Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg
This week’s reading was C. J. Pascoe’s riveting study, Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School. If you’re at all interested in gender, or the culture of schools, it’s a must-read.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvuM3DjvYf0
Some thoughts gathered from Twitter this morning:
Inspired by Harry Belafonte, we’re reading this Langston Hughes poem in class right now. And listening to the Hamilton Mixtape.
The mood in the Park Slope Food Coop this morning was like a New Orleans funeral–multiethnic people talking about genocide to a soundtrack of funky jazz.
Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg
This was a tougher read than Discipline and Punish. To get our morale up, let’s enjoy some Salt-N-Pepa first.
Also, we should let Kanye West set up the other big theme of the book:
Continue reading “Foucault – History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume One”
Public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman for my Philosophy of Music Education class.
This chapter addresses musical meaning and how it emerges out of context. More accurately, it addresses how every musical experience has many meanings that emerge from many contexts. Elliott and Silverman begin with the meanings of performance, before moving into the meanings of composition, listening and so on. They insist that performance is not an activity limited to an elite cadre of “talented” people, that it is within reach of anyone who has the proper support.
We propose that people’s capacities for and enactments of an intrinsic motivation to engage in different kinds of musicing and listening are extremely widespread phenomena, restricted only by lack of musical opportunities, or ineffective and indifferent music teaching. Indeed, developing a love for and devotion to musicing and listening is not unusual when students are fortunate enough to learn from musically and educationally excellent teachers and [community music] facilitators, and when they encounter inspiring models of musicing in contexts of welcoming, sustaining, and educative musical settings, including home and community contexts (240).
Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg
This week’s reading is Discipline and Punish, by noted ray of sunshine Michel Foucault. The book begins with a memorably graphic torture scene that pretty well sets the tone for what follows.
This video gave me some helpful biographical context.
This is a widely used college level music theory textbook.
Remember, kids, to be a complete musician, all you need to know is the most formal version of the harmonic preferences of aristocratic Western Europeans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Midterm paper for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg
Max Weber locates the roots of capitalism in vestigial puritanical Protestantism. Émile Durkheim, in turn, gives a theory of how that Protestantism arose in the first place. In this paper, I ask two questions. First: can Weber’s and Durkheim’s theories of religion be extended to explain culture generally? Second, and more specifically: can their theories explain music?
Music is a valuable lens for examining cultures, because while every world culture includes it, the particular form and function varies considerably from one culture to another. Contemporary America contains a variety of musical subcultures and countercultures that overlap and conflict with one another. We might follow Weber’s example and say that America’s culture has capitalism as its single defining feature. And we might say that America’s commercial pop mainstream defines our musical culture. But those two generalizations conceal roiling masses of unresolved conflict.
Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg
Unlike most social theorists of his era and since, Marx can actually write. His prose has a rhythm and urgency that feels more like a sermon than a scholarly text. Of course, he has the advantage that he’s writing a manifesto, so he isn’t bogged down by nuance, complexity or the admission of contradictory arguments.
Public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman for my Philosophy of Music Education class.
It seems obvious that the point of music education is to foster musical understanding. But what is musical understanding, exactly? Where and how do we learn and teach it?
On an emotional level, people seem to understand music just fine without being taught how to. My son, at age three and a half, recently heard “And She Was” by Talking Heads for the first time, and within ten seconds was commenting on how happy it sounds. He might not be able to explain why it sounds happy, but he understands just fine what he’s hearing.
Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg
This week’s reading was the second chapter of Pierre Bourdieu‘s Outline Of A Theory Of Practice, on Structures and the Habitus. Bourdieu writes the worst, most opaque prose of any social theorist. The second paragraph of this chapter includes the phrase “structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures.” Later: “the habitus, which at every moment structures in terms of the structuring experiences which produced it the structuring experiences which affect its structure…” Bourdieu. What are you doing. Why do you write like this.
Continue reading “Bourdieu and Swidler – Structures and the Habitus”
