Teaching examples

Kyle Gann provides some good examples of bad program notes. I'm mostly posting this so I remember to use this when my first-year students start to write program notes in about five weeks. By the way, my blog is an expression of the never-ending dialectic within myself, exhibited with the confidence of the briefest pun conflicting with the illusory structure of the entire blog.

What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! (say it again)

President Bush declared war on terrorism after the U.S. was attacked on 9/11/01. Today he announced that this war is unwinnable. I have two thougts about this. (I actually have more than two, but the rest are unprintable.)

First, what military or political theory would justify the continued pursuit of a war that can't be won? We cannot afford the continued expenses to wage war in perpetuity. These expenses include financial costs, soldiers' lives, and the erosion of civil liberties. While reasonable people are willing to make sacrifices to achieve greater goods, they are not willing to make continuous sacrifices with no achievement in sight.

Second, the current administration has used the phrase "war on terror" to justify crackdowns on civil liberties and sweeping new powers for the president: Because "we are fighting a war right now," we should detain people without trials. Because of the war we should not question the president or change to a different leader. This war has been used to excuse the outing of CIA agents, the squashing of the press and protestors, and the denial of legal rights to both foreigns and U.S. citizens. If this war will never be over, then the Republicans are really shooting for a permanent state of martial law.

Forever wars are the stuff of Orwell and Haldeman, scifi visions of bleak dystopias. The permanent war is not the basis for a free and democratic society.

Class Blog is Up

My First Year Seminar students have started posting to their new blog, The Musical Crematorium. For the first two weeks they are providing definitions of useful music terms. They will then be writing about their experiences with world music, performance anxiety, and music technology as they learn about these things from my colleagues. For the second half of the semester the students will be writing reviews, biographies, textbook entries, program notes, and article abstracts.

The students are required to make at least five comments each week on each others posts, and at least one posted article each week. I'm looking forward to seeing how their writing and critical thinking skills improve through the semester. Feel free to make suggestions to the students on their posts, or to me on the design of the blog project.

Update! I have been accused of oppressing my students' constitutional rights by requiring them to blog.

It may be fun to keep an eye on this professor's experiment in involuntary blog servitude, which I would have thought would be unconstitutional, but hey, they're only students, it's not like they deserve to have rights or something.

I know my students sometimes call me a slavedriver, but I thought it was a term of endearment. Hmm...

Anthemgate lives!

I've had an amazing increase in hits for the last few days. Many of my new viewers come via Virginia Postrel and Tim Sandefur, with others finding me through searches for "national anthem at the olympics Breiner" or variants thereof.

It is curious that none of these visitors have left comments. Neither Virginia nor Tim have comments enabled on their blogs, so perhaps their regular readers aren't used to commenting. Eszter Hargittai has written about the democratic value of comments, allowing nonblogging people to have a voice in the blogosphere. Stand up and allow your voices be heard, people!

Class Blogging

Charles Downey has been soliciting ideas for his course on 20th century opera. In his summary article he lets slip that the students will be involved in a blogging project. This struck me, as I have also created a class blog for one of my courses, a First Year Seminar on critical reading and writing about music. Will blogs become a regular part of the college curriculum? In my case I'm using the blog to encourage regularly-practiced experimental writing and thoughtful criticism. I've tried online discussions before, using my campus' Blackboard service, but the students did not take it very seriously. I hope that the public nature of the blog will get the students more invested in the project, which certainly seems to be the case in the debate over the name of the blog. I made a list of the music blogs I currently link to, as ideas to stir the creative process. They made the jump to the crematorium idea from an inside joke involving their peer mentor. (All First Year Seminars at DePauw are assigned an upperclass student as a mentor, a very good way to help new students with the tribulations of college life.) They have also been having fun creating pseudonyms for the blog, though everyone in the class will know who belongs to each tag.

It will be interesting to see if class blogging takes off as an academic tool, or if it is just a fad. I'll let you know how I feel after the semester is over.

Blame Canada

I have more information about "Anthemgate," the dastardly re-orchestration of the Star Spangled Banner at the Olympics. The perpetrator is Canadian composer Peter Breiner, as part of a nefarious plan for the Canadians to take over the Olympic Games. This is the first Olympics to use unified arrangements of the anthems. Each was approved by a national representative, but clearly Breiner was sneaking in his political views. David Horowitz needs to take on the music world after he cleanses academia.

But wait! The scandal continues. Breiner isn't really Canadian, he is Czech. I knew the Europeans were behind this. They want to weaken our position in the world by playing our heroic and warmongering anthem with sappy strings instead of the brass and percussion that God intended. What do they think music is for, creating harmony?

What so softly we hail...

On the SMT-List David Loberg Code comments on the different orchestration of the Star Spangled Banner being used at the Olympic games. He suggests that the soft strings and non-standard harmonization at "the bombs bursting in air" may be an attempt to portray a less aggressive or martial United States of America. He then asks what constitutes the official national anthem. Igor Stravinsky was arrested in Boston for desecrating a national treasure with icky modernist harmonies. Perhaps the Boston police will arrest the IOC next.