Sound Thinking: It's ALL Music: How Music Connects with Everything
Edition: 3
Copyright: 2019
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Sound Thinking: It's ALL Music: How Music Connects with Everything is a teaching–learning companion. It is not meant to be encyclopedic, complete, exhaustive, or all-inclusive. Rather, it is designed to augment a broad set of lectures for cross-campus arts inquiry courses and is designed with a certain interdisciplinary quality.
Designed for general survey courses, Sound Thinking expands on the students’ general awareness of all music in Western Civilization. It includes classical music periods from the Baroque through fin de siècle and the first decades of the 21st century, including opera and ballet. In addition, there are entries into American music: First Nations music, folk music that arrived in the New World with immigrants from throughout the Old World, gospel, spirituals, blues, jazz (ragtime, Dixieland, big band, small band jazz, bebop, third stream), Tin Pan Alley, military band music, film music, American musical theater, Rhythm & Blues, rock ‘n roll, folk music in the volatile years of the 1960s, country music, bluegrass, and ever-growing subgenres and amalgamations, including hip hop and rap/spoken word.
Sound Thinking can be supplemented with the author’s multiple Emmy Award winning Montana PBS-TV series “11th & Grant with Eric Funk”. Students watch three episodes per week and submit comments electronically. The series, available on the web, involves eleven seasons to date of 57 one-hour episodes featuring professional musicians in all genres. The shows are approximately 45 minutes of music and 15 minutes of interview. These are live shoots of the music and interviews done at a separate time and location. It involves classical, folk, jazz, rock, bluegrass, country, Celtic, Zydeco, honkytonk, Prohibition Era, Dixieland, etc. and serves as a microcosm for the music genres that are alive today in any region of the United States today.
Week 1: Opening the Door
Week 2: Enter In
Week 3: Getting Familiar with the Time & Place
Week 4: The Whole World is Changing: Listening for “Instead”
Week 5: What’s That Sound?
Week 6: All Institutions under Scrutiny
Week 7: Do Dreams Die with the Dreamer?
Week 8: “The Great Forgetting”
Week 9: The New “Fin de siècle” – Reflecting Society’s Truths, Understanding Even More Deeply
Week 10: Coda
Eric Funk has been nominated for not one, but eight Emmy Awards for his role and the production of the prize-winning PBS-TV documentary regarding his solo violin concert "The Violin Alone." In addition to the eight Emmy Award nominations, Eric has received a special judges citation from the American Prize for Composition - symphonic division for "Best Concerto of the Year."
I really like how Sound Thinking ties the themes back together into a progressive moment of carrying the torch and continuing the expansion of music appreciation and exploration. This has definitely reached and inspired excitement about my academics (and how that ties into a world approach). It has been refreshing to learn and be forced to evaluate norms from someone who is passionate about the work they do and not just fulfilling the academic responsibility of a tenured professor (as some of the hard science courses end up being).
I also really enjoyed the reflection into what makes a song "great" and how we define beauty/whether there is any art that could be considered universally beautiful. I think that is part of what makes travelling and adventure so important, to broaden one's perceptions so as to not remain fixed in the perceptions we 'inherited' from wherever we grew up.
Kennan Hooker, Student