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We Should Teach Music History Backwards
- newsbinator 8y agoThis makes sense. I've always been an advocate of teaching the majority of things backwards.
- rm_-rf_slash 8y agoI often argue the same for computer science education: either teach backwards, or start at the abacus.
- oldsklgdfth 8y agoI we started with the abacus schooling would take a while. Judging by your username you want to see the world burn.
- arbie 8y ago> Judging by your username you want to see the world burn. An effective ad hominum!
- matte_black 8y agoHow would you teach mathematics or reading backwards?
- gravypod 8y ago"Backwards" is relative to the original way a subject was taught. My from my experience math is taught formula first rather than by starting with an intuition based on physical representation. Starting with developing an intuition like 3B1B and then deriving a formula would be "backwards" to how I've been taught in the past.
- tomjakubowski 8y agoGilbert Strang's lectures on linear algebra work this way. He typically first gives a simple example (like for least squares, fitting a line to three points in two dimensions) and then over the course of the lecture susses out a broader generalization / formula from the simple example. Unfortunately, OCW seems to be having some kind of copyright issue with YouTube, but here's a link to the video anyway. https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra-spring-2010/video-lectures/lecture-16-projection-matrices-and-least-squares/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra...
- smallnamespace 8y agoI generally agree with this approach, but sometimes even the 'simple' example isn't intuitive or motivating to someone; it highly depends on your audience. E.g. a lot of math courses under my school's engineering curriculum would start off with examples from physics, but if you don't have the proper physics background or aren't interested in those applications, it's just another layer of abstraction to slog through. My high school stats textbook would use classic problems from medicine (e.g. x/n people sampled are sick, what bounds can we put on the distribution of how many people are sick in population?), but that might not be particularly motivating to someone who has no interest in medicine or why an epidemiologist might care to know the distribution. The best starting point to teach anything is the point that is closest to what the student understands and motivates them, but unfortunately that can vary a lot from person to person.
- newsbinator 8y agoWhat you're saying makes sense and is one viewpoint. I could see it the opposite way too: In school, it's good for someone who doesn't know or care about epidemiology to get a slice of what would be useful to an epidemiologist. Likewise in reverse. The reason Macs have always had nice topography is because Steve Jobs happened to audit a calligraphy class taught by a monk (who stopped being a monk because he met a nice girl). I'm not banging the interdisciplinary drum- we all already know learning outside our interests is good. I'm saying it's probably a good educational tool to force students to look at problems based on their utility to someone else. Sometimes the further a problem is away from being directly useful to you, the wider your horizons will be once you understand how to solve it, and (more importantly) why to bother.
- ljw1001 8y agomath for mathematicians excepted, starting with an application that shows how to do something useful and working backwards seems pretty reasonable to me.
- newsbinator 8y agoOne way to teach reading backwards is to start by creating a personal alphabet together with the student, from first principles. Make up symbols for various words. This gets cumbersome when you have words like peace, happy, glad, joyful, nice, etc. To solve for that, make up symbols for each sound. Then start writing new words by assembling the custom symbols you made. The problem you run into is that books/articles/internet aren't printed in your symbols, and no one you know can read them. Solve for that by introducing the (English/Spanish/Korean/etc) alphabet and the sounds it makes. Write simple words together. Then read simple words together. Then expand.
- ddebernardy 8y agoNot just music. This applies to all of history.
- foob 8y agoIt depends a lot on the specific field that you're talking about. I studied both music and physics in college, and I think that teaching the history backwards would work for music, but not for physics. You can understand modern harmonic theory without knowing the details of how it evolved out of contrapuntal theory. It would be easy to learn about the current state of music theory as is, and then extend your understanding afterwards by learning about the context and history which led to the current state. Physics isn't really like that. There's no way that you're going to understand general relativity first, and then learn afterwards that the theory evolved from Newton's laws. Some fields successively build on top of their own histories while others morph and change in such a way that knowledge of their histories is nonessential for understanding their current state.
