Personal website for Megan Lavengood, music theorist.
Let me start by clarifying that in my own scholarship, I rarely deal with foreign-language sources (hopefully this isn’t too shameful an admission). But at George Mason University, where I teach Doctoral Research Methods, we have lots of international students who bring their expertise in their native language into their research. This post summarizes the relevant bits of Chicago Manual of Style…
My focus on the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer may seem overly niche or specialized, but in this essay I establish the magnitude of this synthesizer’s impact on popular music in the 1980s. While the average person is unaware of the synthesizer by name, the DX7 changed popular music as we know it today. To say that the DX7’s arrival was earth-shaking would be no exaggeration: the affordable price, sound…
For the uninitiated, the Take Along Tunes toy plays a series of excerpts from Classical- and Baroque-era (mostly) orchestral works while flashing colored lights; its purpose is to distract and occupy your baby while you’re forcing them to do something they don’t particularly enjoy (in our case, diaper changes). As musical toys go, it’s really not annoying, because the tunes are pleasant and the…
After obsessing over typographical details in my theory papers for over 10 years, I am distilling my tricks for anyone else who might like a hand making their papers look pretty. I occasionally reference some Mac-specific things, but I’m certain there are analogous tricks for Windows machines.
I wrote up a thread on Twitter yesterday summarizing the worst takes in the Journal of Schenkerian Studies Vol. 12, which responds to Phil Ewell’s plenary talk at SMT 2019 on what he calls Music Theory’s White Racial Frame. In this blog post I want to build on that by pointing out how many of the responses raise concerns/questions that Ewell already addressed in his keynote. Instead of referencing…