Nathan Bowen's Blog

Again, as the Hunter College Blackboard site is still wonky (well, it works right now), I’m posting the Extra Credit Assignment here for students’ convenience.

Choose one of the following topics and write a 3- to 5-page essay (double-spaced, 12 font size, 1″ margins) according to the guidelines specified below. Your essay will be worth up to 15 extra credit points and will be added to the point total of either your test scores or your homework scores (whichever has the lower percentage). This essay will be due at the beginning of the last class, Wednesday May 13th (no exceptions).

Extra Credit Topic A

Explain the difference between classical and flamenco guitar styles.

Your writing should account for the origins of these styles, how these styles have been transmitted over time, and differences between classical technique and flamenco technique. What are the objectives that a player of these styles would strive to be able to do (e.g. clear tone, minimum muscle effort, speed, etc.)?

Terms to be incorporated into your essay:

palos
cante
baile
golpe
picado
rasgueado
alzapua
tremolo
harmonics

Andrés Segovia (classical) and Paco de Lucia (modern flamenco) are two fantastic artists representative of two contrasting styles of guitar performance. Watch some performances of the two below to get started:

Your essay must include at least three scholarly resources. While I encourage you to use the internet for starting (there is a great article on flamenco to get a starting orientation here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamenco), the only online resource you may quote from for this essay is Grove Music Online, http://www.grovemusic.com. This is an online musical encyclopedia, which you may access from Hunter computers or with your Hunter username and password. Also, JSTOR is a fantastic online journal database for scholarly articles, and it allows you to download articles as .pdf files. Go here to access Grove Music Online and JSTOR: http://library.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/databases/index.php.

Extra Credit Topic B

Bert Williams (1875-1922) is one of the most popular black entertainers and comedians of all-time, and was by far the best-selling black recording artist before 1920. He managed to gain respect as a comedian from all audiences, despite living in a time where stereotyping and racial inequality was an accepted part of life. Your task will be to explain the following:

a) why Williams performed in blackface;
b) how he ascended to star status (specifically, what were the influential shows that brought him before larger audiences);
c) how he became a best-selling recording artist;
d) what roles did George Walker, Florence Ziegfeld, Eddie Cantor, and the Gotham-Attucks publishing company play in furthering Williams’ career?
e) for a time Williams was viewed by many leaders of the black community as a hindrance rather than a progressive figure, but that has changed with recent scholarship. Why was he viewed negatively? Why is he viewed as a vitally important pioneer now?

A recent compilation of his music is available as a CD entitled “Bert Williams 1915-1921″ (2005 Document Records).

Your essay must be at least three pages (double-spaced, 12 font size) and must include at least three scholarly resources. While I encourage you to use the internet for starting, the only online resource you may quote from is Grove Music Online, http://www.grovemusic.com. This is an online musical encyclopedia, which you may access from Hunter computers or with your Hunter username and password. Also, JSTOR is a fantastic online journal database for scholarly articles, and it allows you to download articles as .pdf files. Go here to access Grove Music Online and JSTOR: http://library.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/databases/index.php. New York has the fortune of being home to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, up in Harlem. For a thorough study I would definitely make a trip there to research the topic.

Here’s an example paper that got 15 points last semester.

Dear MUSHL 101 Students,

Since Blackboard has been down for the last week, let’s work around it.  Please post your comments at the bottom of this post.  Let’s move the deadline to this Wednesday, May 6th, by midnight.  To remind you of the Blackboard Assignment, here it is:

Our class has been primarily based on listening to digital recordings via a CD player or mp3 player and speakers. This article deals with how much of our musical listening experience is entirely reliant upon our ears (rather than, for example, watching a violin player use her bow to produce a sound).

This article in particular is a difficult read, perhaps due to the translation from French into English.  I think you may find these Wikipedia links helpful for reference:

acousmatic sound
acousmatic music

By midnight on Wednesday May 6th, read the article by Pierre Schaeffer and post a comment in response to his remarks on the Discussion Board thread. It can be downloaded here with the provided link “Schaeffer-Acousmatics” or also in the Course Documents section. TO DOWNLOAD THE READING, CLICK HERE.

Again, as a reminder quick word about posting protocol:

Please be specific to the points Schaeffer makes and respond appropriately.  Also, feel free to respond respectfully to other student viewpoints.  There hasn’t been much discussion or response from one comment to the next.  I suspect this is due to the tendency for many of you to wait until the last minute to read and comment…

Now, in preparation for tonight’s lecture on musical theater and film, here’s a great article that you can access in full through the Hunter Library website:

Eric Salzman, “Whither American Music Theater?” The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Apr., 1979), pp. 230-244

For those of you who manage to come by this blog but don’t like milling through my Twitter, I’m doing a recap of some things I’ve found interesting in the past couple of weeks pertaining to file sharing and how it’s affecting the music industry.