- ddebernardy 8y agoWell, I suppose OK, fair enough. Maybe for the likes of technical history, Newtonian mechanics is easier to understand than Relativistic mechanics, and the same holds for a variety of other scientific theories. Though I'd put forward that in teaching the old ones before the most recent ones, we end up with lots of people who end up not studying the latter at all and not grokking how or why, insofar as we understand things at least, light speed is a speed limit in our universe. But then, as you correctly point out, some fields change in such a way that knowledge of their histories is nonessential for understanding their current state. As to history proper, explaining the cold-war era proxy wars warrants a dive into WW2 and the onset of the cold war at some point; which then naturally leads you to dive into GD and WW1 as to why there was a WW2 in the first place; and why there was a WW1 to begin with; and why there was so much German-French animosity then; and why Europe was a powder keg at the time; etc. One can go on and on all the way back to the Roman Empire and Classical Greek history. I'm admittedly an armchair historian at best, but methinks reversing the arrow of time in history books might yield a very interesting take on the topic that is a lot more approachable to kids and teenagers.
- emilga 8y ago"As a great Swiss historian once pointed out in another connection, history is the one subject where you cannot begin at the beginning." - J. M. Roberts
- dghughes 8y agoAs a terrible programmer my trick is to read statements backwards. Maybe programming should be taught that way too not just reading of it but the history of it all the way back to Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace and even weaving looms.
- Waterluvian 8y agoI do code reviews backwards. Not sure why. I'm not sure it works better.
- noname120 8y agoThis makes sense. Reading code forwards overwhelms your working memory because lots of information is at the beginning (e.g. class members). If you read it backwards, you directly dive into the logic, while variable names give away what they're supposed to hold. As you progress further, you get a clearer view, and finally see how these variables are defined.
- tlb 8y agoBetter to organize code backwards in the first place. Within a file, I try to start with the juicy logic and then work down to the boring support functions. C++ makes this slightly inconvenient because everything has to be declared above its use, but JS lets you organize things with very few constraints.
- asaph 8y agoI write my code backwards so if you review it that way you'll actually be doing the code review forwards. :)
- lordnacho 8y agoThat's what I was taught back in undergrad. I can't quite remember the context, but I do remember having to start at the end and tracing backwards when looking at some simple programs.
- dgellow 8y ago
- YouAreGreat 8y agoThe author observes that self-driven students of very selective parts of Music History are "driven by emotion rather than obligation" and usually start from a passion for some current music. This seems true enough. The next step, however, is a giant leap: > shouldn’t music history writing and teaching be done in the same backwards direction? No, that doesn't follow, because we are now talking about obligatory learning of the rest of Music History, which will be what I just experienced for most of the author's text: An endless litany of names, names, names, names, names, some arrows drawn between them, some dates and places attached. It doesn't matter which order you teach me all the rest of Music History. It doesn't get better that way, although it probably doesn't get worse, either.
- codazoda 8y agoTrue, but if you start with an artist I like today, and work backwards through some of her influencers, I'm likely to find I like some of those. Then repeat. I may find myself liking, or at least appreciaing, one after another. I enjoy blues. I started with curiosity about current sound tracks on popular movies and TV shows. Then I followed it back to it's roots in rudemantry instruments played by African Americans in the Deep South. That, in turn, can be traced back to the music of Africa mixed with American Folk. I feel like I have a stronger appreciation when I learn it in reverse. Of course, I am not learning it in order to get a full knowledge of it, rather, I am enjoying it in reverse.
- resu_nimda 8y agoExactly. It seems like this author got really into Sam Smith, did a deep Wikipedia dive, then somehow extrapolated that into a wide-sweeping theory of pedagogy, with bold assertions like "That’s how we learn about music: backwards, always backwards." There are so many counter-examples. I am instantly reminded of a childhood friend who was really into classical music. I don't think he arrived there working all the way back from present. I started listening to The Who because my dad had a CD of theirs in his car, which led to other classic rock. It had nothing to do with a backward time travel from whatever contemporary music I was hearing at the time. I think a lot of music learning happens more serendipitously like that, through friends, random encounters, etc. The historical research is definitely a part of it but this article way overstates it.
- rullelito 8y agoThis applies to cooking as well.
- pishpash 8y agoClickbait title. This is not teaching backwards, it is teaching it forwards but via recursion towards the causal factor. Good luck with that when the stack gets deep. Same cautionary tale with the use of recursion. There is a certain way that history progressed (the motivic force, so to speak) and it would make no sense to reverse the order. And given the stack issue, better not be faddish and just pick a time and go forward from there.
