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For many collegiate music programs, the Western music history survey is a critical opportunity to reach out to every undergraduate music student who goes forth to become the music educators, performers, and advocates for music in our communities.²For some recent and useful discussions of the survey sequence, see Matthew Baumer, “A Snapshot of Music History Teaching to Undergraduate Music Majors, 2011–2012: Curricula, Methods, Assessment, and Objectives,” The Journal of Music History Pedagogy 5, no. 2 (2015): 23–47 (http://www.ams-net.org/ojs/index.php/jmhp/); and the contributions by Melanie Lowe, “Variability and Flexibility in the Music History and Repertory Core Curriculum,” and Douglas Seaton, “A Survey and Some Questions,” to the “Core Music Curriculum Components II: History and Repertory” section of the Proceedings: The 87th Annual Meeting, 2011 (Reston, VA: The National Association of Schools of Music, 2012), 21–26 (https://nasm.arts-accredit.org/publications/annual-meeting-proceedings/). In such courses, we are essentially providing our students with the “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” and “why” of Western music, complementing the efforts of our music theory colleagues as they focus on the complex question of “how.” Addressing all of these questions in the typical history survey sequence of two or three semesters is a daunting task, especially when, as a discipline, we are coming to terms with the biases that have customarily restricted the scope of these courses to a limited series of canonic works composed primarily by white males of European descent from a circumscribed time period. Too often the desire for a more inclusive approach to the history survey has resulted in anthology editors and textbook authors adding token pieces by composers from various underrepresented groups or regions, rather than examining more closely and critically the traditions and practices that created the problem in the first place. This solution bloats an already saturated curriculum, overwhelming both students and those of us who teach these courses.

It is the moral imperative and privilege of our generation to rethink how we approach the music history survey for undergraduates in the face of the opportunities offered by the curricular diversity of new topics, materials, and methodologies. The call to dedicate our institutions to principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion is a sea change that is happening across academia in a variety of fields, and the results have the potential to redefine the music discipline, from the kinds of research questions music scholars ask to the repertoire played in the concert hall.³Loren Kajikawa provides an excellent discussion of the inherent racism of the music curriculum in North American institutions in “The Possessive Investment in Classical Music: Confronting the Legacy of White Supremacy in U.S. Schools and Departments of Music,” in Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness Across the Disciplines, ed. by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Daniel Martinez HoSang, and George Lipsitz (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019), 155–74. For another call to rethink our disciplinary biases, see Margaret E. Walker, “Towards a Decolonized Music History Curriculum,” The Journal of Music History Pedagogy 10, no. 1 (2020): 1–19 (http://www.ams-net.org/ojs/index.php/jmhp/), and the other two articles by Travis D. Stimeling and Kayla Tokar (20–38), and Michael A. Figueroa (39–57), in the same issue. We can empower our students and ourselves with our pedagogical decisions by bringing underrepresented groups into consideration or breaking down the Eurocentric, teleological narrative that has limited the scope of our discipline. With these goals in mind, many institutions have reinvented their approach to teaching music, forgoing the “traditional” survey in favor of topical or critical approaches. Yet, many of us teach at institutions that are reluctant to completely rewrite the music history curriculum, and we may worry that we are in danger of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” if we completely disregard all of the traditional approaches and repertoire. For those who have invested considerable thought and time into survey course content, the idea of overhauling this material can be a daunting task if not a practical impossibility. The goal of this article, therefore, is to propose changes, large and small, that any teacher of a Western music survey course can make, guided by a sense of social responsibility and a few practical principles for teaching students to rethink the systems that withheld and obscured so many musical creators.

Teaching early music, meaning Western European music from 700 to roughly 1750 CE, presents particular challenges to the educator attempting to offer a more diverse and inclusive approach.⁴An exciting new database of materials focused on adding diversity to early music research and teaching was just released in August 2020. Curated by Erika Honisch and Giovanni Zanovello, this resource can be found at: https://inclusiveearlymusic.org/ (accessed August 19, 2020). As a scholar of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century music, I have attempted to be more inclusive in both my teaching and my research because there are rather large gaps in our collective knowledge of these distant times and places. More important is the fact that these gaps exclude the musical practices of large segments of the population. For example, it is difficult to discuss the music of rural farm workers from northern Europe in the early fifteenth century due to the lack of a notated tradition. While these people surely participated in a variety of musical activities, both vocal and instrumental, these activities made no impression on the written record. In fact, for most of the early music period, notated traditions were limited to elite members of the clergy, a few secular musicians associated with courtly environments, and a small but growing number of amateur musicians. Ironically, this means that it is possible that some of the notated “musical” sources that remain are not primarily evidence of musical sound or practice but existed principally as products of visual and intellectual culture, such as the elaborate notational games of the late fourteenth century, often referred to as the ars subtilior.

