Music for Global Human Development - Winter 2020 schedule: Difference between revisions

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* Set up your log file (via eClass: see "Student field note logs Wiki")
* Set up your log file (via eClass: see "Student field note logs Wiki")


=== For today ===
=== Due today ===
* "About me" due (not graded; via eClass: http://bit.ly/m4ghd20e)
* "About me" due (not graded; via eClass: http://bit.ly/m4ghd20e)
* Performances of Rosie
* Prepare to sing Rosie
* Other Call and Response strategies in class
 
=== Ideas:  music of by and for the people ===
=== Ideas:  music of by and for the people ===
* Musical adaptation via participation - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOj_pIhsqkw Tarab:  Sabah Fakhri]
* Musical adaptation via participation - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOj_pIhsqkw Tarab:  Sabah Fakhri]

Revision as of 18:16, 6 January 2020

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

  • This class is itself a M4GHD project!
  • In this class you will create a mini M4GHD project as a response to needs and constraints of your CSL placement.
  • CSL organizations: a variety of organizations have offered placements...representatives will be visiting us over the next two weeks to help you decide where you'd like to volunteer. Consult this list.
  • Introduction to CSL and the CSL Certificate. Set up via portal. 20 hours of CSL during the term, replacing other work.
  • Easy to remember URL shorteners:
    • bit.ly/m4ghd20 = syllabus
    • bit.ly/m4ghd20e = eClass
    • bit.ly/m4ghd20s = schedule
  • Course syllabus review (note what is due next Thursday)

Thurs

Announcements

  • Set up your log file (via eClass: see "Student field note logs Wiki")

Due today

Ideas: music of by and for the people

  • Musical adaptation via participation - 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.
  • Rosie performances
"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

CSL options