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We Should Teach Music History Backwards

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Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#121

Post by inimino »

JasonFruit wrote: post #113

I'm going to disagree with everyone! You should learn history — or any subject — by starting with the things that interest you and working outward from there. Studied that way, nothing is dry, because your motivation to learn stems from what you're passionate about. For example, I learned 20th-century world history based on its relation to aviation, and in the process gained a real, abiding interest in history; I lea…

This is the best answer, but it raises a difficult question, which is what do you do with a classroom of thirty students?

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#122

Post by o_____________o »

jcranmer wrote: post #115
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…

The problem with that approach is that you can end up begging the question and not realizing that your proposed answers start to deviate wildly from evidence. For Jared Diamond, the answer to the question of European domination is solely that Eurasia won the agricultural jackpot [1] and the Americas lost it, and anything that happened in the intervening 10,000 years doesn't factor into it. But... the Americas won the…

> For Jared Diamond, the answer to the question of European domination is solely that Eurasia won the agricultural jackpot

This is oversimplified to the point of either being disingenuous or misinformed, and China was discussed in the book. There are valid issues with the work, including environmental determinism[1], but it was a wide ranging pop sci book and as such has many surfaces and incentives for attack.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_determinism

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#123

Post by taeric »

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…

Predicting the past based on the present is rather difficult. To the point that I suspect we would just be wrong in other ways.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#124

Post by jcranmer »

c3534l wrote: post #114
wolf550e wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beware, historians don't like the book: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...

The criticism seems to be mostly that it's too broad and lacks nuance rather than being something akin to pseudoscience. When I read the book I never thought the book was meant to be the be-all and end-all of history, so I never really understood that criticism. Yes, history is complicated. I'd just keep that in mind. It kind of reminds me of when people criticize the book Code for not being a technical enough discus…

That's not really the criticism. Jared Diamond is very extremely wedded to the environmental determinism theory (this becomes more obvious after you read Collapse; it's somewhat more muted in Guns, Germs, and Steel), and this theory has serious gaping holes that Diamond never really addresses.

One of the problems of GG&S in particular is that the book presupposes that the European colonization of the Americas was inevitable. For anyone who's actually studied that topic--and Diamond pretends that no one has ever done that before, which is a big fat lie--the most immediate and important conclusion is that it was not inevitable. Pre-Columbian history is already a topic where pretty much everything you were taught is completely and totally wrong [1], and Diamond takes these wrong facts as axiomatic, and people constantly suggest Guns, Germs, and Steel to help reinforce the explanation--it's no wonder there's a large amount of exasperation on the topic.

[1] If you want a good book on this, read Charles Mann's book 1491. It's also a great way of showing how a non-specialist in history can competently approach the topic.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#125

Post by ekianjo »

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…

I think the backward thinking has problems too. If you ask the wrong questions you will inevitably get to an improper understanding as well. Things make a lot more sense when taken in their proper chronological context, since thats how humans perceive time in the first place.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#126

Post by JasonFruit »

inimino wrote: post #121
JasonFruit wrote: post #113

I'm going to disagree with everyone! You should learn history — or any subject — by starting with the things that interest you and working outward from there. Studied that way, nothing is dry, because your motivation to learn stems from what you're passionate about. For example, I learned 20th-century world history based on its relation to aviation, and in the process gained a real, abiding interest in history; I lea…

This is the best answer, but it raises a difficult question, which is what do you do with a classroom of thirty students?

I don't have the slightest idea — that's why I teach my own kids.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#127

Post by c3534l »

jcranmer wrote: post #124
c3534l wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The criticism seems to be mostly that it's too broad and lacks nuance rather than being something akin to pseudoscience. When I read the book I never thought the book was meant to be the be-all and end-all of history, so I never really understood that criticism. Yes, history is complicated. I'd just keep that in mind. It kind of reminds me of when people criticize the book Code for not being a technical enough discus…

That's not really the criticism. Jared Diamond is very extremely wedded to the environmental determinism theory (this becomes more obvious after you read Collapse; it's somewhat more muted in Guns, Germs, and Steel), and this theory has serious gaping holes that Diamond never really addresses. One of the problems of GG&S in particular is that the book presupposes that the European colonization of the Americas was ine…

I'll check it out. But yes, Jared Diamond definitely believes in maybe not determinism per se, but definitely geographic, erm, importantism.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#128

Post by badminton1 »

ljw1001 wrote: post #92
badminton1 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, in your revisionist mindset, the opium wars were just like any other war?

The motivation of the opium wars was to fix the British Empire trade deficit by selling opium to China, turning them into drug addicts in the process. When the Chinese started seizing their opium they declared war.

It's fucked up to just imagine what kind of morally bankrupt psycho could have thought of that as a solution to an economic problem, and what kind of society it takes to get everyone aligned to execute it.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#129

Post by hrktb »

falcor84 wrote: post #30
oraknabo wrote: post #20

Wouldn'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.

wouldn’t there be an issue of diversity, where the pool of studied matter would get smaller and smaller ?

I would contrast this to languages, where we still study ancient languages, as well as preserve “dying” languages for future reference. Teaching music genres that didn’t ‘survive’ would have its benefits.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#130

Post by ubernostrum »

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" .

If you read Guns, Germs and Steel, it doesn't argue that the specific sequence of observed history was inevitable. In fact, it argues against an "inevitability" position.

The book's goal is to present a coherent explanation of the observed course of history for the general public, without resorting to and in fact debunking "western Europeans dominated because they are a superior breed of human and their culture is superior to other cultures, and superior people win" arguments.

Thus, it argues that the environments in which different groups of humans found themselves influenced the course of observed history (things like climate, geography, availability of domesticable species, etc. all can provide advantages or disadvantages to people in a particular area), but does not argue that these factors made the specific sequence of actual human history inevitable. I suspect the author would agree that if you could re-run human history a huge number of times, you'd see variation in the results; he'd just argue that the factors he covers make certain outcomes more probable than others, so they would occur more frequently in such a mass simulation of possible histories.

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