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I. Initial Considerations
My experience with road maps began fifteen years ago, when I was teach- ing an upper-division course on 20th-century music. Sarah Z, a senior, was simultaneously pursuing degrees in violin performance and studio art. She chose to analyze for her final project Arvo Pärt's Fratres (1977). A week before the project was due, Sarah came to see me during an office hour. She told me that she had spent nearly two months studying Fratres, comparing performances, modeling the small-scale and large-scale form, and learning about Pärt's musical language, including his use of plainchant and tintinnabuli.1
Yet she was experiencing (for the first time in her academic life) a de- bilitating case of writer's block. Frustrated and nearly distraught, she wanted to analyze a different piece for her final project. I said no-it was much too late in the semester to re-start the entire process-and then brainstormed with her until we found a compromise: rather than write an essay, Sarah would submit an annotated score and a painting of some sort. While I wasn't entirely thrilled with this solution-how would a music theorist assess a work of art?-it seemed far better than scrapping the project altogether and beginning anew.
One week later, Sarah submitted an annotated score and an exquisite two-foot by three-foot watercolor. Much to my surprise, she also handed in a seven-page analytical essay. She explained that, once she had finished the artwork, her writer's block vanished; the paper "seemed to write itself." Her paper was not only musical and insightful, but more compelling than her previous essays. Sarah's epiphany inspired me to investigate the literature on multiple intelligences, left-brain versus right-brain processing, and learning theory.2 Encouraged by these readings and emboldened by Sarah's breakthrough, I made a conscious decision to have every student do a road map the following semester. I've continued this practice, without regrets, ever since.
A road map is a representation or documentation of how one hears a work unfold in time. In its simplest form, a road map can be a time line or flow chart. But it can also be an elaborate landscape of observations, correspondences, and associations, with text descriptions, symbols, staff notation, rhythms, colors, and shapes. A road map can be teleological or...