The Hour is Blue

Dr. Leigh VanHandel on How Music Works — and How We Understand It

In this conversation, I speak with Dr. Leigh VanHandel, Associate Professor of Music Theory at UBC’s School of Music, whose research brings together music theory, music cognition, rhythm and meter, the relationship between music and language, and the ways we teach and learn music. Her work asks how music works, how we perceive and process it, and how our experience shapes what we hear.

CiTR 101.9 FM / The Blue Hour

Recorded live on September 15, 2026

Listen: CiTR | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

The Blue Hour, hosted by Farha Guerrero, airs live every Tuesday at 2 p.m. PT on CiTR 101.9 FM at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Dr. Leigh VanHandel is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of British Columbia’s School of Music. Her research spans music theory and cognition, rhythm and meter, music and language, and music theory pedagogy.

Leigh began university as a science major, intending to pursue genetic engineering, before returning to the music that had been an important part of her life growing up. She initially pursued music education and performance, but her interest in music theory—and in psychology and language—eventually led her toward the emerging field of music cognition, where those interests could come together.

Her research examines how we hear and understand musical structure and how experience influences what we perceive. Her current work includes questions that arise from experiences most of us have without necessarily thinking about them: How do we know how fast a piece of music should be? What makes one rhythmic pattern seem more complex than another? And could the language we have spoken throughout our lives influence the way we hear musical rhythm?

These questions have led Leigh to study tempo, rhythm and meter, syncopation, musical complexity, and the relationship between the rhythms of language and music. Her work also extends into how music theory is learned and taught, drawing on research in cognition and on approaches developed in STEM education.

Leigh is the editor of The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy, which received the Society for Music Theory’s Outstanding Multi-Author Publication Award in 2022.

Her path—from a student considering genetic engineering to a scholar working at the intersection of music, psychology, language and cognition—reflects the larger question running through much of her work: how does music work, and how do we understand it?

Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity while preserving the natural rhythm of the live conversation.

Farha: It's a great privilege to have you here today.

Leigh: Thank you so much for having me.

Farha: I would like to talk a little bit about your journey to being someone who has dedicated your life, in a very large way, to music theory.

Just like many of the young students walking around this campus right now, you started off in a different program, and then somehow you were pulled back into that musical world. As I've learned, as a high school student you were a very active musician.

Leigh: That's true. In high school, I did a lot of science, and when I started my undergraduate degree at Ohio State University, I actually started in a genetic engineering program.

I loved it, but I realized very quickly in my first year of the program that I missed music a lot. I missed making music, and I missed learning about music. I started getting more involved in music at Ohio State and realized, wait, no, that's actually where I want to be. So I switched my major into music education and music performance.

Then, in the third year of that program, I had an advisor who said to me, "Your name came up in a music theory faculty meeting as someone who seems to be really good at this. Have you thought about doing this?"

I cringe a little when I think about this, but my response was, "Okay, but what would I do with that?"

That faculty member just sort of looked at me and said, "Well, that's the degree I have."

And I was like, "Wait, I could teach music theory? That sounds really cool."

That person has been a mentor to me my entire life, so we laugh about this all the time. Essentially, somebody recognized that interest in me and encouraged it.

I've been very, very lucky with the people that I've worked with in my life. The same thing happened when I went on for my master's degree in music theory. There was a faculty member there who I was talking to, and he said to me, "Are you aware that everything you're interested in is music cognition?"

And I was like, "What's that?"

He said, "It's this field that is different than, but definitely related to, music theory, and I think you would enjoy exploring how they interact."

I started learning more about music cognition and realized at that moment that the Venn diagram of my interests did have a centre, and that's where these disciplines were. I realized that this encompassed everything I was interested in in my life, and so here I am.

Farha: Here you are. And you are someone who, in an interesting way, even if it was just a short time in the sciences in your initial undergraduate study, connects music and science.

You are a big believer in the interdisciplinary, the cross-sections, the ways in which we can understand music through different lenses, whether it's psychology, cognition, language, experimentation, perception, and even STEM.

One thing that strikes me is that you're very passionate about music theory, and someone noticed that early on. You were good at it and as well, you really liked taking music theory classes, and now you like to teach it!

I also want to know a little bit about you. I've had quite a few of your colleagues from the School of Music on the show. For anyone who's familiar with the UBC campus, I encourage everyone to go to the building. It's gorgeous.

