Minds That Know: Seeking A New Music Literacy through Syntax, Prosody, and Community

Abstract

Teaching for musical meaning can be a multifaceted topic, since a universally accepted definition of musical meaning is elusive; yet musical meaning remains at the heart of music literacy. Music literacy is equally complex, as changes in technology constantly reorganize how musical sounds are produced, recorded, and transmitted. Today, musical texts are presented through increasingly diverse, multi-modal forms, and changes in media bring accompanying changes to how we construct musical meaning. In this article, I consider parallels between language and music as they are transmitted through evolving texts and interpreted by a reader to create syntactical, prosodic, and social meaning. These three meaning domains are examined within print and oral cultural ways of knowing since both are present in the current media landscape. Considering notation as a form of externalized cognition, I advance a new music literacy theory that reclaims orality as necessary for active participation in the various music discourses in contemporary society. In the proposed model, students discover musical meaning as they make decisions and formulate beliefs related to musical organization (syntax) and expression (prosody) in relation to a community.