21M.260 | Spring 2016 | Undergraduate

Stravinsky to the Present

Instructor Insights

Course Overview

This page focuses on the course 21M.260 Stravinsky to the Present as it was taught by Professor Emily Richmond Pollock in Spring 2016.

This course provides an overview of the musical styles and techniques developed over the past 115 years. The anthology and supplemental listening present a range of art music aesthetics in a variety of genres such as chamber music, symphonic and choral music, and opera. Students tune their ears to novel sounds, hone their own preferences and aim to understand the motivations behind and importance of a wide diversity of compositional orientations, including Expressionism, Impressionism, atonality, neo-Classicism, serialism, nationalism, the influence of jazz and popular idioms, post-tonality, electronic music, aleatory, performance art, post-modernism, minimalism, spectralism, the New Complexity, neo-Romanticism, and post-minimalism.

Course Outcomes

Course Goals for Students

  • Become familiar with the musical languages developed since 1900
  • Listen to music precisely and describe it using appropriate terminology
  • Identify and analyze important features in notated scores
  • React independently and critically to unfamiliar works to understand how music is shaped by aesthetic, historical, and political motivations

Instructor Insights

"Students’ conversations become the class session. That’s how I teach. There’s not a lecture, I don’t hold forth on particular topics for many minutes on end. Students have already done the work. They’ve completed the readings, looked at the details that I’ve asked them to explore, and come to class ready to share their reactions. Rather than dispensing information, I spend my time helping students refine their ideas."
— Emily Richmond Pollock

Below, Professor Emily Richmond Pollock describes various aspects of how she teaches 21M.260 Stravinksy to the Present.

Curriculum Information

Prerequisites

21M.301 Harmony and Counterpoint I or permission of instructor.

Requirements Satisfied

  • GIR
  • CI-M
  • HASS

21M.260 may be applied toward a Bachelor of Science in Music or a Bachelor of Science in Humanities and Engineering/Science.

Offered

Every spring semester

Assessment

Grade Breakdown

The students’ grades were based on the following activities:

  • 20% Attendance and warm-ups
  • 15% Daily assignments
  • 10% Five short listening quizzes
  • 10% Two live event reviews
  • 45% Papers

Student Information

Enrollment

Fewer than 10 students

Breakdown by Year

Mostly juniors and seniors

Breakdown by Major

Mostly music majors or minors

Typical Student Background

Sometimes students come to a course like this one with a stereotypical bias against modern music, but in this case, that did not occur. Several students considered themselves composers and artists and were particularly excited to learn about twentieth-century music.

› Read More/Read Less

All of the students had studied some harmony or music theory before enrolling in the course, but most had not taken a music history class before participating in 21M.260 Stravinsky to the Present. This is partly because the course is not taught as part of a sequence of music history courses. If I were teaching 21M.260 Stravinsky to the Present at an institution with many music majors (MIT typically has a handful of music majors each year), it would likely be taught as part of a music history sequence. Students would start with early music, learn how the Renaissance built on the medieval period, and then learn how the Baroque period built on the Renaissance period. After that, they’d learn how classical music broke all the rules from the Baroque period. When they’d finally arrive at the twentieth century, they’d know all the music that those twentieth-century composers would have known, which would allow them to understand musical concepts central to the course, such as that when Stravinsky was writing a fugue he was doing something Bach had done earlier in history. 

But because MIT students may have a limited prior understanding of “classical” music that came before the modern period, I have to keep that in mind. Often I have them access Grove ®Music Online to read articles that provide historical background about the concepts we’re learning in class.

Although it takes some adjustment to facilitate this course for students who don’t necessarily possess the standard historical narrative in their heads, it also affords some particularly engaging teaching moments. Serendipity happens when students bring in their own connections to music from the repertoire, often in ways I could not have foreseen because their backgrounds are so much more diversified than a standard curriculum can be. That’s always exciting.

Ideal Class Size

Around twelve students is the ideal class size for this course. This class size is small enough such that each student’s contributions can be heard during each session.

How Student Time Was Spent

During an average week, students were expected to spend 12 hours on the course, roughly divided as follows:

In Class

  • Met 2 times per week for 1.5 hours per session; 27 sessions total.
  • Class sessions were discussion-based, and included warm-ups.
  • Joseph Auner, author of the course textbook, was a guest speaker during one of the sessions.

