Boston University School of Medicine Alumni News

Newsletter for Boston University School of Medicine alumni

Satie, Cage, and the New Asceticism

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The Apostasy Of George Rochberg

An exploration of George Rochberg’s much-publicized rejection of musical modernism—in particular serialism—in the early 1960s. The paper will explore Rochberg’s conception of musical time and space, duration in music and its relationship to the roles of memory, identity, intuition, and perception in the shaping of human experience. It will explain his notion of the “metaphysical gap between human consciousness and cosmos,” which he derived in part from Wittgenstein’s proposition that ethical and aesthetic judgments lie outside the property of language. In Rochberg’s view, serialism fails to provide an organic three-dimensional model of duration as experienced through the human perception of time: past (memory) and future (anticipation) become conflated into a continuous present, and the crucial balance between information and redundancy has malfunctioned.Une exploration du rejet bien connu, chez George Rochberg, du modernisme musical — plus particulièrement du sérialisme — au début des années 1960. Cet article examine la conception que Rochberg se faisait de l’espace et du temps musical, de la durée en musique et de ses rapports avec la mémoire, l’identité, l’intuition, ainsi que la perception dans le développement de l’expérience humaine. Il explique la notion d’« écart métaphysique entre la conscience humaine et le cosmos » que Rochberg fait en partie remonter à la proposition de Wittgenstein selon laquelle le jugement éthique et esthétique résiderait en dehors des propriétés du langage. Selon Rochberg, le sérialisme ne parvient pas à fournir un modèle organique tridimensionnel de la durée qui correspondrait à celui qui provient de la perception humaine du temps : passé (mémoire) et futur (prévision) fusionnent en un présent continu, et l’équilibre décisif entre information et redondance se révèle défaillant

Contemporary Music in Canada - 2: The Avantgarde and Beyond

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Contemporary Music in Canada - 1

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Interview with John Cage

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Effect of Summer Learning Loss on Aggregate Estimates of Student Growth

Recent reforms in federal educational policy now mandate the use of student assessment data to evaluate teachers and principals. Despite the widespread adoption of Student Growth Percentiles (SGPs) and other models to link student achievement growth to teacher and school effectiveness, little research exists evaluating the validity of the resulting effectiveness estimates for use in high-stakes personnel evaluation systems. This paucity in the literature is especially problematic given that significant correlations between effectiveness estimates and student characteristics, specifically poverty, have been well documented. This dissertation explores summer learning loss as one potential source of bias in annual estimates of student growth for teacher and school evaluation. The guiding hypothesis is that economically moderated summer learning patterns are contributing to systematic error variance in teacher and school effectiveness estimates when calculated based on annual test scores. Datasets from two, nationally distributed commercial interim assessment programs are analyzed separately and their results discussed. Results reveal that the extent of summer learning loss, and by extension, its effect on the validity SGPs for evaluation purposes varies by subject, grade level, and testing program. Statistically significant correlations between mean Student Growth Percentiles and summer learning loss range from r = -.310 to r = -.662. Implications for fairness and education policy are discussed