Using Jazz Compositions to Teach the Sentence

The poster can be viewed here.

My undergraduate honors thesis can be read here. This poster is a pedagogical extension of that research. My thesis includes musical examples and analysis of jazz compositions that feature various types of sentence structures. It also includes a list of the 130 sentences from Sher’s The New Real Book, vol. 1.

Out of 25 total examples of sentences from four core theory textbooks, none are from the jazz canon. This data can be viewed here.

If you would like to discuss any of this material further with me, feel free to reach out!

Works Cited (Selected)

BaileyShea, Matthew. 2019. “The Poetic Pre-History of the Sentence Form.” Music Theory Spectrum 41/1: 126–145.

———. 2004. “Beyond the Beethoven Model: Sentence Types and Limits.” Current Musicology 77: 5–33.

Burstein, L. Poundie, and Joseph N. Straus. 2019. A Concise Introduction to Tonal Harmony. 2nd ed. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.

Callahan, Michael R. 2013. “Sentential Lyric-Types in the Great American Songbook.” Music Theory Online 19/3.

Clendinning, Jane Piper and Elizabeth West Marvin. 2016. The Musician’s Guide to Theory and Analysis. 3rd ed. New York: WW. Norton & Company.

Caplin, William E. 1998. Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Forrest, David, and Matthew Santa. 2014. “A Taxonomy of Sentence Structures.” College Music Symposium 54. (accessed 24 September 2019). https://symposium.music.org/index.php? option1⁄4com_k2&view1⁄4item& id1⁄410629: a-taxonomy-of-sentencestructures&Itemid1⁄4124.

Kostka, Stefan, Dorothy Payne, and Byron Almén. 2018. Tonal Harmony: With an Introduction to Post-Tonal music. 8th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Education.

Laitz, Steven G. 2016. The Complete Musician: An Integrated Approach to Theory, Analysis, and Listening. 4th ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Sher, Chuck. 1998. The New Real Book, Vol. 1, ed. Bob Bauer. Sher Music Co.