"Long-braided Lolitas," or Teaching Undergraduate Music History in a Study Abroad Context

  • Laura E Kennedy Furman University
  • Patrica Puckett Sasser Furman University
Keywords: music history, Ballets Russes, study abroad, primary sources

Abstract

This article describes a music history course entitled “Rites of Spring: Paris, the Ballets Russes, and the Arts of Modernism,†which used an interdisciplinary study abroad model for teaching and sought to address both musicological and pedagogical challenges. The course itself centered on Sergei Diaghilev’s original ballet company (1909-1929) and the ways in which the troupe mirrored the aesthetic and socio-political currents of the early twentieth century. Taking students to Paris and London, the course used the Ballets Russes as a paradigm for exploring those currents in their historical and physical context. In describing “Rites of Spring,†we hope to illustrate how diverse approaches to pedagogy can foster new encounters with music history for undergraduate students and lead to direct, experiential, and individualized modes of teaching and learning. 

Author Biographies

Laura E Kennedy, Furman University

Laura Kennedy is an assistant professor of musicology at Furman University. She received the BMus in music performance (piano) from Wheaton College and the PhD in historical musicology from the University of Michigan. Her research centers on twentieth-century music and Russian studies, with a particular focus on Dmitri Shostakovich; she has presented at numerous conferences and contributed articles to Notes, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and The Grove Dictionary of American Music.

Patrica Puckett Sasser, Furman University
Patricia Sasser is Music Librarian for the Maxwell Music Library, where her duties include collection development, research assistance, and instruction. She earned a BA in music summa cum laude from American University, where she was a Presidential Scholar and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and the MMus in musicology from the Johns Hopkins University. While writing her thesis at Hopkins, she developed an interest in archival and library science which eventually led to a second master's degree at the University of South Carolina's School of Information and Library Science.
Published
2017-01-31
Issue
Vol 7 No 2 (2017)
Section
Articles

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