Many of you are also musicians. Can you tell me a little bit about your musical background from that early age? What got you into music, why did you return to it at university?

I also learned that you have played in a band. And I know a little bit about your musical tastes.

Leigh: Oh boy. I was adopted as a baby, and so my parents didn't know what I was going to want to do. They gave me every resource they possibly could, and from a very early age, the thing I was interested in doing was making noise.

I would sit on the kitchen floor and bang pots and pans together. My mom was not happy about that. When I was maybe four years old, I found a guitar in my dad's closet. I used to go and sit in my dad's closet and play this full-size guitar as a four-year-old girl.

I wasn't good. I wasn't doing anything that would be recognizable as music, but man, I was having a great time.

Somehow my parents found someone who was willing to give a four- or five-year-old girl guitar lessons, so I started on guitar super early.

Then, in public education, I started playing flute when I was in fifth grade. I switched to bassoon when I was in seventh grade and played bassoon throughout high school and college, but kept playing flute. I played piccolo in high school marching band, because that's normal, and through college played bassoon also.

I don't perform that much anymore. Bassoon is a cruel mistress and takes a lot of time to keep your chops up. Plus, you have to make your own reeds and do all this stuff, so there's a lot of time involved.

I have gotten pulled into some ensembles as a ringer, particularly on contrabassoon, because that you can sort of pick up and play and you can't really hear it, you only feel it, so nobody cares if you're terrible at it.

That's not true. I shouldn't say that. Nobody cares if I'm terrible at it. But I still play a little bit.

I play piano also. I did an undergrad in music education, so I learned to play every instrument. The joke is that you learn to play them better than a fifth grader.

I played a baritone horn, a brass instrument, in college marching band. I did drum corps for a couple of summers, and I actually still play in a British-style brass band here in Vancouver called the Little Mountain Brass Band. British-style brass bands have a very specific instrumentation to maintain a specific type of sound. Baritone is one of the instruments that's in there, so I play in that ensemble, which is super fun.

Somewhere along the line, I started playing bass guitar because I wanted to be a punk rock babe. Before we moved to Vancouver, we had a band with some friends of ours. We weren't any good, but it was a lot of fun, and that's what counts. We had a great time playing. We would occasionally play gigs for friends and make sure that they had a lot to drink so that we sounded okay.

So, very varied musical experiences.

Everyone thinks, "Oh, you're a music professor. You must listen to Brahms all day long."

Oh man, I don't.

I love classical music. I love all types of music, honestly, but my problem is that if I'm listening to something that feels like it's something I should be teaching, my brain starts analyzing it, and it's not relaxing. It's not soothing. My brain is going, "Oh, I could use this in this class, and I could do this, and I could do this."

So what I have to do is listen to pop music or punk music. Even then, sometimes I'm like, "Wait, this song doesn't have a chorus. This is a great example of this."

And my husband's just going, "Oh my God, just listen to the music, please."

I'm like, "I am, but I'm also taking notes."

So I kind of joke that I have the worst taste in music. It's not what people would expect, I think, from a music professor, but it's what years of studying music has done to me, I guess.

Farha: It is all connected.

It's Poster Day at UBC, and this goes back to when I was a kid at UBC, because I grew up on this campus. I've known Poster Week for years and years, now we're talking decades. It was really nice to see some bands that I like, and one of them is Tool.

What I've learned, because I do like classical music, is that with Tool, even being the sort of progressive rock that they are, there are connections. There are moments where you think, wow, it's very similar.

I think there is maybe this is the part of you that is quite interdisciplinary. You can bridge out into all kinds of music, and that's lovely, too, for your students, because I'm sure your students are coming to your classes with all different tastes.

Leigh: And musical backgrounds and experiences. I learn a lot about music from my students.

Sometimes I'll ask students to bring in examples of things that they're listening to, and as a class, if we have the time, we can say, "Let's just listen to the song and talk about what hits us about this."

I love that because, especially with the multicultural student population here at UBC, I'm learning things about K-pop and J-pop and Chinese popular music, and music from all over the world that I don't normally know where to look for. It's absolutely fantastic.

Farha: Maybe that's a bridge to this next part of your work that really interests me, the idea that language is connected to music. You had an interest in this, as you said, from your dissertation. Why don't you bring us into that and first set it up for us? What first intrigued you about trying to understand that connection?

