Overview
Your Listening Journal 2 assignment is to write a three-to-five-page paper on a musical work of your choosing or selected from the list provided below. Your paper should provide a musical analysis of one piece of music using the established parameters designated in our course textbook and implemented in our class discussions. Please do not select a work that is a Gateway piece in the course textbook as it has already been analyzed. If you would like to write your paper on a work that is not listed below, please email your plan to your instructor. I look forward to reading a clean, well-organized paper on a musical work that interests you.
You have considerable flexibility regarding how you chose to approach your topic, but please develop an organized analysis that interrogates the seven elements of music and the five questions that provide the organizational foundation of our discussions: What is it? How does it work? What does it mean? What is its history? Where do we go from here? Your paper should be written in standard academic English language style (double spaced/ 11 font). Please use appropriate citations if your chose to consult source materials (APA, MLA, or Chicago style sheets), and provide an appropriately formatted bibliography. Please keep in mind that all papers will be electronically checked for plagiarism.
Here is the list of suggested works to study based on our recent investigations of gateways from Part II in your textbook (Chapters 6,7,8):
Classical-period Chamber Music: any string quartet by Franz Joseph Haydn or Ludwig van Beethoven (I recommend a look at the “late” string quartets of Beethoven)
Classical-period Symphonies: Symphony No. 41 in C major, K. 551 (known as the Jupiter Symphony) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Classical-period Opera: Don Giovanni (K. 527) or The Magic Flute (K. 620) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Classical-period Piano Music: Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57 (known as the Appassionata sonata) by Ludwig van Beethoven
Music of the Atlantic Slave Trade: any relevant musical example of Candomblé
Beethoven Symphonies: Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68 (known as the Pastoral Symphony) by Ludwig van Beethoven
Programmatic Orchestral Works: A Faust Symphony in Three Character Pictures, S.108 (known as the Faust Symphony) by Franz Liszt
Romantic Piano Music: Carnaval, Op. 9, for piano solo by Robert Schumann
Nineteenth-century Opera: The Flying Dutchman (WWV 63) or The Valkyrie (WWV 86B) by Richard Wagner
Early American Popular Music: any relevant example of early American popular music from 1800 to 1850
European Musical Nationalism: Finlandia (Op. 26) by Jean Sibelius or Peer Gynt (Op.23) by Edvard Grieg
Classical Music at Century’s End: La mer (L. 109, CD. 111) by Claude Debussy or Rapsodie espagnole by Maurice Ravel
Here is a list of musical genres to consider based on our investigations of Gateways from Part III in your textbook (Music History during the Long Twentieth Century). You may choose a notable work from one of these genres:
The Blues/ American Band Music/ Ragtime/ Music of the Early European Modernists/ Balinese Gamelan/ Early Jazz/ Swing/American Popular Song/ American Symphonic Nationalism/ Mexican Mariachi Music/ Country Music/ Bebop/ Classical Music and World War II/ Trinidadian Steel Pan Music/ Rock/ New Directions in Jazz/ The Classical Avant-garde/ Salsa/ Rap and Hip-Hop/ Neo-traditional Jazz/ Postmodern Classical Music/ Reggae/ and current trends today.