Andrea M. Calilhanna’s ‘Ski-hill Graph Pedagogy Meter Fundamentals’ now
available in Spanish version.
The book offers a fresh approach to understanding and teaching mathematical music theory for beginners.
Andrea M. Calilhanna continues to promote her groundbreaking approach to teaching meter fundamentals with “Ski-hill Graph Pedagogy Meter Fundamentals: Mathematical Music Theory for Beginners” (self -published). The book is now available in Spanish version, “Fundamentos de la pedagogía de compases del gráfico ski-hill: Teoría Musical Matemática para Principiantes,” just in time for its attendance in the upcoming Guadalajara International Book Fair this November 30 to December 8, 2024.
Calilhanna, an Australian musicologist and music teacher, provides music educators and pre-service teachers a helpful resource to transform the way they teach meter fundamentals to students. Through the ski-hill graph, beginners develop listening skills that provide a solid basis for more advanced studies of meter, and the process of visualizing each pulse and meter through the ski-hill graph enables students to learn critical thinking about meter and about the mathematical aspects of the meter. This innovative teaching method effectively helps students in understanding the meter mathematics, stabilize the rhythms, and solve problems with decoding notation.
What reviewers are saying:
“‘Ski-hill Graph Pedagogy’ is an ambitious textbook that incorporates math into its work, suggesting a radical
method of teaching music.” —Foreword Clarion Review
“A dense but revelatory treatise and guide to musical time and rhythm.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Ski-hill Graph Pedagogy Meter Fundamentals: Mathematical Music Theory for Beginners”
About the Author
Andrea M. Calilhanna developed Ski-hill Graph Pedagogy, a three-step approach to teach meter fundamentals. Her primary research interest is pedagogy through ski-hill graphs, listening and visualizing mathematical and psychoacoustic aspects of the meter. Inspired by the contemporary meter theories of Yale University music theorist Richard Cohn, Calilhanna began to teach meter theory fundamentals through the ski-hills with beginner students.
She observed ski-hill graphs bring many benefits to students to augment time signatures’ notation-based meter and this book provides Ski-hill Graph Pedagogy meter fundamentals. Calilhanna has taught music since 1991 in classroom and music studio settings with beginners through to advanced students; and she has analyzed traditional Igbo music, Nigeria.
She is a member of professional organizations: Musicological Society of Australia, Acoustical Society of America, Australian Acoustical Society, the Society for Music Theory, Australian Society for Music Education, the Society for Mathematics and Computation in Music, the Music Teachers’ Association of New South Wales. In Australia, she is director of Cherrybrook Music Studio, and regularly presents conference papers, and publishes in journals, books, professional magazines, and online forums, editor for H-Net’s H-Music network, and a casual academic available for consultation. Calilhanna formerly enrolled at Western Sydney University, MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, and was a visiting fellow (WSU) in 2019.
In 2018, she completed a Master of Music (Musicology) at the University of Sydney, Sydney Conservatorium of Music (2018). She is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Adelaide, Faculty of Arts, Business, Law, and Economics, Elder Conservatorium of Music.