Leigh: I feel like this brings up a point where there's an alternate version of me somewhere that's a linguist, because I've always been really interested in language.

Like I said with the Venn diagrams, it's language, it's psychology, it's science, it's all of these things.

I always wanted to take an intro to linguistics class when I was an undergraduate, but the problem was it met at the same time as an ensemble that I was required to be in to maintain my scholarship, so I never got to take that class.

There's an alternate-universe version of me that did get to take that class and is now a linguist somewhere, because I find that stuff absolutely fascinating. I probably could have veered off in that direction if the prompt had been there at the time.

When I was in grad school, I was fortunate enough to be able to do interdisciplinary coursework, so I was taking classes in art history, English literature, and linguistics.

I started taking a series of classes in linguistics that just lit something inside me. We were learning about measuring rhythmic patterns and melodic patterns in speech, and about how different languages have different rhythmic patterns. Obviously, tonal languages rely on pitch in a very specific way, but even different languages, dialects, or accents use pitch patterns in different ways when they speak.

I had already had my dissertation proposal accepted on a completely different topic, and I was in this linguistics class and had one of those moments where everything becomes completely clear and the heavens open up, and you go, "I need to do this. I need to answer this question."

I went from that class to my advisor and said, "Okay, so hear me out. I want to change my dissertation topic."

His first response was, "No, absolutely not."

Then he thought about it for a second and said, "But tell me what you're thinking."

So I explained it to him. Essentially, what I wanted to do was look at French art song from the 19th century and German art song from the 19th century.

This was a period when art songs were being written to poetry, so obviously there's a music-language connection there, an explicit one. But some French composers and some German composers were very, very attuned to the ways those different languages sounded, and they wanted to compose in such a way that it reflected the way these languages sounded.

I wanted to create a large database of rhythmic information for these songs and look for rhythmic patterns, and whether or not these reflected the rhythmic patterns that we expected to see from French and German.

French and German are languages that have two very different rhythmic patterns baked into them.

German is what's known as a stress-timed language. A stress-timed language is one where there's usually a regular alternation of stresses. English is a stress-timed language, and if you even think about what I just said, "a regular alternation of stresses, a regular alternation of stresses," it's not exact, but we tend to have a rhythmic pattern that gets set up when we speak of stressed syllables, and other things get compressed or expanded to accommodate for those regular stresses.

French, on the other hand, is what's called a syllable-timed language, and syllables tend to be approximately the same length. You don't get that same expansion or contraction in French.

So I thought these two case studies would be a great way of testing this idea that the language that you're familiar with, that you're composing in or to, affects the way you write.

Farha: I would take that on after what you just delivered on air. I would say yes.

Leigh: So that was my dissertation.

The hilarious thing is that I designed this whole study and ran all these statistics on it, and initially it came back, no, there's no difference between French and German.

I remember I called my advisor literally crying because I was like, "Oh my God, it didn't work. What do I do?"

And he said, "No, this is way better, because you expected that result, which means that if you had gotten that result, you would have gone, cool, done. Now you have to ask more questions. Now you get to figure out why you didn't get the results that you expected."

So then I had to dig into the data that I had and look at individual composers and individual compositional style and practice, and found some very, very interesting things that way that made the dissertation way more meaningful than if I had just gone, "French and German are different, done."

It's funny, I frequently say I've made a career out of being wrong, but that is what kind of happens. I start doing something and I go, "I think this is going to happen," and then something else happens, and I go, "Why did that happen?"

Then I get to start exploring why the thing I didn't expect happened.

Farha: It sounds to me, Leigh, that you have a scientific brain. Am I right?

Leigh: Yes.

Farha: I think you're using that brain. And that's really what scientists do. They don't always get what they're looking for, right? They want to keep pushing and pushing. Even when they get the final answer, they want more answers.

But then there's also this connection with native language. That's a very interesting angle, how a person's native language affects how they could perceive complexity in these rhythmic patterns.

Leigh: We're doing all these studies on rhythmic complexity, and one of the questions that we ask people who participate in our studies is, "What is your native language?"

One of the things that we're finding is, again, there are these different types of rhythmic profiles in languages. We're finding evidence that your native language, the language you speak most often, may influence how you are perceiving certain types of characteristics within rhythmic patterns.

