I came across Toby W. Rush’s website through his Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People (I think I was looking for counterpoint resources). After I contacted him, he agreed to be a guest for the Fischarper 5 Questions with… series!
Keep reading to learn more about his work with Braille music, music theory resources, & more!
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I found your site via Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People. What prompted you to make & share those resources under a Creative Commons license?
These sheets began as review materials for my own students, I had joked for a long time that when I wrote a textbook, it would be in comic book format. Some time later, I learned about Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón’s graphic novel adaptation of the 9/11 Report, and realized that maybe it wasn’t such a crazy idea after all! As I created more, my own students recommended that I share them online for other students.
I think I first planned on giving them away for free because I didn’t think anyone would want to pay for them! But I’ve also been a beneficiary of many, many free resources online so I relished the idea of giving back to the community. I’m happy to see that many of my colleagues have come to the same conclusion; Robin Wharton and Kris Shaffer’s Open Music Theory is an online textbook that is also released under a Creative Commons license, and it is used and respected by many people in the field. I really think, especially with the traditionally high costs of textbooks (which we professors generally get for free, so we’re somewhat insulated from the problem), that free and open source materials are becoming more and more popular. And when materials are available online, they can be updated regularly and instantaneously.
What do you enjoy most about music theory, & how do you share that with your students?
I think what I enjoy most about music theory is how universal it is. So many music students come away from theory classes with the idea that only certain music is worthy of study. I love the classics, but I am way more excited to pick apart something by Jack’s Mannequin or a tune from the Legally Blonde musical. And this obviously isn’t a hard sell to students; getting them to approach the music in their Recently Played lists on their phones with the same level of academic rigor gets them so excited about music theory, and removes some of that unspoken guilt that they’re not listening to Mahler symphonies in their spare time. In my mind, if a piece of music elicits an emotional reaction from the listener, that’s a successful piece of music, and I want to know what makes it tick!
Your bio shares that you teach a variety of music classes, but work on computer programming. How has one discipline shaped the other for you?
As a matter of fact, I was messing around with computers long before I decided to go into music theory. My family got a TRS-80 Color Computer back in the 80s and I taught myself programming in BASIC, and have enjoyed it ever since. I suppose the analytical nature of programming matches my love for music theory, and they’ve certainly influenced one another. Much of my current research involves music technology in one way or another, but it may just be that I can’t help but look for ways I can solve problems by typing out some code!
One of my specific interested within computer program is interface design: how to make programs more intuitive for the user. This aligns pretty closely with my love for music pedagogy, which, on a certain level, is the same thing: the process of making the lesson material more intuitive for the student.
TobyRush.com has a page of Braille music resources. How did you begin working with Braille music notation?
If you had told me ten years ago that braille music notation would be one of my primary research areas, I wouldn’t have believed you! It started in 2012 when I had two students in my theory and aural skills classes who were blind and who relied on braille and braille music. While our disability support office on campus was extremely helpful, they had no experience in music, so it was up to me to find a way to provide them with course materials like homework, tests, sight-singing exercises, and so on. (In hindsight, it was a stroke of luck that they were both fluent in braille music notation, because it made it a lot easier for me to get up to speed.)
Being a tinkerer and something of a perfectionist, I spent a lot of time creating braille music resources “by hand” — translating scores into braille music notation character by character, building the files necessary to send to the braille embosser, and so on. Of course, this arduous process naturally led me to come up with a way of automating things. (There are translation utilities out there that will take a Finale or MuseScore file and translate it to braille music notation, but the results were similar to the results you’d expect from Google Translate: pretty good, but not perfect, and I wanted to provide a higher standard to my students.) The result was my utility Braille Music Notator, which allows sighted musicians to build braille music scores graphically, without needing to do all the tedious translation.
However, my utility has a ulterior motive: I think we as teachers provide the best educational environment when we can meet the students where they are. It was painfully obvious to me in those first few months with my braille-reliant students that they were having do to a lot work in the teacher-student relationship… something they were used to, to be sure, but it seemed unfair when their sighted colleagues did not have to work as hard. So I designed my utility to teach the user the tenets of braille music notation as they use it. Braille music notation is actually not very hard to understand — it’s actually quite a bit more efficient than our system of traditional notation — and being fluent in diverse systems like allows us to help our students become more musically literate, rather than just relying on them to figure it out.
What is Braille music notation like & what can interested musicians do to learn a little more about it?
Braille music notation uses the regular braille characters in different ways, but the system is very simple. A single character will denote both length and pitch, so for example there is a single character that represents a C quarter note, and a different one that represents a C half note. Instead of clefs, braille music notation uses special characters to denote which octave you’re in. Beyond that, the basics are very similar to traditional music notation; there are key signatures, time signatures, accidentals, barlines, slurs, and everything else. In fact, braille music notation is pretty thorough; there are symbols for harp diagrams, accordion notation, Schenker analysis and IPA symbols, to list a few examples.
And there are a lot of resources online for people who want to learn more. I’ve listed many of them on my web site. But if you ask me, a great place to get started with braille music is to mess around with my Braille Music Notator, which works in your browser and is free for everyone to use. Chances are, after just a few minutes of playing with it, you’ll be able to notate full pieces of music without any trouble!
How interesting is all that info! Do you think you’ll explore Braille music notation? How about those theory resources?
Be sure to go check out tobyrush.com, & follow Dr. Rush on Twitter, Reddit, & Facebook!
-Barbara
An active pedagogue and technologist, Toby Rush currently serves as associate professor of music theory and technology at the University of Dayton. Dr. Rush’s research interests include applications of educational technology and new media for music studies, interface design, and music theory and aural skills pedagogy. His online pedagogical materials, which include Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People and Braille Music Notator, have garnered worldwide acclaim.
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Barbara Fischer runs Fischarper, LLC and loves her job as a harpist and private music educator. She enjoys blogging about various aspects of the music field on fischarper.com/blog. For more music resources, check out the Fischarper store. Find out where you can find Barbara on the interwebs here. And you can sign up to receive Fischarper updates by joining the email list.