- acjohnson55 8y agoI'm skeptical of this as a way of gaining a holistic understanding of music history, although it may be a helpful technique in the toolkit.
- gyrgtyn 8y agoWe should start with Black Sabbath and work forwards and back from there.
- meggar 8y agoMonks -> Bach -> Mozart -> Beethoven -> Tchaikovsky -> Stravinsky -> Black Sabbath -> Gangnam Style
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bambax 8y agoNot just music history, but history in general. History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures. History told backwards makes sense: look for the seeds of post events, in the past. However the human mind loves nothing more than causation; we see cause and effect everywhere even where it's not, we like "stories", we don't understand, don't believe in, and outright reject chance.
- tsenkov 8y agoI honestly can't imagine how this would work. Even in cinema I rarely like this approach (telling a story backwards). In music history I think it makes sense to go a couple of steps backwards (if you are just a fan trying to better understand their preferences), but if you are really interested - you have to start from the beginning and look how things have developed. Same thing in programming - starting up with something you can immediately use like JavaScript or Python is a nice thing because it will 'fool' you (in a good sense) that you are now a programmer. (I once knew a successful person who told me "I never start a project I can't fool myself into thinking I can complete within a weekend"). You can only do a couple of iterations back, before it gets too complicated to go backwards. It's like discovering the usefulness of an integral (Calculus) and then going backwards in order to understand it if you have no prior math knowledge and experience... I often read papers full with math I don't understand and I am forced to go backwards, but it only works because I hit a previous knowledge not so far back in that graph.
- ellius 8y agoI think it might actually work. In teaching "history," you are always picking an essentially arbitrary starting point. I think you could easily start with something like nuclear negotations between the Soviet Union and the USA, then work backwards from there. Why was it these two powers that had nuclear weapons? Well, let's talk about World War 2... How did this Hitler guy come to power in Germany in the first place? Well, let me tell you about World War 1... Obviously there would need to be some linearity to each individual chapter, but moving backwards in time at the thematic level absolutely seems possible and even advantageous in certain respects. History is a very different subject from the sort of applied technical things you're describing. But in fact you might be making a good argument for doing it this way: you're describing the need for some kind of anchor in a knowledge graph. There probably isn't a better anchor than the current existing world as everyday people experience it. Why not start there?
- oraknabo 8y agoWouldn't this limit your study to only musicians that influenced current trends? I've definitely discovered a lot of music from digging into the influences of groups I like, but this seems like a kind of survivorship bias to only focus on the ones that have direct lineage to what's popular at the moment you're engaging in study.
- falcor84 8y agoI don't understand how it could be different. There has obviously been way too much music in the past to teach in it's entirety. We have to decide what to teach based on what we currently think is "important". And though we can try to fool ourselves that there is some measure of objective importance, at the end of the day, I'm pretty sure it always boils down to popularity within some milieu.
- oraknabo 8y agoOf course there have to be criteria for any course of study that leaves out plenty of artists that have to be considered not significant enough to cover. If you were designing a course in either chronological order or in reverse, niether one might ever touch on groups like the Residents, Young Marble Giants, Donovan or Charles Ives--but what if you couldn't even get back to Mozart, Charlie Parker or Woody Guthrie from your current starting point?