I argue that by making cultural context, performance, and primary source knowledge integral to our students’ educational journey from the beginning, we will provide an experience that is both critically engaged and socially relevant, regardless of the era, region, or topic. When we consider both the original performance contexts and primary sources for the music we teach, whether or not that music is provided as a transcription in a published anthology, or in a listening list we curated ourselves, we begin the conversation from a socially grounded perspective. By acknowledging the reality that every piece we study exists in a primary source document somewhere, we recognize the various processes that not only privileged this musical object but also overlooked others and the people that created and used them.⁵With the evolution of technological resources that make distant archives and primary source documents accessible to more people than ever before, it is our responsibility to give students tools to interpret and evaluate these resources, since they will likely run into a wide variety of scores online, including both bad transcriptions as well as original documents. This leads directly to my second point, namely that although composers are certainly important, their music cannot become reality without performers—both modern and historic—interpreting their scores, whether for paid performance, pleasure, or study. A primary source document copied out quickly for a professional gives different information than a meticulously prepared one printed for the edification and delectation of amateurs. Likewise, the fame of a performer—as much as the renown of a composer—can contribute to the dissemination of a particular repertoire, which should be incorporated into our fundamental understanding of the music. For instance, with respect to the concerto as a genre, if we give performers more of an equal status in our courses, we can then begin to understand that the concerto owes at least as much to the stability and virtuosity of a group of Venetian female musicians who were imprisoned for life for being orphans,⁶Jane L. Berdes, Women Musicians of Venice: Musical Foundations 1525–1855 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). as it does to the composers who provided them music, including but not limited to Antonio Vivaldi.⁷Looking as a class at the repertoire preserved in the partbook of Anna Maria (1695/6–1782), one of the orphans who lived at the Pietà in Venice, provides a glimpse into how she functioned as a performer. She relied on the rapid figuration of her solo line for the fast movements but copied out the continuo parts for the slow movements in order to guide her expressive ornamentation. For more on Anna Maria, see Jane L. Baldauf-Berdes, “Anna Maria della Pietà: The Woman Musician of Venice Personified,” in Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music, ed. Susan C. Cook and Judy S. Tsou (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 134–55. And finally, as we make more of an effort to incorporate these resources and performance considerations into our survey courses, we must become comfortable about being open with our students regarding all the things we do not know, either as a discipline because of a lack of source material or as an individual.

There are essential ambiguities that surround musical knowledge and practice of any era, but for the Western European tradition, this is especially true regarding early music. It is also impossible for one person to be an expert in all the repertoire of a survey sequence. Thus, when we take on the role of teacher in this type of course, it is natural to be a fellow seeker alongside our students, hopefully providing them with the resources, tools, and curiosity to ask questions that we may never have considered or may seem unanswerable. In what follows, I argue for why early music matters to all modern Western musicians, and describe how I put my ideas into practice through my approach to “Music History Survey I: Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque,” the first course in a three-semester required sequence offered at my institution, the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

 

The Challenges of Teaching Early Music and Why it Matters

In my experience, teaching the first semester of a chronological Western music history survey brings both particular pleasures and challenges. For many undergraduate music students, this is their first experience with the study of music history and, at least in conservatory-style programs centered on the performance of later canonic repertoires, they often question whether and how the material covered is relevant to their educational needs and interests. This course typically requires students to combine their emerging academic abilities to gather, retain, and communicate basic knowledge about music from textbooks, anthologies, and classroom activities with their developing aural skills.⁸For a survey of the various formats and objectives in the History Survey sequence, see Baumer, “A Snapshot of Music History Teaching” (2015), 39–47. See Appendix 3 for some sample assessments and assignments that integrate aural skills with vocabulary and research skills. In addition to encountering new disciplines and methods, students are also often unfamiliar with the sound worlds and/or repertoires of the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque eras.⁹On the first day of class, I always have students work in small groups to name composers that they know from each of these eras. Typically, the class will be able to come up with 0–1 Medieval composers, 1–3 Renaissance composers, and 3–5 Baroque composers (reliably, I can count on Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi). Such eras encompass an enormous swath of distant times, peoples, and places, especially from the perspective of a North American university student. Traditional survey courses often include a brief section on the music of Greek Antiquity as well, so the course may well expand to address almost 2000 years of music in ten to sixteen short weeks. This expanse of material, even limited to a Western European context, threatens to (or perhaps already has) burst the reasonable boundaries of the course at its seams. For example, of the 1,008 text pages in the ninth edition of Norton’s A History of Western Music, approximately half of the textbook, 462 pages, is dedicated to music pre-1750, an overwhelming amount of information to ask an undergraduate music major to digest in one semester.¹⁰J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music, 9th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014).

