music paper

Music 345: World Music in Contemporary Life

Assignment Guide
Blog #2: Authenticity, Technology, and Popular Music

Writing Prompt:

How much does musical authenticity (however you define it) matter to you?
Our concert series and class case studies have focused mostly upon on acoustic music, much of it traditional, played with a minimum of technological enhancement. This is often not the case with popular music. When performing live, many pop music performers choose to reenact the choreography of their music videos while singing, lip-synching (pretending to sing while a recording plays their voice) at least in part while on stage. Even some excellent vocalists resort to using recordings during live performance due to the strain of nightly work, illness, or their inability to sing as well as they did when they were twenty years younger. For you as an audience member, does it matter if a performer uses recordings or technological enhancement? What about the case of pitch correction technology demonstrated in the assigned videos? Is use of such technology “cheating,” rendering a performance inauthentic and phony? Or is it merely an artist using the tools at hand to create the best music possible? Is the final musical product (recording or live) all that matters? Should that be all that matters, or would you feel cheated if you learned that the performer you just watched really can’t sing that well and used technology to fix her/his voice? Is there a different standard involved for live versus studio recordings? Is it okay to “cheat” with technology when recording in the studio? Why or why not? After all, many of the “performances” we hear on recordings may have been played live, but put together one instrument at a time, or one performance is actually a combination of several different takes. Is there greater artistic “truth” in real “authentic” performance (whatever that means), or is the greatness in the perfect realization of a final product? Do your same values apply to electronic dance musics, whose DJs often “perform” by not using sounds that other people made?

Essay Assignment: Using the video clip from Before the Music Dies (and the YouTube example) and the above prompt, describe your opinions regarding authenticity and the use of technology to enhance music performance and recording. As with our previous assignment, students may view such technology positively, negatively, or have a mixed opinion. To fulfill the assignment: 1) evaluate the use of performance technology (positive, negative, mixed) and/or authenticity in music using any of the prompt questions and then 2) support your opinion. As before, this is a reflection and opinion paper, not a research paper. Besides stating your opinion, do your best to explain your perspective. If, in the end, you feel ambivalent about performance enhancing technology, or vexed by the value of performative authenticity, explain your ambivalence and demonstrate an awareness of positive or negative viewpoints of the subject as expressed by the people in the film or the reading assignment’s author. Use any of the questions raised in the writing prompt above as a point of departure.

The assignment is worth 10 points. You will be graded on content (4 points), writing (4 points), and comments/discussion contribution (2 points).

Music 345: World Music in Contemporary Life

Specific Guidelines:

Assignment length: ~250 words. Write your mini-essay in a word processing program, back it up, edit it, proofread it, then when ready, submit/upload it to the Group Blog 2 link.

• Do write in complete sentences, in clear, solid prose.

• You may write in the first or third person.

• Feel free to write personally, but not informally (i.e., avoid overly casual

  language, slang, profanity, etc.).

• Introduce and conclude your essay (introduction and conclusion sentence)

• If you refer to class lectures or topics, do not summarize readings or lectures.

  You may use the lecture material for examples, but the examples should only

  support your ideas/opinions.

• All ideas and quotations that are not your own must be properly cited to follow standard academic procedure and avoid breaches of the Honor Code (you may any citation style as long as you are consistent in its application). It is not a requirement of the assignment that you include outside sources, but any sources that you do use must be cited.

• Do not go over the word limit by more than 10%