help me with my class?

kermitdrinkingtea.jpeg of course

i'm glad those threads are more welcoming than i thought they were
i turn off when i see interpersonal bickering (universally dull imo) or incomprehensible clowning (my fault for not getting it)

anyway i have a youtube channel now!

pre-WWI recorded music, minstrel shows, ragtime, cakewalk, Sousa, etc, would by no means call myself an expert i may need your help, thank you. for some reason* i am really excited about telling them about the gigantic shift that occurred once music started to be recorded and played at home (not family singalongs, but records!) and the resulting explosion of music. i remember learning that and finding it so compelling to contemplate. also my gpa worked for RCA so i was familiar with the gramophone and the doggie. i'm trying to stay away from forcing them to learn the pet things i am interested in but i'm sure a little of that is inevitable.

i thought maybe the oklahomans was like grapes of wrath/okies/oh susanna/i've been workin' on the railroad?! if that's not it, i have no idea tbh.

* the reason is obvious, this is the kind of music dork i am

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Thursday, January 18, 2018 2:04 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ok, some good books I've found on this topic

Greg Milner - Perfecting Sound Forever - This is excellent on the way that recording techniques shape our ideas about music, very accessible and entertaining as well as enlightening, lots about the 'sound tests' where a soprano would be on stage and the curtain would pull back to reveal it was a record, etc.

Susan Schmidt Horning - Chasing Sound - On a similar topic, but going in-depth into the changes in engineering through the years, good anecdotes about the earliest recording studios

Mark Katz - Capturing Sound; How Technology Changed Music - A series of scenes on the topic, feels like four random chapters from a much larger book. Good stuff on cultural impact of the phonograph, how it led to styles changing and becoming unified as musicians heard each-others work, then skips forward 80 years to a chapter on turntablism. Comes with a website with extensive audio examples.

David Wondrich - Stomp and Swerve: American Music Gets Hot, 1843–1924 - Less academic, more enjoyable opinionated narrative on the leadup to jazz and blues, comes with an excellent CD covering the early years of the century, not what you're looking for but would reccommend generally.

so helpful!! thank you!
i need to spend some time today gathering resources.

Byrne's How Music Works also looks at music x technology, incl. how listening experiences evolved, incl. for professionals, incl. what engineers and producers told him going back to the beginning of his recording career (and what he told himself in home tape "sessions" in teens) also considerations of live performance & presentation, going back to busking in Berkeley etc in late 60s (fave is the tour where dancers got the players doing some dancing and vice-versa). The finale goes back to ancient Greeks, having sympathetic fun w "music of the spheres" and then how that concept influenced later composers, The ebook has music excerpts, but haven't heard it.
xpost Greg Milner's book is among those mentioned on the thread about the Centuries of Sound archive, with links to it and each section (starting w 1859-60); also Mr. CoS shows up on there to talk about the tracks and artists, as he adds more: Centuries of Sound - pre-jazz-era recorded music

lot of good old pop music and trivia on this radio show:

The Old Codger: playing 78 RPM records like they're going out of style!

https://wfmu.org/playlists/OC

Updates:

* first night of class tonight, feeling pretty prepared for the first week at least. i think i have week 2 under control but we'll see...
* i have a playlist on my youtube channel "is this music?" that should be fun
* chose "in a silent way" as my students' entrance music. it's interesting, palatable, they have probably never heard it. i have the complete sessions, probably going to play disc 2 :)

psyched!

in undergrad, my intro to anthropology prof started each class by playing us a piece of music and asking us to try to guess what country it was from, which I remember quite fondly as a fun/challenging intro to understanding diff music traditions. My most vivid memory is being baffled by the sound of portuguese

oh man in a silent way great choice

sterling example of how in recorded music editing is indistinguishable from composition

Wonder if it would be worthwhile for them to compare Miles' version (or versions, if you're playing takes from the box) with Zawinul's own, from his s/t album (which I haven't heard in ages, but was a late-night favorite for some of my friends and me, even though I was never that big on Weather Report, aside from Mysterious Traveler and Tale-Spinning). I read somewhere that his composition of it drew on (sense?) memories of being a shepherd boy in the hills of Austria.

forks contributing to this thread by self-promoting his shitty playlists and dragging personal beefs into it is A++++ posting

was thinking that too... play miles and then play zawinul and be like 'these are the same song did i just blow your mind'?

