Pedagogy Panel to be held in Quebec
Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society
Quebec City, PQ Canada
November 3, 2007

Pedagogy Panel to be held in Quebec

On Saturday, November 3 from 12:45-1:45, panelists Jose Bowen, Jim Briscoe, and Marjorie Roth will discuss questions from moderator Patrick Fairfield and attendees. The panel will focus on current issues facing music history teachers, from class sizes and curriculum requirements to technology in the classroom. Although there will be time for attendees to ask questions at the event, PSG members may also submit questions in advance by sending an email to Patrick Fairfield.

Teaching Music History Day

September 22, 2007

Conference Program

PSG Poster Session planned for L.A. meeting

After soliciting a call for presentations, the PSG session committee is pleased to announce the participants for the L.A. poster session:

Deanna D. Bush and Cynthia Beard (University of North Texas)
Sarah Day-O'Connell (Knox College)
Dan DiCenso (University of Cambridge)
Melanie Lowe (Vanderbilt University)
Fred Maus (University of Virginia)
Anne-Marie Reynolds (SUNY Geneseo)

Presenters will be on hand to discuss innovative approaches to teaching music history courses and will share examples of course activities, syllabi, and on-line course materials.

Poster Session Abstracts

Fred Maus (University of Virginia)
An Introductory Course for a Decentered Music Major Curriculum

This presentation will introduce my University of Virginia course, Music in the 20th Century (MUSI 305), which has a number of unusual features.

1. Taught at the introductory major level, it is required for all majors, and is conceived as a general introduction to college-level music study. It is rare to place music of the recent past as a "gateway" course for majors.
2. The course covers a wide range of musics, including modernist art music, vernacular music, popular music, and experimental music.
3. It covers this range of musics through focused examination of significant examples, rather than through a survey. This is in keeping with the general decision, in our Department, to abandon the "historical survey"
model in our courses for majors.
4. The course design is multi-disciplinary, bringing together examples of historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and popular music studies, and drawing on critical approaches such as ethnography, gender and sexuality studies, cultural geography, and Adorno's culture criticism. With one exception (Reebee Garofalo's sophisticated textbook on rock), all readings are professional-level scholarly writing rather than textbooks.
5. The writing assignments are unusual. The final project is a sustained paper on a single composition, song, or album, usually a classical or popular example. Through the semester students work on preparatory assignments to give them a range of approaches to their music before they write the final paper.

The presentation will include

1. a concise display of bulleted points about the course, similar to the comments above;
2. copies of the syllabus;
3. ample worksheets and assignments, including the components of the final project.

Daniel J. DiCenso (University of Cambridge, Ph.D. candidate)
Activities-Based vs. Outcome-Based Approaches to the Music History Survey: Making Deliberate Decisions about Classroom Activities and Assessment

Among the many theories of curriculum and instruction, two models emerge as the dominant ways of structuring the music history survey: the Activities-Based model and the Outcome-Based model. Though these theories are rooted in very different assumptions about what constitutes learning, many instructors mix and match pedagogical activities rooted in both of these theories. As a result, classroom practices and assignments do not always clearly communicate to students what constitutes "learning," leaving students confused and instructors frustrated.

The purpose of this presentation is threefold: 1) to help instructors make deliberate and effective decisions about involving Activities-Based and Outcome-Based approaches in the teaching of the music history survey, 2) to demonstrate the very different classroom practices that derive from each approach, and 3) to illustrate how instructors can ease the burden of learning for students by carefully aligning their classroom practices with their philosophical assumptions about learning. Understanding what one's assumptions are and how those assumptions impact upon the day-to-day of teaching can help make lessons easier to design and music history easier to learn.

The presentation will include a definition of terms, an explanation of Activities-Based vs. Outcome-Based theory, and a demonstration of the influence each approach can have on the design of syllabi, classroom activities, and assessment (testing) using concrete examples. An annotated bibliography of other resources on Activities-Based and Outcome-Based curriculum and instruction will be provided as a handout.

Deanna D. Bush and Cynthia Beard (University of North Texas)
Making Large Classes Personal: Music Appreciation in a Blended Format

In the fall of 2005, the Music History Area of the College of Music of the University of North Texas received a grant in support of a proposal co-authored by Dr. Deanna D. Bush, History Area Coordinator, and doctoral student Cynthia Beard to convert its high enrollment general music courses (200 plus students) from a traditional lecture format to a "blended" format that combines web-based instruction, class lectures, and weekly meetings with groups of approximately 30 students per group. Favorable student response to the pilot version of this "Music Appreciation" resulted in the need to open additional sections of the course.

The success of the course is largely attributable to a more effective use of class time and improved instruction enhanced by technology. Class lectures serve principally to introduce students to a new unit and to live performances of music by faculty artists. Online lessons, self-testing, and detailed information about the daily operations of the class are readily accessible on the course website and free up class time for instruction in small groups. Groups meet weekly to participate in a variety of interactive learning activities designed to teach them to problem solve and to develop effective strategies for focused learning.

