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I would ask them (students) to listen to less music more frequently, that’s one thing I would say.
Is to sort of focus one’s listening on smaller things.
A kind of listening that asks you, at certain points anyway, to kind of take apart what you’re hearing
and kind of break it into constituent parts and compare those parts,
and try to figure out how those different parts are operating.
Those parts may be things like melody or the rhythm of the piece.
The harmonies, would they be sort of strange or are they normal, those sorts of questions.
You’re confronted with this artifact,
it could be a poem, it could be a piece of music, it could be a novel, whatever it is.
It’s hard to know what to hold onto at first, where do I grab this and start thinking about it.
As I’ve said I want my students to think really hard about this, well where do you start?
Strangeness is actually an excellent way to begin approaching an artifact like this.
Well, what is that seems to me unusual about it,
what is it that singles this out from the kinds of artifacts that I see in my daily life or other things that I’ve read.
So it’s something to grab hold of at first, and to start picking at.
Why is it strange? What other things in this poem or in this piece are related to it, and how does that tell me more.
So it’s an entry point that opens up an avenue of interpretive possibilities.
I think it works musically as well,
and there I think the process is more one of defamiliarization
because actually a lot of the things that we take for granted were at one time strange,
very strange, musically speaking.
Certain sorts of sounds, were not possibilities in the historical past the way that they are now.
We live right now, musically speaking, in an extremely heterogonous culture.
You know moving out of an elevator and into a concert hall and back out again onto the street
one can hear music of different cultures and different time periods.
Attending to literature artifacts with an eye to what makes them peculiar, foreign, unusual
and then trying to figure out if there’s some value to this otherness, this foreignness, this strangeness,
is part of the project, I think. Part of the project that I’m interested in, in the class.
What does this line look like, where are the stresses, how long are the feet?
I want students to say, “I know where the stresses are, and I think the stresses are here, here, and here
and wait a minute, this line is missing one.” Why is it missing one?
or this line has an extra stress, what is going on with this?
In poetry, form and meter carry meaning.
If you don’t have a language to talk about that layer of meaning
you miss something pretty significant about the operation of the poem.
I’m not expecting students to have prior familiarity with reading music.
Part of the value with organizing the course in a semi-historical fashion is
that I can introduce certain key concepts and relate them to a kind of rudimentary
understanding of musical notation, early on in the course,
because we’re dealing with some music that was being written right when certain
notational conventions were coming into being
in order to account for rhythm, (laughing)
pitch, those sort of basic perimeters of western musics.
Part of the way the course works is that we will be learning from one another
what the relationship is between these media and how they interact,
and the process of our learning will get ramified in the class as part of the process of the students learning.
Beneath that elegant language lurks the word “work,” which I think is a very important part of this class.
Questioning of assumptions, trying to come to a deeper, fuller, stranger encounter with
the media of literature and music, than perhaps the student’s been accustomed to.