The creation of new materials to be uploaded to the MIPR Textbook Enhancement Repository makes an excellent class assignment. Students who engage with this work must first turn a critical eye to the textbook and curriculum. They must assess what is there and what is missing, and ask questions about how the curriculum developed and why they are taught about some things but not others. To produce a publication-worthy enhancement, they must explore all available sources of information (including recordings and scores) and polish their writing skills. Students who complete the assignment at the highest level come away with a publication and the knowledge that their work will make a difference in music history classrooms.
I have been employing this assignment in my Music History I survey for several years. Each semester, two or three students end up producing a textbook enhancement worthy of publication, and all students have a meaningful experience and come away with a more nuanced perspective on historiography and the music curriculum. Before publishing an enhancement, I do a careful copy edit, make sure that the formatting is correct, add alt-text to the images (if the student has not already done so), and confirm that all of the links work. (Tip: You can obtain a short-form link for a YouTube video by right-clicking on the video and selecting “copy video URL.”)
I assign published textbook enhancements in my own classes. This semester, for example, my Music History II students read Sydney Prince’s essay on Joseph Bologne—an essay, incidentally, that recently won the UNG Music Department Scholarly Writing Award. Most of them know Sydney, and now they have a firsthand understanding of how college students can shape the curriculum and educate one another. I want my students to be producers of knowledge rather than passive recipients. This project gives them agency and power.
We talk about the assignment a great deal in class, but the written instructions read as follows:
Add-an-Example Project
Our textbook, The Oxford History of Western Music, provides a history of art music in the literate tradition that traces its roots to medieval Europe. That history is necessarily incomplete. No book can discuss every composer, work, trend, movement, or region. However, our textbook has some glaring omissions. For this project, you are going to identify and correct one of those omissions. At the end, you will submit an “addition” to the textbook that will focus on a single composer and work. You will provide historical context and musical analysis, to include a listening guide. In other words, your final submission will provide the same information that we currently find in the textbook and anthology. Excellent projects will be published in the Music Instruction & Pedagogy Repository on Humanities Commons for use in music history classrooms around the world.
Your example can be drawn from any period. The only requirement is that it is suitable to the scope of the textbook (that is to say, it should belong to the European compositional tradition, broadly defined). While you are free to select your own topic, I offer the following suggestions, all of which are poorly covered in the textbook:
- Music for wind ensembles of any description
- Music for solo instruments other than piano
- Music from Southern and Eastern Europe
- Music from Central and South America
- The textbook has no examples
- Music from non-Christian traditions
- The textbook has no examples
- Music by female composers
- Composers to consider: Francesca Caccini, Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre, Louise Reichardt, Maria Szymanowska, Louise Farrenc, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Emilie Mayer, Cecile Chaminade, Ethel Smyth, Alma Mahler, Rebecca Clarke, Germaine Tailleferre, Margaret Bonds, Joan Tower, Ellen Taafe Zwilich
- Music by non-white/marginalized composers
- Composers to consider: Joseph Bologne (Chevalier de Saint-Georges), William Grant Still, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Margaret Bonds, Hale Smith, Harry Burleigh, Julius Eastman, Wynton Marsalis, Duke Ellington, George Walker, Tan Dun, Toru Takemitsu, Bright Sheng, Alberto Ginastera, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Claudio Santoro, Luis Humberto Salgado
I supply my students with the official style guide for Textbook Enhancement Repository contributions, and I also provide them with the following project instructions:
- Proposal – You will propose a composer and work. You must offer a justification as to why the composer and work are worth studying. You must indicate which chapter you are adding your example to.
- Annotated Bibliography – You will submit an annotated bibliography. It must include at least one book, one peer-reviewed article, one relevant article from Oxford Music Online, and one Internet source. For each source, you will explain why it is reliable and summarize its relevant contents.
- Draft – You will submit a complete draft of at least 800 words. In it, you must provide information about your composer, the context in which they lived and worked, and their historical significance. You must also provide an analytical description of your chosen work, including a listening guide. Please also provide a link to a streaming performance and some captioned public-domain images.
- Final Submission – Following revisions guided by instructor feedback, you will submit your final project.