NU Splash Biography

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DIANNA LAUROESCH, NU fifth year, music student teacher

College: Northwestern University

Major: music, linguistics

Year of Graduation: 2021

Brief Biographical Sketch:

My name is Dianna (they/them) and I am a fifth year undergrad at Northwestern majoring in music education, music performance, and linguistics with a minor in Japanese. This fall I am student teaching (major part of being certified as a teacher) over zoom. I was previously at a high school in a suburb of Chicago and I am now at two schools in Evanston, an elementary school and a school for those who need a self-contained classroom. My main instrument is euphonium but I also play the piano.

Past Classes

(Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

A537: Music without the Octave: Wendy Carlos's Unique "Scales" in Splash 2020 Fall (Online) (Nov. 14, 2020)

The octave may be the most fundamental relationship in (Western) music. Yet, what happens if we remove it? Wendy Carlos, composer and electronic musician, wondered what would be the optimal spaces between notes if we valued the thirds and fifth rather than the octave. From this exploration she found 3 "scales" simply labeled as Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, which have far more in tune thirds and fifths than our system, yet no octave! We'll take a brief stroll through music history to see how we got to this point, look at how these relationships are determined, then see what we may do when thrown into a musical system different from our own.