It is clear that something needs to change in our music history curriculum, but exactly how to proceed is less obvious. As a specialist in musical communities of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, as well as an active musician who is deeply engaged in contemporary musical cultures and practice, I maintain that early music matters to all music majors, since numerous key changes in the notational and conceptual frameworks that form the basis of our modern musical system occurred during these years. The study of early music has tremendous potential, moreover, for exploring alternative sound worlds, and the dynamic interplay of notated and oral traditions is an aspect of musical knowledge that remains relevant today.¹¹For a recent discussion of this subject, see Lynette Bowring, “Notation as a Transformative Technology,” Early Music 47, no. 2 (May 2019): 225–39. Therefore, a thoughtful consideration of this period is essential to our students’ understanding of their own musical culture as budding professionals. It also provides them with tools to contextualize the Western musical canon and to appreciate traditions that differ from it. Depending on the goals and emphases of a degree program, department, or school, I recognize that a full chronological survey of music in a Western European context may not have a place in each program of study, but in any music degree that relies heavily on modern musical notation, understanding some basic elements of these eras is critical to comprehending the music of today.¹²This information could be presented in a variety of formats, from a traditional chronological survey to a topical approach that considers “notation” across various cultures and time periods.

An effort to communicate the ways in which early music should matter to my students guided my process of revising my institution’s survey course on music of the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods. My experiences teaching courses in a traditional chronological model, and also designing and teaching an alternative topical course focused on building critical thinking and writing skills, had left me dissatisfied with both options.¹³Melanie Lowe has discussed a topical organization that focusses on critical thinking in both “Rethinking the Undergraduate Music History Sequence in the Information Age,” The Journal of Music History Pedagogy 5, no. 2 (2015): 65–72; and “Teaching Music History Today: Making Tangible Connections to Here and Now,” The Journal of Music History Pedagogy 1, no. 1 (2010): 45–59 (ams-net.org/ojs/index.php/jmhp/). I was troubled because the cumbersome striving for comprehensiveness in the traditional model failed to engage with the issues that make music history relevant to contemporary music students. I was also concerned that without the temporal sweep of a chronological survey, students would lack the structure to appreciate the ideas discussed in a topical model and the uniqueness of various distant times and musics.¹⁴I also was not in the position of being able to make a full revision of the music history survey curriculum; rather, I simply needed to create a single semester course covering music up to 1750 that fulfilled my educational and social goals For this reason, I created a course that is something of a hybrid, building on the strengths of each model to provide my students with a solid foundation for their historical knowledge of music that was germane to the types of questions they wanted to ask as contemporary musicians.¹⁵I taught a more traditional, chronological version of the Music History Survey I course four times and a topical, critical thinking course once before creating its current hybrid, context-based configuration, which I have now taught four times. Central to this process was a commitment to respecting the shared humanity of my students and the historical subjects who created and interacted with the music we study. The process of making these revisions and teaching the new course for the first time was like a chemist’s crucible, as my students and I subjected each aspect of the material traditionally examined to the refining fire of “so what?” and “how does this matter?”

