Important:
- Before you begin to write anything, please first read through the instructions and tell me the genre you choose either by email or on website chat (if it’s available) so I can confirm whether that genre is suitable or not.
- Please use at least 4 scholarly/peer-reviewed sources from JSTOR or Oxford Music Online/Grove Music online (preferred 7 sources in this term paper since there are many things should be analyzed). You can choose your own source, just make sure that they are scholarly/peer-reviewed sources and please cite the source in Chicago format. Please make a bibliography and discography. Also, please include in-text citation.
- Choose a music genre first, analyze that genre as instructions below, and then choose a song in that genre to analyze.
- I’ve attached a file which shows the basic structure of this term paper and another file which shows a really bad example of how this term paper can be. Please look at the terrible example and write a better paper than that.
Instructions:
Papers are to be 1500 to 2000 words in length (which is about six to eight typed, double-spaced pages in 12-point Times New Roman font) with a complete bibliography and discography at the end. Long quotations must be indented and single-spaced.
Choose one vocal genre from a single culture to examine in terms of historical development, contemporary contexts, and musical parameters. The following genres are NOT permitted: Western Art Music (i.e. “classical”: Bach, Beethoven, opera, art song, etc.), jazz, and Western popular music (this term refers to all mainstream commercial Western music - punk, rap, blues, reggae, etc. - not just what is called 'pop'), Britain Folk Music (Child’s Ballad,…), Japanese Folk Music, Yodelling. I’ve attached a sample one in the order as an example, please use a different genre than that.
Possible verified genre that you are encouraged to write about:
Akan music of Ghana
Carnatic art music
Bengali Baul folk song
Portuguese fado
Nigerian afrobeat
el son Cubano
joropo music in Venezuela
sea shanties of Newfoundland and Labrador
Hindustani dhrupad
Maori chants of New Zealand
nanguan of Southeastern China and Taiwan
French Canadian folk music
Korean kagok
Taiwanese aboriginal music
Icelandic rímur
sean-nos singing of Ireland
mariachi
flamenco
shan’ ge: folk music in Guangxi, China
South African kwaito
p’ansori of Korea
Tongan lakalaka
Cuban salsa
Filipino kundiman
klezmer in The US
Greek rembetika
puirt-a-beul: Scottish 'mouth music' in Cape Breton
Iranian mosighi_e_asill
North Indian khyāl
Colombian cumbia
If you want to choose a new genre, please tell me what genre are you going to write about first so that I can confirm whether it’s appropriate or not.
Choose one song to examine in depth as a representative of the broader genre. Consider how some of the readings from the course so far might come in to play. Follow these features when analyzing the song:
Group make up: How many people are playing on this piece? How many vocalists can you hear? How many instruments?
Meter: What is the meter of the piece? Does it remain the same throughout the piece? Which instruments, if any, emphasize the meter?
Melody: Does the melody have a noticeable shape (e.g. arched, terraced, wavy, descending)? Is the range between the high and low notes very big?
Texture: What is the general texture of the piece? Does it change at any time? Do particular voices interact with each other, creating other sorts of textures (e.g. two voices performing heterophonically with each other in a piece that is otherwise homophonic).
Ornamentation: Is there ornamentation in the vocals or other instruments? Examples of ornamentation include: glissando (sliding from one tone to another); melisma (changing the pitch while singing the same syllable); vibrato (moving repeatedly slightly above and below a note) and trills (moving back and forth between two notes).
Tempo: What is the tempo of the piece in beats per minute? Does it speed up or slow down, or remain constant throughout?
Volume: At what volume is the piece performed? Is there much change in volume during the piece? Where does this happen?
Timbre: For vocals: are they pinched and thin, or resonant and ringing? Do they sound forced or relaxed? Are they nasal, or raspy or clear? Are the consonants pronounced crisply or are they slurred? For instruments, there are all sorts of adjectives we might use for timbre: airy, piercing, ringing, buzzy, fuzzy, bright, dull, rich, thin, mellow, harsh, warm, cold, pure, complex. Other descriptors come from specific types of instruments, like brassy, reedy, percussive, synthetic and electronic.
