Teaching Stravinsky from the Wennerstrom Anthology

Abstract

Let me begin by acknowledging Dr. Mary Wennerstrom’s profound impact on my decision to become a music theorist. An inspiring teacher for several courses and independent studies during my master’s and doctoral coursework from 1973–75 and 1976–78 at Indiana University, she soon became my model for what a music theory teacher can achieve. Her graduate classes on variations and theory pedagogy were legendary, but so was her undergraduate teaching. I was one of her associate instructors for the Classical-Romantic undergraduate semester, during which I learned as much or more as her students did. When Allen Forte’s The Structure of Atonal Music first appeared in 1973, I immediately began working through it page by page, in an independent study the next fall with Dr. Wennerstrom.1 But sadly, I never had the opportunity to take a twentieth-century course with her. Nevertheless, her Anthology of Twentieth-Century Music became the vehicle through which she continued to influence my pedagogical development, as I designed twentieth-century undergraduate core courses at Michigan, Penn State, and Indiana (where I returned to teach from 1999 to 2011).2 Her choice of examples was pedagogically ideal in so many ways that, despite supplementing her collection with excerpts