Annotated Playlist Assignment

Formatting
• 12-point font, Times New Roman, double-spaced, 1-inch margins
• A BRIEF (no more than a paragraph) proposal of your topic, emailed to me by Tuesday, November 15 (but feel free to email me as soon as you have a fully formed idea)
• a paragraph (for our purposes) is AT LEAST four sentences
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Description
Throughout our discussions of American popular music genres, forms, and texts from the 19th century to the present, we have discussed this repertoire’s articulation and representation of a number of social issues, including identity formation, political engagement, class, gender, and race. Your assignment is to choose a topic and create a playlist of 8-10 songs/pieces from any American popular music genre from the late 19th century to the present and provide a paragraph-long annotation for each. You MAY NOT choose a work that is featured in your textbook or that we’ve covered in class. These annotations should provide some background on the song, offer information on its historical context, and reveal, through a consideration of its musical features, how and why it relates to your topic of choice. You should choose a topic and pieces that are representative of your own listening practices. In short, choose something you’re interested in and enjoy.
For example, you might choose the topic “Jazz Musicians as Intellectuals from 1945-1980” and include Charles Mingus’s “Adagio ma non Troppo” as one of the representative pieces. The annotation could look something like this:
“Adagio ma non Troppo” (Charles Mingus, Let my Children Hear Music, 1972) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KozkReSD0G4
Scored for a large jazz orchestra by bassist, composer, and pianist Charles Mingus, “Adagio ma non Troppo” reveals Mingus’s life-long project to bridge the gap between European art music (so-called “serious” music) and the jazz idiom. Indeed, this is a key theme that runs through the album as a whole, shining a critical light on “The Great Divide”. As a typical tempo marking/orchestral movement indication, the name of the first track found on Let my Children Hear Music, “Adagio ma non Troppo,” signals right away an intersection with the classical sphere. Additional “art music” characteristics of note are Mingus’s use of changing tempi, unconventional jazz instrumentation and timbral organization, and precomposed material. For Mingus, the division between improvisation and composition is not in kind but in manner, a belief that he clearly presents in the album’s liner notes where he discusses the problematic schism between “spontaneous” and “pencil” composers. “Adagio ma non Troppo” exemplifies jazz musicians’ desire to have their music treated as serious music and their talents as formed through years of work, rather than by innate ability. By 1972, after the rise of cool jazz and fusion, this notion would have been received well by a general American public.
While your annotation may certainly not be as elaborate as mine, you’ll notice that it includes:
(1) The name of the piece/song
(2) The composer, album, and year of composition
(3) A link to a Youtube clip where the piece can be found (you may choose a clip that contains important visual material—for example, a music video—but only do so if you plan to discuss this briefly in your annotation. If the visual component of the video is irrelevant, it’s best to stick with clips that just feature the song as it appears on an album). If you have a piece that you’d like to put on your bibliography that cannot be found on Youtube, that’s fine, but you’ll need to provide me with a sound file (e.g., an MP3 or MP4)
(4) A discussion of at least 2 extra-musical characteristics of the piece (e.g., the song’s history and historical context)
(5) At least 2 musical characteristics (e.g., its form, melody, harmony, timbre, etc.)
Receiving full credit on an annotation requires that you include each of these elements.
This assignment is worth 20% of your overall grade, broken down as follows:
Proposal: 20%
Grammar/style: 20%
Content: 60%

Category: Essays