That whole idea that I just talked about with stress-timed and syllable-timed languages, that's measured by what's called variability.

What you're measuring is the amount of variability in the length of successive syllables in spoken language. We can translate that into music by measuring the difference between the length of successive events, like pitches or drum taps or whatever.

If you have a rhythmic pattern that has more variability, someone who speaks a stress-timed language, which has more variability as the rhythmic profile of that language, actually has a little bit of an easier time processing that rhythmic pattern with a lot of variability, because they hear it all the time when they're speaking.

Whereas someone whose primary linguistic profile is a syllable-timed language, or Japanese is what's called a mora-timed language, but it's a similar idea, may have a little bit of a harder time processing rhythmic patterns that have more variability in them, just because it's not a rhythmic profile that they hear all the time as auditory input.

The results are mixed.

One problem that we have with the results that we've gotten from the studies at UBC is that even people who are native speakers of a syllable-timed language, like French or Chinese, coming in here, they're speaking English all the time. They're hearing English.

That can be a confound with processing because, if they're hearing a language with a lot of variability surrounding them constantly, they get more used to it.

So we've thrown around ideas about, what if we go to China and find Chinese speakers who don't have constant communication with English or constant contact with spoken English, and study how they perceive these things?

There are so many challenges with trying to set up a study like that, but it's something that my lab has thrown around a bit.

Farha: So someone who's a polyglot, who speaks multiple languages, just by that idea, would they perhaps be able to distinguish between more of these rhythmic patterns?

Leigh: Potentially. They would have more experience with hearing auditory input that reflects these types of patterns, essentially.

It might be less challenging for them to process these patterns, which means they might say, on a scale of one to six, where six is most complex, maybe I'm going to rate this rhythmic pattern as a four, as opposed to someone who didn't have that experience, who might rate it as a five or a six.

They might just attenuate their ratings a little bit.

Farha: You mentioned taking your lab maybe outside to other places where you could experiment more, but what do you really hope to gain from this earlier investigation, from your dissertation to where you are now? What type of questions are you curious about?

Leigh: I've always just wanted to know, what's happening in my head?

For me, that's kind of the biggest question. Why do I hear something one way and somebody else hears something another way? And what are the factors that affect how that happens?

Also, when you're learning music theory, unfortunately, a lot of times it gets taught to you as a series of rules. You have to do this. You can't do this. You can't do this. You can't do this.

That makes music feel very proscriptive, like there's a right way of music, and I find that really unfortunate because that's not what music theory is.

Music theory is descriptive. It's looking at music and going, "Hey, we've noticed that this thing happens over and over and over again. Why might that happen over and over again? What does that say to us when we're listening to it? Why would we want a complex rhythmic pattern in this situation, but not in this situation?"

I just really want to understand how it's put together.

When people ask me what music theory is, I always say it's how music works, why it works the way it does, and why composers wrote the way they did. That's my layperson description of what music theory is.

Then music cognition, I say, is how we're processing and understanding music. What's happening in our brain, and how is that affecting us?

Big picture, that could be physiologically, is it raising our heart rate? Is it giving us chills? Or it could be emotionally, does this music uplift us, give us energy?

One of the big paradoxes is, why do we like to listen to music that makes us sad? Why is that a pleasurable experience, to make ourselves sad?

Essentially, it's because it's a controlled environment where we're able to express and feel those emotions.

We can have emotional reactions, physiological reactions, and health and wellness implications.

Music therapy is a discipline that's very closely connected to music cognition. Basically, music therapy takes cognition research and uses it in clinical settings to help people, whether that's physically, stroke victims learning to walk again or learning to speak again, or mental health issues, depression, Parkinson's, degenerative diseases.

There's a lot of work here on campus using music as an intervention for helping Parkinson's patients with things like apathy or lack of interest in engaging in daily life. If music can help them with that, then it's serving an incredibly meaningful purpose.

I just like answering questions about how and why, I think, and that's kind of where my thing is.

Farha: I just loved what you said about why we choose to listen to music that makes us sad. It's not necessarily because we're sad. We may be choosing to listen to sad music on a sunny day, in a perfectly wonderful moment in our life.

In fact, just last night I was singing along with my son, who was playing the guitar. He was telling me about the story behind one of Eric Clapton's songs. It's very sad when you know the meaning. You've heard it and maybe never even connected the dots, but there we were singing it together.

