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!
• Course premise: Music is a Social Technology...it does something! (Brainstorm: what can music do?)
• 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): musicking (EVERYONE can communicate through music)
  • Outside of class: homework, and Community Service Learning projects in the community.
• Self-introductions
• A few definitions for this class:
  • "Music": extended to "expressive performance" and other media)
  • "Ethnomusicology": extended in sound, media, context, disciplinary lens
  • "Applied ethnomusicology": operating outside the usual boundaries of the academy (research and teaching)
  • "Music for Global Human Development" (M4GHD): an approach to applied ethnomusicology that entails participatory action research projects in music & development (humanized in aims and methods), centered on global collaborations between academics, NGOs, government organizations, musicians, and others, applying ethnomusicology to real-world social issues, focusing on peoples who have been marginalized--socially, politically, economically--by colonialism and its aftermath, whether in the "developing" world or not, and linking them to others across the globe.

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.

More 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

• "About me" due (not graded; via eClass: http://bit.ly/m4ghd20e)
• Prepare to sing Rosie

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 option

Graham Strauss, Children & Youth Settlement Services, Edmonton Immigrant Services Association

Week 2: 14-Sep & 16-Sep

Tues

CSL options:

The Sarah McLachlan School of Music

Sinkunia Development Organization: Joseph Luri

Chantelle Goulart, Volunteer Coordinator, Cerebral Palsy Association in Alberta

Thurs

CSL option: Jay Hrycun and music teacher, Assistant Principal Bracco school