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William
Goldenberg
News Release
Contact: Mark McGowan, NIU Office of Public Affairs
(815) 753-9472
November 10, 2004
NIU music professor to promote playfulness
during Presidential Teaching Professor seminar
DeKalb — William Goldenberg majored in mathematics as an undergraduate while he plotted a course for medicine.
“I took a lot of math and science courses, and I was admitted to medical school,” said Goldenberg, a Presidential Teaching Professor in the Northern Illinois University School of Music. “I didn’t do it. Music was what I wanted.”
Yet nearly a quarter-century after he began teaching music at NIU, Goldenberg finds a prominent connection between the teaching of music and the teaching of … well, just about anything else, including even the strictest hard sciences: playfulness.
“Every discipline depends on playfulness. You need to kind of open your mind and be playful. You need to allow for any thoughts that might develop in your mind to blossom,” Goldenberg said.
“Later you have to judge them – the buzz word today is ‘assessment’ – but first you must allow your mind to be open to whatever is playful. Creativity is really what it amounts to. That is what I did when I was working in mathematics, trying to prove theorems.”
Goldenberg will lead “The Playful Touch: Developing the Whole Human Being Harmoniously in Community,” a Presidential Teaching Professor Seminar scheduled for noon Tuesday, Nov. 16, in the Capitol Room of the Holmes Student Center.
Refreshments will be served at 11:30 a.m. All are invited. Call (815) 753-1085 for more information.
“Teaching, if not the most important thing we do here, is certainly the most important thing we do with our students, and the Presidential Teaching Professors are the best of the best. The intent of the seminars is to have them share their thoughts, ideas and insights about teaching,” Vice Provost Earl “Gip” Seaver said. “I’ve found them to be quite stimulating and very focused on what people can do to help students learn.”
Those who attend Goldenberg’s seminar should expect a playful approach as they discover how music can tap and nurture human potential, the professor said.
Goldenberg promises to lecture and take questions for only 30 minutes before turning to the piano to perform a short Beethoven sonata. He also will demonstrate how musicians work to interpret and develop a piece of music, and will close the session by involving the audience in their own musical interpretation of a familiar song.
The impromptu choir rehearsal will accomplish Goldenberg’s greater goal: to show how the teaching of music is applicable across the university.
“I have a quote on my flier: ‘Music is the best tool for learning, absolutely, because it takes everything. It takes coordination, it takes brains, it takes heart and it takes collective effort.’ I love that,” he said. “Music is a wonderful way to use all the different ways our brains work. We use our heart, we use our intellectual capacity, we use our social efforts and we use our physical efforts. That’s what’s so wonderful about music, and one reason I’m involved in music.”
Goldenberg began studying piano and music theory at age 6. It grew into a lifelong love, taking him from Oberlin College in his native Ohio to the prestigious Juilliard and to Indiana University-Bloomington, where he earned his Doctorate in Music in 1991. His career at NIU began in 1980.
Music students here enjoy his popular classes in accompanying and sight-reading and the intimate student recitals held in his office. Goldenberg himself plays as many as 30 concerts a year.
He teaches through demonstration, telling stories and putting words to music. Students learn the history behind a composition, music theory and even finger exercises.
“I hope people come away from my seminar knowing that our work here – our research and our teaching – are really fun,” he said. “We’re being playful.”
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