- vidarh 8y agoThe your current starting point is exceedingly narrow. Don't take it too literally. E.g. don't assume you'd start at a single leaf and trace a graph only backwards, but looking at "here is this set of music trends that are common now. Why do this subset over here have X in common? Lets backtrack... " and then don't be afraid to take steps to the side as well. The point of the article I took was that when we're exploring music (and other art forts) we tend to be exposed to current trends, and then we tend to explore backwards to something similar but not quite the same. But we don't go strictly backwards. We may very well e.g. trace an influence back to a wider genre and start exploring to the sides, and even then forwards again. started with. I think the more important point is to aim to start with something that students are likely to be immersed in and follow threads that hopefully retain their interest because it retains their connection to something they enjoy, rather than e.g. jumping 500 years back in time and taking ages tracing things forwards before you've reconnected it to something they care about. To take a very contrived example: If you like German electronic artist Zombie Nation, what's the odds you'll find starting with 40's easy listening interesting? But go backwards: In 1999 they sampled Lazy Jones for Kernkraft 400 [1]. Lazy Jones was a 1984 game with a very memorable main track [2]. If you start poking around in mid 80's chip tunes, you'll pretty much have to cover Monty on The Run [3] - one of the big things that MOTR brought, was a much more ambitious orchestral inspired score with heavy use of rapid transitions and vibrato to get closer to simulate real instruments despite only having three voices to play with. Compare Lazy Jones and MOTR with Kernkraft 400 - while Kernkraft 400 copies the tune, MOTR is at places surprisingly close to having a sound you might expect in modern electronic music. As it happens, among many other references to earlier styles of music, the immediate influence on MOTR was the Dick Barton theme tune [4] from the late 40's. If you dig deeper, you'll find many additional influences and threads to unravel in between. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraft_400 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraft_400 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWxlYYA8yrg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWxlYYA8yrg [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIA_0cvS2gQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIA_0cvS2gQ [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2eqX93umXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2eqX93umXo
- the_cat_kittles 8y agomore simply, start by teaching things that people are currently interested in, and work back from them. if you like something, you are curious about where it came from
- slx26 8y agoI couldn't agree more. It's very difficult, but in my opinion the most complicated part in teaching is getting the attention and grabbing the interest of students. If you have that, as long as you do it ok, people will learn. First, find the connections between the subjects and the students. Then, you can start teaching. Of course, teaching some things in order might be important or useful, and students have some decent degree of attention too. And sometimes you need to explain boring things. Ok, but people learn the most when they want to learn. Curiosity can be induced.
- ant6n 8y agoThat's how you should teach games. Start when the game ends, and the winning conditions.
- saghm 8y agoWhenever I'm being taught a game, my first question is always "What's the goal?" I find that without knowing what I'm supposed to be trying to achieve, it's extremely difficult for me to remember all the rules explained to me beforehand because I have no context as to why they're important.
- samatman 8y agoAh, but at what level of detail? Should we start with the climax of the 9th symphony, then the Ode to Joy, then the prelude? Or should each piece be played as its own crab canon?
- linkmotif 8y agoThis is part of an enormous cultural trend in the US that has determined that people need to be tricked or somehow otherwise eased into learning, because otherwise learning is too boring! This trend is responding to a real issue, because capitalism has so successfully neutered the common man into a entertainment/carbohydrate consuming machine that the desire or need to learn is only associated with the need to earn an income, if at all. > We don’t start our investigations at some arbitrarily chosen point in the past; we begin where we are, from our current burning passion. Who said anything about choosing an _arbitrary_ point in the past? What the author tries to do here is to make the past arbitrary, not interesting, perhaps less relevant than it ought to be. But that's not the problem. The problem is that this article talks about music history being taught in the first place. In what percent of schools is music history taught in any serious manner by a serious instructor? I honestly am fundamentally perplexed by this article because I would expect first it would establish that music history should be taught in schools at all. Then the author could get into implementation specifics. But the United States hasn't been interested in music history since Leonard Bernstein's Omnibus[0] lectures aired in the 50s, if it was even then. Today, "Classical Music" isn't for old people anymore, it's for keeping vagrants away from your property[1]. So what the author is really attacking here is the past, because more than ever the past has been deemed too boring on a massive cultural scale. This is just one example of people attempting to make palatable "the past" or whatever else is now too boring, too nerdy or too impossible for regular people to approach. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Omnibus-Leonard-Bernstein/dp/B002OVB9Z8 https://www.amazon.com/Omnibus-Leonard-Bernstein/dp/B002OVB9... [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/blasting-mozart-to-drive-criminals-away/2011/10/11/gIQAgDqPEQ_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6e475a06f4cd https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/blasting-moza...
- olavk 8y agoIt is not a question of beeing "tricked" into learning. It is just that we lean best when we start somewhere we can understand and relate to our current experiences and understanding of the world. Then learning from this point will expand the frame of reference allowing us to learn more and more. This is not due to capitalism, this is fundamental for humans.