Form: Can you make any sense of the the shape of the piece? (e.g. If a song has a verse-chorus form, how long is the verse, and how long is the chorus, in seconds?) Is there any repetition happening?
Lyrics: Are there lyrics in the piece? What are they about? Are they repetitive? Do they contain vocables?
This song analysis should take up at least 25% (at least 2 pages) of your paper.
To sum up, this essay should have 4 main parts: Historical development of the genre, contemporary context of the genre, musical parameters of the genre, and analysis of a specific song in that genre.
Sources
Use at least four peer-reviewed sources.
Possible starting sources (available through Toronto library):
The Garland Encyclopedia of Music (in-library, on reserve)
Grove Music Online (part of Oxford Music Online, focused on world musics)
Other sources may be found through electronic databases like JSTOR and the Music Index, where you can search for music articles in journals such as Ethnomusicology, Journal of Music Theory, Asian Music, Early Music, The Galpin Society Journal, and the Journal of the American Musicological Society (JAMS). In addition, JSTOR also features entire e-books on relevant subjects.
For recordings, try CDs from ary, or one of Toronto’s public libraries; online services like Smithsonian Global Sound and Naxos Recordings are accessible through the website. Use of YouTube is discouraged because, like Wikipedia, there is often no way to verify the accuracy of the information. Recordings discussed in class, in the text, or listed on your listening lists are not permitted for discussion in your paper.
You are expected to use reference materials in the library (books, journals, encyclopedias, on-line data bases, recordings). General interest websites will not be considered valid sources, as it is difficult to determine their validity. You should use a minimum of four scholarly sources in addition to recordings, and must cite all directly or indirectly quoted and paraphrased material, including the professor’s notes or lectures (If you are unsure what constitutes a scholarly source, see <
Bibliographic, and Citation Requirements
Papers with citations, bibliographies, and discographies that do not follow the Chicago formatting for music will lose up to 10%. Bibliographies and discographies must be single-spaced, with second and subsequent lines of each entry indented and all punctuation in the correct place. For this paper you must use the author-date-page format for in-text citations. You may put your bibliography and discography on the same page, but make sure that your discography has a separate heading, as in the above-mentioned document. Be sure that that the entries in your bibliography and discography are in alphabetical order (by author whenever possible), and free of spelling mistakes and other errors, as this part of the paper is worth a full 10% of the mark. Papers that do not use the minimum four scholarly sources will lose 5% per missing source.
It is possible to lose a total of 30% of the paper grade with a combination of no peer-reviewed sources and an incorrectly formatted bibliography or citations. Please take care in all of your citation practices.
In-text Citation
In the body of your essay, cite sources that are listed in your bibliography as follows:
(Author’s last name [no comma] year of publication, page number of quote or information used)
e.g. (Kikuchi 1997, 349).
For electronic resources like the Grove Music Online (the “world music” encyclopedia in the Oxford Music Online group), the author’s name and the site is enough for in-text citation, though you will need to list the specific article in the bibliography, as shown in the section below entitled “Proper Bibliographic Formatting”.
e.g. (Hughes, Grove Music Online)
Below is an excerpt from an essay with several examples of how to use in-text citation:
A re-conception of what it meant to be Japanese was undertaken in the early twentieth century by a number of influential scholars, like Yanagita Kunio, Yanagi Sōetsu, and Tetsurō Watsuji. They were instrumental in creating a Japanese “national cultural identity,” parts of which have survived to the present day (Kikuchi 1997, 349).
The writings of Yanagita Kunio in particular enjoyed a resurgence in the postwar period, especially from the mid-1960s, as Japan's economy strengthened and its national pride began to recover. His lasting influence can hardly be exaggerated; as Ronald Morse states, “folklore studies... is really Yanagita studies in Japan” (Morse 1985, 11). Sample Solution