually manage duple->triple OK, but maintaining a constant pulse in the move from triple to duple is still very difficult.

The bar line became more usual during the 17th C., and was welcomed by some performers who were still using part books. My introduction to 17th C. facsimile was a Wilbye madrigal in which the baritone part had had (rather wobbly) bar lines added before it was photocopied by the 20th C. publisher. The other parts did not have them, so presumably it was some singer from the past who had found them necessary.

OK, OT warning, but then it's my topic...

In terms of education I think it's a right laugh that we are sent several trees' worth of bumph telling us about the choice that we have in education. But all I have in the way of choice for my daughter is one age-led written curriculum, government controlled school or a different age-led written curriculum, government controlled school. Or a religious version of said age-led, written curriculum, government and local RC council controlled school. If I want her to receive any other form of education I have to pay for it AND pay my taxes for my school place, which of course gives parents "choice". We have a Steiner and a Montessouri but neither is part of my "choice". We have a massive number of Polish arrivals in this area where the children would not have started school until approaching 7, but they arrive age 6 in the UK and find themselves in the second year of our system. There is no provision for them to be taken into the first year. So, for no fault of their own they are suddenly "behind". The law allows me to keep my daughter out of school for another year, but again when she is ready to start she will go into P2, and I will have solved nothing of the issue of her being not at all ready.

Interestingly, this method was unheard of in early education systems, boys of all ages were in the same forms at public school. It's mass education that brought in this system, mostly because the kids were at work in t'mill at different times, so it made sense to educate the ones that got 2 hours of school separate from those who had 4 hours of school, so along came the age-led system. Public schools continued to make decisions on when a child "went up" based on a combination of age and attainment to date, so only those ready to sit school cert were in the school cert form. There's too many kids sitting in Standard Grade and GCSE classrooms who can't reliably read! The compulsory curriculum requires they be prepared for their examinations.

This is a huge part of what has attracted me to music education rather than the classroom, I was tired of the system that could not meet the needs of a child. If I take on two pupils aged 6 at the start of the year and one gets to grade 1 and the other to her prep test then so be it, I will be under no pressure to make the prep test girl "catch up" to a government-prescribed grade 1. Parents are another matter, but there is no implication that the slower child is in need of remedial work, she'll just get to grade 1 later.

Still OT. The present law allows you to keep her out of school as long as you like. Education is compulsory, school is not. Bearing in mind how random it is whether any primary school has anyone who is teaching reading effectively, you would do well to keep her out until you have taught her to read yourself. PM me if you want references to good methods for reading or to home education support groups.

Among those of us interested in beginning reading, a regular piece of advice is, "School-proof your child".

Thanks, I understand that, the issue is that I want to keep her out of school when she is 5 so that she can start when she is 6, but if she starts when she is 6 she will start in P2 not P1. The reason I want to keep her out for another year is so she starts school exactly as is but a year later, not so she will get a home education year and then go to school from her second year. All they want to know when you do apply for school is when is her birthday, September, OK she'll be in Primary 2 then. I know you couldn't expect to put an 11-year-old into P4 (year 3) but for the sake of an extra month's difference between her and the July kids who are an official year younger, what does it matter?

If I had the money and the physical health I would home ed her throughout, but this first year is really important to me because she's quite a slow developer, she will be so much more ready to take on school when she's goign on 6 rather than going on 5. There's 23 months between her and her cousin, but they are to go to school 12 months apart. Not on my watch!

I know exactly how you feel. My younger daughter has always been the youngest in her year because of where her birthday falls and in France they start school the year they are three (but because the school year follows the calendar year she was three months short of her third birthday when she started). She is eleven and a half months younger than the oldest one in her class and at that age it makes a huge difference. In all the early classes her teachers complained that she was immature compared to others in the class

Then there was the problem that she was exceptionally bright but they only thing the school could offer us as a way of "stretching" her was to put her up into the class above which would have made the age gap even bigger and she would have been even more "immature" so we opposed this.

Good luck is all I can say.

Interesting! At which school?