Syllabus

MUS 130 C Understanding Music Spring 2015

Rotation with Eric Edberg:

Music as Creative Activity and Relationship

Eric Edberg

0119 GCPA  

765-658-4384 (office)

765-719-0140 (cell)

MUS 130 Understanding Music is a unique, team-taught course in which students participate in three twelve-session rotations, each taught by a faculty expert. In addition to this rotation, you’ll do a unit with Prof. Brockmann on Dalcroze Eurythmics and one with Prof. Salman on jazz improvisation. The rotations are of equal length. The grades from each section are averaged to determine your final grade.

This rotation engages you in a set of activities and introduces you to a number of ideas which together allow you to experience and think about models of music making which focus on making music as part of a community and exploring (or discovering) your creative voice.  This unit’s experiences, if you enter into them fully, will enhance your ensemble-playing skills, self-confidence, assertiveness, and leadership abilities, as well as your musical imagination. We will also discuss a number of issues relating to succeeding as a college music student and preparing to make a living in the 21st-century musical world after graduation.

We start out as a community drum circle (in which each of you is a leader), and then move into expressing yourself through sound and connecting with each other through free and lightly-structured improvisation activities. We’ll finish with performances of original music, combining planned and spontaneous elements, created in small groups.

There will be a good deal of reading, writing, and out-of-class music making involved.  We’ll read a number of articles by Arthur Hull on community drum circles (Arthur has been a major force in the facilitated drum circle movement); information of Babatunde Olatunji, who indirectly helped give birth to the American community drum circle movement; the Music for People “Bill of Musical Rights,” which is statement of humanistic values; and “Musicking,” a rather challenging lecture by the late musicologist Christopher Small, which explores questions every musician does well to encounter.  

Writing

This rotation is primarily experiential.  The readings, while presenting alternative (to most classical musicians) and for some people life-altering models of music making are for the most part fairly short.  Writing about your experiences during the rotation, about the readings, about how experiences and ideas connect, and about other things in your musical lives is an important process.  You form ideas and insights in the act of writing that do not occur otherwise.  

In this rotation we’re focused more on spontaneous, flowing writing than on formal academic writing.  To that end, we have a class blog.  Blogs by their nature foster quick, spontaneous writing--which can, nevertheless, be quite profound at times.  The URL for the blog for this class is 130b2015.blogspot.com.

Information on how to register to post on the blog has been sent to you via email.  The assignment for the three weeks we are together is for you to:

• write at least one original post per week, and
• write at least five comments on other people’s posts per week (this total includes comments you write on “comment required” posts by me).

At the end of each week, send me an email with the URL for your original post and the comments you’ve written.  (I will email you and example and post it on the blog as well.) Those lists are due at the end of each week, by 7:00 PM Sunday.  For your section that is:

• 11:00 PM  Sun. 4/19
• 11:00 PM  Sun. 4/26
• 11:00 PM  Sun. 5/3
• 11:00 PM Sun 5/10 (this is during exam week, so it is fine to do it early)

In addition to the blogging, there is also a final essay. This will be a short (400-700 word) reflection on the readings and experiences you have in this rotation.

Readings, Out-of-Class Homework Activities, and Written Responses

I’ll give you as much advance notice as I can. Because I work best when I am responding to what happens in a particular class session and to the energy and interest generated, sometimes the assignment isn’t made until right after the preceding class. You will have the assignment for the next class by the end of the day in which the preceding class occurs.  Almost always, you will be required to write a response on the class blog or in an email to me.

Attendance and Grading:

Absence policy for all MUS 130 rotations:

This coursework is highly experiential in nature, which means that the core principles of the course are discovered and explored largely through the work that you do in class each day. If you miss class, you have missed learning something that day. While there will be portions of some rotations that include homework done outside of class, if (for example) you miss a group activity in Eurhythmics, there’s no way to “make up” that experience.

For this reason, daily attendance is critical. Each absence within a particular rotation will result in a letter grade reduction for that rotation. Your final grade is the average of all three rotation grades, so in most cases this works out to each absence lowering your grade by 1/3 of a letter. However, if you were to miss four classes within one rotation, even if you had an A to start with, you would fail that rotation (1st absence makes your rotation grade a B, 2nd makes it a C, 3rd makes it a D, 4th makes it an F), which would leave you with a maximum grade of D+ for the semester.

Grades:

Your grades in all three rotations are averaged together to yield your semester grade. Numerically, grades are defined for the overall course as follows:

A (94-100%), A-(90-93%)

B+ (87-89%), B (83-86%), B-(80-82%)

C+ (77-79%), C (73-76%), C-(70-73%)

D+ (67-69%), D (63-66%), D-(60-62%)

F (0-59%)

Grading for this section (we will develop a rubric for class participation and blogging in class; I’ll supply a rubric for the final essay when I send you the assignment):

60% Class Participation

20% Blogging

20% Final Essay

Important Date:

W 5/6 Group Session (course evaluations)