Ah, but at what level of detail?
Should we start with the climax of the 9th symphony, then the Ode to Joy, then the prelude?
Or should each piece be played as its own crab canon?
We Should Teach Music History Backwards
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Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards
#32This is part of an enormous cultural trend in the US that has determined that people need to be tricked or somehow otherwise eased into learning, because otherwise learning is too boring! This trend is responding to a real issue, because capitalism has so successfully neutered the common man into a entertainment/carbohydrate consuming machine that the desire or need to learn is only associated with the need to earn an income, if at all.
> We don’t start our investigations at some arbitrarily chosen point in the past; we begin where we are, from our current burning passion.
Who said anything about choosing an _arbitrary_ point in the past? What the author tries to do here is to make the past arbitrary, not interesting, perhaps less relevant than it ought to be. But that's not the problem.
The problem is that this article talks about music history being taught in the first place. In what percent of schools is music history taught in any serious manner by a serious instructor? I honestly am fundamentally perplexed by this article because I would expect first it would establish that music history should be taught in schools at all. Then the author could get into implementation specifics.
But the United States hasn't been interested in music history since Leonard Bernstein's Omnibus[0] lectures aired in the 50s, if it was even then. Today, "Classical Music" isn't for old people anymore, it's for keeping vagrants away from your property[1].
So what the author is really attacking here is the past, because more than ever the past has been deemed too boring on a massive cultural scale. This is just one example of people attempting to make palatable "the past" or whatever else is now too boring, too nerdy or too impossible for regular people to approach.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Omnibus-Leonard-Bernstein/dp/B002OVB9...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/blasting-moza...
Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Backwards" is relative to the original way a subject was taught. My from my experience math is taught formula first rather than by starting with an intuition based on physical representation. Starting with developing an intuition like 3B1B and then deriving a formula would be "backwards" to how I've been taught in the past.
Gilbert Strang's lectures on linear algebra work this way. He typically first gives a simple example (like for least squares, fitting a line to three points in two dimensions) and then over the course of the lecture susses out a broader generalization / formula from the simple example. Unfortunately, OCW seems to be having some kind of copyright issue with YouTube, but here's a link to the video anyway. https://ocw.m…
I generally agree with this approach, but sometimes even the
'simple' example isn't intuitive or motivating to someone; it highly depends on your audience.
E.g. a lot of math courses under my school's engineering curriculum would start off with examples from physics, but if you don't have the proper physics background or aren't interested in those applications, it's just another layer of abstraction to slog through.
My high school stats textbook would use classic problems from medicine (e.g. x/n people sampled are sick, what bounds can we put on the distribution of how many people are sick in population?), but that might not be particularly motivating to someone who has no interest in medicine or why an epidemiologist might care to know the distribution.
The best starting point to teach anything is the point that is closest to what the student understands and motivates them, but unfortunately that can vary a lot from person to person.
Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards
#34Not just music history, but history in general. History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures. History told backwards makes sense: look for the seeds of post events, in the past. However the human mind loves nothing more than causation; we see cause and effect everywhere even where it's n…
I honestly can't imagine how this would work. Even in cinema I rarely like this approach (telling a story backwards). In music history I think it makes sense to go a couple of steps backwards (if you are just a fan trying to better understand their preferences), but if you are really interested - you have to start from the beginning and look how things have developed. Same thing in programming - starting up with some…
I think it might actually work. In teaching "history," you are always picking an essentially arbitrary starting point. I think you could easily start with something like nuclear negotations between the Soviet Union and the USA, then work backwards from there. Why was it these two powers that had nuclear weapons? Well, let's talk about World War 2... How did this Hitler guy come to power in Germany in the first place? Well, let me tell you about World War 1... Obviously there would need to be some linearity to each individual chapter, but moving backwards in time at the thematic level absolutely seems possible and even advantageous in certain respects. History is a very different subject from the sort of applied technical things you're describing. But in fact you might be making a good argument for doing it this way: you're describing the need for some kind of anchor in a knowledge graph. There probably isn't a better anchor than the current existing world as everyday people experience it. Why not start there?
Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do code reviews backwards. Not sure why. I'm not sure it works better.
