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This study guide is designed to help you and your students prepare for, enjoy, and discuss ArtsPower's one-act musical play From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. This guide contains background infor-mation and cross-curricular activities to complete both before and after the performance.
music notes and symbols are written or printed on. arts of a note: Head - . the round part of a note. (All notes have a head.) Stem - the straight lin. part of a note that is connected to the note head. Flag - a curved. line that is attached to the other end of the stem. Beam - a str. n the two dots) is where the note “F” i. nd.
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- Introduction: Writing about Music
- Part I: Some Special Features of Writing About Music
- Technical vs. Lay Language
- Metaphor
- Part II: Major Writing Assignments
- Before You Start Writing
- Planning Your Paper
- Some Tips for the Final Paper
- The First Nights Course site
- The Writing Center
The chief purpose of First Nights is to show you how music can enrich your life. In First Nights, you will examine several major musical works, including Handel’s Mes-siah and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. You will also read accounts of those who attended those first performances, for when we think about listeners of the past, we see how they are l...
You don’t have to be an expert in music to write a good paper about it. You certainly don’t have to be able to read music. You just have to be able to listen closely, analyze the music, and arrive at a view, an opinion, an interpretation of the music’s meaning. So in many respects, strong essays about music are like the best essays about anythin...
Though it can be daunting to the neophyte, technical vocabulary allows writers to describe music’s subtleties precisely. Using some technical language may thus be necessary for the sake of clarity. And if you’re familiar with music, you may find it natural to use such language and make reference to the score. But that’s not the only choice you h...
Good writing about music almost always employs metaphorical language, which can convey the essence of a musical passage far better than technical description alone. The paragraph above helps you imagine the chromatic bass line in a Chopin piece by suggesting that it “slithers.” Metaphor brings us closer to conveying the expressive quality of a pi...
Two paper assignments in First Nights will allow you to experience first-hand how thinking and writing about music enhance your appreciation of it. Each paper asks you to make an argument that is based primarily on specific, concrete musical de-tails. Each asks you to pay attention to the music’s context, to understand the way cultural expectatio...
Writing about music, like writing about any subject, takes place in stages. “Listen-ing to Music,” the guide included in your sourcepack, details a procedure that will help you know the music well enough to write about it for your First Nights papers. In brief, prior to developing the thesis and planning the structure of an essay, you need to obse...
When it comes time to write your papers, remember that you can’t discuss every detail, or even every kind of detail. You may, perhaps, limit yourself to arguing about the ways in which a few musical parameters (like melody, instrumentation, rhythm, dynamics, etc.) affect the piece’s meaning or create a particular experience for the listener. And ...
In the second paper, you will review the world premiere of a new work of music. Writing the review of a new work means straddling the divide between journalistic writing (reporting on what you’ve heard) and academic writing (analyzing the ma-terial). And of course, you will need to make sure to maintain an appropriate tone so that your readers kno...
First Nights students should find useful an extensive website created for the class. This site contains background images and text for each of the performances the course examines, access to the music itself, close analyses of moments in the music linked to the online glossary, and listening notes for each major piece. It also con-tains links to o...
The Writing Center offers individual assistance to students who would like to work closely with trained tutors on structure, focus, and clarity of essays, research papers, and theses. Students may access the Writing Center website to make an appoint-ment. [www.fas.harvard.edu/~wricntr]
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School of Music Academic Writing Guide (Style Sheet) 2021 1 About this Document The School of Academic Writing Guide is a style sheet. It provides guidance on many aspects of the preparation and presentation of your written work. This includes information on various writing conventions as well as procedures for source citation and referencing.
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Welcome to this crash course in how to write music. The approach I’m going outline for you can be applied to almost any form of music: from pop songs to hip hop tracks, film scores to string quartets.
In this section you will find handy tips for writing the lyrics to your song. The first thing you need to decide is what you want your song to be about! What’s your theme? Here are some ideas for the subject of your song: Spring – Think of how the world changes as spring approaches!
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The Berklee Online Songwriting Handbook offers comprehensive guidance on melody, harmony, arranging, and lyric writing for aspiring songwriters.
