Your third listening journal assignment is to write a three to four page paper on a musical work of your choice. You are invited to write on a work from a popular music genre as well as classical, jazz, or world music (I have provided some genre suggestions below). Your paper should provide a musical analysis of your chosen piece using the established parameters designated in our course textbook and implemented in our class discussions.  

You have considerable flexibility regarding how you chose to approach your topic, but please develop an organized analysis that interrogates the seven elements of music and the five questions that provide the organizational foundation of our discussions: What is it? How does it work? What does it mean? What is its history? Where do we go from here? Your paper should be written in standard academic English language style (double spaced/ 11 font). Please use appropriate citations if your chose to consult source materials (APA, MLA, or Chicago style sheets), and keep in mind that all papers will be electronically checked for plagiarism.  

The paper is due on Monday, April 27th. Please turn your assignment in on Blackboard. Contact me if you have any questions regarding this assignment.

Here is a list of suggested genres to consider based on our recent investigations of Gateways from Part III in your textbook (Music History during the Long Twentieth Century):

The Blues/ American Band Music/ Ragtime/ Music of the Early European Modernists/ Balinese Gamelan/ Early Jazz/ Swing/American Popular Song/ American Symphonic Nationalism/ Mexican Mariachi Music/ Country Music/ Bebop/ Classical Music and World War II/ Trinidadian Steel Pan Music/ Rock/ New Directions in Jazz/ The Classical Avant-garde/ Salsa/ Rap and Hip-Hop/ Neo-traditional Jazz/ Postmodern Classical Music/ Reggae/ and current trends today.