- jancsika 8y ago> We don’t start our investigations at some arbitrarily chosen point in the past; we begin where we are, from our current burning passion. That reveals a problem with learning backwards-- rampant epicism in which students would rarely choose to learn about, say, dead ideas like sonata form. Rather than requiring the student to learn linearly through time, the professor ought to select a handful of musical periods and/or case studies and then randomize the order in which they are taught. Make a big spectacle of picking numbered ping pong balls from a bingo machine in the lecture hall. In the U.S. these are usually elective classes so they are essentially an institutional form of entertainment, anyway. In other words-- it shouldn't matter how you pick a period/style/composer. What should matter is that students improve their ability to use their ears and their growing knowledge to investigate any music, no matter its origin or time period. Publicly using randomness to select from possible periods/cases would show good faith that the professor is skilled enough to leave the chosen topic up to fate. That would make it harder for profs who aren't fully comfortable with all the material, which is probably why nobody teaches this way. :) Edit: clarification
- anoncoward111 8y agoJust like with programming, I start with the end result that I have in my head and then teach myself everything backwards thats needed to produce the end result
- BucketSort 8y ago"If we had tried to tell this story forward, we would have lost most of our audience once they encountered Tharpe’s old-fashioned dresses, twangy guitar and sanctified lyrics." This is an obnoxious piece.
- adamnemecek 8y agoThis is only tangentially related but I’ve been working on an ide for music. Sign up if you are interested https://www.ngrid.io https://www.ngrid.io
- ljw1001 8y agodefinitely tangential, but i was interested anyway until i got to the no-detail, gimme-your-email web page. I think these prelaunch page things are over, and if they're not, they should be.
- adamnemecek 8y agoWhat would you like to know? Just FYI I set it up because people I talked asked if there was a way to be notified.
- sbilstein 8y agoIf you start taking music lessons, you might learn some simple pop songs first and move your way backwards to older, often complex pieces that have stood the test of time. I don’t think everyone just starts learning music playing Bach or medieval music. It’s far far less of a straight path than this article suggests.
- jradd 8y agoWouldn't we need to understand history forwards before teaching history backwards anyways, effectively nullifying this idea? This idea reminds me of how artificial intelligence might conceptualize a subject, but doesn't make sense for the corpus of history.
- breakall 8y agoThis reminds me of the hours I spend poring over the Allmusic Guide to Rock I had borrowed from the local library, tracing backwards from Van Halen, Nirvana, and Beastie Boys to discover their influences. I had taken piano lessons for several years and had learned Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Debussy — sometimes tracing back led me to what I had learned on piano. I agree that working backwards can lead to wonderful discoveries. What can be difficult to grasp as you go back is what the music sounded like at the time—how an album sounded because it was the first time musicians had made that sound.
- ddingus 8y agoI don't agree at all. First, people do learn and process differently. No one size fits all here. Adding this to the forms we have developed makes great sense. No argument. I personally prefer to take it in mixed mode. If I'm wanting to do something, understanding related history helps. Maybe that's a backward progression back to roots. But, it can be a chain of forward influences too. Who built on what and how, why? In a more general sense, maybe narrative makes the best learning. What happened?
- summerdown2 8y agoAlso playwriting. There's a really good book explaining that if you read a play backwards you can work out the causality much better and get a far greater understanding of the play: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Backwards-Forwards-Technical-Manual-Reading/dp/0809311100 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Backwards-Forwards-Technical-Manual...
- sailfast 8y agoCounterpoint: learning in this way is a good method of keeping attention ("you should learn this because your favorite artists liked these artist!") but if you actually listen to the old stuff first, you can also appreciate it in the RIGHT order of things. It is, however, pretty difficult to listen to much of what's come before. I think a healthy appreciation in both directions, digging into whatever node you happen to traverse is the preferred method.
- JasonFruit 8y agoWhat do you think is difficult to listen to about earlier music? I can't say that music of the past was difficult for me, except for music written before leading tones became almost obligatory, i.e. before the advent of functional harmony — and that was a pretty rapid adjustment. I suppose some of the medieval music that uses parallel fifths between raised 4/7 and 5/1 at cadences took a little getting used to, as well.
