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

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=== CSL options ===
=== CSL options ===


* The Sarah McLachlan School of Music
* 2:00 pm The Sarah McLachlan School of Music
* Sinkunia Development Organization: Joseph Luri
* 2:20 pm Sinkunia Development Organization: Joseph Luri
* Chantelle Goulart, Volunteer Coordinator, Cerebral Palsy Association in Alberta
* 2: 40 pm Chantelle Goulart, Volunteer Coordinator, Cerebral Palsy Association in Alberta
 
Concert announcement: [https://www.mysteriousbarricades.org/edmonton Mysterious Barricades: a cross-Canada concert for suicide awareness, prevention and hope]:  Saturday, September 15, 4:00 pm, Convocation Hall.
 


=== M4GHD overview, Ethics  ===
=== M4GHD overview, Ethics  ===

Revision as of 16:41, 13 January 2020

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

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

  • 2:00 pm The Sarah McLachlan School of Music
  • 2:20 pm Sinkunia Development Organization: Joseph Luri
  • 2: 40 pm Chantelle Goulart, Volunteer Coordinator, Cerebral Palsy Association in Alberta

M4GHD overview, Ethics

Announcements

  • Meet our TA, Gabriel Ojakovo!
  • Everyone please introduce yourselves once more. (Please consider adding a photo to your UofA gmail account)
  • Please submit assignments via eClass ("About me")
  • CSL signup procedure: see eClass under Week 2. Lynn will join us on Thursday to explain more.
  • Don't forget to set up your field notes document as a Google Doc; add its link to the appropriate eClass wiki, and share access with me.

Some concepts....some questions...

  • What is Ethnomusicology (henceforth EM)? Musicology (the study of music), but ethno-extended in 3 dimensions, thereby enclosing "music" in "context":
    • (1) scope of "music" as cultural construct and in the world of sound (e.g. Javanese gamelan; Qur'anic recitation); extending from music to poetry, dance, costume, drama...;
    • (2) context of music as situated in performance space-time as well as in culture and history (e.g. a Yeve shrine ritual in Ghana, part of Ewe culture; the history of bluegrass);
    • (3) disciplinary approaches to its study, to encompass all fields of arts, humanities, social science, science (e.g. approaches from anthropology, political science...)
  • Can you give me some examples of these extensions? Consider Rosie as a work song, in cultural and historical context.
  • Ethno-musicology (2,3) vs. Ethnomusic-ology (1)
  • 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, towards broader social transformations.) 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, displacement, social integration) stemming from dehumanization, through MUSICAL 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 humanistic development (cf: Culture and Development, Communication for Development C4D, Edutainment)
    • Open participation, inclusive approach to entire PAR process, broadening the network
    • Music: Flexibility (timbral, rhythmic, tonal) & Improvisation, enabling...
    • ...feedback through the network...leading to adaptation & thus resonance...starting with the PAR network itself.
    • M4(GHD)=M4(DGH): Music for "global human development"....Music for development of the "global human"
  • What is Community Music Therapy (CMT)? An extension of Music Therapy (MT) situating musical healing in a broader social context. (CMT : MT :: EM : Musicology)
  • Examples:

Thurs

Preliminaries

  • "About me"?
  • Attendance
  • eClass usage

Workshop: (melo)rhythmic cycles, rhythmic call/response, and interlock

In Western music meter usually not externalized in a recurring pattern, but it does serve as a social binder, holding musicians and listeners together.

In other musics, meter is more overt, as rhythmic patterns cycle, repeating over and over.

Arabic rhythmic cycles. Arabic durub, constructed out of "dum", "tek", "iss".

Such cycles bind participants together, setting the stage for resonance.

The call and response form models social relationships. We heard a melodic instance in Rosie, in the relation between pentatonic call and response melodies.

Call and response also happens through rhythm, likewise modeling social relationships. Such call and response patterns can be very short, to the point of hocket or "interlock": a melody or rhythm divided up among parts.

Balinese cycles: kecak: Co-developed by German painter-musician Walter Spies in the 1930s with local musicians and dancers, while living in Bali, based on an older trance dance (sanghyang), this "monkey chant" tells part of the story of the Hindu epic, the Ramayana, as protagonist Rama is assisted by Hanuman, the monkey king. The dance represents traditional interlocking instrumental music, but also serves as a tourist draw (We may learn to perform this next time!)

The interlocking patterns need not all be constructed of the same sound. Rather sounds can differ in pitch, or timbre, or both. Consider "dum" and "tek": low and high, different sounds. They can also overlap.


Group assignment: Creating your own melo-rhythmic interlocking or call-response cycles


Using this circle notation, create your own interlock patterns, in groups of 2 or 3. You may use different symbols to indicate melo-rhythms. After writing the rhythm focus on trying to internalize it as an aural call/response or interlock pattern, freeing up the eyes to make connections within the performing group; the notation can be socially fragmenting, although it's a convenient way to compose and remember.

Thurs

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