I frame the course with activities and discussions on “the issues of studying early music,” namely, the major differences that we encounter during the semester as we delve into the musical remnants of the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque eras. These issues boil down to a need to investigate and understand primary musical sources, original performance contexts, and original instruments and performance practices. These concepts matter because they give students the tools to peel back the layers of what accorded merit and distinction to music of any era or place, and why some musical artifacts remain while others disappeared. In our discussions, I regularly point out that the remaining musical sources are simply a tiny slice of the pie chart of what was happening musically in all of these eras and that they do not represent the full scope of music-making among different classes, genders, races, and ethnicities. We also discuss the power factors of access and education that skew our understanding if they are left unacknowledged. Though these topics and tools are relevant for considering any music, they are necessary for the study of Western European music pre-1750. This was a time when (1) nothing really resembling a modern performance venue existed, (2) musical notations were both different from modern forms and significantly less prescriptive, (3) vast amounts of musical knowledge were transmitted entirely or to some extent orally, and (4) many of the instruments used are now unfamiliar or were constructed and played differently from their modern equivalents. Guiding my students to recognize these issues or principles as opportunities for understanding other ways of approaching music, rather than as evidence of a lack of sophistication, is key to empowering them with tools to explore and value musical activity in any era or place.

The development of musical notation during the Medieval period is perhaps the most important turning point in the history of European music.¹⁶I use the term “development” simply as a way of discussing changes that occur over time and the inevitable reality that changes in the system will in part shape the next steps, rather than as a teleological progression from some sort of perceived simplicity to complexity. For an engaging discussion of notation in a European context, see Thomas Forrest Kelly’s Capturing Music: The Story of Notation (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). Although this is not the only musical notation system used in the world, some form of it has been employed in almost every non-European domain, and its form, strengths, and limitations have shaped many musical systems and practices in fundamental ways. Whereas the essentials of this system form the basis of our modern notational practices, it certainly did not emerge as fully formed. Rather, it encompassed a series of technologies and innovations that served various purposes and were shaped by social, political, financial, and artistic factors. In fact, throughout the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque eras, there were a variety of notational systems and practices (e.g., from monophonic chant notations to instrumental tablatures and partbooks of complex mensural polyphony) that influenced—and were influenced by—the oral traditions that continue to exist to the present day.

Whether they are classical pianists, jazz guitarists, or operatic vocalists, my students all use or play music influenced by this notational system on a daily basis. Consequently, it is vital to know something about its genesis. For example, in pointing out the political motivations behind the Frankish development of chant codification, dissemination, and notation as a form of religious and cultural dominance in late Medieval Europe and the direct link that this process has with our modern system of musical notation, we can provide students with a key for personally appreciating the long-term and often unseen implications of cultural colonialism. This notational system is an essential part of the musical heritage and identity of students, but it is complicated by and enmeshed in broader social forces. What is more, while we examine the original sources of notated organum that seem to have been central to the musical practices of the Notre-Dame school in Paris during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it becomes clear that they preserve only selected parts of the performance of liturgical plainchant, that is, those that would be sung in polyphony. The scribes relied on the singers’ memorized knowledge to fill in the sections that would be sung in a monophonic texture. It is possible, moreover, that these sources served only as mnemonic aids or even commemorative records of quasi-improvised performances. Yet, the development and repeated use of a system for controlling the duration of notated melodic lines so that they could be blended into a cohesive polyphonic structure through a system of visual cues gradually revolutionized the harmonic language of European music. Such examples show our students that there was no grand scheme or teleological trajectory, but rather a series of events and practices that interacted in complex ways. The systems or repertoires that were codified through contemporary theories of musical structure inform our various curricula and have continued to be modified and augmented through modern musical and notational practices.

In my course, I bring the issue of performance context to the forefront by organizing repertoire into three chronological modules: (1) Contexts for Secular Vocal Music; (2) Contexts for Sacred Vocal Music; and (3) Contexts for Instrumental Music. Focusing each module on these categories makes it easier for us to consider how each of the pieces that we study functioned within various venues for musical activity and performance, rather than as disconnected musical objects, further allowing us to trace trends over time and recognize outliers. For instance, in studying the contexts for secular vocal music, we wander from musical entertainments for clerical musicians to the courts of Medieval and Renaissance nobility to Baroque courtly and public theatres, and we even take a sojourn to an English girls’ boarding school to consider the environment that generated Purcell’s unusual English opera, Dido and Aeneas (ca. 1683–88). In following this path, we can think about how these works were funded, who performed the music, and how the original context impacted the way the music was composed or performed, while relating the specifics of one piece to the trend within similar works. Sometimes we do not have all of the answers for each piece. For instance, even with Monteverdi’s L'Orfeo (1607), it is unclear how closely the two original performances are reflected in the extremely detailed printed score that was published two years later. However, by acknowledging the complexity and social embeddedness of musical activity, we breathe life and color into the withered, dusty folios of primary source documents and reinvigorate the skeletal and often fragmentary remains of our musical subjects.

