Student Learning Outcomes
The Department of Music at La Sierra University is committed to helping the serious music student develop a life-long engagement with music as performer, composer, and listener. By providing the essential tools for making and responding to music, it is the aim of the following student learning outcomes to create a “whole” musician with the requisite skills, experiences, and artistic sensibilities that have the potential to continually inform and transform the musical life during and after formal study. Thus, at the completion of music studies at LSU, the student will have developed:
- A seeing ear and a hearing eye. Further defined, students should be able to recognize, identify, and create, given notation and/or sound, simple to complex patterns and structures as they relate to the musical elements of pitch, duration, amplitude, and timbre.
- A theoretical foundation of music. Analytical techniques, from simple to advanced, are presented as tools to help in understanding and internalizing musical form and content. This leads to the student’s development as “analyzer and evaluator” in becoming a qualified listener.
- The ability, given sound and/or notation, to respond to, perform and shape the elements of music. This suggests being able to manipulate these elements within the student’s role as listener (both analytical and evaluative), performer, or composer, in a stylistically coherent and informed manner.
- A working knowledge and practical understanding of the history of music and musical styles. Primarily based on the European-centered tradition, but also observed from world traditions, this study informs the student’s role as listener, performer and composer.
- An understanding and application of appropriate pedagogical techniques, methods and tools as they relate to the variety of demands placed on today’s music teacher. Depending on the student’s area of emphasis, this means gaining effectiveness in the implementation of methodologies in primary and secondary areas of musical expertise as they relate to age group and discipline.
- Refined technical and interpretive skills necessary for informed solo and collaborative performance appropriate to the degree.
- A basic competency in music technology. These elements include digital notation, sequencing, MIDI sequencing, audio recording, and web integration of multi-media objects.
- A broad base of experiences on which to build a personal philosophy of music. In light of the above outcomes, this means being able to appreciate music of worth, and distinguish between what is longlasting and what is fad, in secular and sacred styles