Music for Global Human Development - Winter 2020 schedule
short link to this course schedule page: http://bit.ly/m4ghd20s
Week 1: 07-Sep & 09-Sep: 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? What does music do for people? (for you, for inmates...) How does it establish connection? What is the source of this power? Make a list of musical features. How does music adapt?
- Divide into subgroups and create your own version of Rosie.
- This is roots music - it comes from the people, from below, without commercial intent. A prison work song, recorded by Alan Lomax in the 1940s.
- What about the system? How is Rosie repurposed within the music economy?
- 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:
- Project brainstorming! Sustainable modules you'll create.
- 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)
Thurs
Announcements
- Set up your log file (via eClass: see "Student field note logs Wiki")
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
- Improvisation and flexibility: there's room for individual expression, without compromising the whole. But improvisation has a range and an ideal number of "rules", and there's a bell curve of rules: too many or too few rules are constraining. See Stravinsky, The Poetics of Music, p. 63.
- Lyrics: collectively composed by all participants, maybe improvised? Repetition and vocables make it easier.
"The creator's function is to sift the elements he receives from [imagination], for human activity must impose limits upon itself. The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free" - Igor Stravinsky, The Poetics of Music, p. 63
- Any Rosie versions to share?
- Pentatonic structure
- Call and response project in class