Never before have so many of these musical sources been accessible to our students in the form of a website link to a distant European library or archive. During every session of the first three weeks of my class and regularly throughout the semester, I provide students with a link or pdf file that features at least one original source for each piece that we discuss from their anthology. During class meetings, we spend time analyzing the features of the source, including the type of notation, the layout of the page, and potential reasons that this particular object may have been created and preserved. Although I do not expect my students to learn to perform directly from early music notations, I think that it is critical for them to understand the differences between original and modern notations, especially recognizing that sometimes information has been filled in by an editor or important nuance may have been lost in translation.¹⁷See Margaret Bent, “Editing Early Music: The Dilemma of Translation,” Early Music 22 (1994): 373–92. This also provides an opportunity to think about what it means for a piece to exist in a manuscript (usually a unique source created by hand) versus a print, which indicates multiple copies created with a printing press and often part of a commercial venture of some kind.

When we discuss the first piece in my syllabus, “Can vei la lauzeta mover” by Bernard da Ventadorn (1135–94), we can easily compare the transcribed versions in the anthology with the Parisian manuscript available through Gallica intra muros, the digital branch of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.¹⁸Chansonnier La Vallière, Bibliothèque Nationale de France/Gallica, accessed June 24, 2020,   https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b60004306/f126.item. From looking at the layout of the page and browsing through the manuscript, students can see that even in this rare notated chansonnier, while the texts are fully legible, the red staves carefully drawn for the musical notation have often been left blank. I point out that this does not imply that the chanson melodies were less important, but rather reinforces the fact that knowledge about musical notation was rare and that oral transmission of melodic information was essential to the chanson repertoire. Even where the notation is present in this source, there is little indication of rhythm, tempo, and whether or how an instrument might be used to accompany these songs. Therefore, we can conclude that this source could not be used to learn one of these pieces, but instead serves simply to preserve these songs for some historical or commemorative purpose, or possibly as a memory aid for a song that the reader already knew. We can speculate that since this manuscript is richly decorated with expensive ink and gold leaf, it was made for a wealthy person, implying that this repertoire was highly valued by a literate nobility, even if many of the original creators of the songs were not wealthy, or perhaps even literate, themselves.

In contrast, when we discuss the madrigal “Il bianco e dolce cigno” by Jacques Arcadelt (ca. 1507–68) as an accoutrement of musical gatherings of mixed gender groups of wealthy amateurs, I believe it helpful to use the Stimmbuch-Viewer (Partbook Viewer) of the Bavarian State Library, in order to browse through all four separate partbooks at the same time.¹⁹Stimmbuch-Viewer (Partbook Viewer), Bavarian State Library, accessed June 24, 2020, https://stimmbuecher.digitale-sammlungen.de/. Although each part printed in a different book could make musical analysis more difficult, as opposed to the SATB score format provided in the anthology, this format facilitated the decorous and physically separated interaction of the socially and economically privileged amateurs who had access to these madrigal collections, despite the often sexually explicit lyrics. In a more extreme way, viewing the physical presentation of the published songbooks of John Dowland (ca. 1563–1626) reinforces an understanding of the ways that printed sources can inform us of the social environments in which they were intended to be used. When I project the facsimile of Dowland’s The First Book of Songse or Ayers (1597) on a screen, I usually wait for a moment, until I see a few students begin to crane their necks to the side, trying to read the notation (see Figure 1). I then ask them, “What is odd about this image and what does it tell us about the way this music print would have been used?” Once we have determined that it was probably intended for domestic music making, lying open on a table while members of a family gathered around, we speculate about who may have read from each part. I propose that the young lady of the house (with a lute in hand, neck pointed to the left, away from her companion) could sit next to the tenor/baritone (perhaps a potential suitor), while her mother (altus) and father (bassus) acted as chaperones across and on the side of the table. This same young woman or the tenor could also use the book for private amusement, playing the lute accompaniment while singing, or with a small group of different voice types. Certainly, these are not the only ways that this source could have been used, but by mapping the physical layout onto a relatable and everyday social context, we can observe how the domestic market influenced both the format and potentially also the content of these published English lute songs.

