First Nights check-in: Concert Reviews

Just a quick one here, throwing up the four concert reviews that I'm asking students to read for this week's sections. We're going to continue our trend of spending part of section time discussing how to write about music, by analyzing four different concert reviews. Three of them are very recent, while I picked the other one in order to give them some variety - a new music review, since that's what they'll be writing at the end of the semester.

Either/Or Spring Festival (New York Times, June 2, 2013)

Blue Heron in Cambridge (One I actually went to! From Oct. 20, 2014)

Emerson String Quartet and Yefin Bronfman (Oct 20, 2014)

Julliard String Quartet at Jordan Hall (Oct 20, 2014)

First Nights Lesson Plan #4 (There was no 3...)

Hi everyone,

Missed an entry last week, because there wasn't much to report. My students paired up and did presentations on the musical selections of the Messiah. I was really happy, for the most part, with what they came up with: most of them gave really nice overviews of their assigned pieces. It was nice seeing what they gravitated towards: some dug into the text, even looking up the original Bible verses and figuring out what Handel had omitted or altered (which I'd never noticed before, and is in some cases very interesting!) A few presentations went a bit too long, and wandered a bit, but they were mostly very solid. I think the students enjoyed hearing some from their peers, with a minimum of direction from me. 

I was happy with the way I set things up for the presentations, as well. I asked any students who wanted to use Powerpoint slides to send them to me the night before, along with the timings of any examples they'd like to play (based on the 'official' class recordings). I compiled the slides into one presentation, and queued up the examples beforehand. This helped transitions go very smoothly, with no worrying about changing between Macs and PCs, setting screen resolutions, etc. I'll definitely do that with student presentations in the future.

I liked how participatory the last class was, but I wasn't quite happy that the presentations ended up taking literally the entire time. There was very little opportunity for questions, checking up on how the class is going, etc.

Today, the plan is a bit more traditional. We're going to start with another 'writing about music' exercise, this one built around editing a paragraph. The TF manual has a great old example called "The Paragraph That Walked in Darkness," a piece of musical writing that has a lot of problems. I'm going to give them some time to read it and mark it up, and then we'll annotate as a class.

Next, I'm planning to play a clip from a production called "The Young Messiah" (check it out in its glorious 80s-ness here) as a way of jump-starting the conversation about authentic performance, vs. modern approaches. Again, the goal is to get them talking and thinking with each other, with less intervention from me.

Finally, I'm using another recorded example: PDQ Bach's "New Horizons in Music Appreciation," his famous recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, with a baseball game commentary on the form as it unfolds. They began learning about Beethoven's 9th in lecture today, and this seems like a fun way to continue the conversation about form. I've got a handout to match.

First Nights Reflection II (Part 1)

Just a quick, post-teaching entry here - we had our breakthrough in terms of discussion, near the end. It came about through a happy accident. I did my pre-teaching prep up in the library, instead of my office, so my computer's batteries had died when I arrived at class. I teach my section in a large room full of chair-desks, and I like to have the students re-arrange them into a circle for class. However, my cord today wasn't long enough for me to have my laptop in the circle. So, for the extended discussion portion (on the writing assignment), I was forced to be physically outside the circle. This was a great way to force them to negotiate the "who's talking" bit among themselves while I threw myself into the class Google Doc, trying to say as little as possible. Finally, by the end, they were not only taking turns speaking among themselves, but actually responding and having discussions without my involvement. It was great, and exactly what I've been hoping for.

In less great news, we didn't have time to get to the third section (the conversation about liveness and recording), which is disappointing not only because I wanted to have a class discussion that wasn't so focused on facts and observations, but also because I'm now seeing a few people who are participating less. Through people adding the class and switching sections, my 4pm section has swollen to 17 members, which is pushing the boundaries of a roundtable-type discussion (I know there are other ways, and it looks like I may have to use them more often). Hopefully the things I have planned for next week will jog these other students into more participation, and build on the momentum of the more positive things that happened.

We'll see how tomorrow morning goes, with the other group of students.

