Music for Global Human Development - Fall 2018 Assignments and Schedule

Note: as this class is an instance of M4GHD, incorporating feedback and gradually adapting to context, the schedule will unfold from week to week as a pedagogical improvisation.

Short link to this page: http://bit.ly/m4ghd18a
Short link back to the syllabus: http://bit.ly/m4ghd18s

Week 1: 04-Sep-18 & 06-Sep-18: Introduction

Tues

• Welcome to M4GHD!
• There are absolutely no prerequisites for this course.
• Self-introductions
• In this class we'll learn about music's social power by reading & discussing & writing....but also by experiencing and doing.
  • Tuesdays: academic didactic/discursive/critical learning (propositional knowledge)
  • Thursdays: experiential learning (procedural knowledge)
  • Outside of class: homework, and Community Service Learning projects in the community.

M4GHD and Rosie

• M4GHD: deploying music as a social technology, for connection. How does that work? Understanding through experience...
• Let's jump right in with the experiential: Connecting through song: performing Rosie.
• What is the social power of music? (for you, for inmates...) What is the source of this power?
• Completely Optional: prepare your own versions of Rosie for Thursday.
• Rosie via David Guetta ft. Nicki Minaj ("Hey mama") - appropriation by the music system?
  • What do you hear? World musical influences?
  • How has the meaning changed?
  • Celebration of the original? Or exploitation? Cultural appropriation?
  • What are the implications for world music?
  • See this article by Jeff Miers.

About the course

• In this class you will create a mini M4GHD project using models from Community Music Therapy. (In fact, this class is itself a M4GHD project!)
• Introduction to CSL and the CSL Certificate. Set up via portal. 20 hours of CSL during the term, replacing other work.
• CSL Collaborations:
  • Edmonton Mennonite Centre for Newcomers (EMCN), Suzanne Gross, Manager – Strategic Initiatives.
  • Multicultural Health Brokers, Yvonne Chiu (co-founder) and Kreisha Oro (Intercultural Consultant)
• Project brainstorming! Sustainable modules you'll create.
• Special dates to note: Symposium on Community Music Therapy (Dates TBD - last week of Nov or first week of Dec)
• Easy to remember URL shorteners:
  • bit.ly/m4ghd18s = syllabus
  • bit.ly/m4ghd18e = eClass
  • bit.ly/m4ghd18a = assignments
• Course syllabus review (note what is due next Tuesday)
• Noon: Visit from Suzanne Gross and Joseph Luri, Edmonton Mennonite Centre for Newcomers.

Thurs

Announcements

• Set up your log file (via eClass: see "Student field note logs Wiki")
• Concert: Mysterious Barricades: a cross-Canada concert for suicide awareness, prevention and hope: Saturday, September 15, 4:00 pm, Convocation Hall.

Music workshop

• Tarab: Sabah Fakhri
• Too much music separates us rather than connecting us.
• M4GHD should connect through thought-feeling (ideas and emotions) and interaction. Some features:
  • Avoid the visual. Music is an auditory art.
  • Inclusive style : Not too virtuosic. No high wire acts. Keep it slow and easy, or at least provide parts that enable participation.
  • Body music central. Everyone has a body, including voice. Not everyone has a bass clarinet.
  • Vocal timbre : accommodating of all voices
  • Range : medium
  • Pitch : microtonality, wide tonemes - expressive
  • Scale : open notes, blue notes... pentatonic leaves more space.
  • Notes: avoid the discrete; go for the expressive gesture. Musical elements need not be notes.
  • Polyphony : flexible shifting of lines
  • Melody : Improv, using responsive rules of interaction, encourage connection
  • Harmony : octave as well as fourth fifth third equivalents, allows folding of range
  • Meter : polymeters provide more than one way to fit
  • Form : call and response or interlocking, hocket (connecting). Longer flexible patterns
  • Lyrics: come from participants, maybe improvised? Repetition and vocables make it easier.
• Any Rosie versions to share?
• Pentatonic structure
• Call and response project in class

CSL options

Kreisha Oro (from MCHB) will be visiting.

Week 2: 11-Sep-18 & 13-Sep-18: M4GHD, Ethics, CSL

Concert announcement: Mysterious Barricades: a cross-Canada concert for suicide awareness, prevention and hope: Saturday, September 15, 4:00 pm, Convocation Hall.

Tues

Reading/browsing

... to be completed before class. Come prepared with thoughts, comments, and questions for discussion (see eClass for assignments to be submitted)

• "Music for Global Human Development," by M. Frishkopf (Week 2 folder)
• Review Course ethics documents in Week 2 folder
• Browse Canada's TriCouncil Policy on Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans
• Browse the CSL site

In class

Tarab: Sabah Fakhri

Announcements:

• Concert Saturday: "Mysterious Barricades", for suicide awareness (after a harpsichord piece by François Couperin, 1717)
• CSL assignments on eClass (wiki). EMCN: Saturday and Sunday; MCHB.
• CSL signup procedure: see eClass
• Don't forget to set up your field notes doc and share with me

Some concepts....some Socratic method...