Figure 1. Table-book format from The First Book of Songes or Ayers, (1597)

Online course management systems make it easy to provide students with unrestricted access to primary musical sources, as well as demonstrations of, and performances using, original instruments and practices. Videos of performances on period instruments are not only integral to understanding the disembodied sound worlds of the anthology recordings but also key to demonstrating the potential for acoustic diversity, even within a Western European context. Examining instruments, like the violin or the horn, that remain standard in modern orchestral or chamber music settings, shows historical differences in construction, sound, and playing technique, and can reveal new ways to listen and play. Tuning and temperament are other important issues to address, in particular as we encounter keyboard instruments, such as period organs that often sound out of tune to my students. Through a discussion of the variety of solutions that musicians have used to resolve the practical issues posed by the physical properties of sound, we can appreciate that while most of us are accustomed and accultured to contemporary performances and instruments that rely on equal temperament, this is not the only option.²⁰The videos posted by Elam Rotem at “Early Music Sources” (Elam Rotem, accessed June 24, 2020, https://www.earlymusicsources.com/) are extremely useful, especially the two videos on “Tuning and Temperaments in the Renaissance” (Elam Rotem, Oren Kirschenbaum, and Johannes Keller, accessed June 24, 2020, Part 1, https://youtu.be/R75unSXKJXQ; Part 2, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLa7GOKGMaQ). The first assignment in my course requires students to complete a comparative analysis of two contrasting recordings of a piece from the syllabus. In this task, they demonstrate their knowledge of the ambiguities and particular qualities of original sources, instruments, and performance practices to explain the ways that these elements influence the choices modern performers make when playing pieces from these repertoires.

The alternative sound worlds and performance practices of early music, as well as the inherent ambiguities of this repertoire (i.e., relying on a combination of notated and oral traditions) presents our students with lessons that will serve them well in thinking critically about other musical periods and genres, especially those lying outside the Western classical canon. By sharing gaps in our knowledge with our students from the beginning and being honest about how history itself is a changeable story of connecting the dots between scattered pieces of information, and providing them with tools to access primary sources, we can then give them the opportunity to become participants in the process of retelling music history. Indeed, this is an act in which we take part every time we enter a classroom or walk onstage. For example, I always make sure that my students are aware that we only spend one day on independent instrumental music of the Medieval period, not because this music did not exist or was unimportant, but simply because such instrumentalists functioned without any need to notate their repertoire, primarily relying on oral transmission and improvisation, thus leaving little trace of their prolific musical activities. Acknowledging this makes it possible to recognize the impact of these otherwise invisible musicians and validates other musical traditions that do not depend on written transmission. When taught within a contextual framework, early music of the Western European tradition can actually work to break down the implicit value judgements and assumed superiority of the classical canon by articulating the roots of some of the systems that privileged certain knowledge, repertoires, and people, while neglecting or denying others.

 

Personal Reflections and Conclusions

Overwhelmingly, redesigning the traditional, chronological first course in the music history sequence has been a transformative and constructive experience for me as an instructor. It has not only allowed me time to delve into the issues that are central to why I study this music but also encouraged me to articulate the reasons why I think early music matters to me and to my students. It is very difficult to assess the relative experience of these changes on my students, but an enthusiastic student who had struggled in a traditional chronological survey course shared with me that the topical approach made the material relevant to his experience as a jazz musician and was also more enjoyable.²¹This student contacted me a couple years later to ask for help compiling a bibliography for an assignment in an advanced writing course that he had tentatively entitled “Why Bach was the First Jazz Musician.” I have observed that this approach fosters greater investment from students who seem more likely to relate course content to their personal experience as musicians in their voluntary contributions to class discussions. The contextual format allows us to immerse ourselves in the sexual or gender politics of courtly love songs and madrigals, to consider the competition and political power dynamics of liturgical elaborations, or to reflect on the civic pride expressed in music written for exquisitely crafted North German Baroque organs. In my course, we dance the pavane and contemplate the exoticism of the canario, we discuss counseling resources on our campus as we lament with Dido, and we climb through the workings of our institution’s tracker organ imagining how Bach might have tested its “lungs.” In other words, we do our best to come to terms with the humanity we share with the people who experienced this music in various ways throughout the centuries. We also strive to become aware of the music makers who are left out of the record of music history, in the hope that we might revive their voices even as we empower our own through knowledge of the musical past.

 

Notes

1. I would like to thank Julie Cumming, Catherine Mayes, Elizabeth Craft, Sara Haefeli, and Kristen Turner for their advice on earlier versions of this article, as well as the two anonymous peer reviewers for their feedback on the current article.