Out of Class

Students completed anthology assignments and supplemental listening exercises, in addition to writing two formal papers and reviews of live events featuring music since 1900.

"While the anthology assignments helped students hone their score-reading skills, the supplemental listening exercises, for which I did not provide scores, had purely to do with what students could get from listening alone."
— Emily Richmond Pollock

In this section, Professor Emily Richmond Pollock explains why she asks students to practice attentive listening to music without distractions, and how the practice of listening relates to her philosophy about approaching difficult tasks.

When I assign supplemental listening exercises in the course, I request that students listen with no distractions. I ask students to engage in this kind of deeper, more attentive listening because I believe that doing difficult things gets better with practice, whether that difficult task is reading scores of symphonies, learning how to listen to classical music when you are not familiar with classical music, or in this case, listening to twentieth-century music, which can be difficult to grasp aurally when you listen to a new work for the first time.

If students make a point of listening to a lot of music with undivided attention, in conditions that allow them to focus on listening, they will get better at it. It’s as simple as that. They’ll be more equipped to go to a concert and listen to a twentieth-century piece they’ve never heard before and have some kind of meaningful and aesthetic experience.

"[I want] my students to embrace attentive listening as a practice, maybe in the same way that yoga is a practice."
— Emily Richmond Pollock

Putting these listening exercises into every daily assignment encourages my students to embrace attentive listening as a practice, maybe in the same way that yoga is a practice. You’re working out your brain not so that you immediately become some kind of listening genius who can hear every single note at all times, but because listening in a present and practiced way demystifies complicated music and provides a richer, more personal experience with the piece.

Often, MIT students are used to being really good at everything and when they encounter something unfamiliar, they might be resistant because they can’t immediately understand it or have an obvious aesthetic relationship with it. The supplemental listening exercises expose students to unfamiliar music so they can get better at listening to unfamiliar music, period. The more they work at it, the more they’ll understand the music, and the more confident they’ll be in their own reactions.

In this section, Professor Emily Richmond Pollock shares her views about teaching writing in musicology, including her expectation that students cite musical evidence and develop arguments in their writing. She also shares a method for providing students with feedback on their final papers.

Teaching Precision and Focus

21M.260 Stravinsky to the Present satisfies the Music degree Communication Intensive in the Major (CI-M) requirement, which entails 5,000 words of formal writing, and incorporates oral presentation, revision, abstract-writing, and citation practice. Even though CI-M classes are among the final writing courses students take at MIT, many students may not yet understand paper-writing conventions specific to the humanities, such as how to format footnotes and cite texts and secondary sources. 

"I ask them to cite musical details with bar numbers or track timings so that I know they have not just generalized an observation, but that they’ve found specific musical evidence for their claims."
— Emily Richmond Pollock

When students write about musical texts, I ask that they be as precise as they’re capable of being. In particular, I ask them to cite musical details with bar numbers or track timings so that I know they have not just generalized an observation, but that they’ve found specific musical evidence for their claims. That’s one aspect of the papers that I’m adamant about in my assessment; I’ll give a student a lower grade if they haven’t been able to cite specific evidence, even if their interpretation is interesting.

I also expect that students will make an argument in their papers, and because the task of creating an argument in the humanities is unfamiliar, I share with them a detailed process to help them. It involves making many observations, making lists, being as specific as possible from the beginning, taking as many notes as they can, and then using these “data” to formulate a thesis. The challenge, and the most critical part, is then to strategically select which observations should be left out of the paper and which should be included in support of their arguments. In a five-page paper, there just isn’t space to include every piece of evidence and observation. They learn to filter and make decisions about what details are most relevant to their arguments.

Providing Feedback via Summary Emails

I generally provide feedback to students about their writing by making comments directly on their papers, but for the final papers, I write them emails in which I summarize what I liked about their writing and what I thought they could have done better. I also share my rationale for the final grade they earn. I do this because the final papers are at the end of the term, and I won’t necessarily see them again. The emails provide a way for them to hear from me and get some closure on the course as a whole. Sometimes, they’ll write back, letting me know that they’ll try something different the next time they approach writing or clarifying what they were hoping to accomplish in the paper. I think they appreciate the feedback.

In this section, Professor Emily Richmond Pollock discusses using visits from contemporary composers to position modern music as a living tradition. She shares her strategies for preparing for these visits and facilitating a dialogue between students and the composers.