• What is Ethnomusicology (henceforth EM)? (Musicology, but extended in 3 ways:
  • (1) scope of "music" as cultural construct and in the world of sound;
  • (2) context of music as situated in performance space-time as well as in culture and history;
  • (3) disciplinary approaches to its study, to encompass all fields of arts, humanities, social science, science)
• Can you give me some examples of these extensions? Consider Rosie.
• Ethno-musicology vs. Ethnomusic-ology
• What is "world music"? (hint: consider one of the extensions, and consider classes rather than instances)
• What is Applied Ethnomusicology? (Ethnomusicology operating outside the academy.) Examples?
• What is Music for Global Human Development (http://M4GHD.org)? Music as a (Psycho-)Social Technology. Aims and methods. Helping to ameliorate BIG problems (racism, war, disease, poverty) stemming from dehumanization through RECONNECTION. Listen to this nay. KEY ELEMENTS of M4GHD:
  • Participatory Action Research (PAR): collaborative, grassroots, sustainable, helical process (cycle: plan/act/observe/reflect. Line: upwards progress) through a social network.
  • Expressive musical communication ("thought-feeling") for development (cf: Culture and Development, Communication for Development C4D, Edutainment)
  • Open participation
  • Improvisation
  • Feedback through a network & adaptation...leading to resonance...starting with the PAR network itself.
• Examples:
  • Giving Voice to Hope
  • Sanitation
  • Singing and Dancing for Health
  • Aswan Music Project
• What is Community Music Therapy? An extension of Music Therapy situating musical healing in a broader social context. Essentially parallel to EM extensions.
• What is the SYSTEM? LIFEWORLD?

The power of music

• What is the power of music, for you?
• M4GHD - introduction

Music as social technology

• Distribute Giving Voice to Hope CD and speak briefly about the project.
• Discussions:
  • What makes music a powerful social technology?
  • What is M4GHD and how does it work?
  • What is research ethics? Why is it important in our work?
• Introducing: Giving Voice to Hope: CD project

Week 3: 18-Sep & 20-Sep: Ethnomusicology

Tues

Ethnomusicology and Applied Ethnomusicology

• The study of music extended in 3 dimensions
• Methods
• Aims
  • Academic
  • Applied

CSL procedures (see eClass)

Week 15: final assignments due

Final project report (and (b)log and module) due UPLOAD VIA ECLASS.

The project report summarizes what you accomplished, describing the process, assessing results and impact, reflecting on strengths and weaknesses, suggesting future directions, with relevant citations to the literature we read during the term (and optionally going beyond it). Your report should be between 10 and 20 pages in length, not including bibliography or additional assignments attached as appendices -- (b)log and module.

Use 1.5 line spacing, 1” margins, 12 pt font, Times New Roman or equivalent.

In your paper you can reflect extensively on your project, assess why certain directions worked out while others didn't, compare your project to others of your classmates, thinking about why results may have been different in each case.

Report sections may include the following (you don't have to adhere rigidly to this model if it's not working for you):

• Title
• Aim/significance: a paragraph or two on your overall aim and its overall importance - linking to the general aim of M4GHD, human development through music (and including your own development!), and intercultural theories we read.
• Background: (what/who/where/why) what is the setting? who are you working with, and where? provide enough background so the reader can understand the project, and its significance.
• Method: initially, what did you decide to do, and how did you decide to carry it out? Refer to PAR as the general frame (explain how you collaborated and with whom), but then explain more precisely what your plan was. How did your project fit with the larger project at your site, in relation to your colleagues working with you? This section could refer to your project as you initially formulated it (with subsequent changes deferred to the next section).
• Impact: what actually happened? drawing on fieldnotes, present the ethnographic scene as you encountered it at the beginning, describing whom you worked with (including your classmates as well as people at your site, and Edmonton Mennonite Centre for Newcomers), how relationships (to everyone) changed throughout the duration of the project, how you came to formulate your project initially, how you adapted it over time when things didn't work (or did), and what changes you observed at the end. How did your results compare to those of others you worked with? (if you worked together most of the time then they'll be substantially the same, but hopefully you each chose a unique angle, and you can talk about that). If your fieldnotes contain paraphrased speech it's always effective to include some of that in your report - what people actually said (approximately).
• Critical self-assesssment: again drawing on fieldnotes: what worked, what didn't, and why...How sustainable is your project? What have you left your co-participants to continue on without you? What happens when they leave - can it transfer smoothly to those who come after them? What would you like to have done differently? What would you try next if you were to continue (which you can!)
• Future directions, final thoughts, ideas.
• Bibliography

In addition, tack on the following as Appendices (but these sections won't count towards the total page count of 10-20, nor will the bibliography):

• Link to the project module you have developed. Project module: your project includes a portable "module" comprising a set of "resources", potentially including text, images, and audio, which you'll use to carry out your CSL project. You'll develop these during the course of the term, and make them available for others (especially EMCN) to use (include this material within your final paper, or as a website to which your final paper can link). If your module comprises text you can simply include it; otherwise, if there are media (video, photos, audio) involved you can link to a website of some kind (http://sites.google.com will allow you to create websites and share them - there are many other tools that do the same) where the module is stored.
• (b)log: based on field notes, you've been tracking your project by adding entries to a typed log (which may also include media), some portions of which can be made public as a blog (but subject to ethics approvals which we'll review), and other portions of which will remain private (but shared with the instructor) - essentially, these are your fieldnotes, perhaps suitable censored (if on a blog), edited, written out (if handwritten initially). You don't have to make them public on a blog, but if you do you may link from your project report (see below). In either case please submit by Dec 16. If you created a blog (out of fieldnotes), just link to it. Otherwise, just bundle your fieldnotes as your log as an appendix.

Notes: Throughout, cite relevant sources we read in class, or others that you've consulted, especially for the background section (which will be different for everyone, e.g. you may want to include a reference to South Sudanese immigration to Canada...), but also when talking about interculturalism or PAR (since we read various papers in class; you can reference these). Use http://zotero.org or another reference manager to make the reference task much easier - there are plugins for Word and other word processors that will automatically insert citations and format a bibliography. When you cite your fieldnotes you can simply write "(fieldnotes, November 5, 2016)", for instance; you don't have to add fieldnotes to your bibliography. Note that the bibliography doesn't count towards paper length. Please include photos (if you received permission).