In my MUS 218 World Music classes today, we talked about how to determine whether a web page might be reliable enough to be cited in a research paper. Here’s my presentation (Google Docs presentations). I’m publishing it here in part because someone might find it useful. However, I’m mostly sharing this with the world because I know there are lots of people who have spent more time thinking about this stuff than I have, and I’m hoping they might be willing to help me refine it. Please let me know what you think in the comments!

(PS – I know the GDocs embedded version chops off a little bit of the right side of each slide. Go fullscreen to fix it if you like.)

While the audience is finding their seats, the members of the orchestra will gradually find their seats on the stage. They will be playing and warming up during this time. When the lights go out, the hall will get quiet. The concertmaster ² will come out. Despite the fact that he or she has yet to do anything at all, the audience will applaud, and the concertmaster will bow. The concertmaster will turn his or her back to the audience. The oboe will play a note, and the ensemble will join. This may be repeated. Then, the conductor will come out and receive the same treatment as the concert master. He or she ³ will then begin the concert.

At this point, I was unsure of how to proceed. I think that in general, not clapping between movements is kind of dumb and arbitrary. Do I tell them the custom and perpetuate it? Do I tell them to be sure to clap despite the disapproving stares they will inevitably get? Or do I tell them nothing about this custom and let the chips fall where they may? My cop-out was something along the lines of “I think this custom is kind of arbitrary, and it certainly isn’t how Mozart and Beethoven heard their music performed. However, it’s important to me that you feel comfortable attending as many concerts as you want to.”

Did I do the right thing here? What would you/have you told your friends and students attending an Orchestra Concert for the first time.

I had some time to think about my teaching philosophy statement over the Thanksgiving weekend. I basically have no idea what I’m doing with regard to the length or scope or detail or really much of anything with regard to this document. Basically what I’m saying is this: I’d appreciate your thoughts in the comments.

David MacDonald, composer
Teaching Philosophy Statement

Before entering formal music training, we are all used to hearing music and reacting to it on an emotional level. We talk about how music makes us feel. I believe that we all also have the capacity to engage with music intellectually. To put it as simply as possible, this is what I strive to teach students, to think about music, not just feel about it. Thinking about music allows us to talk and write about music in meaningful, objective ways. We can then use those observations to understand why music makes us feel a certain way, or at least what it is about the music that makes us feel that way. This is as important to composers, performers, conductors, educators, and audience members. The goal of any theory course I teach is to give students cognitive tools they can use in any of those pursuits.

To teach that, I try to surround every concept I teach in music theory with thoughtfully selected musical examples. Abstractions, like scales in whole notes or triads in close position, are useful distillations of complex ideas. However, I’ve never lost a class’s attention faster than when I begin and end with abstractions. There are challenges to using real-world musical excerpts. For instance, composers don’t necessarily follow the “rules” exactly all the time. This can cause some consternation in students, but I think it’s worth that small amount of difficulty to present real art in the classroom. It also allows them to develop an appropriately nuanced understanding of music.

When I use examples, I think it is just as important to let them hear the music as it is to look at the score. I am always emphasizing the difference between music, which is made up of sounds, and the score, which is made up of visual symbols on paper. After all, most of the time when we’re experiencing music we don’t have the score in front of us. For example, when I have taught sonata form, I have begun by playing a recording and talking about the sections and cadences as they went by. It is important for students to connect the skills they develop in their written theory classes with those that they develop in their aural skills classes.

I use a broad range of evaluations and assessments, but the ones that I find most valuable and reliable are those that require some creative problem solving. For example, not just writing out a scale, but writing a melody that uses the scale or analyzing pieces that stretch the strict definitions of forms discussed in class. Larger assignments would include small compositions and writing assignments.

The final goal of any theory class is to equip students with the critical thinking skills they need to deal intellectually with music whether or not they have the score in front of them. They won’t always have a conductor or a teacher to explain a piece of music to them. In fact, in many cases, they will have to be the ones doing the explaining. I try to get students to a level of understanding at which they feel comfortable engaging intellectually with the kinds of music they may actually encounter in these situations as they go on to become well-rounded  and thoughtful performers, composers, educators, and listeners.

