Big Blog II: One Last Music Culture

 The time is here--our last Blog entries! 

This last blog is (obviously) a Big Blog, and the scope (but not the content) will be the same as the first Big Blog. In fact, let's just copy them here: 

  • A minimum of 1000 words
  • At least four music selections we can hear, embedded into the body of your blog
  • At least two images (pictures), also embedded into the blog.
  • At least four sources, not including Wikipedia, that need to be cited in a bibliography at the end of your blog. MLA, APA, or Chicago style may be used for those bibliography citations. 
  • If you use ChatGPT to help you generate ideas or other aspects of your blog, please tell me how you used ChatGPT as a part of your citations at the end of the blog.
  • Once you have decided on your topic, please leave a comment on this blog letting us know what your topic will be. That way you can all see each others topics so that, when it comes time to read four of your classmates' blogs, you can choose topics you find interesting. (Also, that way we can avoid having the entire class do the same topic.)

    • The content will be quite different from the first Big Blog, though. As we've discussed in class, pick a music-culture that we haven't explicitly covered in class. Let your imagination run wild! You can pick a people, a country, a repertoire, or something else along those lines. The Maori of New Zealand, the Inuit of Alaska, the Tango of Argentina, the country of Madagascar, traditional Bulgarian music, Tuvan throat-singers, Chinese opera, etc. Your goal is to teach the class sort of like how I've been teaching y'all throughout the semester--give us something of a broad overview, but pick some deep pockets to expand on. It will help you if you pick a topic of medium breadth. For instance, "China" is way too big--it's a huge country with many ethnicities and traditions and a much-recorded long history. C-Pop is way too narrow--it's a fairly recent popular music genre without much real variety. Chinese opera, however, comes in lots of different styles has been around for centuries but is fairly contained--it's just right. Smaller countries--like Madagascar--that have much less of a written tradition and are therefore trickier to research are just right all by themselves. 

    I've been teaching you about various music-cultures all semester, so I'm not going to provide an example here. But I do have something fun to share! Our favorite Gambian griot, Sona Jobarteh, recently received an honorary doctorate from the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Here's her acceptance speech--it's pretty awesome!










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