First Nights Section Plan. #2 (Tuesday 9/23)

Hi everyone. The second week of First Nights sections is upon us, so here's the plan:

Today, I'm opening with a brief, low-stakes listening quiz. I'm going to give them three excerpts from Orfeo, which we've mostly finished discussing in lecture, and perhaps one from Handel's Messiah, which we're just beginning. It'll be on paper, because I'd like to see where they are, but ungraded, since it's still very early on. The goal is to show them just how important it is to know the listening assignments backwards and forwards.

From there, we're going to open the class proper by going over the homework assignment. Students were asked to "map" the second act of Orfeo in a way that makes sense to them, and will help them to learn it in detail. I've seen some of the results already, and it's fascinating to see how they've arranged the material, and what struck them as important (or by omission, unimportant).

Next, the bulk of the class will be a "Quick Write" exercise. I'm going to play an excerpt of Messiah ("But who may abide..." from Part I) and ask them to write a paragraph or two about it. They'll then trade papers and discuss them with partners to see what came out of it. I picked this piece specifically because it has interesting things to say about form (the completely contrasting "For he is like a refiner's fire" section), text-setting (there are only three lines of text in a four-minute piece...), the orchestra (the opening ritornello, etc.), and hopefully many other things. Class discussion will branch out from there.

Finally, if there's time, I'd like to return to some of the preliminaries that we didn't have time for in the first week. One of the recurring issues in First Nights is the distinction between live music and recorded music. I'd like to ask students to share some significant listening moments from either recorded music or live concerts, and how they might differ. Hopefully we can get a good, free-ranging discussion going here. My secondary objective with this is especially to involve students who might be less comfortable talking about the technical aspects of music.

My big concern going into this one is fitting it all into 53 minutes. I'm determined to start the listening as close to on-time as possible, to reinforce to them that they need to be punctual. (Although last week, that was undermined by my decision to move the chairs into a circle, which took a few minutes. The lesson there is that I need to be there before classes change at 4, to rush in and re-configure things). I'm hoping that this lesson plan involves a good mix of various types of participation: hearing and writing, sharing responses one-on-one, sharing work with the class, and having a free discussion on a more personal, less factually-oriented topic.

First Nights Reflection I

Overall, both of my sections went pretty well. It was very effective to start with an activity right off the bat, and push the introductions, syllabus distribution, and other business to the middle. Asking students to talk about the music in pairs or threes really woke the room up, and both classes brainstormed good lists of musical descriptions, and we had good conversations about how we might group those descriptions into categories (technical, emotional, narrative...) and how and why each might be used.

During the introductions, I really enjoyed hearing about my students' eclectic tastes in music (Bulgarian folk music, jazz, minimalism, alongside all manner of pop, broadway, classic rock, Classical, etc.) A very high percentage of my students have significant musical experience (12 yrs of piano here, 10 years of trombone there, preparatory classes at the Manhattan School of Music, etc.), which is sort of interesting in a class that purports to be pitched at students with no musical experience. I wonder if that has to do with self-selection among students filling their "Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding" requirement (i.e. students with a musical background are flocking to First Nights, while those without are sticking with literature or visual arts), or if it's because this is the only non-majors course offered this semester (Music 1, a more straightforward 'music history' class, might have in the past drawn off many of the serious musicians). When a student in my Tuesday afternoon section asked me if he could stay in the room to practice piano because he had a coaching on the Franck Violin Concerto in three hours, I knew this was not going to be an ordinary music appreciation course.

The opening activity and intros/course business took longer than anticipated, leaving only 15 minutes in one section and 20 in the other. Asking the students to talk about some of the questions they had answered for homework was where things bogged down a little bit. There was no shortage of interesting points ranged, but I felt like there wasn't enough "cross-talk," enough discussion. Student talks to me, I talk back. Another student talks to me, I talk back. That's what I had really been hoping to avoid. I may have to remove myself more: perhaps resolve not to say anything in response, or perhaps get better at making students answer one another's questions. I did a bit of that, but it was difficult, since many of the questions that arose near the end of section were related to the course, and only I could answer them - how to access the recordings online, etc.

Overall, I'm reasonably happy with it, but there's significant room for improvement. Energy was good, participation was good, but I'd like to see a lot more, and more complex, discussion, and more interaction between students, rather than me serving as a proxy.