"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." --Elvis Costello* Frank Zappa
In earlier posts I've offered partwriting help. In this post, I'm going to offer some suggestions for those of you who have to write papers about music (*gasp!*).
You should always start with a clear statement of purpose, like I just did above. Feel free to tell your reader exactly what you intend to cover over the course of your essay. This statement is often called the thesis of your paper, and it's something that you intend to demonstrate or prove over the course of your paper. Then lay out how you intend to prove your point. I had students in one of my classes read Christopher Hasty's "Segmentation and process in post-tonal music" (Music Theory Spectrum 3 (1981): 54-73) and the opening of the article offers a great example of this kind of exposition:
"This article presents a brief outline of a theory of segmentation and an analytic method which I believe can be fruitfully applied to many twentieth-century compositions. In order to give as concrete an explanation as possible I will develop the theory through a close analysis of the opening measures of three works(1). These works are the first of Schoenberg's Five Piano Pieces, op. 23 (1920); the second movement of Webern's Concerto, op. 24 (1934); and Stefan Wolpe's String Quartet (1969)." (p. 54)
I've only had to read two sentences and I know exactly what to expect from this article: Hasty is going to introduce a theory of segmentation and use three works from the post-tonal repertoire to illustrate this approach. If I was looking for an article on 14th-century counterpoint, I know I'm in the wrong place.
One thing that I think is important when writing is to keep in mind your audience: who is your essay directed to? I think one mistake students tend to make is that they write for their teacher. I received an assignment the other day that was supposed to be a one-page response to one of three possible listening pieces. The response began with the following sentence:
"I liked the second piece we were supposed to listen to."
Nowhere in her one page did she mention the title or the composer: I happen to know what that piece is because I created the assignment. I challenged the student to write it in such a way that a person who was completely unfamiliar with the class and the assignment would know exactly what she was talking about. She had written for an audience of me. Her response would have been available to a much wider audience had she written:
"I liked Duke Ellington's 'C-jam blues' best out of the three selections."
Now, a reader unfamiliar with the assignment could at least go find a recording of the piece and better understand what the writer was talking about.
As an exercise, try writing to different audiences: write so that your parents could understand the paper; write so that your musically-inclined friends could understand; write so that the Society for Music Theory could understand; write as though you were giving a speech; write as though you were writing for the local newspaper.
Finally--and this isn't so much about writing about music as it is writing in general--proofread, proofread, proofread. In the digital age, most of us rely on the spell-check feature of our word processor to catch mistakes. The problem is that spell checkers don't catch misused homonyms. Consider:
Eye here a violin.
"Eye" and "here" are both spelled correctly, but they're used incorrectly. Spell checkers won't catch these things; humans will. Better yet, have a friend read it. Beware also of the auto-correct. One of the pieces discussed in Roger Kamien's Music: An appreciation is Hildegard of Bingen's O successores, which Microsoft Word um... helpfully corrects... to O successors. Foreign language words are particularly dangerous in this regard.
For more on writing about music, here's a great site from Indiana University.
*You'll notice that the quote is also given on the Indiana University website, but there it's attributed to Frank Zappa. As far as I can tell, no one is quite sure exactly who said this first.
In earlier posts I've offered partwriting help. In this post, I'm going to offer some suggestions for those of you who have to write papers about music (*gasp!*).
You should always start with a clear statement of purpose, like I just did above. Feel free to tell your reader exactly what you intend to cover over the course of your essay. This statement is often called the thesis of your paper, and it's something that you intend to demonstrate or prove over the course of your paper. Then lay out how you intend to prove your point. I had students in one of my classes read Christopher Hasty's "Segmentation and process in post-tonal music" (Music Theory Spectrum 3 (1981): 54-73) and the opening of the article offers a great example of this kind of exposition:
"This article presents a brief outline of a theory of segmentation and an analytic method which I believe can be fruitfully applied to many twentieth-century compositions. In order to give as concrete an explanation as possible I will develop the theory through a close analysis of the opening measures of three works(1). These works are the first of Schoenberg's Five Piano Pieces, op. 23 (1920); the second movement of Webern's Concerto, op. 24 (1934); and Stefan Wolpe's String Quartet (1969)." (p. 54)
I've only had to read two sentences and I know exactly what to expect from this article: Hasty is going to introduce a theory of segmentation and use three works from the post-tonal repertoire to illustrate this approach. If I was looking for an article on 14th-century counterpoint, I know I'm in the wrong place.
One thing that I think is important when writing is to keep in mind your audience: who is your essay directed to? I think one mistake students tend to make is that they write for their teacher. I received an assignment the other day that was supposed to be a one-page response to one of three possible listening pieces. The response began with the following sentence:
"I liked the second piece we were supposed to listen to."
Nowhere in her one page did she mention the title or the composer: I happen to know what that piece is because I created the assignment. I challenged the student to write it in such a way that a person who was completely unfamiliar with the class and the assignment would know exactly what she was talking about. She had written for an audience of me. Her response would have been available to a much wider audience had she written:
"I liked Duke Ellington's 'C-jam blues' best out of the three selections."
Now, a reader unfamiliar with the assignment could at least go find a recording of the piece and better understand what the writer was talking about.
As an exercise, try writing to different audiences: write so that your parents could understand the paper; write so that your musically-inclined friends could understand; write so that the Society for Music Theory could understand; write as though you were giving a speech; write as though you were writing for the local newspaper.
Finally--and this isn't so much about writing about music as it is writing in general--proofread, proofread, proofread. In the digital age, most of us rely on the spell-check feature of our word processor to catch mistakes. The problem is that spell checkers don't catch misused homonyms. Consider:
Eye here a violin.
"Eye" and "here" are both spelled correctly, but they're used incorrectly. Spell checkers won't catch these things; humans will. Better yet, have a friend read it. Beware also of the auto-correct. One of the pieces discussed in Roger Kamien's Music: An appreciation is Hildegard of Bingen's O successores, which Microsoft Word um... helpfully corrects... to O successors. Foreign language words are particularly dangerous in this regard.
For more on writing about music, here's a great site from Indiana University.