It’s been a minute! A few weeks, at least. The problem with doing a newsletter about your book is what to do with it when you’re not working on your book. There are a few small tasks in the works right now — mostly tracking down photo permissions — but while the manuscript is with reviewers, serious book work is on hiatus.
So instead I figured I’d talk about the other thing that’s occupying a lot of my brain space right now, which is redesigning one of the main courses I teach at Maryland: MUSC 130, aka “Survey of Music Literature.” That’s a fancy name for what is essentially an entry-level music appreciation course for non-majors (it’s also required for music minors). This coming spring will be my fifth time teaching the class, and I’m doing a much-belated full overhaul. In the past, I taught it as a chronological survey of Western classical music, using Mark Evan Bonds’s Listen to This textbook; this time around, I’m going sans textbook, and moving away from a survey focus into three big units on symphonies, operas, and experimental music. In a future newsletter I’ll talk a bit about why I am making some of these (again, long overdue) changes, what I’m hoping for with the new class, and the framework of “musical meaning” I’m attempting to develop as an overarching scaffold for the course. But for now I thought I’d talk a little bit about what I’ve just finished working on for the course, which is the big “capstone” project for the final, five-week unit on experimental music. Plus, it’s thematically relevant, at least, to the newsletter’s main focus.
I posed this question on Facebook recently, and got some helpful responses from various folks.
I’d already been thinking a lot about what an assignment like this would look like — getting students who are not music majors to create a piece of music (a text or graphic experimental score) that could be performed by their colleagues. One way to do it is to make it a relatively small assignment — provide very loose guidelines, see what they come up with, and then perform it in class. That would work well with a seminar-size class, I think, especially in a liberal arts environment. But MUSC 130 is a medium-size lecture course — 50–70 students, with Monday/Wednesday lectures and Friday discussion sections — and tends to draw a pretty disparate array of students, both STEM and humanities majors. I wanted to also make the assignment something bigger, that represented a culmination of what we had learned about experimental music over the preceding weeks, and didn’t just feel like something they could rush and/or not take seriously. Plus I wanted them to feel empowered to do something creative (“I get to be a composer and create a piece of music!”) while also workshopping it and feeling that it had a clear assignment structure (“I’m a bit intimidated by creating something from scratch but want to try it and get a good grade so would like some steps for what I need to do to succeed!”).
So here’s what I’ve come up with, so far — note that I haven’t proofread any of these documents yet!
Let’s talk through those four components.
Leading up to the assignment, we’ll learn about composers like John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, and Wadada Leo Smith, and look at a lot of different experimental text and graphic scores. They’ll perform Oliveros’s Sonic Meditations, Wolff’s Stones, and similar scores in their discussion sections, and get some hands-on time with score collections like Women’s Work and An Anthology of Chance Operations.
Then for the assignment, over several weeks, they will: create a score; workshop that score in performance with fellow students (in discussion section) and with friends (at home); revise that score; and write an accompanying essay about it. For the university’s mandated final exam slot (we have to hold a “final exam” then), we’ll all get together and perform some of the finished scores.
Here are the instructions I’m giving them as far as creating their score goes — I haven’t yet decided if it’s too much info, but my hope is that if I give the students enough questions to launch their thinking processes, they won’t get too bogged down in the “How do I create brand new music from scratch?” quagmire:
Your score can take any form you wish: a set of written instructions; a hand- or computer-drawn illustration; some combination of the two; or something else!
Some tips for brainstorming what your score––and the resulting sounds it can generate in performance––might be:
Start by thinking about what you like about the experimental scores we’ve looked at in class. If you want more examples of experimental scores, consult Pauline Oliveros’s Sonic Meditations and An Anthology of Chance Operations.
What sounds do you want your performers to make?
Consider what melodies, rhythms, etc. might be involved in your piece.
Consider instrumentation: what are the “instruments” you want to use? Can your score be executed with what we typically have on us (our voices, our hands, our clothing?), or does it require extra instruments (like rocks)?
Is there an overarching theme behind your piece?