Imagine my reaction when perusing the application requirements for a number of newly posted professorships included some form of “a statement of the applicant’s philosophy of teaching.” Gah! Five effing years of graduate school, ostensibly in preparation for a university teaching position, and nobody ever thought to teach me this?! I’m still not sure if I’m madder that I have to write this extra document, or that none of my professors have done more than acknowledge the existence of such documents. ¹

One of the first things I do these days when I find myself in this kind of dilemma is tweet about it, especially when I’m pretty sure some of my friends have been through the same thing. I did this in my usual snarky way. Responses came in pretty quickly from friends who teach music at just about every level from grade school to college. My very good friend and frequent intellectual sparring partner Tim Rosenberg, who has a music education degree and is currently teaching saxophone at Ithaca College, told me I should take this task more seriously. He told me that “[A] teaching philosophy is important and describes why you act the way you do while teaching. Writing them is a clarifying experience.” Normally I’m all about clarity, but people who talk about “clarifying experiences” are usually trying to sell you something herbal. Though, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that he was (as he is on an alarmingly regular basis) completely right. ² Part of the reason I blog is to clarify my thoughts for myself. As E. M. Forster famously wrote, “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?”

Another sure fire helper, after my friends and colleagues, is the all-knowing Google, through which I found this extremely helpful article from the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2003. There are quite a lot of people writing on the web about teaching philosophies, but almost none of them are about higher education. Later that evening, my friend Matt Schoendorff, who also holds a music ed degree and is currently teaching at Wayne State University, was kind enough to send me the document he’s been including in his recent job applications.

So, the more I think about it, the less I’m dreading writing this thing. I’ll continue posting my thoughts as I gather them. Check back in the next few days for a fully(ish)-cooked teaching philosophy. Here’s where I’m starting:

1. This note from Tim:

“Start by outlining, sans buzzwords, about why you teach and why it’s important. Then move to how you teach and why you do it that way.”

2. This excerpt from the Chronicle article I found:

If you’re still feeling overwhelmed by the task at hand, try to focus on concrete questions, as opposed to the abstract question of “What’s my philosophy?” says Mr. Kaplan ³.

“Breaking down that broad question into component parts — for example, What do you believe about teaching? What do you believe about learning? Why? How is that played out in your classroom? How does student identity and background make a difference in how you teach? What do you still struggle with in terms of teaching and student learning? — is often easier,” he says. “Those more concrete questions get you thinking, and then you can decide what you want to expand on.”

Jarvis does a really excellent job of distilling some principles of Googliness (one of the many fun, Google-related words he invents) in a way that makes them meaningful while being general enough to apply to a lot of different circumstances. Here are some of my favorites:

• “Give the people control, and we will use it.”
• “The link changes everything…Do what you do best and link to the rest.”
• “If you’re not searchable, you wont be found…Your customers are your ad agency.”
• The mass market has been (or is being) replaced by the mass of niches.
• “Atoms are a drag.”

…and, perhaps his most radical proclamation…

• “Free is a business model.”

My favorite sections of the book, however, are after Jarvis has explained the basic tenets of Googliness. He goes through several hypothetical Googly institutions. Near then end of these is “Google U,” a hypothetical university. Appropriately, Jarvis has made this chapter available as a blog post on his website. He wonders why, in this world of seemingly infinite communications technology, why do students have to be limited to taking classes at a single university? Why can’t they take classes a la carte from programs around the country?

I’m not sure I think this is practical. How do you control the curriculum in such an institution? How do the institutions control their enrollment numbers and standards? I don’t have answers to these questions. However, one thing I do like about the idea is that a degree-holder (would they even have degrees?) would have to be evaluated on something other than the name-brand familiarity of the institutions they attended.

One of my favorite websites seems to be working toward this idea already, and best of all it’s free! You can watch videos of lectures from many courses at top institutions at Academic Earth. However, when you look through the available lectures, you might notice something missing: the arts (now we’re back to my neck of the woods). There are a handful of offerings in creative writing and a course in Roman architecture, but there are no classes in music (not even theory or musicology), and no classes in artistic “practice.” Courses that are so basic to art programs(life drawing or color theory) and music programs (counterpoint and aural skills) seem to defy the model.