- sailfast 8y agoIt’s not the listening - it is the sheer volume. If you track backward you know there will be a connection. If, however, you attempt to start with the past you’ll need to go pretty wide to get to all the things heavily influencing modern work. I guess you could recommend a list. Start with medieval madrigals and then work your way to Stax records anthology? Haha
- nautilus12 8y agoI disagree whole heartedly. This will end up putting an overemphasis on contemporary work, and not enough on classic works. Think about how often cirriculum never gets to the end of, when such seminal and formative composers such as Bach are fit into the last weeks you will inevietably gloss over them. We already make Gods out of our contemporary world view at the expense of downplaying the brilliance of past thinkers. I dont think we need to fan this flame. We will end up with an aesthetic that is so devoid of the basics that it barely comprehends itself, and if ever hits a dry spell will never be able to recreate its former greatness. The net effect will be to gradually turn our backs on the collective insights of the greats of the past
- pokemongoaway 8y agoThere already is an emphasis on the experience of one's lifetime during one's life time! It's a way better way to get context on Bach by starting with something familiar - instead of forcing them to "imagine a time long long ago..." Besides, it teaches one to be superstitious - like big bang theorists :)
- hindsightbias 8y agoI think the reality will be that the contemporary will be the focus and the old will be glossed over. I get that someone who loves Tarantino can't sit thru a Peckinpah movie. But imagine if Tarantino had been one of those people.
- the_cat_kittles 8y agoyea but how come you arent complaining that basically nothing of indian classical music, gypsy music, hungarian folk music, balkan, etc is taught. its just the white guys in europe who were good? of course not. in general, music education is insanely myopically focused on the (of course wonderful) tradition of western diatonic harmony- i guess i think your comment makes no sense if you contextualize it within a bigger musical world.
- SwellJoe 8y agoWhat is "too much" and "not enough" when it comes to what a student is passionate about? I think there's currently a tremendous, almost unbelievably large, over-emphasis on music that has a written score in most music programs, which leaves out literally everything that is popular and contemporary. One has to specifically pursue those subjects in elective classes (there are jazz programs that make it up through the 70s as part of the primary coursework, but popular modern music is practically absent from most college music programs). Even when modern music is covered, it tends to be those pieces written by composers using traditional methods, which includes a written score...which is not what is popular. This is a new phenomenon (though, I guess, studying music in college is also a new phenomenon, when speaking on the time scale of music history). Bach was popular in his time, and he paid attention to other popular composers of his time. What we think of as the "repertoire" that is sort of widely regarded as what someone ought to study as a music major is also pretty new-fangled. There was much less awareness of music from even different parts of the same continent during Bach or Beethoven's time than we have today (I mean, we likely know more about contemporaries of Beethoven from across Europe than he did in his day, and we certainly have better access to history on both sides of his life than he did), and yet we pretend this is how it's always been and that it's the way it should be. There's a good argument to be made about a common language among musicians...and that historically has been the western repertoire that is generally taught in universities, but there are other common music languages that have similar depth and rigorous analysis (jazz being one of them, perhaps surprisingly, given its origins as popular dance and party music). A music education is supposed to prepare someone to make and/or play music (hopefully music that they like) often with others, and always for others. The musical language they use to speak to those other people doesn't have to be deeply informed by Bach to be valuable. Of course, if that is the music someone loves and the music someone wants to make, it's great that it's available to them. But, I think it's Eurocentric and extremely limiting when imposed as a requirement.
- Bud 8y agoGeoffrey Himes comes at this from a popular-music perspective which doesn't really contemplate the reasons why music history is taught the way it is, but this is still an interesting idea. I say this as a classically-trained singer who studied music history at the undergraduate and graduate levels. For Himes, the history of music doesn't seem to go back more than about 80 years or so. But the real history of course goes back many centuries further, even for notated "western" art music. So it would have been more interesting if he extended his idea further and tried to justify it based on an 800-year perspective, rather than 80 years or so.
- airwebster 8y agoas an afrobeat devotee... who worshipped James Brown as a child... I would say 'f--k yeah' ... much later I learned that Fela Kuti hosted JB in Lagos... who knew? but it all makes sense if you listen to the music
- JasonFruit 8y agoI'm going to disagree with everyone! You should learn history — or any subject — by starting with the things that interest you and working outward from there. Studied that way, nothing is dry, because your motivation to learn stems from what you're passionate about. For example, I learned 20th-century world history based on its relation to aviation, and in the process gained a real, abiding interest in history; I learned medieval history based on my interests in the music and religion of the time. I'm weak in the Enlightenment, but I'm sure I'll get there. I strongly recommend this approach, not because it is systematic or comprehensive, but because it encourages you to actually learn, not just bone up for tests. Being old and curmudgeonly is fun, too.
