Music Ethnography

This class concerns itself with music in human experience, and the social aspects of making music. Your first assignment is to write a musical ethnography of yourself. A musical ethnography is a written interpretation and analysis of a living community, small group, or individual in context, with a focus on music. Your subject in this paper will be your own life. You want to include some of your earliest musical memories and some of your most recent musical experiences, but this is a NOT a play-by-play account, history of your musical life or timeline of your life in music. It is an analysis around a main idea using your life experiences as data. You should consider your own participation in music as a “performer” (widely conceived). You should also consider music with which you are more passively engaged as an active and passive listener. Ask yourself how music has become meaningful for you, and how you have made it meaningful. Take this paper as an opportunity to think critically about your complex relationship to music.

Requirements:

1) Your paper must be organized around a thesis. That thesis should be the central claim—the thread—that ties the whole paper together. You want to gather all your information, and then see what connections you can make between the different ways you have involved yourself with music. Maybe your interaction with music relates strongly to your relationship with your parents, your history moving from place to place, your membership on the football team, etc. Use that idea to organize your paper, and make that claim clearly in your introductory paragraph and your conclusion. If you are unfamiliar with how to write a thesis paper or have questions, please come see me.

2) You must include information from at least two interviews. You will use these interviews in combination with your own memories to provide the “data” for this paper. You might interview a family member who can recount events early in your life or your early involvement with music. You might interview a friend or a teacher about your shared musical experiences. You can do your interviews over the phone or online if you like, but you must use several direct quotes in your paper. When you conduct your interviews, try to ask open-ended questions that will illicit long responses and anecdotes, rather than asking “yes or no” questions (for example, “When do you remember me singing as a child?” rather than “Did I sing as a child?”). Before your interviews, write down your own thoughts about what brings your musical experiences together. Then, base some of your questions on what you think you might write about,

while still including some very general questions. Remember, after your interviews, you might change the focus of your paper based on what your interviewees say!

3) You must relate your ideas to specific ideas from the Bonnie Wade chapters called “Thinking about Music” or “Thinking Critically about Issues”. Think about how your musical past relates to one or more of the issues she discusses such as globalization, gender, community, ethnicity, identity, nationality, mass media, transmission, etc. To earn an “A,” your paper should make at least one meaningful and sophisticated connection between your life and an idea from Wade. Be sure to include proper citations for the Wade quotations you use, including page numbers. Stay away from her broad statements.

Reminders

1) You should introduce quotations before you include them, and then digest and analyze them for your reader. Your reader should know why the quote you have just included is important for how you are supporting your thesis. So, before you quote someone, introduce that person. After you quote someone, make a clear statement about what that quote has to do with your thesis. This goes for quotes from written sources and interviews.

2) You should cite the Wade reading and your interviews in your paper and include a bibliography (with the entries listed alphabetically by the author’s last name). Find a suggested system for citations and bibliographic entries below. Please pay attention to punctuation and make sure that you are consistent.

Interview citations:

Within the paper: “I remember when you played in 8th grade band …” (Breithaupt 1/20/20).

In the bibliography: Breithaupt, Peter. Personal communication, 1/20/20.

Books: you may use any standard method with which you are familiar, but you must include the author’s name, the book title, the city of publication, the drafter and the year. Here’s a suggestion:

Within the paper: “… in 8th grade band” (Wade 2013:3). In the bibliography:

Wade, Bonnie C. 2013. Thinking Musically: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture. Third Edition. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.