Do you want the sounds to be entirely “abstract,” or do you want there to be some “extra-musical” meaning that could be personal, political, historical, etc?
How will you convey to the performers what they should do?
Will the musical idea you want to convey work best via a simple set of text instructions? Or do you need additional information conveyed by an illustration of some kind?
How much creative freedom do you want to give the performers?
There are a lot of ways to approach this: you can give poetic instructions of varying degrees of vagueness (from “Make sounds” to “Make sounds with stones” to “Make soft melodies, in unison rhythm, with stones”)
Your score could even consist entirely of an abstract illustration that the performers have to figure out how to interpret -- but it shouldn’t be so abstract that it’s a puzzle to figure out.
How long do you think your piece might last?
Your instructions should be able to facilitate a performance that lasts at least a couple minutes.
Think about how flexible you want time to be: could your piece be performed over many hours, or only in a few minutes?
How will you convey your idea of the piece’s length in your instructions, or will you not?
As you create your score, keep in mind:
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Don’t go crazy trying to think of a musical idea that no one has ever thought of before, or reinvent music. Small creative ideas, and relatively narrow parameters, can open up a world of musical possibilities!
Don’t plagiarize from existing experimental scores! Prof Robin knows the repertoire pretty well; feel free to draw inspiration from experimental music, but don’t rip it off.
Think about how your score might fit into the tradition of experimental music.
Try to distill your score down to the essence of what you want: if you give your performers too many instructions, it can lead to confusion.
Make sure it’s self-explanatory: if someone 100 years from now were to perform it, would they be able to understand all of your instructions and create a performance within the rough parameters you want?
Remember the KISS principle: Keep it simple, stupid! Less complicated sets of instructions make it easier for performers to understand them, and can lead to more creative results.
I also wanted to make sure that they got to work through these scores in performance, and think really carefully about what a revision process would look like, based on how those performances went — how they could refine the instructions/language they used to convey to the performers what to do. Ideally, these scores would be “self-explanatory,” such that the composer did not need to be present for the performers to execute some version of their vision. We’ll see how that pans out. But I did create a feedback form so that they have written-down responses from performers to take into account — they will have to gather a group of friends to perform the piece at home and get feedback from them, which they will have to address. (The feedback form also serves to demonstrate to me that they did, in fact, perform the score outside of class.)
I also decided to create a couple example scores, which I annotated for the students (see the Google Doc), to point out various things they should be aware of as they work. I do think these would be fun to perform, so may try one out in class:
Here are two examples of experimental scores that Prof Robin quickly thought of:
Sock Music
Look at the socks of the person seated next to you.
Imagine what sound their socks might make.
Make that sound using your mouth or your hands.
Your sound can last for a very long time, or a very short time.
Listen to another sock sound.
Look to the socks of another person in the room, and repeat.
Continue until it feels like all of the socks have been sounded.
Squiggle sounds
Look at these squiggles.
Take a new piece of paper, and draw your own squiggle; it should not be the same as these squiggles, but it should not be too different, either.
Sing the sound of your squiggle.
Carefully rip the piece of paper apart, while thinking about the shape of your new squiggle, and listening to the sound it makes.
You now have two pieces of paper––one with your squiggle and one that is blank.
Repeat from the beginning, but with your squiggle as the old squiggle, and your blank paper as the new paper.
Stop when the pieces of paper are quite small.
Finally, I’ve gone rubric-crazy for the first time ever this semester, after realizing it makes sense for a class like this. It’s again, for this assignment in particular, a way of balancing creativity and structure, and will also hopefully help create consistency in grading among my (awesome) graduate student teaching assistants.
Anyway, that’s it for now! If you have any thoughts at all on this assignment, have done anything like it in the past and have suggestions, or think it’s stupid, please let me know! I really have no idea how it will go, having done nothing quite like it before, and not yet knowing what this crop of students will be like.
More on other MUSC 130 redesign stuff soon!
Georgia had a great Thanksgiving with her auntie Bonnie.
But it was also exhausting.