We present our second THINK THEORY! crossword. Answers come from recent issues, so diligent readers will recall these music theory-related terms.
Click the crossword puzzle for a full-size downloadable image that you can print out (or fill out on your touch display).
CLUES
- Fireflies will do this with flashing LED lights
- Winged jazz saxophonist?
- Jewish instrumental folk music from Eastern Europe
- Avant-garde American composer whose scores approach visual art
- Prefix shared by meter, active, and marché
- 8-note collection employed by Messiaen, Stravinsky, and Silvestri
- Polyhedron that models the hexatonic set via triads
- Extremely small intervallic difference
Crossword Answers
See the completed puzzle with explanations here.
Department News
Faculty Updates
From Mark Arnett: For the third year in a row I’ve enjoyed teaching a blues and rock analysis course, examining the forms and patterns that make up many sub-genres of American popular music. On the curriculum front I was asked to chair the College of Music Curriculum Committee, assisting our faculty in creating and updating courses to better serve our student body. I was also asked to serve on the Boulder Faculty Assembly Working Group for Common Curriculum to continue to work towards implementing a campus-wide set of educational experiences which will apply to all incoming first-year students.
Karin Buer’s review of Progressive Sight Singing, 3rd edition (Carol Krueger) and A New Approach to Sight Singing, 7th edition (Berkowitz et al.) was published in the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy in spring 2025. She has upcoming performances with the Longmont Chorale (violin) and Longmont Symphony Orchestra (violin), and is working on a chamber music recital (piano) for the spring.
Philip Chang has become interested in pop/rock choruses that have internal bridge-like structures. He has also been selected to serve on the program committee for the 2026 edition of the Pedagogy in Practice conference in Vancouver, B.C.
Leah Frederick recently had two articles accepted for publication: “On Fingerboard Shapes, Violinistic Chord Spacings, and Instrumental Affordances in the Adagio of J.S. Bach’s G-minor Violin Sonata, BWV 1001” will appear in Music Analysis and “Expertise, Difficulty, and Recognizing Chords in ‘More Complicated’ Contexts: Harmonic Analysis as a Pedagogical Bottleneck” will appear in the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy.
Daphne Leong’s chapter “A Metric Puzzle in Sibelius’s Violin Concerto” was published in Encountering Music Analysis (2025) by the Sibelius Academy, Finland; her “Embodying Coltrane’s Love Supreme” should be out soon in Music and Motion: Interweaving of Artistic Practice and Theory (mdwPress). She is editing a journal issue, “Rhythm in Music since 1900: Views from Theory and Practice,” for Revue musicale OICRM, bringing together composers, performers, and scholars on rhythm in music ranging from jazz and rock to Benjamin Britten and Iannis Xenakis. In the peer-reviewed volume she is proud to present the voices of young scholars (including Theory Certificate alum Andres Orco) and established ones (such as Jason Yust and Richard Cohn), alongside those of performance luminaries (such as Miles Okazaki, Jacqueline Leclair, and Fabrice Marandola), composer Nicole Lizée, and many others. In 2025-26 Leong has given or will give three invited presentations: as keynote for the Rocky Mountain Society for Music Theory and Musicological Society, for the Israeli Musicological Society, and at the University of Toronto.
Yonatan Malin published “Timing in Klezmer Music” in the journal Analytical Approaches to World Music. He also published “Modes in Klezmer Music: A Corpus Study Based on Beregovski’s Jewish Instrumental Folk Music” together with Daniel Shanahan (Northwestern University) in the journal Music Theory Online. This fall, Yonatan hosted a Yiddish Song and Klezmer residency with the singer Anthony Mordechai Zvi Russell, accordionist and composer Dmitri Gaskin, violinist Zoë Aqua, and cellist Raffi Boden. He presented a paper at a joint meeting of the Society for Music Theory Autographs and Archival Documents Interest Group and Analysis of World Musics Interest Group; the paper was titled “Archives and Living Traditions: Interpreting a Klezmer Manuscript from the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine.”
Keith Waters’s recent book, Chasin’ the Sound: Learning Jazz Improvisation through Historical Models (co-authored with Brian Levy), was published by Oxford University Press this summer. In February he traveled to the University of Amsterdam to participate on a dissertation defense and deliver an invited lecture at the conference “Jazz Progressions: Voicing Theoretical and Historical Perspectives.” Keith also performed with Grammy-award winning jazz trumpeter Brian Lynch in several venues in June. He looks forward to another three-class public music theory course with (friend of the theory department) Dave Fulker next spring at the Jewish Community Center in Boulder entitled “Old, New, Borrowed, and Blue, or How Music from the Renaissance to the Blues Has Employed Repetition, Reuse, Repurposing and Recycling.”
Meet Our New M.M. Students
Ethan Bonnell holds interests in combinatorics, group theory, prosody, and aesthetics. Reflecting this diversity, he is theoretically working on analyzing expressive timing in vocal performances of jazz standards, enumerating all-interval series under various groups, categorizing performances of the music of J. S. Bach in non-classical idioms, and studying the group structures of uniform triadic transformations. He is more often grading for aural skills, reading 20th-century novels, playing chess, and watching basketball. He listens largely to country music.
Marshie Ly is a master’s student, teaching assistant, and tutor in music theory at CU. Her research interest is music cognition, and she is a laboratory affiliate in the Brain Music Laboratory at the ATLAS Institute. She earned her dual bachelor’s degree in music studies and psychological and brain sciences with a minor in German studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she was a four-time recipient of the Dean’s Honors Award from the College of Letters and Science. During her time at UCSB, she was a research assistant in the Music Cognition Laboratory, the Longitudinal Mixture Modeling Research Laboratory, and the Computational Mate Choice Laboratory. Additionally, she was a pianist and clarinetist with the UCSB Ensemble of Contemporary Music.
ABOUT THE MUSIC THEORY DEPARTMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER
Our faculty are Mark Arnett, Karin Buer, Philip Chang, Leah Frederick, Daphne Leong (chair), Yonatan Malin, and Keith Waters.
Visit the department home page for more information.
Header image by Fer ID.
