Teaching Music History Day

DePauw University
Greencastle IN
September 13, 2008

For details, please visit the conference program.

Pedagogy Panel to be held in Nashville

Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society
Nashville, TN
November 8, 2008

Reaching out to Performance Majors in Music History Classes

Co-Chairs: Colin Roust (Oberlin College Conservatory of Music), Valerie Woodring Goertzen (Loyola University New Orleans)

Performance majors may find music history to be an especially challenging portion of their curriculum. While some performance students excel in these courses, others find that their abilities do not translate into ready success in music history, which calls on a very different skill set. Moreover, where students do not recognize connections between course topics and their own experiences and concerns, they may come to view these courses as a burden and a distraction from ensemble rehearsals or the practice room. The papers in this session offer strategies for helping students to engage more purposefully in the study of music history. Topics addressed include the building of critical reading skills through examination of primary source readings, the investigation of contemporary repertoire for a student's instrument or voice, the exploration of links between the cultures of the past and present, and the possibility of a music history curriculum grounded in music making.

"What's in it for me?": Engaging Performance Students with Primary-Source Readings
Julia Randel (Hope College)

One thing we have going for us when we teach performance majors is that they actually like music. Most of them really are interested in learning about the history of the music they love, in the lives of their favorite composers, and in what it would have been like to attend, or participate in, the first performance of one of their favorite pieces. As historians, we know that the best way to gain access to these experiences is through primary-source texts, and yet, when we assign these texts, students often find them difficult and seem to get frustratingly little out of them. This workshop-style presentation will demonstrate techniques for building students' critical reading skills. First, I will lead participants through a sample classroom exercise, a guided reading of three source texts from the late 18th century, using questions designed to take students from basic comprehension, to critical interpretation, to practical application of the ideas in the text. In the second part of the workshop, I will invite discussion of the methods, as well as of practical issues such as how to adapt them for use in large classes, how to choose the most useful and engaging texts, and how to fit these time-consuming activities into our already crowded syllabi.

Bridging Pastness and Presentness in the Teaching of Music History to Performers Jen-yen Chen (National Taiwan University)

One of the paradoxes of performing "canonical" music of earlier historical periods is the apparent contradiction between pastness and presentness: a Beethoven sonata (for example) belongs to a bygone culture, yet also constitutes a significant element of today's living culture. In this presentation I shall argue that the teaching of both history and performance has tended to focus disproportionately on one or the other aspect, thereby enforcing a notion of the irrelevance of the two areas to one another, and that an important way for history classes to become fresher and more vital to performance majors is through an effort to intertwine pastness and presentness. In scholarly terms, the process is a hermeneutic bridging of cultural difference, but from a practical pedagogical viewpoint involves actively encouraging students to articulate links (whether of similarity or of contrast) between the materials of music history and their own personal backgrounds. For my examples, I shall draw upon my recent experience teaching a Mozart course in Asia, which may be especially useful in light of the pronounced cultural disparity (and perhaps also of the preponderance of Asian students in today's conservatories). These examples will include observations by students on parallels between Leopold Mozart's upbringing of his children and filial obedience in Asia; between Wolfgang's entrepreneurial creativity and the activities of contemporary "indie" musicians; and between emerging ideals of individual freedom in the eighteenth century and struggles towards the same ideals in the modern world. By means of this "dialogue" with the past, students may foster a critical appreciation of their own passion for perpetuating historical cultures in our own times.

Music History Against the Grain Dillon Parmer (University of Ottawa)

My paper goes against the grain of this session.

As both professional musician and musicologist, I argue that the difficulties performance majors have with the subject arise because its underlying paradigm-historical contextualism-is fundamentally dissonant with the way music works in actual practice. To be of relevance and value, music-history pedagogy needs to be reconceived on a paradigm grounded in performance.

I argue that traditional pedagogy misconstrues the relationship of academic study to performance. The error derives from an institutional ideology, one that elevates research-based understanding to the status of "higher learning," thereby reducing musical practice into a venue in which such understanding is applied. Both scholars and musicians remain oblivious to how much this ideology still governs their research, teaching, and performance practice.

Drawing from my work as a musician, I debunk the basic premises this ideology instills in the study of music history, that it enriches performance, that it makes for better musicians, that it leads to compelling artistry. Instead, I point to an alternate model for understanding, one grounded in music making. I then outline a curriculum derived from this model, one which makes performing central to understanding. Score study and listening still factor in, but the emphasis is placed on talking about the repertoire in the context of our own performance practice.

The curriculum dispenses with traditional music-history pedagogy, therefore, but performance and non-performance majors alike find the approach more consistent with their playing experience, and they are consequently encouraged to deepen their understanding further.

20th-Century History Projects for Performers
Elizabeth A. Wells (Mount Allison University)

This session describes a paper project that has been assigned to performance majors at both the Eastman School of Music and a small liberal arts college for a 20th-Century history course. The assignment asks students to select contemporary works that are in their repertoire or might well be and conduct research on those works to fulfill an essay assignment following specific criteria. This session will describe the parameters of the assignment and provide real examples of exceptional results from actual student projects. A tie-in with Classical radio stations and the opportunity to "perform" their projects in a conservatory setting has radically changed students' appreciation of and investment in the importance of music history. Some challenges and caveats will be discussed, as well as other assignments for these courses that help to focus student attention on the relevance of music history and musicology to their performance degrees.