Diverse Cultures and their Musics Jan 2020

And here we are at the end of the semester. I can’t tell you how much of a joy it’s been to work with you all this term. You’ve really affirmed my deep belief that learning about other people and cultures is absolutely one of the most important educations we can pursue. If you know more about others, you fear them less and appreciate them more, and and our own lives become richer and the world becomes a better place. Your final blog assignment is the only one that won’t require you to comment on each others blogs, although you’re more than welcome to carry on the tradition if you like. My only request is that you continue these habits of looking deeper into your course material and sharing your thoughts with your classmates as you venture into the Spring Term. For your final blog post, you only need to answer the following four questions. Really think about them, though—don’t just give me one-sentence answers. As always, try to use this assignment to think more deeply and...

It’s time for our final round of Cool Stuff! This last round should begin with inquiries about cultures found in Southeast and Far East Asia. We’ve mostly looked at (and listened to) the music of Indonesia and China, but if you’d like to extend your exploration into other parts of Asia (excluding India and neighbors, which we’ve already covered), please feel free. Cool Stuff! 4 blogs are due by 11:59 on Wednesday, January 29. As you’ve all no doubt figured out by now, I find the various traditional religions of the Asian continent to be really interesting. And I  loved  the World Religion course I took with Dr. Fohr. We didn’t cover much of the  music  of those religions in the course, though, so I started to look into how music was used in conjunction with Hinduism and Buddhism. We talked briefly in class about the bhajan, a kind of religious hymn in Hinduism,  but we didn’t really talk much about music and Buddhism. I don’t want to go too deep into it, in ca...

We’ve talked about this one a good bit in class, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to you: This week’s blog narrative topic is “Music and Family.” For this assignment I want you to step out of your own head and into someone else’s. Specifically, into the head of someone in your family from an older generation than your own. (You may define “family” as broadly as you need to in order to complete this assignment.) As we’ve discussed, you need to interview your chosen family member and discuss with your interviewee what his or her connection with music was “back in the day.” For some, you might discuss their childhood; others will want to talk about their teen years or early adulthood. You’ll need to ask them many questions (not just one or two), and record it if at all possible. (You needn’t provide me with the recording—it will just make it much easier for you as you type it up.) You are released from your 500-word limit, as you won’t have control over the loquacity of your i...

The two areas of the world up for discussion for this round of Cool Stuff are the Arab World and India, and both are writ large. In terms of the Arab world,  keep mostly to the Arabic map I’ve been using in class (it’s the second map on the Arab World Powerpoint), unless you really want to follow Islam to another nearby area. (Keep in mind that your last Cool Stuff blog will be about Eastern and Southeastern Asia, so you might want to save any interesting items that infringe on those areas for that upcoming blog.) As to India, you can also include those bordering countries that Dr. Weeks will be sharing with us on Monday—Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Nepal. I’ll even throw in Tibet for good measure. This blog is due by 11:59 pm on Thursday, January 23, with your list of Comments posted here on the next day. And here’s a couple of Cool Things that I would share, had we time in class. Thing 1: Every time I talk about Arabic music, I find myself wondering what  Tareq Jundi ...

So it’s time for another round of Cool Stuff. The rules are the same as last time—think of three things about the past few cultures that you’d like to pursue, and go pursue them on the web. Then come back to your blog and post the information and your thoughts on it for your classmates to read/watch/listen to. The cultures at play for this round are South/Latin American and African-American music (especially the Blues). This round of Cool Stuff is due by 11:59 pm on Tuesday, January 21. I’ve purposely waited until after I’ve gone through some your Cool Stuff 1 blogs to post this prompt, because I wanted to check out how you’re doing and head off any problems before we went any further. For the most part, your Cool Stuff 1 blogs have been awesome! I love getting to learn more about so many things. There are a couple of aspects of the assignment that I’d like to reinforce, though: Do post your items to be as accessible as possible. That means embedding videos and pictures rather t...

As we’ve already begun to notice, participation in music and the related arts is often proscribed by the gender of the potential participator. For your Music and Gender Blog, I want you all to muse on how music and gender have intersected in your own musical experiences. Were there certain instruments played more by more boys, or more by girls, in your marching band? Did the bass section act differently from the soprano section in your church choir? Did you find that middle school boys and middle school girls tended to listen to different stuff on the radio, or was it about the same? And, of course, do you find that you experience music differently in Converse’s almost-all-women environment than in a mixed gender setting? I’ve told many of you the story about my mother-in-law, Karen. She grew up in Dayton, Ohio, in the 1950s, the second of four children. She really wanted to play the drums, but girls just didn’t do that in Dayton in the 1950s. So she took piano lessons, like a ...

Monday’s blog topic is “Cool Stuff!” As we’ve discussed in class, your assignment is to identify concepts from the two cultures that we’ve studied so far—Native America and Sub-Saharan Africa—that you’d like to know more about, roam the web to find further information about those items, and post that info on your blog to share with your classmates. You’ll need to find at least three separate, different items to post (no, three songs sung by the same person don’t count as three separate items), and they need to be posted in such a way that others can experience them as fully as you have (i.e. any links must actually link, any downloaded pictures must actually load, any musical selections must actually play, and so forth.) Embedded videos and pictures are always preferable to links that take you elsewhere, unless you have a good reason for wanting us to go to that “elsewhere” (i.e. “I found this awesome website…”). Also write up a hefty paragraph about each of your items—why you thou...

While we’re together in class, the bulk of our discussions will involve cultures that are probably not the main personal touch-point for most of you in our class. So for a few of our blog posts, we’ll take the light of observation and shine it back on our own, personal cultures. Just as we’ve spent some time discussing how music and religion are interconnected in various Native American cultures, for your next blog post you should shine that light back on your own culture to explore connections between religion and music in your own backyard, so to speak. When we discuss the connection between music and religion in any given culture, we tend to cover two basic areas— use  and  aesthetics.  For instance, many Native American groups  use  a good amount of music in their religious ceremonies and teaching. Song creation is attributed to the Deities, and performers will sometimes sing the part of those Deities (Yeibichai) in their ceremonies. Too, th...

Welcome to Diverse Cultures and their Musics! My Blog for this class will serve a few different functions. I’ll be elaborating on the Blog topics assigned in your Course Schedule, so that you have a more thorough idea of what I’m expecting of you. It will also serve as a hub for you us to all access your class blogs. It will be a place for you to leave evidence that you commented on your classmates’ blogs. And who knows? We might find a few more uses along the way. A few ground rules to get us off and running. All your Blog entries must be in grammatically correct Standard English. Capitalize your “I”s and spell out Y-O-U. They don’t charge by the letter here, and tweets aren’t going to cut it. You might want to consider actually typing out your blog entries in Word, checking through it all, and then pasting your text into your blog. As you type, please remember that blogs are available for everyone to see—classmates, professors, grandmothers, mentors, potential dates, a...