Music History and Literature Parts Essay – Description
This requires a little backstory, so bear with me.
The Backstory: this class is part of a two-class series called “Music History and Literature Parts 1 and 2.” (The “Literature” refers to writings about music, not the novels from your English classes.) These two classes covered the history of Classical music (also known as “art music”) from the Western Hemisphere spanning from about 600 AD with the first written chants in the Catholic Church all the way to contemporary art music in the 21st century. Music History I = 600-1750, and Music History 2 = 1750-2000.
Not only is that a ridiculous amount of music to cover in two semesters, it’s also extremely narrow in terms of who wrote the music (mostly straight, white men). In recent years, we’ve been trying to open up this narrative to tell more stories and include a more diverse pool of composers (women, people of color, LGBTQ+, etc.) and maybe even include jazz and film music in addition to the classical music. But yet, even opening things up in this way didn’t seem (at least to me) to provide a better way to contextualize this music as part of a bigger world. It just seemed to tokenize those who were not cis, white, males, making those folks still seem like outsiders in the curriculum. (If you want to read more about the idea of tokenism in
Add the title of each work in that far right column, placing it in proper row based on the time of its composition.
Add the name of the composer in the “Active Composer” column, again in the proper time period.
Add the genre of the work under the “Dominant trends/popular genres” column, in the proper time period.
You will do this every week, adding each new piece as we go. And every week, you will hand in the Timeline with all of the new info added for that week. In the last week, you will do one extra thing–so it’s worth more points: Write up a brief observation of about 250 (or more) words sharing your observations about this process and about what you noticed while or after you filled in the timeline. Mention places where you saw interesting overlaps or intersections or places where you were surprised by the things happening in the same period. You can also make a video of 2-3 minutes instead of writing up your observations.
This Timeline will be shared with you as an editable Word document, but there are plenty of free timeline creating tools online, if you want to get fancy. One thing, though, if you create a timeline using some other tool, you MUST include all of the info in the boring Word Doc version.Music History, please read this fascinating blogLinks to an external site..)
Add the title of each work in that far right column, placing it in proper row based on the time of its composition.
Add the name of the composer in the “Active Composer” column, again in the proper time period.
Add the genre of the work under the “Dominant trends/popular genres” column, in the proper time period.
You will do this every week, adding each new piece as we go. And every week, you will hand in the Timeline with all of the new info added for that week. In the last week, you will do one extra thing–so it’s worth more points: Write up a brief observation of about 250 (or more) words sharing your observations about this process and about what you noticed while or after you filled in the timeline. Mention places where you saw interesting overlaps or intersections or places where you were surprised by the things happening in the same period. You can also make a video of 2-3 minutes instead of writing up your observations.
This Timeline will be shared with you as an editable Word document, but there are plenty of free timeline creating tools online, if you want to get fancy. One thing, though, if you create a timeline using some other tool, you MUST include all of the info in the boring Word Doc version.
So…what do we do?
I found this interesting textbook called Resonances: Engaging Music in Its Cultural Contexts, and instead of going through the history of classical music in chronological order, which is the norm, it organizes music by type or genre. This allows for a cross-cultural study of a genre of music. For example, Chapter 5 in Resonances is about songs. This allows us to compare the musical structures and emotional impact of Lemonade by Beyoncé (2016) with The Beautiful Maid of the Mill by Franz Schubert (1823). We can see the similarities and differences, and hear how both song collections deal with love and loss. So now, I invite my classes to think about music in a broader way.
BUT! – There’s always a “but” isn’t there…
Since many music programs still require these classes–and many of those programs are still defining the scope in the older, narrow way–we are using a SECOND textbook called Understanding Music Past and Present. This book is a much more old-school presentation of the old-school curriculum for this class. So I wanted to find a way to lay out all of the musical examples in both texts so you could begin to get a bigger picture of music in the world.
So I came up with “The Timeline”: a way to put all of the music from this semester in chronological order to see it both in the narrow way and in the broader scope.
Each week, you will add that week’s musical pieces to The Timeline. This is what it looks like (this is just a portion of it for visual reference):
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