Music 2 Musicology Essay: The Role of Music in Social Movements

This multidisciplinary volume celebrates the influential scholarship and career of Lawrence Earp through fresh and innovative contributions in musicology, codicology, art history, theater and literary studies, bibliography, and historiography, written by twenty-seven leading scholars in their respective fields.

Music 2 Musicology Essay

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Benjamin L. Albritton (Rare Books Curator at Stanford Libraries). He has published on the music and poetry of Guillaume de Machaut, fragmentology, and the application of digital methodologies in medieval studies.

Committed to fostering critical thinkers and writers, the master of arts in musicology offers a wide range of courses in classical and vernacular Western and non-Western music. Courses focus on the study of music in its historical, analytical and cultural contexts. Master's candidates may also pursue a dual degree with a master of music in performance.

[1] Musicologists like me, who study Renaissance music, have usually studied surviving musical scores and documents. We knew that there were unwritten musical traditions, but since we thought we had no access to them, we made little attempt to recover them. Several developments in musicology and music theory have changed all that.

[7] Realizing that improvisation was a basic skill practiced by every choirboy has transformed my research and my teaching on Renaissance music in at least five different areas: compositional process, analysis of Renaissance music, style change, pedagogy, and Renaissance culture. Each of these areas is the subject of a brief discussion here.

[10] To improvise a canon after one time unit at the fifth below (shaded in yellow in Table 1), you make up a melody that includes only thirds and fifths down, seconds and fourths up, and unisons. The sixteenth-century Spanish music theorist Francisco de Montanos includes an example of such a canon (Example 1; Schubert 2002, 518).

[12] It is relatively easy to improvise a two-voice canon; but Gioseffo Zarlino says that you should also be able to improvise a third voice to any duo. He provides two sample added voices for a duo by Josquin Desprez that begins with a canon after one semibreve at the fifth above (Example 2; Schubert 2002, 214). Any group of Renaissance church musicians would have been able to improvise a three-voice piece of this kind; a musician could also have used these techniques in order to compose without a score.

Open Access Musicology (OAM) encourages submissions of 3,000-6,000-word essays in all areas of music scholarship, including ethno/musicology, theory, performance studies, and sound studies. Essays should be written in a style and at a level appropriate to the undergraduate music classroom. OAM essays ensure that cutting-edge research inspires classroom practice, provides diverse and methodologically transparent models for student research, and introduces different modes of inquiry to inspire classroom discussion and varied assignments. Addressing a range of histories, methods, voices, and sounds, OAM embraces changes and tensions in the field to help students understand music scholarship as the product of critical inquiry.

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Contributors to OAM should submit 1) one complete, anonymous copy of their article in Word or RTF format to openaccessmusicology@gmail.com; 2) a brief cover letter including name, contact information, and the title of the article submitted; 3) a list of desired, embedded media (images, video, sound files) and relevant metadata, as per the Media and Metadata Template. To facilitate the anonymous review of submissions, authors are asked to remove all self-references in the body of the paper and in the notes of their submissions. In the cover letter authors are also asked to include a one- to two-paragraph reflection on their subjective position with respect to the topic and/or methodology: in short, why this topic, and why you? After your essay is accepted, this reflection will be published as the front matter for your piece. (See also our Guidelines for OAM Writers for more details.) Finally, cover letters should include an abstract of the article suitable for RILM.

Tables, illustrations, musical examples and other materials which supplement the prose should appear in both the original article and as separate, individual files. Tables should be saved as text files; music and illustrations should be saved as graphics files. Authors are responsible for securing the use of copyrighted materials in their articles to the OAM.

All submitted essays go through a double-review process. They are evaluated by two scholars with expertise in the essay topic content area, with the identities and institutions of both authors and reviewers remaining anonymous. They are also sent to three different institutions where students evaluate the efficacy, relevance, and accessibility of the essay. Scholarly reviewers are provided with the following guidelines:

The essays in our collection unite up-to-date scholarship with awareness of pedagogical and curricular concerns. Thus we ask that you consider the following criteria, used by our editorial board and readers, as you create a successful OAM essay.