- inimino 8y agoThis is the best answer, but it raises a difficult question, which is what do you do with a classroom of thirty students?
- JasonFruit 8y agoI don't have the slightest idea — that's why I teach my own kids.
- inimino 8y agoWhich is a great answer too, though our modern life puts it out of reach for most.
- quadrangle 8y agoYou follow the top-down curriculum demanded of you by the dysfunctional bureaucracy we've built to control everything because teachers are disrespected in our society. But while doing this, you give the kids real perspective by talking about the b.s. of it and explaining critically what's wrong and what's right with the curriculum so that the kids don't think that it's their fault if they are confused, bored, or otherwise struggling with the one-size-fits-all system. [disclaimer: I'm an independent community teacher/tutor who somehow avoided for-better-or-worse getting into the normal classroom teaching role, and I'm writing from an outsider perspective, albeit on things I think about a lot.] Well, what ought to happen in a class of 30 kids? There ought to be at least 2 teachers (1 main, 1 assistant maybe) for a class that size, and they should do a mix of multimedia, field trips, reading, open discussion, group activities, and some amount of inviting each student to explore their own questions and have them help each other research those questions while you work to guide them and go around the class discussing fascinating insights of interest to each of them. They can share with each other what they've learned and not have to all be doing the same things. The focus should be not on learning facts about history but on understanding how one goes about critically researching history so that they have good critical thinking and research skills going forward in their lives and interest in history as a topic.
- WhompingWindows 8y agoI think music history should be taught thematically. Rather than going Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc. in chronological order, use music theory to make connections across all time periods in each lecture. For instance, one could teach about open chords, those containing 1 and 5 only. That might be illustrated in both 2001: A Space Odyssey or monastic music from medieval churches. One could examine how melodies are shaped, what makes music sing. Harmonic analysis could be the aim, looking at how dissonance was increasingly used to create tension and drama. There's also storytelling in music, whether through words or not. All of this to say, I'd rather not use chronological time as the axis of any musical study. We love music for its beauty and power, which is not a function of time but of the intricate neurological systems devoted to hearing and musical thought.
- NVRM 8y agohttps://soundcloud.com/krazhtest-3/banhmi15nico15krazhtest https://soundcloud.com/krazhtest-3/banhmi15nico15krazhtest
- em3rgent0rdr 8y agoThis works fine until you reach back to early 20th century. That's when 20th-century classical music comes in and where the rock/blues goes away.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 8y agoThis is a very strange idea; I'd say everything should be taught based on how it has developed historically. (For example, I'd argue math should be taught this way.) This gives you a real notion of things (as opposed to a mere definition). A notion is a minimal working model of a thing in question and the best place to find those minimal models is to look at the beginning. Imagine you want to understand radio. Where would you start: with a minimal radio receiver that has like five parts or with a modern state-of-art radio station?
- 8bitsrule 8y agoThat's an interesting theory, but it ain't the way I learned music history. When the music store in my home town was closing out 78 records, my dad went in and bought a big stack, a couple of hundred 78s with mostly classical music on 'em. At closeout prices. As a little kid I was allowed to play those records any time I wanted to. And I listened a lot. Listening to that early music helped me, right away, to pick out what was good pop music on the radio, and what was bad. Cuz, I mean, the music on those records had stood the test of time for two centuries. Happy father's day, pop. Thanks for the memories.
- simonask 8y agoJust a nitpick: Classical music from 200 years ago is definitely not "early music" by any cultural tradition. Western music 200 years ago was a highly developed art form, and this is even more true for other classical traditions that exist today, such as Chinese classical music and Indian classical music. 200 years ago, the symphonic form was already highly developed, which most would argue is the most advanced form of Western classical music. I don't think music from this period necessarily gives you any pointers for gauging the quality of modern pop music, but it might influence your tastes in a positive way. Just keep in mind that very advanced music is still being written, and it mostly doesn't sound anything like what was written 200 years ago.
- WhompingWindows 8y agoHow did you determine what is "good" and what is "bad" in pop music? Seems to me like there's a lot of personal preference in music and absolute morality has little to do with the question. You might find the writer Adorno interesting, he takes very very strong stances on Classical musicians and is not shy about calling their work bad or good or some much more eloquent phrasing.
- tenaciousDaniel 8y agoHistory - directed by Christopher Nolan, starring Guy Pearce