We propose to include in our poster presentation an overview of an online lesson, including a Flash interaction, and a video excerpt of a small group session displayed on a laptop computer. The course syllabus, class schedule, and statistical assessment results will be made available to interested parties.

Anne-Marie Reynolds (SUNY Geneseo)
A Novel Approach: Teaching Music History Through Literature

In 20+ years of teaching, I've found that most students think music history is just a series of facts to be memorized, without relevance to their lives.

Therefore the way I teach topic courses in music history is around carefully selected memoirs and historical fiction. These serve as the skeleton of the course, while musical examples, scholarly articles, and related films flesh it out. The whole point is to study music history within the context of a living society, one that is made to feel immediate rather than distant. It has been my experience that this approach instantly engages students and makes the composers and their music real and relevant.

My poster session would detail two examples of music history courses that I have successfully structured around literature, presenting the texts, supplemental articles and films I use, as well as syllabi, sample assignments, and in-class activities I have created.

The first course, "Longing in Music," is based on two historical novels about the lives and music of Robert and Clara Schumann. In addition to a host of musical and ideological issues related to German Romanticism, the books raise questions about historiography and the interpretation of sources, since both were based on precisely the same sources, yet resulted in narratives with different emphases and even agendas. In one assignment, the students consider how much this difference has to do with the authors' gender, since one was male and the other female, and how much with their latter-day perspectives on people and events long past.

The second sample course is called "The Artist in the Third Reich" and addresses the various moral and ethical choices musicians, painters, and actors face as they pursue their art. The first half of the course is driven by a memoir about two players in the orchestra Hitler established for Jewish musicians. One assignment asks the students to compare the ways that Classical music was used by the Nazis for propagandistic purposes and how the very same compositions were used as statements of protest by musicians in concentration camps. Similarly, the second half of the course deals with how differently jazz was viewed by the Nazis as compared to members of the Resistance, and centers on a historical novel about the experiences of a gay, black, jazz pianist interred in Dachau. The students are asked to reflect on moral and ethical choices artists face today, as well as the ways that music continues to serve as a manipulative device.

Melanie Lowe (Vanderbilt University)
Batman and Beethoven

One of my most effective pedagogical strategies for teaching undergraduate music history courses is to engage students' everyday cultural experiences, particularly by using scenes from recent American films and television shows to frame historical topics. For the poster session, I will have on hand the film clips, lecture outlines, and student activities for two classes I have found to be particularly effective. The first is a class on Beethoven in which I show scenes from Batman, New York Stories, Hannah and her Sisters, Barton Fink, and The Red Violin to consider the composer's biography and mythology, conceptions of the romantic artist, and the enduring legacy of their construction. The second is a class in which I introduce students to topics in Mozart's opera Le nozze di Figaro. At the beginning of this class, I ask my students to consider how the contemporary musical soundscape of our lives informs movie soundtracks. We then draw some parallels between how film composers today use these sounds for expressive purposes and how Mozart used the soundscape of his world for the same. The film Trading Places, which features the Figaro overture as its main title and "Se vuol ballare" whistled diegetically by a main character, serves as an engaging frame for the detailed picture of topics and expressive meaning in Mozart's opera. I will also have available a list of other film and television clips I use and an explanation of how they are integrated into the historical content of the respective classes.

Sarah Day-O'Connell (Knox College)
K. Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism and the Liberal Arts Music Curriculum

In college and university music departments, curricular discussions often invoke a familiar dichotomy: canonic repertoires and methodologies "versus" the interests of diversity. Meanwhile, a provocative and widely-reviewed new book advocates cross-cultural understanding while concurrently rejecting "globalization" and "multiculturalism" as rubrics under which to pursue it -- thereby calling into question the premises of traditional music curricula as well as many of our efforts at curricular revision.

I take up this challenge by proposing a one-year, introductory course sequence directly inspired by the book in question, Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (W. W. Norton, 2006). Cosmopolitans, as Appiah construes them, uphold intertwining beliefs in universal values, obligations to others (transcending family and citizenship), and the importance of human difference. A cosmopolitan music curriculum, then, would centralize "habits of coexistence," that is, "conversation in its older meaning, of living together, association" (xix). Given this emphasis on dialogue, in fact, the study of music is particularly suggestive for a cosmopolitan worldview, which relies on engaged listening. Cosmopolitanism, in turn, provides a timely alternative to the polarization that threatens to obscure the complexity of issues and research, as well as the potential for disparate scholarly enterprises to overlap and instruct one another.

The proposed course sequence also addresses musical case-studies in order to examine some of Appiah's bolder assertions in depth. These include "contamination" and the condescension of cultural preservation, "cultural imperialism" and the exaggerated threat of the homogenized consumer, and "local allegiance" and the prioritization of cultural practices that are close and familiar. Handouts will include syllabi and detailed assignment sequences.

CMS Institute for Music History Pedagogy

June 8-10, 2006
Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana 46208

Institute for Music History Schedule

Synopsis of 2006 Meeting