Oh yeah, reminds me: Giddens wrote that his students didn't gasa avant jazz, until he played them some reworkings of early jazz; think he might have incl. this one, well-described by xgau:
Air Lore [Arista Novus, 1979]
Demonstrating not only that ragtime (Scott Joplin) and New Orleans (Jelly Roll Morton) are Great Art consonant with Contemporary Jazz, but also that they're Corny. And that both Great Art and Corn can be fun. Which is why the somewhat stiff, if not corny, readings of the themes, especially "King Porter Stomp," don't get in the way. Although just what could get in the way of Henry Threadgill improvising over an explicit pulse for a whole album I can't imagine. A
Nor that it has to be Corny, or corny but yinow that whole Ancient To The Future thing, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp & Horace Parlan's Going Home and Trouble In Mind (even Shepp's reworking of commercial funk with an atonal solo, on "Mama Too Tight", way before Ornette's Prime Time, which itself may have been a response to Beefheart & Magic Band, especially when he was still playing sax and the whole act was sometimes tagged as "Howlin' Wolf meets Ornette Coleman). Not too far from "Bourbon Street," on
The Complete Basement Tapes (or "If Dogs Run Free," where D. might be saluting Mose Allison).

xp, not my fault if the truth hurts pal

you're literally the worst poster on ilx

perhaps drag the personal beefs to another thread; Lechera teaching a class.

Excited to hear about the first lesson LL!

Perhaps I missed this, but: what age are your students?

maybe next week i will compare the two versions -- we're also working on description, vocabulary & discussing/writing about music next week so that should be fun.

the problem is not that i don't have ideas, but that i have too many and can't do all of them. i was telling my husband that usually when my head is full of work stuff, it stresses me out but since my work stuff is music stuff now, it's much more pleasant and enjoyable to be thinking about all the time. a nice change of pace, at least.

LBI -- students are college students, adults of various ages. hard to know bc our student population average age tends to be somewhere in their 30s?
ulysses is hardly the worst poster on ilx. at least he is a real person. i beg of you: civility itt.

"is this music?"

this is the best part of teaching a class like this, they've literally almost never thought about this and then you play them like, whatever, and then ten more whatevers, and they're like, O_0 zomg

omg
1) 10/13 students showed up on the first day
2) 10/10 were women
3) they loved "is this music?" and a meditating preschool teacher is now a stars of the lid fan; a harry styles obsessive who has only listened to music via youtube on her phone (ever! her whole life!) said she could imagine falling asleep to kevin drumm because it sounds like white noise; a "soft jazz" enthusiast discovered miles <3

great 1st day even if i only got through 2/3 of what i had prepared. more for next week! this is a good problem.

:)

that's awesome!!

a harry styles obsessive who has only listened to music via youtube on her phone (ever! her whole life!)

i taught a class abt 8 years ago in which a student had never listened to an entire album straight thru, only skipped and scanned thru tracks in itunes, sometimes not even songs, just looking for good bits to see if she felt like listening to the whole song

we encouraged her to try listening to whole albums, and she went bonkers when she found out that made music better

i did not know these people existed. seriously.

RE: rhythm, Pretty Purdie talking his way through his famous shuffle of quarters, eights, sixteenths, triplets (12/4 AND 12/8) while being half-time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1j1_aeK6WA

I mean, he's showing off, but more importantly explaining (sorry, "splainin") the individual components one-by-one before he launches into it. I have probably watched this video a hundred times.

That reminds me of a track that might be fun to introduce to your class: one of my fallback favorite meta-songs, Glenn Gould's "So You Want to Write a Fugue"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZM4yxbE0ZE

bonus video of Gould puckishly discussing the "process piece"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s4TKOaUZ7c

ok we are about to embark on week 2: basic musical terminology, how to describe music, examples of certain terms (this is what I might need some help with initially)

we are never going to make it through all of the stuff i am supposed to make it through, but one thing i would like is to have a week 2 playlist for them to practice the following for homework:

1) recognizing instrumentation
2) recognizing and identifying elements of music like melody, tempo, rhythm, harmony, dynamics, tone quality
3) writing about above in a descriptive way and taking notes
4) recognizing their own responses and how they feel about what they're hearing/the subjective reaction they have to the music

I am looking for about 10-12 youtubes of any musical genre or type that have exemplary elements of the above qualities that would stand out to a novice -- i want them to be able to hear what they are listening for, not stump them. I want them to succeed at this exercise and feel that their musical listening is becoming more active and informed.

harmony: The Roches - Hammond Song https://youtu.be/09ypwCN9FDc
dynamics, tone quality: Talk Talk - Ascension Day https://youtu.be/sGHwWwQw3tc
tempo, dynamics: War - City Country City https://youtu.be/DZmeFGmiQDI

for instrument identification, still nothing beats Peter and the Wolf

Oh YES!! I love Peter and the Wolf!!!!

