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Humanities 223 term paper

HUM 223: Ethnic Music

Springfield College in Illinois

Fall Semester 2006

http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/humanities/hum223syllabus.html

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art. -- Charlie Parker

Term Paper – Fall 2006

One of your requirements in Humanities 223 is to write a documented term paper (at least 2,000 words or eight pages in 12pt type) and deliver an oral report on some aspect of cultural and artistic expression in traditional music or a commercial genre derived from traditional music. This handout tells you how to do it. The instructions, and updates, will be posted to my teaching blog at http://www.teachinglogspot.blogspot.com/ -- Pete Ellertsen, instructor

Your overall assignment. Choose a musician, band or group whose work you enjoy or whom you want to know more about, and write a paper about their artistic influences; how their culture, their musical genre and/or artistic vision shaped their life and career; how they dealt with issues of commercial and artistic success; and their place in the history of American popular music. You may choose your own topic. But since this is an interdisciplinary humanities/cultural studies class, you will do best if you choose a historical figure or a contemporary musician who has been influenced by long-term musical genres (e.g. country, gospel, blues, jazz and the Anglo-Irish or African American cultural traditions they grew out of). Be sure to clear your topic with me before you begin your research. Your opinions and your response to the artist’s music are an important part of the paper, but you need to research your artists’ careers and respond to their music in order to support your opinion. You may use either MLA or APA style. A “Citation Machine” to help you with correct MLA or APA form is available on my faculty website at http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/facultypage.html .

How to approach your paper. In researching and writing your paper, you’ll want to address the following points. Not all of them will be appropriate for every paper you write (for example you don’t need to spell out for me that gospel singer Mahalia Jackson wasn’t a drug addict), but you’ll want to touch these bases in your research:

1. Some biography of your artist or band members, including musical influences, artistic vision (i.e. anything they said about music, like the quote from jazz saxophone player Charlie “Bird” Parker above), and how they made a living from their music. How did they handle the stresses of a musical career, including drug use, road trips, etc.? What compromises, if any, did they make between their artistic vision and commercial success? How successful were they, both artistically and commercially?
2. How were your artists received in their time? By later generations? By the public? By other musicians? How do you, personally respond to their music? Choose a song, or piece of instrumental music, and ask yourself: (a) What about this music stands out in my mind? (b) What in my cultural background, values, taste and interests makes me react to it that way? (c) What specifically about the music makes me feel that way? Consult my handout on literary reader [or listener] response papers and the sample essay on Kinky Friedman at http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/rosenblatt.html.
3. What does your artist’s career tell you about music and the arts, the communications media, the entertainment industry and/or marketing economics in American society? What does it tell you about American popular culture? How well does their music transcend the limitations of its particular genre or cultural background?
   

In researching the paper, you should both read up on the musicians and listen to some of their music. You will find some sources in the library, others on the Internet. If you have trouble tracking down recordings or sound files, see me and I’ll help out.

Robert M. Seiler of the University of Calgary suggests when his students write around music, they actively listen for the sound of vocals or instrumentals, and the “dynamics or the intensity of the sound, in terms of loudness, uniformity, and change.” He also suggests they listen for:

a. the movement of the piece, i.e., concentrate on its rhythm, meter, and tempo,

b. the pitch, i.e., in terms of its order and melody, and

c. the structure of the piece, i.e., its logic, design, and texture.

Seiler’s tip sheet is available at http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~rseiler/music.htm -- his examples are from classical music, but his suggestions work for blues or rock, too. They’re excellent.

Writing about music is a lot like writing about a poem or a play in English classes. In other ways, it's different. Here's what Dartmouth University has to say about one type of music paper:

In a review, you should focus on the form of the music. What sounds make up the music? How does the composer or performer fuse together these different sound elements? How do the different movements work together to create the music's overall effect? Remember to stay away from comments beginning with "I" that reflect only how the music affected you. Instead, question the music using criteria by which we judge excellence, and provide insight into those elements of excellence.

Dartmouth's tip sheet is available on line at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~writing/materials/student/humanities/music.shtml. I recommend it highly.

Who to write about? Any of the artists we have talked about in class are fair game. You can find plenty of information on historical figures like Stephen A. Foster, the Fisk Jubilee Singers or Scott Joplin. Blues and/or jazz vocalists like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday would be good subjects, as would jazz musicians like Louie Armstrong, Charlie Parker or Miles Davis. You can write about gospel singers like Mahalia Jackson, Thomas A. Dorsey (who also sang blues as “Georgia Tom”) or more recent evangelists like Kirk Franklin who mix the music of today with roots music. As you read “Deep Blues” by Robert Palmer, you will learn a lot about Delta and Chicago bluesmen Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, as well as the rock artists like Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan or the Rolling Stones who emulated their music, and you can use Palmer's book as a starting point for your research. You will get other ideas as we watch “Feel Like Going Home” and other DVDs from Martin Scorese’s PBS series “The Blues” during the remainder of the semester. Just be sure to clear your topic with me first.

What are your deadlines? There are three. You will give me a two-page typewritten proposal by Friday, Nov. 3, in which you tell me which performer(s) you will research and what your tentative thesis is; and list, in MLA or APA format, three to five specific sources you have consulted. Your papers will be due by the week of Thanksgiving, which is the week of Nov. 20-21, but I will schedule your oral presentation, on a first-come-first-served basis, when you turn in your paper. So you are allowed to turn it in early. The presentations will be three to five minutes long, and they will be given during the week after Thanksgiving, Nov. 27-Dec. 1.