Leigh: I'm going to guess it was "Tears in Heaven."

Farha: Yes. You realize that's a very tragic song, and yet we listen to it with happiness. I think it is one of the great ironies of life.

Leigh: Right.

Farha: That's deep. That's philosophical. And a whole other discipline.

You mentioned neuroscience. Neuroscientists have been using music for a long time. We scan brains with MRI to try to understand how people perceive music. There is strong scientific research behind how music can help, as you say, with certain illnesses and that kind of thing.

Yet the School of Music might be underfunded in this regard, right? It's another paradox, because you have a very strong scientific side that's trying to use music to help people, but at the same time music theorists like yourself may be underfunded in this regard.

If I'm not mistaken, you're working at trying to bridge that gap. You say something, which was kind of funny, that you "steal" from some of that research that has been funded in order to have better pedagogical approaches, or certainly help you understand music in this cognitive sense.

Leigh: This is a different area of interest for me.

I love teaching music theory, and it's a very complex system that we're trying to teach people. It's something that they need to understand very quickly and easily, and to have this information readily available at all times.

I started realizing that there were a lot of parallels with mathematics.

As children, when we're learning things like basic addition, if we're trying to do four plus three, we usually start off by counting on our fingers and going, "Okay, let's see, that's one, two, three, four." Then on the other hand, maybe we'll go, "One, two, three." Then we still have to count them all together and figure out, "Oh, that's seven."

At some point, we move on from that strategy into maybe going, "Okay, I've got four, and if I add three more, four, five, six, seven. All right, that's going to be seven."

Eventually, we just know it, right? Eventually, we just know that four plus three is seven.

It's the same kind of idea. We have to develop the skills of just knowing a bunch of things in music theory.

So I got really curious about how math teachers navigate through those educational steps and strategies. I did a lot of research in mathematics pedagogy because mathematics is a STEM discipline, and the teaching of mathematics at all levels, from small children and early education all the way through college, has been very well researched and is very well funded in terms of pedagogical research.

So I thought, I'm going to steal this from them.

I looked at a whole bunch of this pedagogical research and tried to figure out, how do we apply this to what we're doing as musicians? Where do we have similar processes or schemas that we need to understand?

There was an article that I wrote in, I think, 2011 or 2012, about what music theory pedagogy can learn from mathematics pedagogy. That was one of the first attempts to really bridge pedagogical literature from STEM disciplines and bring it into music theory.

But even that is bringing in cognition because it's talking about literature of cognition in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Basically, how do we learn this material? How do we make these connections with this material?

Again, the Venn diagram for me just overlaps over and over again, and I keep finding little niche questions that happen within the different overlaps that I get to study.

Farha: You also discovered that students who did really well in math on entrance exams in the U.S., like the SATs, could potentially do well in music theory. That was an interesting side for you, because the mathematical brain seemed to help when it came to music theory.

I know this firsthand. My other son is now in his third year of engineering, and he's actually quite obsessed with the connection between music and math. Sometimes he'll send me something in relation to that.

That doesn't surprise me after looking at this article that you just mentioned, because it does seem that there's a beautiful intersection.

Leigh: Obviously, music has structure and systems and organization, and mathematics has structure and systems and organization.

It's not a one-to-one correspondence. You can't make that direct correspondence. But a lot of things are similar, and especially at early levels of learning, the systems that underlie music theory interconnect in a way that's very similar to a lot of basic mathematical processes.

A lot of times people will take a music theory course and you'll hear them say, "God, it's really systematic, and it feels more like math than music sometimes."

That's kind of true, unfortunately, just because there are these systems that you have to learn and develop the processes and the schemas in order to move on and do other stuff.

But that's true in mathematics as well. You have to learn that four plus three is seven before you can start talking about calculus. So the processes are similar.

There was evidence that the best predictor for how someone was going to do in a music theory class at the university level was how well they did on the math portion of the SAT.

It's a reflection of, do you have that sort of systematic thought process? Do you know how to go through that kind of systematic thought process and create the connections between things?

It doesn't mean that it can't be learned. Students will come in and say, "But I'm not good at math, so I'm not going to be good at this."

It's like, okay, they're related. They're not the same. You can be good at this. There are ways of becoming good at this. You don't have to be good at math.