This makes sense. Reading code forwards overwhelms your working memory because lots of information is at the beginning (e.g. class members). If you read it backwards, you directly dive into the logic, while variable names give away what they're supposed to hold. As you progress further, you get a clearer view, and finally see how these variables are defined.
Better to organize code backwards in the first place. Within a file, I try to start with the juicy logic and then work down to the boring support functions. C++ makes this slightly inconvenient because everything has to be declared above its use, but JS lets you organize things with very few constraints.
Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards
#36Not just music. This applies to all of history.
It depends a lot on the specific field that you're talking about. I studied both music and physics in college, and I think that teaching the history backwards would work for music, but not for physics. You can understand modern harmonic theory without knowing the details of how it evolved out of contrapuntal theory. It would be easy to learn about the current state of music theory as is, and then extend your understa…
Well, I suppose OK, fair enough. Maybe for the likes of technical history, Newtonian mechanics is easier to understand than Relativistic mechanics, and the same holds for a variety of other scientific theories. Though I'd put forward that in teaching the old ones before the most recent ones, we end up with lots of people who end up not studying the latter at all and not grokking how or why, insofar as we understand things at least, light speed is a speed limit in our universe.
But then, as you correctly point out, some fields change in such a way that knowledge of their histories is nonessential for understanding their current state.
As to history proper, explaining the cold-war era proxy wars warrants a dive into WW2 and the onset of the cold war at some point; which then naturally leads you to dive into GD and WW1 as to why there was a WW2 in the first place; and why there was a WW1 to begin with; and why there was so much German-French animosity then; and why Europe was a powder keg at the time; etc. One can go on and on all the way back to the Roman Empire and Classical Greek history.
I'm admittedly an armchair historian at best, but methinks reversing the arrow of time in history books might yield a very interesting take on the topic that is a lot more approachable to kids and teenagers.
Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards
#37Not just music history, but history in general. History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures. History told backwards makes sense: look for the seeds of post events, in the past. However the human mind loves nothing more than causation; we see cause and effect everywhere even where it's n…
I honestly can't imagine how this would work. Even in cinema I rarely like this approach (telling a story backwards). In music history I think it makes sense to go a couple of steps backwards (if you are just a fan trying to better understand their preferences), but if you are really interested - you have to start from the beginning and look how things have developed. Same thing in programming - starting up with some…
I had a history book in school which basically attempted to tell history backward. It didn't work very well in my opinion. The problem is, telling history backwards makes for en extremely "whiggish" view of history where everything is understood in the frame of how it lead to the current state of the world. It makes it very hard to escape hindsight bias.
Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards
#38As a terrible programmer my trick is to read statements backwards. Maybe programming should be taught that way too not just reading of it but the history of it all the way back to Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace and even weaving looms.
I do code reviews backwards. Not sure why. I'm not sure it works better.
I write my code backwards so if you review it that way you'll actually be doing the code review forwards. :)
Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards
#39Wouldn't this limit your study to only musicians that influenced current trends? I've definitely discovered a lot of music from digging into the influences of groups I like, but this seems like a kind of survivorship bias to only focus on the ones that have direct lineage to what's popular at the moment you're engaging in study.
I don't understand how it could be different. There has obviously been way too much music in the past to teach in it's entirety. We have to decide what to teach based on what we currently think is "important". And though we can try to fool ourselves that there is some measure of objective importance, at the end of the day, I'm pretty sure it always boils down to popularity within some milieu.
Of course there have to be criteria for any course of study that leaves out plenty of artists that have to be considered not significant enough to cover.
If you were designing a course in either chronological order or in reverse, niether one might ever touch on groups like the Residents, Young Marble Giants, Donovan or Charles Ives--but what if you couldn't even get back to Mozart, Charlie Parker or Woody Guthrie from your current starting point?
Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards
#40This is part of an enormous cultural trend in the US that has determined that people need to be tricked or somehow otherwise eased into learning, because otherwise learning is too boring! This trend is responding to a real issue, because capitalism has so successfully neutered the common man into a entertainment/carbohydrate consuming machine that the desire or need to learn is only associated with the need to earn a…
It is not a question of beeing "tricked" into learning. It is just that we lean best when we start somewhere we can understand and relate to our current experiences and understanding of the world. Then learning from this point will expand the frame of reference allowing us to learn more and more. This is not due to capitalism, this is fundamental for humans.