If you have questions please don’t hesitate to ask me. The quickest way to get hold of me is to email me at pellertsen@sci.edu.

october assessment newsletter ARCHIVE

NUTS & BOLTS

An electronic assessment newsletter
Springfield College in Illinois
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October 2006
Vol. 7 No. 3
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Editor's Note. Until I am able to post to SCI's assessment website again, I am publishing the newsletter by email and archiving it in the interim on my personal weblog at http://www.teachinglogspot.blogspot.com/. -- Pete Ellertsen, assessment chair

Of CATs, Professorenzetteln and assessment

Assessment and government intrusion into the classroom are nothing new. In fact, a recent book by historian William Clark makes a good case they have changed the way we think in Western society over the centuries. The book is “Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University,” and it is reviewed in the current issue of The New Yorker.

The review, by Anthony Grafton, makes me want to read the book. It also makes me think his students – and faculty colleagues – at Princteon are a lot like ours at Springfield College and Benedictine.

“Anyone who has ever taught at a college or university must have had this experience,” Grafton begins. He continues by describing the experience:

You’re in the middle of something that you do every day: standing at a lectern in a dusty room, for example, lecturing to a roomful of teen-agers above whom hang almost visible clouds of hormones; or running a seminar, hoping to find the question that will make people talk even though it’s spring and no one has done the reading … Suddenly, you find yourself wondering … [w]hy, in the age of the World Wide Web, do professors still stand at podiums and blather for fifty minutes at unruly mobs of students, their lowered baseball caps imperfectly concealing the sleep buds that rim their eyes? Why do professors and students put on polyester gowns and funny hats and march, once a year, in the uncertain glory of the late spring? … These activities seem both bizarre and disconnected, from one another and from modern life, and it’s no wonder that they often provoke irritation, not only in professional pundits but also in parents, potential donors, and academic administrators.

Well, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’ve certainly had that experience. And I know what it’s like to try to describe what we do, and why we do it, to outside stakeholders.

Clark’s thesis is that American research universities evolved out academic traditions in 19th-century Germany, and they in turn evolved out of – get this! – bureaucratic policies and procedures in the petty electorates and principalities of the Holy Roman Empire during the 16th and 17th centuries. As Grafton paraphrases him, Clark notes:

Gradually, the bureaucrats devised ways to insure that the academics were fulfilling their obligations. In Vienna, Clark notes, “a 1556 decree provided for paying two individuals to keep daily notes on lecturers and professors”; in Marburg, from 1564 on, the university beadle kept a list of skipped lectures and gave it, quarterly, to the rector, who imposed fines. Others demanded that professors fill in Professorenzetteln, slips of paper that gave a record of their teaching activities. Professorial responses to such bureaucratic intrusions seem to have varied as much then as they do now. Clark reproduces two Professorenzetteln from 1607 side by side. Michael Mästlin, an astronomer and mathematician who taught Kepler and was an early adopter of the Copernican view of the universe, gives an energetic full-page outline of his teaching. Meanwhile, Andreas Osiander, a theologian whose grandfather had been an important ally of Luther, writes one scornful sentence: “In explicating Luke I have reached chapter nine.”

The upshot, according to Clark, was universities evolved ways of measuring learning that satisfied the bureaucrats, when they pushed for “results that looked rational: results that they could codify, sort, and explain to their masters.” During the Middle Ages, testing was largely done in debates known as academic disputations. They came to be replaced by printed dissertations and formal examinations, “exercises that were carefully graded and recorded by those who administered them.” In the language of our own historical era, we might say the new exams and dissertations offered greater transparency to outside stakeholders.

So when we fill out our Classroom Assessment Technique questionnaires at the end of the semester or ask our SCI sophomores to take a fill-in-the-bubble standardized test in the spring, we’re taking part in a government ritual that goes back to the Professorenzetteln of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.
There’s a lot more in Grafton’s article than assessment. For example Mark Twain’s description of the time a thousand students “rose and shouted and stamped and clapped, and banged the beer-mugs” when a historian named Theodor Mommsen walked into a Berlin banquet hall in 1892. Or Clark’s new take on the old story of Abelard and Heloise, and its implications for the way we think today. Or what a doctoral exam was like at the University of Göttingen in 1787. Trivia? Sure. But fascinating trivia. And in the end, it helps us answer Grafton’s question – why do we pontificate in front of classrooms, dress up in caps and gowns and, in general, do the things we do in academic life.

Grafton’s article, headlined “The Nutty Professors,” was in the Oct. 10 issue of The New Yorker. It’s fascinating, and it’s still available on line at http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/061023crbo_books

Assessment committee empaneled

Members of this year’s Assessment Committee are Bob Blankenberger, Brian Carrigan, Dave Holland, Barb Tanzyus and Pete Ellertsen (chair). Student Affairs Dean Kevin Broeckling and Academic Affairs Dean John Cicero are ex officio. Standing meeting time has been tentatively set for 2 p.m. the second Tuesday of the month in the Brinkerhoff Conference Room.

No commission left behind?

The Spellings Commission, named for President Bush’s education secretary Margaret Spellings, has issued its final report. Its recommendations were unchanged from earlier drafts issued in the late summer. Spellings outlined the findings of her Commission on the Future of Higher Education at a Sept. 26 luncheon of the National Press Club and called on Congress to act on a higher ed reform package. The Associated Press and a couple of major metro newspapers including The Christian Science Monitor apparently sent reporters, or assigned them to work the phone a minute or two and get a story. Local reaction stories ran in media markets like Austin, Tex., and Roanoke, Va. And several student publications, including The Cavalier Daily at the University of Virginia and The Daily Star at Northern Illinois University, also ran stories.

But other than that, the commission’s report was greeted by an almost total lack of coverage. It may be significant that during the week of Spellings’ speech a major congressional sex scandal broke out, former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., resigned his office and Congress recessed until after the November elections.

Inside Higher Ed had a good summary of the report Sept. 27, the day after it was issued. On line at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/26/spellings