But I think it's a little bit daunting for some people in an early music theory class when it's more about systems and processes and less about the music.

I've actually veered towards, let's talk more about the music and let the systems and processes come with that.

I feel like I had to do that research in order to get to a point where I realized, I now know the best ways to incorporate the systems and processes into "let's actually talk about music" and get to the point where we're doing both.

We're learning the processes, and we're talking about music in an analytical and interesting way.

Farha: I have in my notes something that you'd said about an "ill-formed system." Is that what it's actually called?

Leigh: Yes.

Farha: Can you explain that?

Leigh: That's the term for the system.

A well-formed system is one that is completely internally consistent. There is no situation in which you will add four plus three and get anything other than seven.

Music is not well-formed. So it is what is called an ill-formed system.

Everything is dependent on the context surrounding it. That is one major difference between the two.

In music, 90 percent of the time you might see something spelled in a chord in one particular way, but sometimes you won't. Then you have to think and go, "Why? What is happening around this that made this the right choice for the way to do whatever this thing is?"

So it's an ill-formed system, which I laughed so hard when I learned that term, because I was like, "Yes. Yes, it is. Music is definitely an ill-formed system."

All it means is that it's not completely internally consistent, and sometimes different things will result from the same action.

Farha: And then when you start adding things like polymeter and polyrhythm, and offbeat...

Leigh: Syncopation.

Farha: That's the word. I did mention that in the intro. Can you define syncopation for those out there who've never heard that word?

Leigh: Sure.

Syncopation is a measurement of how many events fall essentially in places you're not expecting them.

If you have a very simple rhythmic pattern that's going, "ta, ta, ta, ta," then those are falling on beats. We start developing an expectation for how it's going to continue.

If we have established some kind of regular metric pattern and then start getting events that happen in places we're not expecting them, then that's syncopation.

If we have a regular rhythmic pattern, if I clap, will people hear it?

Farha: Yeah.

Leigh: If we have a regular rhythmic pattern that's kind of going like that, but I start going, "ta, ta, ta, ta," and start saying events on offbeats, then those are syncopated.

They're happening at times where we haven't developed the expectation that something will happen because there's a beat there or a pulse there.

Farha: It reminds me of a flamenco class.

Leigh: Sure. Flamenco uses rhythms that are very, very syncopated.

Farha: Now I want to talk a little bit about something that's also dear to you.

When a professor like yourself starts teaching a music theory class, in some ways you have to shed the idea that you are an expert. You can't expect that what you say is going to be understood by everyone.

It doesn't mean you're going back to ABCs. However, this is where the pedagogical side comes in. You're interested in how people can learn something that an expert just automatically understands, and how that can be communicated.

It sounds simple, but it's actually not.

Leigh: It's not.

There's a phenomenon called the curse of expertise.

The curse of expertise is essentially that when you are an expert at something, you take a whole bunch of steps for granted to get to an answer.

If you are teaching music theory, you are probably an expert in music theory, and you can completely forget how many steps someone just learning this material has to go through in order to get to that end result.

It's something that is so natural and intuitive to you that you've forgotten that it's not that way for everybody.

I got really interested in that idea for a while, and I've been making my colleagues all around North America do this horrible experiment where they have to spell chords and do things in music, but using letter names other than A, B, C, D, E, F, G.

I make them do it starting on H.

For me, it's hilarious, watching people's brains just melt down because all we're changing is the name that we're calling things. People's brains just shut off and they go, "Oh my God, I don't know how to do this."

They freak out about it.

But it's a very vivid demonstration of, look, if you're working with students who are just learning this material, you had to go through all of these steps, and it took you forever to come up with this answer. Then, 30 seconds after you came up with the answer, you forgot it.

That is what your students are going through.

I've done this in workshops and talks for the last 10 years or so. Basically, every time, colleagues at institutions across North America will come up to me and say, "I'd forgotten how hard it can be for someone. Thank you for reminding me that I shouldn't be frustrated with the students when they're struggling with this."

Because I have to remember that they're going through these steps, and I have to think about how I can help them move through these steps.

Some of my research has been focused on how we help students develop strategies and practice strategies to be able to get closer to that mastery or expertise.

I think a lot of professors forget sometimes. You'll write a test question and go, "Oh, they'll be able to answer this in three minutes."