My middle school music class, which was taught by the same teacher who was my orchestra instructor, definitely used Peter and the Wolf!

Also, a lot of sweet Bach pipe organ fugues on vinyl

this is still one of my favorites btw, and you can transition from the idea of a round (people doing "row your boat" starting sequentially) to a fugue pretty easily

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugue_in_G_minor,_BWV_578

it's also great for class listening imo because it's under four minutes

added the roches -- beautiful song
idk about talk talk since i have never heard that song before

i am trying to use my own examples when i can because i can talk about those songs more intelligently (since i have probably listened to them a zillion times)
also, now that i've met my students, i know what they like too and i can choose examples to let them write about songs they have a chance of liking

speaking of, what is the best harry styles song?

re organ fugues -- yes, thank you -- i found a good video!

"best" harry styles is a toughie but i don't hate 'Sweet Creature'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uD6s-X3590

ha that sounds like dan fogelberg at the beginning

post-fahey 1 direction folk

using Fruko/El Preso for rhythm because one of my students likes "old salsa" and it's one of my all time favorites
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5YmrtnLESE

tonight i learned that none of my students had the foggiest clue who Bob Dylan is
and they enjoyed this David Munrow video I showed them, which made me happy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKxdCSbAtOE

Yay I’m so glad munrow got his nose in!
Could couple Peter + Wolf with Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (as happens often on record)

Yeah, I was going to suggest that one but then everyone said Peter and the Wolf and I thought that might be more interesting. For a combination of traditional and more modern instruments, you could mix things up with Tubular Bells, maybe?

For timbre, I usually either play both guitar and piano recordings of Albeniz's Leyenda for comparison or else I play the "Purple Haze" solo with a totally clean tone (when it sounds a bit like a modal jazz solo) and then play with distortion (and maybe an octave splitter, although that's technically cheating).

wait you play it on the guitar for them? lucky them!
i am fighting off waves of imposter syndrome this week but i don't really have time to indulge bad feelings, just gotta do the best i can with what i have
my students seem mildly disappointed that i don't play a prettier instrument (the last person who taught this class was a violin player)

oh well!

Tubular Bells is a good idea, I'll add it to the playlist.

Some examples I've used in pop history classes:

For metres: I often use the Be Good Tanyas' version of "Oh Susanna" for 4/4 (because this leads into a discussion of Stephen Foster) but you could use lots of things. 3/4: Gene Autry's "Home on the Range". 6/8: Nat King Cole's "Bicycle Built for Two". 2/4: "Stars and Stripes Forever"

Textures: "The Fiddle and the Drum" or "Mercedes Benz" for monophony; "Good Vibrations" for both homophony and polyphony (after showing the two things individually with e.g. "Both Sides Now" and the Little Fugue in Gm)

Wide-ranging vs narrow-ranging melody: "Blue" vs "Hello I Love You" (keeping a Joni theme seemed to work)

wait you play it on the guitar for them? lucky them!

Yeah, increasingly, I just demonstrate things this way. Also, in my current classes, which have a mix of advanced majors and people with no musical background, I break down melody, harmony, rhythm, etc by playing mvt 1 of Mozart's K. 545; having them go at it cold, describing as well as they can in small groups; and then breaking down all the terms when they discuss as a whole class. Lets the music students take the lead a bit and feel like they get to do some aural analysis while non-majors get everything broken down for them (and are sometimes surprised by how much they can get).

Also "Norwegian Wood" or "House of the Rising Sun" for 6/8

Also fuck pretty imo

It's a massive cliche but guess I originally learned this stuff from Peter & The Wolf / Young Person's Guide To The Orchestra

thank you sund4r -- this helps a lot. teaching this class for the first time was fueled by powerful excitement at first and now that i am in the middle of it, i realize i need a little more help.
you sound like an excellent teacher and i salute you <3

i'm going to add some of those to the week 2 playlist. my students were pleased and relieved that all the songs on the playlist had been chosen specifically for them (thanks thread contributors!!) to illustrate the elements they learned about in class today. i brought my floor tom, maracas, claves, and a small synth/amp and did some demonstrating but nothing impressive.

Ha, thanks. I wish my students were always so positive about my teaching.:P Parts of Zep's version of "You Shook Me" can work for heterophony.

Sounds like you're doing great btw