What is the Discipline of Music Appreciation? Reconsidering the Concert Report

  • Jennifer L. Hund Purdue University
Keywords: Music Appreciation, Concert Report

Abstract

In an article on music history pedagogy, Douglas Seaton gave two principles: “Music history ought to investigate musical experience,†and “Music history students must not merely imbibe and regurgitate music-historical information but engage actively in the discipline.â€Â These principles provide a starting point for an examination of the concert report, a traditional assignment in which students of music appreciation “investigate musical experience†by describing musical style. This type of assignment reveals a music appreciation discipline greatly influenced by the fields of music theory and history, studies that educators believed could achieve more immediate results than fields that require more time to gain specialized knowledge and hone skill sets such as composition or performance. In recent years, teacher-scholars have pushed against the reigning pedagogical methods to search for alternatives, and this desire to move the discipline is reflected in changes to the traditional concert report assignment.

This paper provides a brief history of music appreciation in the United States to better understand the position in which the discipline finds itself but also to tease out its own identity. Two defining features of the discipline are its focus on listening and its response to social and cultural changes experienced by its students—the general public. In the past sixty years, only the former feature has been explored and reinforced in textbooks, while the latter has been largely overlooked. An alternative concert report assignment is discussed, one that opens the discipline of music appreciation beyond the models provided by music theory and musicology and is more in line with the two predominant features of the discipline as described in the literature.

 

Author Biography

Jennifer L. Hund, Purdue University
Jennifer L. Hund, Assistant Professor of Music at Purdue University, earned her BM in Piano Performance and Pedagogy at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, her MM in Musicology from Florida State University, and her PhD in Musicology at Indiana University-Bloomington, with her dissertation “The Proposta e Risposta Madrigal, Dialogue, Cultural Discourse, and the Issue of Imitatio†(2007). She has presented her research at conferences of the American Musicological Society, Renaissance Society of America, and College Music Society, and is actively creating educational materials for teaching music to the general student. Her most recent publication is Study Guide for A Concise History of Western Music, co-authored with J. Peter Burkholder (W. W. Norton, 2010). Her article “Writing about Music in Large Music Appreciation Classrooms†appeared in the Journal of Music History Pedagogy 2, no. 2 (2012).
Published
2013-10-01