Alessandra's Bib Blog

Between what we’ve learned in Music Since 1800 with Dr. Haefeli and these readings, there is no doubt that music history has a checkered past. Because of prevalent racism and prejudice in societies at the turn of the 20th century, non-white music was either ignored or forced to fit a certain standard. I do believe Alan Lomax was trying to highlight black culture and their impact on music-- I don’t think he’s coming from a “wow this music must be really ‘exotic!’” standpoint. However, he was searching for a type of music that did not exist, and forced listeners of his recordings (really the only bootleg recordings of the time) into believing that this music was “black music.” Obviously, black music had to “fit” the black stereotype of imprisoned people, right? Wrong! I wish people could have learned earlier that music created by whites and music created by blacks were not all that different-- they were just portrayed that way. I didn’t know this was true until this past week when we wat...

I want to start off by mentioning how much I enjoyed the definitions-based reading. The definitions are very lively and I would be interested in teaching my students definitions in a more upbeat fashion than how they more standardly appear. How much "seriousness" do we really need to have when teaching music to young students? Anyway, I appreciated the phrase "magic word" when used to describe urtext. There appears to be a debacle between scholars who are fine with adding measures of music to suit a certain musical purpose and those who want the completely unaltered version of a work in urtext. In fact, scholars who desire the absolute original markings of a composer aren't even willing to correct errors in the piece. But this raises the question, were those errors even errors? This argument could open up a whole can of worms and is very subjective, but I think I side with the purists on this one. I'm currently working on the first Brahms sonata on clarinet ...

I had never deeply studied the definitions we read about until today and I wish I had known them sooner. Knowing about autographs, holographs, sources, urtexts, and facsimiles in the musical context makes me a more informed educator and musician. I always thought that urtexts were almost god-like-- if you had the urtext to something, that was THE edition to learn from. However, it was interesting to learn that urtexts don't necessarily reflect a composer's edits to their piece, and therefore do not reflect the composer's true intentions. Actually, a main theme I'm learning from this course is to be extra cognizant of what's real information and what isn't. I feel I've been hoodwinked for years! Deciphering the difference between autographs and holographs took some brain power. If I'm understanding this correctly, holographs imply that the original author wrote the document themselves. Autographs don't necessarily have to be written by the composer bu...

 I am deeply troubled by how much "scholarly" content of seemingly high quality work is, in fact, not scholarly or high quality. "Scientific Articles Accepted" and "Characteristics of a Predatory Journal" taught me about this issue, as I had never thought that a business would go through the motions of creating a journal just to make money (then again, a lot of people do a lot of bad things just to make money). Regardless, it's shameful that scholars in academia feel the need to be sleazy. In "Scientific Articles Accepted," I appreciated the quote "dark side of open access." Open access sounds like a great thing-- offering lots of people a multitude of "scholarly" articles. However, it does more harm to the academic community than it may realize. Because these businesses with less-than-noble intentions set the standards for their journal, they can "bait-and-switch" authors and release flawed academic articles all...

I feel like I was taught to cite & find quality sources in so many different ways throughout my schooling: I learned about MLA in 8th grade, learned how to research one way in 9th grade, another way in 11th grade, Chicago style in college, more research methods in my freshman psychology class, and the list continues. Up until recently I wasn't quite sure what I was doing when it came to producing a bibliography, and got overwhelmed and confused when I had to find quality sources for a research project. I still have some of that anxiety, but the research and citation methods I'm learning in this class offer me very clear pictures of what information I should be looking for and how I find it. I particularly enjoyed "It's Not Harry Potter" by Rob Weir. This article really highlighted for me that if you don't keep up with consistent research and citation methods, you risk losing the skill. I learned so many different skills that I didn't have a chance of s...

 E.B. White's reflection on the "Elements of Style" was writing "inception." He wrote about how Will Strunk wrote about how to write, offering the reader writing advice. Aaah!! However, the combined works of Strunk and White lead to some excellent points. Editing and reframing an existing work and melding it with others doesn't necessarily alter the original author's intent and opinions, it just enlarges the scope of the discussion. This helped me frame some ideas for my research project. I knew I wanted to do something along the lines of conducting, but needed to hone in on a specific topic. At this moment, I am 99% sure I want to research podium communication across beginning, middle, and high school bands. This will mainly pertain to conducting itself, particularly in terms of how conducting gestures should be tailored to ensembles at different musicianship levels.  I will pull sources from a variety of realms in order to clearly execute my research. ...