Music,
the Voice of History
Description: Coming Soon

Music in History

The NEXUS chapters below explore the history of music and music in history from Ancient Greece to the 1990s. Students also learn to compose period music.

Music is the voice of history. If we ignore it in history classes, students miss out on a large part of what the past has to say to us. NEXUS teaches students to recognize the distinctive musical voice of each epoch – plus students learn period composition styles. Why?

1) If a student can write a few bars in the style of the Ancient Greeks or the Renaissance, for example, she or he becomes a much better listener and appreciator of that music and more attuned to the voices of the past;

2) By composing music students learn to recognize theme and the variation patterns. NEXUS teaches and exercises pattern recognition as a vital cross-curriculum thinking skill – migration patterns in history, patterns of behavior in the sciences, repeated visual motifs in art, themes in literature.

In NEXUS, this skill, which is tested on IQ tests, is exercised in all subject areas making the student much more adept in applying it. Until now, students who learn pattern recognition typically do so by intuition – by osmosis.