Visits from Contemporary Composers

"It’s important that students think of modern music as a living tradition."
— Emily Richmond Pollock

An important aspect of 21M.260 Stravinsky to the Present is inviting composers to visit the class. If an educator at a different institution wants to teach a similar course, I would definitely encourage them to seek out composers on their campus or in the local community, and to invite them to visit the class, because it’s important that students think of modern music as a living tradition. Students need to meet musicians and to talk to contemporary composers in order to understand that what they’re learning in the course is not dead history, but vibrant and alive. Many composers working today are directly influenced by the repertoire and composers we are studying in Stravinsky to the Present.

Preparing for the Dialogue

For educators facilitating visits with musicians and composers, I would recommend asking students to develop questions for the visitors in advance as part of a homework assignment or warm-up. Don’t assume the visitors will do the heavy lifting by facilitating the sessions or presenting a prepared lecture. Asking students to prepare questions in advance ensures they’ll be able to contribute to the dialogue about how the composer’s work relates to what the students know about or are interested in, and that will be more valuable for everyone.

Spotlighting the Relevance of the Visit

When facilitating these discussions, I think it’s important that the instructor have some idea of what relevance she thinks that visitor might have for the students. If important connections don’t come up in the dialogue, you can spotlight them and move the discussion along. It also helps if the visit is connected to some kind of event on campus, such as a concert that students can attend. We want the connection to composers to be both intellectual and personal.

In this section, Professor Emily Richmond Pollock shares how she uses music to help students think critically about their own value systems. She also points to ways in which the act of writing papers helped promote students’ critical thinking.

You Like a Particular Piece of Music? Figure Out Why.

"I ask students to articulate—using technical vocabulary—their values. The ability to communicate their values with authority and evidence is a skill that will be useful in many parts of their lives."
— Emily Richmond Pollock

In 21M.260 Stravinsky to the Present, I want students to become better critical thinkers, and in particular, to learn to think critically about their own value systems and value judgments. Music is a great context for teaching this skill because it’s a space in which people usually have strongly held opinions, reactions, and values. I push students to explore those values, often saying something along the lines of, “So you like this piece of music and you don’t like that one. Figure out why.” I urge them to discern what in the music is making them feel or react in particular ways. In this context, it isn’t enough for them to say, “I just don’t care for this music.” I ask students to articulate—using technical vocabulary—their values. The ability to communicate their subjective reactions and personal values with authority and evidence is a skill that will be useful in many parts of their lives.

Writing Their Way into Critical Thinking

Writing papers for the course is another opportunity for students to develop critical thinking skills. The first paper asks students to engage in a listening-based analysis of a work of their choice, not covered in the course, composed between 1900 and 1945. In the second paper, students compare the sounds and techniques of two aesthetically related works of their choice, one composed between 1945 and 1990 and one composed between 1990 and the present. For both papers, the first step is for students to select a topic by deciding which readings, composers, and pieces they found most interesting and providing some justification for why the topics they select are worthy of exploring.

In this section, Professor Emily Richmond Pollock discusses how the curricular scope is of the course is traditional, while her approach to teaching it is critical.

A Traditional Music History Survey Course

21M.260 Stravinsky to the Present is a historical survey of twentieth-century music. One thing that’s interesting is that, over the past few years, other music departments have discontinued survey classes like this one. Instead, they lean toward offering courses in which fewer topics are covered in-depth, or courses organized around themes, rather than time periods. Some of my colleagues at other institutions are explicitly critical of teaching musicology through historical surveys. Historical coverage is no longer prized in the way it used to be, and other values have replaced the “coverage” mentality that a survey encourages.  So, it’s a particularly challenging moment to be teaching a survey course like 21M.260 Stravinsky to the Present—I am a modern musicologist teaching within a curriculum that is traditional in scope.

