New Class Blogs

You might have noticed that I slightly changed my blogroll, adding a new category and two new blogs. Listening Journal is the blog for my Advanced Musicianship classes (fourth semester aural skills). The students are required to blog about music that they listen to (3 times a week), trying to apply things that we have learned in class. Form and Analysis is surprisingly the blog for my Form and Analysis classes. The students are given specific exercises to analyze and write about. I also require the students to comment on each others analyses, which has already led to some interesting exchanges. There is a lot of overlap between the two classes, as they are both required for sophomore performance majors. And all of the students have been in the same classes with each other for two years, so the dynamic is much different than my First Year Seminar blog.

Feel free to peruse either blog. The Listening Journal is quite free-form, with posts about Rent, Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, Mahler, Taktakishvili, and John Mayer's Sucker. The students have thus far embraced the notion of expressing their opinions about the music, not only technical details but also emotional impact. The Form and Analysis blog is much more technically oriented, though I still want the students to express their personal interactions with the music. The literature is also very constrained, based on assignments from the Spencer/Temko book I mentioned earlier. Comments and critiques are always welcomed.