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We Should Teach Music History Backwards

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Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#91

Post by c3534l »

vanderZwan wrote: post #89
c3534l wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Nati…

> It's a wonderful rhetorical device. It is very appealing, for sure, but it runs the risk of falling into the same trap of "trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures" .

I don't think we know if history was inevitable. How much do we attribute to specific events because they're the ones that happened, rather than simply the result of deeper, sociological, economic, and cultural causes? The best we can do is explain what we can explain, and I don't know if trying to teach people that history is essentially random is even a goal that you should strive for to begin with.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#92

Post by ljw1001 »

badminton1 wrote: post #68
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…

Learning history is fun, for example: The British East India Company was the largest drug cartel of the 19th century. They forced the Chinese to buy opium, and decades later that opium made it to the Americas. Each time you turn on the TV and hear about of some random dude overdosing with illegal opioids, you can blame the British for that. Lawrence of Arabia, the Sykes-Picot agreement, among other British interventi…

I think a better grasp of history would lead you to believe that there's nothing especially British about these activities. This is the exploitation of the powerless by the powerful, and is a close to a universal law throughout history as you're likely to find.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#93

Post by icebraining »

tpurves wrote: post #49
dghughes wrote: post #6

As 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.

As a product manager, I have often found it beneficial to write requirements backwards. Start first with the desired result of a feature or flow and work backwards to the necessary steps, options, preconditions, actors, setup/enrollment steps etc. that would have been required required to get there.

TDD is essentially the same.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#94

Post by bambax »

dgellow wrote: post #87
bambax wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This point of view is, I think, completely false and what I was arguing against. If you toss a coin you will get one result; saying it was "inevitable" because it happened is to misunderstand everything about randomness and statistics, etc.

I think that you misunderstood my comment. I’m not arguing about probability, I’m saying that the toss of coins have already been done, and cannot be repeated or changed. That’s exactly what defines the past. You can spend time studying the details of why you got a specific result of your toss of coin (wind strength, forces applied to the toss, etc), and you can speculate that changing a parameter would have given di…

But saying "what happened, happened" isn't teaching us anything, it's just a tautology.

Also, random is just random. It's not "too many parameters for me to keep track of and account for". That's a very important distinction. Many people believe "chance" is a word used to cover our ignorance. But that's not what it means.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#95

Post by Flowsion »

resu_nimda wrote: post #22
YouAreGreat wrote: post #9

The author observes that self-driven students of very selective parts of Music History are "driven by emotion rather than obligation" and usually start from a passion for some current music. This seems true enough. The next step, however, is a giant leap: > shouldn’t music history writing and teaching be done in the same backwards direction? No, that doesn't follow, because we are now talking about obligatory learnin…

Exactly. It seems like this author got really into Sam Smith, did a deep Wikipedia dive, then somehow extrapolated that into a wide-sweeping theory of pedagogy, with bold assertions like "That’s how we learn about music: backwards, always backwards." There are so many counter-examples. I am instantly reminded of a childhood friend who was really into classical music. I don't think he arrived there working all the way…

It doesn't have to be going backwards from the present, right? In your example, the person could work backwards from classical music. You could work backwards from The Who, or classic rock.

Going backwards from a natural point of interest sounds like it would be the best method to learn history.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#96

Post by ljw1001 »

foob wrote: post #11
ddebernardy wrote: post #3

Not 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…

I suspect that if you're studying the History of Physics, as opposed to just physics, you've already got a special interest in the subject. And if you're not, you're not replying to what the earlier post said, which referred all kinds of _history_.

The original post, I think, was broadly about trying to engage people in the history of something they're not already interested in. For that, the device seems reasonable.

At least it does to me. But maybe that's because I actually did work backward from Led Zeppelin, to the Stones, to Muddy and Wolf, to Robert Johnson and learned to love them all. But if you started me on Johnson, or worse, Charlie Patton with those horrid recordings, you'd have lost me immediately.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#97

Post by ljw1001 »

adamnemecek wrote: post #62

This is only tangentially related but I’ve been working on an ide for music. Sign up if you are interested https://www.ngrid.io

definitely tangential, but i was interested anyway until i got to the no-detail, gimme-your-email web page. I think these prelaunch page things are over, and if they're not, they should be.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#98

Post by ljw1001 »

matte_black wrote: post #8
newsbinator wrote: post #2

This makes sense. I've always been an advocate of teaching the majority of things backwards.

How would you teach mathematics or reading backwards?

math for mathematicians excepted, starting with an application that shows how to do something useful and working backwards seems pretty reasonable to me.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#99

Post by Bud »

Geoffrey Himes comes at this from a popular-music perspective which doesn't really contemplate the reasons why music history is taught the way it is, but this is still an interesting idea. I say this as a classically-trained singer who studied music history at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

For Himes, the history of music doesn't seem to go back more than about 80 years or so. But the real history of course goes back many centuries further, even for notated "western" art music. So it would have been more interesting if he extended his idea further and tried to justify it based on an 800-year perspective, rather than 80 years or so.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#100

Post by s-shellfish »

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…

> However the human mind loves nothing more than causation; we see cause and effect everywhere even where it's not, we like "stories", we don't understand, don't believe in, and outright reject chance.

I'm convinced the 'human' mind loves causality because the human mind loves to believe it is the cause of 'things happening'. This especially holds in chaotic situations where the mind feels it has zero control over anything, down the very nature of itself.

This however, is not always the ideal philosophy to hold (at least to me). I don't know about current culture, but much of eastern philosophy does not share the same sentiment about causality. It's often both, a sort of 'yes-no', the individual self being neither the controller nor the controlled.

Forwards, backwards, I don't think it matters. People fill in the gaps regardless. People see what they want to see, until that gets boring. Then they do something different, wait and see if that changes things. Does it? Maybe.

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