Rethinking the Standard Historical Narrative

"Learning about any given century by studying an array of music from that era is a pretty-old fashioned idea, but the kinds of assignments we’ve developed and the ideas we’re asking students to work with are different from what might have been done in a survey course 20 years ago."
— Emily Richmond Pollock

The music program at MIT, in general, tends to be on the traditional side when it comes to curricula. Where we’re more progressive is in our approach to teaching. Learning about any given century by studying an array of music from that era is a pretty-old fashioned idea, but the kinds of assignments we’ve developed and the ideas we’re asking students to work with are different from what might have been done in a survey course 20 years ago. Part of this orientation is simply to ask students to think critically about historical narratives—to not take the way history is told for granted, and to understand where the ideas about history themselves come from. The choice of textbook is key, because you don’t want to just reiterate the same problematic ideas with your students. You want to rethink them together and recreate those critiques.

That’s why I like Joseph Auner’s (2013) textbook, Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. It comprises two volumes, one with scores and the other with the corresponding historical narrative. Historians refer to historiography, or the way that history is written. We understand that the events historians choose to write about and the ways they write about them shape what and how readers think about those events. In other words, history is not a collection of objective facts on a page; rather, it’s interpretive and evocative and shaped by its writers. Auner’s text is very aware of this, and aware, in particular, of some of the older tropes shaping music history. He writes against those narratives in useful and strategic ways.

Because of this approach, students begin to view historical narratives as stories that can be questioned and contextualized. That’s one advantage of using such a recent textbook: in addition to introducing students to the standard narrative, it also explores what we might do to problematize that narrative. So, for example, one strand of the standard narrative has to do with the function of progress in twentieth-century music, like the idea that music was getting better and better, or more and more complicated, and that the more complicated the music was, the better it was becoming. That idea reigned for a long time, but then it blew up entirely, and by now the idea of “progress” no longer makes any sense to tell as a single story of how twentieth-century music was made. There’s a lot of music and a lot of people that are left out if you tell the story that way, and it’s biased. So we can do better now with some historical distance. 

Everything You Thought You Knew was Wrong

Even though we now know how the twentieth century “turned out,” that doesn’t mean the narrative is ossified. We’re still writing about and problematizing the story, so the narrative keeps changing. One of the thesis statements of today’s musicology is revisionism—that “everything you thought you knew was wrong”—and this is such a valuable lesson for students to learn in a music history survey course. In the teaching and learning we do, we all (students and professors) are a part of how this history is told, and so in telling that history differently each semester we show how the field is changing.

Reference

Auner, Joseph. Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. ISBN: 9780393929201. (Also available in eBook format, ISBN: 9780393904604.)

———. Anthology for Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. ISBN: 9780393920215.

In this section, Professor Emily Richmond Pollock shares how engaging students in warm-up exercises at the beginning of class sessions aligns with her practice of warm calling on students to promote rich, student-led discussions.

Warm Calling as a Guiding Philosophy

I open most class sessions with a warm-up exercise. These exercises ask students to think about and respond briefly (usually in writing) to content introduced in the homework. I’ve been using warm-up exercises since I was teaching as a graduate student because they align with my belief that students should be accountable for their learning. Instead of randomly firing questions at individual students, or “cold calling,” in warm calling scenarios, students have 10 minutes or so to put down on paper their responses to a prompt. This is followed by a classroom discussion during which students share their ideas and consider how close their responses were to those of others. Convergence and divergence in answers are both equally interesting.

Conversations that Shape Class Sessions

Although the students spend only 10 or 15 minutes completing the written response to the warm-up, the classroom discussion that follows can go on for quite a long time. I like it when that happens, and I like the opportunity this offers for students to develop their critical thinking skills. In particular, being in conversation with other people allows them to realize that their own experiences experiencing a particular piece of music could be totally different from someone else’s and that both experiences might be justifiable depending on the criteria or filter.

An Opportunity for Educators to Improvise

"I consider myself a pretty good improviser, and ideas and connections happening in class that I can’t anticipate are more interesting than knowing I have 75 bullet points to address."
— Emily Richmond Pollock

Students’ conversations become the class session. That’s how I teach. There’s not a lecture, I don’t hold forth on particular topics for many minutes on end. Students have already done the work. They’ve completed the readings, looked at the details that I’ve asked them to explore, and come to class ready to share their reactions. Rather than dispensing information, I spend my time helping students refine their ideas.

Although this kind of teaching is inherently less predictable than lecturing, I consider myself a pretty good improviser, and ideas and connections happening in class that I can’t anticipate are more interesting than knowing I have 75 bullet points to address. I immensely enjoy my classroom dynamic and I hope my students do, as well.

Course Info

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Spring 2016
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Undergraduate
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