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    Short Essay From Sister Ray

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    The document provides an assignment asking students to write a brief essay comparing and contrasting the tunes "When the Saints Go Marching In" sung by Louie Armstrong and "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" sung by Etta James after reading Chapter 3 of the textbook. The essay should be 100-150 words and can discuss characteristics of the recordings and lyrics. A sample of excellent writing on Milton Babbitt and John Cage is also provided, noting their differing backgrounds and compositional styles but underlying philosophical similarities that pose a challenge for music critics to discuss the music's sound and underlying ideas.

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    Short Essay From Sister Ray

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    suiteaction
    76 views2 pages
    The document provides an assignment asking students to write a brief essay comparing and contrasting the tunes "When the Saints Go Marching In" sung by Louie Armstrong and "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" sung by Etta James after reading Chapter 3 of the textbook. The essay should be 100-150 words and can discuss characteristics of the recordings and lyrics. A sample of excellent writing on Milton Babbitt and John Cage is also provided, noting their differing backgrounds and compositional styles but underlying philosophical similarities that pose a challenge for music critics to discuss the music's sound and underlying ideas.

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    Sister Ray's epochal essay

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    Short Essay from Sister Ray

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    The document provides an assignment asking students to write a brief essay comparing and contrasting the tunes "When the Saints Go Marching In" sung by Louie Armstrong and "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" sung by Etta James after reading Chapter 3 of the textbook. The essay should be 100-150 words and can discuss characteristics of the recordings and lyrics. A sample of excellent writing on Milton Babbitt and John Cage is also provided, noting their differing backgrounds and compositional styles but underlying philosophical similarities that pose a challenge for music critics to discuss the music's sound and underlying ideas.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    76 views2 pages

    Short Essay From Sister Ray

    Uploaded by

    suiteaction
    The document provides an assignment asking students to write a brief essay comparing and contrasting the tunes "When the Saints Go Marching In" sung by Louie Armstrong and "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" sung by Etta James after reading Chapter 3 of the textbook. The essay should be 100-150 words and can discuss characteristics of the recordings and lyrics. A sample of excellent writing on Milton Babbitt and John Cage is also provided, noting their differing backgrounds and compositional styles but underlying philosophical similarities that pose a challenge for music critics to discuss the music's sound and underlying ideas.

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    Masterpieces of Western Music Spring 2013 Short Essay 1 Due Monday, February 4

    Assignment: After reading chapter 3 of the textbook, write a brief essay comparing and contrasting the two tunes below. A link to a recording of each tune is included. Feel free write about characteristics of these recordings when discussing the tunes. You can also write about the lyrics attached to each tune, if you like. This essay should be written for a knowledgeable musician, rather than a layperson, so any of the technical terms from the readings can be used freely. Your essay should be about 100-150 words long. Tunes: When the Saints Go Marching In, sung by Louie Armstrong

    Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, sung by Etta James

    Prose Samples: Below is a sample of especially fine writing. Before composing your essay, I would suggest reading the example a couple times. Dmitri Tymoczko, from his article The Music Ideas of Milton Babbitt and John Cage: Milton Babbitt and John Cage, two of the most notorious postwar American composers, are often thought to be antipodal figures. Babbitt is straight, Jewish, politically conservative, and southern, a skeptical rationalist who talks like a mathematician on speed. Cagewho died in 1992was gay, goyish, politically left, and Californian, a genial fruitcake whose enthusiasms ran toward astrology, mushrooms, Zen, and anarchist politics. Babbitts music is fastidiously organized, each of his notes carefully placed within multiple nested rhythmic and melodic patterns. Cages music, by contrast, is scrupulously disorganized, composed randomlyfor instance by tossing coins or tracing astronomical maps onto music paper. Not surprisingly, Babbitt is an academic, and has many students who teach at music departments throughout the country. Cage, who never graduated from college, was an auto-didact (more or less), and has had at least as much influence on visual arts and popular music as on the world of academic musical composition. Yet behind these differences there lurks a fascinating, and more fundamental similarity. Leave aside the fact that even expert listeners sometimes have difficulty distinguishing Babbitts sophisticated musical puzzles from Cages mystical soundscapes. The important point is that Babbitt and Cage straddle the line between philosophy and art. Beginning with specific philosophical ideas, each developed an utterly original style of musical composition that reflects those ideas almost perfectlyand in the process thwarts almost every conventional musical value. This poses a real problem for music criticism. For beyond talking about how this music sounds, it is natural to want to talk about why it sounds the way that it does. (And, indeed, about what role ideas should play in our appreciation of music.) This means that the critic of Babbitt and Cages music needs to be a critic of their philosophieswhich is to say, a philosopher himself.

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