2. For some recent and useful discussions of the survey sequence, see Matthew Baumer, “A Snapshot of Music History Teaching to Undergraduate Music Majors, 2011–2012: Curricula, Methods, Assessment, and Objectives,” The Journal of Music History Pedagogy 5, no. 2 (2015): 23–47 (http://www.ams-net.org/ojs/index.php/jmhp/); and the contributions by Melanie Lowe, “Variability and Flexibility in the Music History and Repertory Core Curriculum,” and Douglas Seaton, “A Survey and Some Questions,” to the “Core Music Curriculum Components II: History and Repertory” section of the Proceedings: The 87th Annual Meeting, 2011 (Reston, VA: The National Association of Schools of Music, 2012), 21–26 (https://nasm.arts-accredit.org/publications/annual-meeting-proceedings/).

3. Loren Kajikawa provides an excellent discussion of the inherent racism of the music curriculum in North American institutions in “The Possessive Investment in Classical Music: Confronting the Legacy of White Supremacy in U.S. Schools and Departments of Music,” in Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness Across the Disciplines, ed. by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Daniel Martinez HoSang, and George Lipsitz (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019), 155–74. For another call to rethink our disciplinary biases, see Margaret E. Walker, “Towards a Decolonized Music History Curriculum,” The Journal of Music History Pedagogy 10, no. 1 (2020): 1–19 (http://www.ams-net.org/ojs/index.php/jmhp/), and the other two articles by Travis D. Stimeling and Kayla Tokar (20–38), and Michael A. Figueroa (39–57), in the same issue.

4. An exciting new database of materials focused on adding diversity to early music research and teaching was just released in August 2020. Curated by Erika Honisch and Giovanni Zanovello, this resource can be found at: https://inclusiveearlymusic.org/ (accessed August 19, 2020).

5. With the evolution of technological resources that make distant archives and primary source documents accessible to more people than ever before, it is our responsibility to give students tools to interpret and evaluate these resources, since they will likely run into a wide variety of scores online, including both bad transcriptions and original documents.

6. Jane L. Berdes, Women Musicians of Venice: Musical Foundations 1525–1855 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

7. Looking as a class at the repertoire preserved in the partbook of Anna Maria (1695/6–1782), one of the orphans who lived at the Pietà in Venice, provides a glimpse into how she functioned as a performer. She relied on the rapid figuration of her solo line for the fast movements but copied out the continuo parts for the slow movements in order to guide her expressive ornamentation. For more on Anna Maria, see Jane L. Baldauf-Berdes, “Anna Maria della Pietà: The Woman Musician of Venice Personified,” in Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music, ed. Susan C. Cook and Judy S. Tsou (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 134–55. 

8. For a survey of the various formats and objectives in the History Survey sequence, see Baumer, “A Snapshot of Music History Teaching” (2015), 39–47. See Appendix 3 for some sample assessments and assignments that integrate aural skills with vocabulary and research skills.

9. On the first day of class, I always have students work in small groups to name composers that they know from each of these eras. Typically, the class will be able to come up with 0–1 Medieval composers, 1–3 Renaissance composers, and 3–5 Baroque composers (reliably, I can count on Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi).

10. J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music, 9th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014).

11. For a recent discussion of this subject, see Lynette Bowring, “Notation as a Transformative Technology,” Early Music 47, no. 2 (May 2019): 225–39.

12. This information could be presented in a variety of formats, from a traditional chronological survey to a topical approach that considers “notation” across various cultures and time periods.

13. Melanie Lowe has discussed a topical organization that focusses on critical thinking in both “Rethinking the Undergraduate Music History Sequence in the Information Age,” The Journal of Music History Pedagogy 5, no. 2 (2015): 65–72; and “Teaching Music History Today: Making Tangible Connections to Here and Now,” The Journal of Music History Pedagogy 1, no. 1 (2010): 45–59 (ams-net.org/ojs/index.php/jmhp/).

14. I also was not in the position of being able to make a full revision of the music history survey curriculum; rather, I simply needed to create a single semester course covering music up to 1750 that fulfilled my educational and social goals.

15. I taught a more traditional, chronological version of the Music History Survey I course four times and a topical, critical thinking course once before creating its current hybrid, context-based configuration, which I have now taught four times.