Accessibility: Undergraduate students, both majors and non-majors, must be able to comprehend and engage with the argument and substance of the essay without previous knowledge of musical terms, notations, and scholarly debates. That does not mean, however, that critical thinking must be dumbed down. On the contrary, we believe that clarity of thought is possible without requiring that the reader have a PhD or the ability to translate jargon. We expect that writers take the opportunity to define within the context of the thesis the relevant technical language or theory and/or refer to other essays in OAM for clarification and expansion.

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Prompts/Questions/Follow up: Does the essay leave the instructor and student with a series of further questions for discussion? These can be explicit at the end or embedded within the essay. Would this essay facilitate a productive lecture and/or class discussion?

In addition to already published OAM articles, we encourage you to use existing essays as models for how you might balance scholarly techniques with accessible, student-centered writing. Such models include work by Alex Ross (in the New Yorker), Richard Taruskin (especially his writings for the New York Times or The New Republic), Bonnie Gordon (her articles for Slate.com), William Cheng (writings for Slate.com and Huffington Post), and Nicholas Cook (in particular his Short Introduction to Music). You might also think of the best conference papers you have given or heard: these anticipate expert and non-expert audiences, they work within a time limit by carefully choosing the evidence they present in support of an argument, and they attempt to engage audiences with humor, self-reflection, and creative language. We hope, however, that these writings inspire rather than limit the possibilities.

Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content.[1][2][3] Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world,[4] though it is an aspect of all human societies, a cultural universal.[5] While scholars agree that music is defined by a few specific elements, there is no consensus on their precise definitions.[6] The creation of music is commonly divided into musical composition, musical improvisation, and musical performance,[7] though the topic itself extends into academic disciplines, criticism, philosophy, and psychology. Music may be performed or improvised using a vast range of instruments, including the human voice.

In some musical contexts, a performance or composition may be to some extent improvised. For instance, in Hindustani classical music, the performer plays spontaneously while following a partially defined structure and using characteristic motifs. In modal jazz the performers may take turns leading and responding, while sharing a changing set of notes. In a free jazz context, there may be no structure whatsoever, with each performer acting at their discretion. Music may be deliberately composed to be unperformable, or agglomerated electronically from many performances. Music is played in public and private areas, highlighted at events such as festivals, rock concerts, and orchestra performance, and heard incidentally as part of a score or soundtrack to a film, TV show, opera, or video game. Musical playback is the primary function of an MP3 player or CD player and a universal feature of radios and smartphones.

Music often plays a key role in social activities, religious rituals, rite of passage ceremonies, celebrations, and cultural activities. The music industry includes songwriters, performers, sound engineers, producers, tour organizers, distributors of instruments, accessories, and sheet music. Compositions, performances, and recordings are assessed and evaluated by music critics, music journalists, and music scholars, as well as amateurs.

The modern Western world usually defines music as an all-encompassing term, used to describe diverse genres, styles and traditions.[16] This is not the case worldwide, and languages such as modern Indonesian (musik) and Shona (musakazo) have recently adopted words to reflect this universal conception, as they did not have words that fit exactly the Western scope.[14] In East Asia, neither Japan or China have a single word which encompasses music in a broad sense, but culturally often regard music in such a fashion.[17] The closest word to mean music in Chinese, yue, shares a character with le, meaning joy, and originally referred to all the arts before its narrowing in meaning.[17] Africa is too diverse to make firm generalizations, but the musicologist J. H. Kwabena Nketia has emphasized African music's often inseparable connection to dance and speech in general.[18] Some African cultures, such as the Songye people of the DRC and Tiv people of Nigeria, have a strong and broad conception of 'music' but no corresponding word in their native languages.[18] Other words commonly translated as 'music' often have more specific meanings in their respective cultures: the Hindi word for music, sangita properly refers to art music,[19] while the many Indigenous languages of the Americas have words for music that refer specifically to song but describe instrumental music regardless.[20] Though the Arabic musiqi can refer to all music, it is usually used for instrumental and metric music, while khandan identifies vocal and improvised music.[21] 2ff7e9595c