Roland Arlington Wiggins was an American music theorist and educator.
17 Facts About Roland Wiggins
2.
Roland Wiggins married his wife Muriel Dockery Wiggins on November 3,1956, with whom he had three daughters, Rosalyn Cowell in 1957, Suzan Elaine in 1959, and Carol Melissa in 1966.
3.
In high school, Roland Wiggins studied at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music, including studying with Vincent Persichetti, a classical composer, author, and Juilliard School of Music faculty member.
4.
Roland Wiggins went on to study at the Combs College of Music, where after about a week he was invited to be a member of the faculty, and where he earned his doctoral degree in music.
5.
Roland Wiggins then moved to New York where he studied with American composer and theorist Henry Cowell and in 1961 became an authorized instructor of the Schillinger System of Musical Composition.
6.
Roland Wiggins moved to Massachusetts to be the director of the Center for the Study of Aesthetics in Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and subsequently became an Associate Professor of Music at Hampshire College.
7.
In 1989, Wiggins moved to Charlottesville, Virginia where he was the director of the Luther P Jackson Cultural Center at the University of Virginia.
8.
Roland Wiggins defined music theory as a combination of the study of syntax, semantics, and kinesthetics.
9.
Roland Wiggins wanted his students to understand the traditional rules of melodic motion, how notes are arranged, harmonic progression, and rhythmic structure, sometimes called "inside theory".
10.
Roland Wiggins was a member of the Association for Symbolic Logic.
11.
Roland Wiggins was fond of saying that syntax was largely about sets of things and their behaviors, for example the set of active tones in a chord and the ways in which they can resolve.
12.
Roland Wiggins developed his own theory which he called the "atonal method".
13.
Roland Wiggins was fond of encouraging his students to get rid of their teachers and to become their own theorists.
14.
Roland Wiggins would point out that most great musicians are their own theorists and that greatness is a realization of a tendency.
15.
Archie Shepp speaks of how he asked Roland Wiggins to teach some of his own classes, while Shepp sat in to listen and learn like the rest of the students.
16.
Roland Wiggins encouraged Coltrane to give himself credit for the mastery that he'd already developed and the contributions he'd already made to music.
17.
Roland Wiggins is the father of author and scholar Rosalyn W Berne.