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We Should Teach Music History Backwards

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#71

Post by breakall »

This reminds me of the hours I spend poring over the Allmusic Guide to Rock I had borrowed from the local library, tracing backwards from Van Halen, Nirvana, and Beastie Boys to discover their influences. I had taken piano lessons for several years and had learned Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Debussy — sometimes tracing back led me to what I had learned on piano.

I agree that working backwards can lead to wonderful discoveries. What can be difficult to grasp as you go back is what the music sounded like at the time—how an album sounded because it was the first time musicians had made that sound.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#72

Post by limsup »

bambax wrote: post #19

Not 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…

Not for science history. It's very hard to grasp what the hell the LHC is about. First tell me why how they figured out water wasn't an element but a combination of two.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#73

Post by jaredklewis »

bambax wrote: post #19

Not 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…

This would not only be a great way to teach history, but also literature and probably other things like philosophy as well.

In literature, it is not uncommon to start with the past reading things like the Odyssey, moving forwards to Beowulf, then Canterbury Tales, then Shakespeare, then John Milton, then Dickens, and on and on.

The result is you start with the least accessible work and move forward to the most accessible. On the hand hand, by starting with a modern work like Catch 22 or whatever, you start with an accessible work that is more likely to be an enjoyable to the reader in its own right, not just as an important work. As you move backwards the reader is also gradually increasing their reading prowess, becoming more attuned to the finer points of literature, and thus more able to enjoy the older, less naturally accessible works.

Having middle and high school students wade through Shakespeare and Nathaniel Hawthorne always seemed like such dumb idea to me. For every one student that is interested by such texts, another 10 are turned off literature completely by the dense diction and distant context. Better to start with J.K. Rowling than Herman Melville if it lets more students discover the joy of reading.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#74

Post by ddingus »

I don't agree at all.

First, people do learn and process differently. No one size fits all here.

Adding this to the forms we have developed makes great sense. No argument.

I personally prefer to take it in mixed mode. If I'm wanting to do something, understanding related history helps. Maybe that's a backward progression back to roots.

But, it can be a chain of forward influences too. Who built on what and how, why?

In a more general sense, maybe narrative makes the best learning. What happened?

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#75

Post by coldtea »

bambax wrote: post #61
coldtea wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That, besides being totally unintuitive to our sense of time, puts even bigger emphasis on making the future seem inevitable (the past harvested as the "see…

Some seeds grow, some don't. Just because we look for seeds that lead to the future, doesn't mean they were there (things happen for no reason) or that there weren't many other seeds that didn't bear fruit, or later, or differently. Think about your family tree: does it make more sense to try and search for your ancestors, or to find some guy in the 13th century and compile a list of all of his descendants? You can d…

>Some seeds grow, some don't. Just because we look for seeds that lead to the future, doesn't mean they were there (things happen for no reason) or that there weren't many other seeds that didn't bear fruit, or later, or differently.

You can far more easily make the same argument in the normal forward taught history (in fact that's what you do above, when you say: "some seeds grow, some's don't".

Teaching history backwards it's harder to point that, because you start from what's already established (grown).

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#77

Post by methodover »

jacobolus wrote: post #55
tsenkov wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 often read papers full with math I don't understand and I am forced to go backwards, but it only works because I hit a previous knowledge not so far back in that graph. This is the best way to learn new things (besides spending time face to face with an expert tutor). You have a motivating problem, an idea of where you are going, and a whole graph to traverse backward until you fit the pieces together. You will r…

This is a great comment.

As an adult, the way I’ve come to learn is exactly the same as you. It’s way more efficient, too: if you begin with the end and work backwards, you can ignore the things that aren’t very useful. Like if you’re learning how to make a graphics engine and you don’t know linear algebra, you can learn only those parts of linear algebra that are relevant to the work of creating an engine and leave all the other useless stuff behind. (And in linear algebra there seems to be a ton of pretty useless stuff.)

This is probably a bad idea for a mathematician or scientist, but for a programmer who’s in the trenches just trying to build stuff, it’s great.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#79

Post by sailfast »

Counterpoint: learning in this way is a good method of keeping attention ("you should learn this because your favorite artists liked these artist!") but if you actually listen to the old stuff first, you can also appreciate it in the RIGHT order of things. It is, however, pretty difficult to listen to much of what's come before. I think a healthy appreciation in both directions, digging into whatever node you happen to traverse is the preferred method.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#80

Post by c3534l »

bambax wrote: post #19

Not 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…

There was a great essay a while back that I can no longer find that summarized Guns, Germs, and Steel by continually asking the question "why?" It start with "Why is Western Europe and America so dominant culturally and economically?" Then regressed back to questions like "why did Europeans colonize the Americas instead of the other way around" to "why did the Europeans have steel, disease, and gunpowder but the Native Americans didn't?" down to "Why did agriculture develop in the fertile crescent and spread to Europe earlier than corn spread to the Americas?"

It's a wonderful rhetorical device. Human nature is to pay attention to conflict and we like to see how it's resolved. By asking a series of "why" you broadly expand a person's view and they understand why you're talking about, at some point, the minutia of zoological diversity in the middle east. I never did well in school because I always want to know the "why are we talking about this" up front, and teacher's answers were always just "it's in the syllabus." I like programming because it asks the problem first, then I have to solve it.

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