I’ve been wracking my brains since reading and listening to this chapter. I really want for the arts not to be an exception to  the Google U model. I really want arts education (and the arts themselves) to flourish in the Google Age. Is it the art that has to change or is it the way its taught? Or, do the arts simply defy our current communications technology? It’s probably a little of both, and of course the combination of the crusty academics and curmudgeonly classical musicians means that music programs will probably be the last parts of their respective universities to make such a change.

Is it possible to start a “free” university-style music school for the internet? I don’t know. Who wants to help me try?

I know there are a LOT of question marks in this blog post. I don’t normally like writing that way, but there are some many questions and so few certainties. If you have any thoughts on the matter, please share away in the comments!

Some of my students came in and really dug the music, others came in with a “What the $^&$@ is that crap?” look on their faces. I found a nice paragraph in the liner notes that I decided to share with the students at the beginning of class.

It would be best to acknowledge, right from the outset, that this is not the most easily grasped jazz album you are ever likely to hear. And it is also appropriate to say that, like many things which require careful attention, it repays that attention with a greater reward than you might get from music that reveals its total character the first time around.

As soon as I finished reading it, one student piped up “I disagree with that completely.” I told him that it was time to consider developing a more mature outlook on art.

In our class this semester, we will be studying music by Hindemith, Bartok, Schoenberg, Carter, Babbitt, and others whose music is not “easily grasped” the first, or even the second or seventh times around. In fact, many people might never grasp it. I do think that music should give the attentive listener some reward the first time, but if it gives you everything the first time, there’s not a whole lot of incentive to listen to it again. One of the things that appeals most to me about great music is that I can hear something new in it even after I think I know it really well.

Last year, I heard the Chicago Symphony under David Robertson perform one of the great “Top 40″ orchestral hits, Dvorak’s New World Symphony. As many times as I’ve heard (and played) that piece, I heard some brilliant counterpoint that evening that I’d never noticed before. The saying goes that you can’t judge a book by its cover, but maybe you can’t be so sure about it even after the first reading.

They seem to be geared toward an audience that may not have a thorough technical understanding of the music already, but there is a lot of compelling information in them. Freund runs through a significant chunk of the first book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, pointing out anything that he finds particularly interesting. That’s really a lot of what composers do when they listen to music, though. “Hey that sounds neat. I’ll take some of that.” Here’s a couple of the videos Freund has posted: part of the introduction, and part of the discussion of the C-sharp minor fugue. I encourage you to check out more of them on his YouTube channel.

If you don’t know what a masterclass is, or if you’ve only been to performance masterclasses, composer John Adams just wrote a humorous and thoughtful essay on composition masterclasses that you should read. As a summary, I will tell you that he calls the student composer “the victim” and the process “ritual disembowelment.”

I find masterclasses to be a bit nerve-wracking in the best of situations, but this will be something else altogether. This will be a masterclass given by one of the most prominent American composers of his generation, and I imagine it will be attended by several members of the faculty from outside the composition area. Thankfully, I will be presenting a rather short (6½ min.) piece, Falling up the down escalator. Also, I happen to have a stellar, recently-released recording by the H2 Quartet.

I’m hoping to come out of the experience smarter but not in too much pain.

It’s a tough question, and it’s one that I know a lot of composers deal with, though not one we often talk about. I’m a one-thing-at-a-time kind of person. That’s bad, because it means if I get side-tracked by one of these “next projects,” I put off my main project and it loses momentum. There are some people that can successfully work on two pieces at once, but I’m not among them, and I think most of the composers I know would say the same thing. This can cause some problems. One of the most frustrating is that working on large-scale projects means that you can’t take on any new projects for a long time. Right now, I’m working on my dissertation. By the time I finish it, I’ll have been working on it for at least a year and a half. The worst part is when somebody says, “Hey, we should work on a piece. I want you to write something for me.” This doesn’t happen very often, and when it does and I can’t act, it’s pretty maddening. I have to tell them to come back in a year and ask me again.

The good thing about the one-piece-at-a-time policy is the moment I get the new idea. Nothing gets me more excited about finishing the piece I’m working on than the allure of diving into a new one. (Admittedly, the diving in can be painful, but in a hurts-so-good kind of way.) I know some composers that keep a written queue of pieces they want to write. I keep a mental list. Sometimes I bump things up and down the queue. I’ve been meaning to work on a one-act chamber opera for the better part of 5 years. But when things start to stagnate, it always helps me to start thinking of that next big thing.