Music and Technology at Delaware: A retrospective

By Larry Peterson

Music History Projects

Larry Peterson began developing his Interacting with Music Series in the late 1980s. The series now includes multimedia lessons to teach Verdi’s Otello, Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, Puccini’s La Boheme, and Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. Two of these lessons were Honors Theses prepared by Megan Jenkins(BM '00, MM' 02)(Otello) and Emily Wimberley(BM '03)(Le Nozze). In addition to lessons based upon particular operas, Vocal Timbre I, Vocal Timbre II, and Ensembles/Embellishment are three lessons used in both opera courses Peterson teaches—Introduction to Italian Opera and Introduction to Opera—as well as the graduate music history course and three Honors courses. The Interaction with Music series also includes lessons on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Haydn’s Symphony 103, and several large sets of analyses completed by former music majors in Musc 211, 312, and 313. These analyses utilize a software program, CD TIME SKETCH, designed for Prof. Peterson, utilizing a type of bubble analysis that was incorporated in the department’s laserdisc series.

Russell Murray began working with the publisher WW Norton on the Online Tutor for the music appreciation textbook, Enjoyment of Music, in the fall of 1997.  The first edition of the site went online in the spring of 1999. Subsequently Murray added content for the next edition (2003) as well as for the upcoming edition (2008). The first version was spun off as a stand-alone site hosted by Sony and is still available at http://www.essentialsofmusic.com/. The Enjoyment of Music site is available at: http://www2.wwnorton.com/college/music/enj9/.

Murray’s work for the music history textbook A History of Western Music (W.W. Norton) started with his own lessons for the Plainchant Mass and early medieval polyphony using the software Cap-Media. This work led him to consider how the music a teacher chooses creates an unchanging canon in the minds of the students who study it. He published a chapter dealing with this in Mary Natvig’s Teaching Music History (Ashgate, 2001), which in turn led the editors at Norton to ask him to create electronic listening guides for the sixth and subsequent editions of the text.