Willing, I think.........

The challenge this week was to think about incorporating multimodal assignments into the classroom. Our readings, of course, were targeted towards the  writing composition classroom, and as such offer a variety of justifications for including multimodal composition alongside alphabetic composition, most of which seem to highlight the advantages of pushing students to think and act rhetorically outside the traditional comfort zone of written text.

            From the perspective of the music history classroom, however, the situation is reversed. Instead of considering how to move composition assignments away from text-based activities towards developing a competence with multi-modal ones, musicology professors deal with students often well-versed in the multi-modal arenas of music, dance, and performance and who must instead be challenged to learn about music from the perspective of text and text-based information. As well, as an historical discipline, music history demands that connections between abstract information and sounding music itself are forged. Making these connections is often difficult for students, as is the production of a written document that offers description, analysis, and synthesis around a work involving other modalities. The music history classroom can become a stressful environment as activities involving reading, writing, and other book-based learning that must be confronted within the traditional writing assignment.

            Like Takayoshi and Selfe in our readings for today, I do not advocate doing away totally with the written essay as an important product for music students – it is already a multimodal activity for them to attempt to explicate music through text, whether that is descriptive, analytical and historical, and in many ways creating a formal writing assignment is one of the best ways to get them to learn to choose points, structure those points into a coherent framework, and practice description and analysis. But I do think it would be a good challenge for me as a teacher to allow them to work in media other than alphabetic text in an attempt to validate skills they have in these areas that are often not credited in the music history classroom. As well, more and more music is disseminated and explicated on the web, and students should be able to feel that they could contribute to these environments for music outside tradition written music criticism, and are given some practice in some of the skills they might need to do this kind of work and the opportunity to consider some of the issues involved.

            Despite some of my reservations – I myself do not feel at ease yet with various kinds of multi-modal production involving the manipulation of visual images, audio and video, and so I worry that I will not be able to give students the help they need to do these kinds of assignments – I am willing to give it a try. So in my Music History I survey class next semester I am going to assign a multi-modal project.

            The class covers the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods and certainly most of my students know little of Medieval and Renaissance music. They find it difficult to understand and they struggle to create a useful historical context for the music. Though we cover visual iconography and primary sources in the class, they have a hard time connecting that material to what they hear and the more abstract information contained in their textbook. So I thought I would ask my students to create a multimodal presentation around a piece from the Medieval or Renaissance period, linking visual images and text to a performance of the piece. Images could include artworks from the period, examples of visual iconography, photographs of places or architecture, and/or still or video clips from performances. Texts could include excerpts from primary sources, manuscripts, contemporary analysis, or other writings. The idea is that the students would produce a storyboard for a video that would present their chosen visuals and text excerpts while an audio track of the music was running behind, a historical and/or associative digital story with sounding music at its core. If they wish (or if I feel that most of the class can do this easily) students can produce their videos. As well, students will need to include a written explanation of how the images and texts relate to the piece they have chosen.

            Assessment is always difficult, but I think I will provide a rubric that emphasizes evaluation based on the relevance of the chosen material to the piece and the extent to which the visual component of the story can be seen as an appropriate creation of a context for the work.

             The purpose of the assignment is to give the students the opportunity to produce a virtual contextual space for a musical work that they construct for themselves. This should allow us to discuss the elements of choice when it comes to making those kinds of contextual connections, and relate it to the more abstract “spaces” created in alphabetical texts. Finally, it should give students who feel more comfortable with non-alphabetic production the opportunity to tackle issues of historical context in ways that highlight these strengths yet still forces them to deal with the creation of context from unfamiliar and strange-to-them sources.

            I’ll see how it goes!........