First, select an area of activity in your life from the following options: your social life, your culture, your religious or spiritual life, your political views, your sense of patriotism or nationalism, or your creative life. You must choose one of these for your paper and name it in your first paragraph.
Then, explain in prose how music functions in that part of your life.
Be sure you write about “musical function” in terms of the musical functions you read about in the summary of Alan Merriam’s bookPreview the document, and which we’ve been using in this course. You don’t need to write about all ten of Merriam’s functions. Try just exploring two or three of them in-depth.
Important: Use specific musical examples to support your points, referring to musical features as necessary. For example, name a particular song, not just a genre (i.e., The Beatles’ “Love Me Do” instead of just “rock ‘n’ roll”). This is important; a paper without specific examples is not a well-written paper.
Finally, compare and contrast what you’ve written about musical functions in your own life with musical functions in one of the music traditions we’ve studied so far in this course.
Sample Solution