16. I use the term “development” simply as a way of discussing changes that occur over time and the inevitable reality that changes in the system will in part shape the next steps, rather than as a teleological progression from some sort of perceived simplicity to complexity. For an engaging discussion of notation in a European context, see Thomas Forrest Kelly’s Capturing Music: The Story of Notation (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014).

17. See Margaret Bent, “Editing Early Music: The Dilemma of Translation,” Early Music 22 (1994): 373–92.

18. Chansonnier La Vallière, Bibliothèque Nationale de France/Gallica, accessed June 24, 2020,   https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b60004306/f126.item.

19. Stimmbuch-Viewer (Partbook Viewer), Bavarian State Library, accessed June 24, 2020, https://stimmbuecher.digitale-sammlungen.de/.

20. The videos posted by Elam Rotem at “Early Music Sources” (Elam Rotem, accessed June 24, 2020, https://www.earlymusicsources.com/) are extremely useful, especially the two videos on “Tuning and Temperaments in the Renaissance” (Elam Rotem, Oren Kirschenbaum, and Johannes Keller, accessed June 24, 2020, Part 1, https://youtu.be/R75unSXKJXQ; Part 2, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLa7GOKGMaQ).

21. This student contacted me a couple years later to ask for help compiling a bibliography for an assignment in an advanced writing course that he had tentatively entitled “Why Bach was the First Jazz Musician.”

 

References

Baldauf-Berdes, Jane L. “Anna Maria della Pietà: The Woman Musician of Venice Personified.” In Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music, edited by Susan C. Cook and Judy S. Tsou, 134–55. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Baumer, Matthew. “A Snapshot of Music History Teaching to Undergraduate Music Majors, 2011–2012: Curricula, Methods, Assessment, and Objectives.” The Journal of Music History Pedagogy 5, no. 2 (2015): 23–47. http://www.ams-net.org/ojs/index.php/jmhp/.

Bent, Margaret. “Editing Early Music: The Dilemma of Translation.” Early Music 22 (1994): 373–92.

Berdes, Jane L. Women Musicians of Venice: Musical Foundations, 1525–1855. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Bowring, Lynette. “Notation as a Transformative Technology.” Early Music 47, no. 2 (May 2019):  225–39.

Burkholder, J. Peter and Claude V. Palisca, eds. Norton Anthology of Western Music, Volume One: Ancient to Baroque. 7th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.

Burkholder, J. Peter, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca. A History of Western Music. 9th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.

Cook, Susan C. “Teaching Others, Others Teaching, or Music History Like it Mattered.” In Vitalizing Music History Teaching, edited by James R. Briscoe, 105–24. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2010.

Kajikawa, Loren. “The Possessive Investment in Classical Music: Confronting the Legacy of White Supremacy in U.S. Schools and Departments of Music.” In Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness Across the Disciplines, edited by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Daniel Martinez HoSang and George Lipsitz, 155–74. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019.

Kelly, Thomas Forrest. Capturing Music: The Story of Notation. New York, W. W. Norton, 2014.

Lowe, Melanie. “Rethinking the Undergraduate Music History Sequence in the Information Age.” The Journal of Music History Pedagogy 5, no. 2 (2015): 65–72. http://www.ams-net.org/ojs/index.php/jmhp/.

Lowe, Melanie. “Teaching Music History Today: Making Tangible Connections to Here and Now.”  The Journal of Music History Pedagogy 1, no. 1 (2010): 45–59. ams-net.org/ojs/index.php/jmhp/.

Lowe, Melanie. “Variability and Flexibility in the Music History and Repertory Core Curriculum.” In Proceedings: The 87th Annual Meeting, 2011, 21–22. Reston, VA: The National Association of Schools of Music, 2012. https://nasm.arts-accredit.org/publications/annual-meeting-proceedings/.

Seaton, Douglas. “A Survey and Some Questions,” to the “Core Music Curriculum Components II: History and Repertory.” In Proceedings: The 87th Annual Meeting, 2011, 23–26. Reston, VA: The National Association of Schools of Music, 2012. https://nasm.arts-accredit.org/publications/annual-meeting-proceedings/.

Walker, Margaret E. “Towards a Decolonized Music History Curriculum.” The Journal of Music History Pedagogy 10, no. 1 (2020): 1–19. http://www.ams-net.org/ojs/index.php/jmhp/.

 

Appendices

Appendix 1: Practical Notes on the Implementation of a Contextual Approach

Appendix 2: General Course Overview

Appendix 3: Sample Assignments