Rasmus Gustav Levin: Toward Empirically Grounded Satslære

Field of study: Music Education

This project addresses the lack of empirical grounding in Satslære textbooks used at Scandinavian music academies, which often relies on qualitative accounts of stylistic norms and listener experience, and tend to conflate these perspectives, thereby blurring the distinction betweenclaims.

First, the project documents stylistic norms in Satslære textbooks and compares them with digital corpus data to establish an empirically grounded, stylistic-norm-based framework.

Second, it develops a distinct listener-based framework by adapting music-cognitive concepts, such as expectation, memory, and encoding, to support subjective analysis in Satslære, and to connect Satslære more directly to students’ personal musical praxis.

Finally, the project evaluates how keeping stylistic-norm-based and listener-based principles analytically separate facilitates students’ learning of Satslære, and examines students’ views on the usefulness of music-cognitive concepts in their musical praxis through semi-structured interviews and reflexive thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke.

Research Questions

These are the key questions that form the basis of the study:

1. Which stylistic norms of the common-practice period are presented in Satslære textbooks used in higher music education in Scandinavia, and how accurately do these presentations correspond to statistical data from large-scale digital corpora?
2. How can stylistic-norm-based and listener-based frameworks be developed to support clear and analytically rigorous Satslære that is approachable for musicians, and what factors should guide the systematic introduction of concepts from each framework across bachelor-level Satslære courses (years 1–3) to optimize conceptual clarity and coherence?
3. What pedagogical influence do higher education teachers and bachelor music students (years 2–3) report from working with Satslære that adopts the stylistic-norm-based and listener-based frameworks within the classroom, and what practical influence do students report from applying these frameworks in independent work (e.g., practice, performance, and composition)?