Maybe you can answer it in three minutes, but it's going to take them 15, because you can do the steps a lot faster than they can.

I think people forget that when they're dealing with students. Especially if you're dealing with students who are learning fundamentals, foundational skills, it's going to take them more time to develop those skills, and you have to allow for that.

Farha: That might be a good segue to quickly talk about The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy, because that was a real baby of yours. You really wanted something like this to be available.

It's not a usual book. I want you to explain why, and what you've seen since its publication in terms of what you had hoped for it to be and what has come from it.

Then, before we run out of time, because we're getting close, I don't want to forget you telling us aboiut Ask Dr. Van.

Leigh: So The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy, basically, I put a call out to my colleagues and said, "Send me the lesson plan that you look forward to teaching every year. Just the one that you love teaching, the one that works, the one that students remember, that they respond to. Send me those lesson plans."

I wanted to create a volume of models of excellence in teaching, but also make them accessible to anyone.

If you're going, "Oh my God, I have to teach rhythm and meter tomorrow. What does this person who specializes in rhythm and meter, how do they teach this?"

The book contains a lot of actual lesson plans: start here, do this, do this. It's really aimed at instructors of music theory, not at students who are trying to learn it.

There are also things available online, assignments and worksheets and all kinds of stuff that instructors can use to help students learn this material.

I shopped this book idea around to a number of places, and everyone was like, "No, that is crazy. That's insane."

Routledge was willing to take a chance on it, and I ended up working with 68 different authors.

That was a lot of cats to herd. But luckily, everyone was on board, and it went off surprisingly well.

It came out in 2020, literally right before the pandemic happened, and everyone shifted online, at which point pedagogy completely changed.

Since then, it's being used in a lot of classrooms, like music theory pedagogy classes where you're learning how to teach music theory.

A lot of people teaching those classes ask students to buy this book so that they have these models to look at. A lot of people have told me, "I used this lesson, and this lesson, and this lesson."

I love that this book is providing ideas and models for active learning, for active engagement on the student part.

One of the other things I focused on was using a repertory that was broader than just Western classical music. There's popular music, there's some music from other traditions in the book, and explaining how you can understand this well enough to be able to teach it, which I think is a fear for a lot of people trying to teach outside cultures that they're familiar with.

The really important thing for me is that people are using the book and that people are finding it useful and practical.

It got honoured with a publication award from the Society for Music Theory, which is the big North American society for that discipline, in 2022.

That's actually kind of a big deal because it's the first pedagogical scholarship to ever be given a publication award in the discipline's history. That made me feel really good that this was something that people were finding valuable and meaningful.

I just recently got contacted by Routledge to see if I wanted to put out a second edition.

Farha: Fantastic.

Leigh: So I have more work ahead of me.

Farha: Do you think you'll stay at around the same number of contributors?

Leigh: I don't know what it's going to look like yet. They were saying we might keep some of the articles and add other new things.

I don't know yet what it's going to look like. Watch this space, I guess. That might be coming.

But that's a project that meant a lot to me, and the fact that people are finding it useful and practical is the main thing that makes my heart grow three sizes each day.

Farha: And then finally, Ask Dr. Van.

Leigh: This started because I started getting emails from secondary students, junior high and high school.

A lot of programs have students do research projects earlier these days, and students would send me questions that they were thinking about for their research projects. They would say, "Can you recommend sources for me?" or "Can you help answer these questions?"

I started getting a whole bunch of these. One night, I was joking with my husband and said, "I should just put the answers up online," because some of the questions were similar. I thought I should put the questions up online so that people can go and look at them and see if I've answered their question.

He said, "That's a really good idea. Do that."

So I came up with a website, Ask Dr. Van.

I always ask permission from the students, and I'll redact their full names and whatever, but I'll put up the question and the response that I gave the student.

There are some really deep questions up there.

Sometimes I'll get a question from an eighth grader and go, "All right, you've just hit on one of the fundamental questions of music cognition in general, and there's literally no way I can answer this question. But let me point you to a couple of resources that might be at a level..."

They also don't have access to academic research. I can't say, "Read this journal," because they don't have access to it. But I can point to some books that they might be able to read and understand.

That might prompt or spark some kind of interest where they start pursuing this as a career.

Farha: Finally, Leigh, thank you again for joining me today.

Leigh: Thank you so much for having me.

Further Reading