This is essentially a follow up on an assignment I gave to my Hunter College Intro to Music students to read and comment on a reading by John Oswald called  ‘Bettered by the Borrower: the Ethics of Musical Debt’ in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music.  Here are some interesting reads (and viewings) about the current state of digital media and file sharing as it pertains to music.  It seems we’re at a serious crossroads for the future of culture, the values we ascribe to, and how we approach and share thought (and music).  Enjoy (and discuss!).

I’m teaching an Intro to Music class at Hunter College, and we’re currently discussing the classical period with an introduction to Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Personally I’ve never been a big fan of the first Viennese School, despite a fair amount of exposure to their music throughout my schooling. There’s always been plenty to learn from them, and I mean no disrespect, but music from the classical period hasn’t always been very compelling to me. Until now.

© Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz

The trick for me is to attempt to recreate the listening relationship an audience member would have had with the music at the time it was written. This is music that relied on an interested and informed listener who would be paying attention the whole time. Going to a concert was a highly anticipated event, and there would not be music preceding and following the experience. Because there was no ability to hear the piece several times to let it sink in, composers had to write into the music a way to let things sink in to their listeners. Instead of doing an entire piece once through and then repeating the whole thing (which would be our typical orientation with an iPod: put the song on repeat), composers of this period decided to repeat sections within a piece. Hence, a double exposition repeats the first of four sections in sonata form (exposition, development, recapitulation, coda) before moving on to the development. This is, I believe, a very sophisticated solution to audience engagement for music that is experienced in real-time and is often not heard ever again. It also indicates a fairly nuanced approach to the demographics of the audience: educated and full of certain formal expectations (i.e. “ooh, that’s a nice second theme.”).

Since I don’t typically listen to this type of music by actively trying to determine how the piece maps onto a certain form, it has been an exciting experience to play the ‘what’s going on now’ game. Yay for music not being boring!

'Franz Liszt Improvising at the Piano,' by Josef Danhauser, 1840.

Last night in our Music Appreciation class we got into quite an interesting discussion about virtuosity.  What began as an intro to Franz Liszt turned into a debate about what happens when musicians decide to be professionals.  I think that this discussion is relevant to a variety of fields, even though it was during the Romantic period that dazzling performers like Liszt created the modern concept of virtuoso.

Some feel that like any profession, becoming a top-notch musician or performer requires talent coupled with a lot of work.  There’s no real magic bullet involved.  Others wonder whether it is best not to try to get to the highest levels of performance, that something gets lost in the process.  In the methodical pursuit of honing the craft, do musicians lose their ability to express emotion and connect with audiences?  When you hear a compelling artist perform in a seemingly magical way, is simply the result of hard work?  Or is something more required to have a ‘magical’ effect?

P.D.Q. Bach (pseudonym of Peter Schikele)

Last session in our Music Appreciation class, we listened to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony from start to finish.  I think it was safe to say that some students had a hard time tuning in for that long, and not just because the coda of the fourth movement carried over two minutes after class was supposed to finish.  Perhaps we should adopt the P.D.Q. Bach way of listening to Beethoven.  Listen here for a good laugh.

Benjamin Britten wrote this piece in an attempt to introduce the different instruments of an orchestral ensemble to a new listener. Notice that he tries to show what each instrument can do well (for instance, the clarinet is capable of very fast runs of notes going up and down its range.  It can also do trills well).

It’s a fairly long piece, but the purpose is extremely utilitarian.  If you were going to introduce each instrument for such a large ensemble, how would you go about it?  Write a piece?  From the standpoint of the teacher/pedagogue like Roger Kamien (the author of our text), can you see the attraction he might have had to use this in his text?

This is another video of a piece we have in our recordings.  It’s kind of interesting to see this as a film and to note the recording differences.  The soloists and the order of the solos is not the same between this video and the CD version, which is somewhat illustrative about the nature of jazz music.  It has a certain amount of flexibility and elasticity pertaining to the length of the piece, the number of players, and the ordering of soloists.

Notice how the video conveys a sense of transportability to the music:  people can just walk in and join the performance (well, it was convenient for the drummer to already have that set up).  It’s a very different approach in comparison to Stravinsky’s music, where everyone reads off of notated music.  Here, everyone knows the basic riff and the chord changes, and then improvises over it.  One gets the feeling that players joined in once they arrived, connoting a sense of spontaneity and casualty.  This is music for leisure and fun.

Here’s a video of Igor Stravinsky conducting his own piece (I find his conducting style to be quite entertaining, especially in his age).  This same portion of music is part of the first piece we listened to in class (MUSHL 101 – Hunter College).  By comparing the recording we have with this video recording, do you notice any differences between the two?  Is the tempo the same?  Are there articulation differences?

Notice the way the string players do a variety of bowing techniques.  Can you hear different sounds based on their motions?