Authors: Brian Culver • Nancy Reale
How do we incorporate a diverse curriculum intelligently into syllabi that are already overloaded?
This has been a long-standing question asked by every instructor teaching in the Liberal Studies Core Program. One part of this program, the Cultural Foundations sequence, demands its instructors to incorporate a variety of cultural media (including literature, the visual arts, and music), spanning many historical periods, and drawn from many different cultural traditions throughout the world. Thus, a necessary challenge involves faculty training: many instructors are understandably hesitant to introduce materials into the classroom concerning which they have not been formally trained.
One solution is to make available to both instructors and their students shared online screencasts, which would be produced by those faculty with more training or teaching experience in one curricular area for their colleagues. The screencasts could be viewed outside the classroom – either as instructor-assigned viewing or at the discretion of the individual student – freeing up valuable classtime for discussion or group work.
The adoption of an online art history textbook for the Cultural Foundations courses has given instructors the opportunity to upload supplementary digital resources directly into the text. During the summers of 2014 and 2015, Nancy Reale and Brian Culver began a project to create a number of video mini-lectures (between 5 and 13 minutes each) on music to accompany the relevant discussions on art in the online textbook.
Since it was up to the individual instructor to decide which and how to use these videos, each had to have a focus that would allow it to function as an independent module. Moreover, each had to serve a variety of different purposes: (1) introduce a specific element, genre, or period of music, (2) make connections to other media, and (3) makes connections to other cultural traditions.
To illustrate these goals, we will describe just one of the five screencasts produced during the summer of 2015, one entitled “Sounds of Desire: Chromaticism in Romantic Music.” The focus of this screencast is Richard Wagner’s “Prelude” to his opera Tristan und Isolde (1859) and its liberal use of the chromatic scale, which weakens the sense of this music’s tonality. These topics comprise the screencast’s musical content, but Romanticism as a broader cultural movement is also invoked through connections to the poetry of William Wordsworth and the painter Caspar David Friedrich. In addition, the concept of chromaticism is introduced by a more general explanation of the musical scale and the tonal center, elements of music that, the screencast explains, are standard features of nearly all music from every cultural tradition.
What we have seen from these initial explorations with digital delivery are both the great possibilities and the potential difficulties inherent in the process. The topics of the videos we have so far produced include the transcultural genre of religious chant, the medieval troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn, the Classical forms of sonata-allegro, minuet, and rondo, and the initial reception of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. We hope that having these video mini-lectures available online for all faculty to use will enable instructors to encourage students to think both about music and its relation to the other media we teach.