We Should Teach Music History Backwards
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
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 not, we like "stories", we don't understand, don't believe in, and outright reject chance.
Same thing in programming - starting up with something you can immediately use like JavaScript or Python is a nice thing because it will 'fool' you (in a good sense) that you are now a programmer. (I once knew a successful person who told me "I never start a project I can't fool myself into thinking I can complete within a weekend"). You can only do a couple of iterations back, before it gets too complicated to go backwards.
It's like discovering the usefulness of an integral (Calculus) and then going backwards in order to understand it if you have no prior math knowledge and experience... 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.
There are so many details that led up to WW2 that going backwards would just feel messy. All the things happening in Europe would have to be described in a way where you already know about the next war but now have to list off these different events.
I don't think that going backwards is going to make things interesting for anyone who isn't going to be interested in it forwards. The technique of teaching (a good teacher) will do more for this than teaching things backwards.
The class was oriented entirely around the starting point of our present (both as a group of people living in a university town in California and as a global society). We worked backward from that present to key in on some of the main changes of the past several thousand years, notably the origin of written language, agriculture, urbanized societies, global trade, and science. Teaching world history without that present-day hook would be virtually impossible because there is just too much to cover and you need some kind of limiting factor. As you note, the best anchor is the current existing world, so that's what world history teachers tend to use.
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 remember the parts you come across because they are connected together (both forward and backward), and you will be working closer to the edge of your capabilities. It is much easier to achieve flow doing this kind of learning.
If you have too many unconnected edges in the graph, then sometimes you have to give up and pick a closer/easier subject to study, but the time spent was still not wasted, as it provides useful orientation for future attempts.
Not sure how well it works if a lecturer or textbook is guiding you though. The whole point is picking your own problems and questions, and then figuring out how to solve/answer them.
> I once knew a successful person who told me "I never start a project I can't fool myself into thinking I can complete within a weekend"
Not sure about “never”, but doing many of these little projects is often a more valuable use of time than banging against a project whose scope is so big you have no idea where to start.
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.
The only real advantage over starting with C, is that you have the motivating current event A to capture the attention of your students.
In a way it’s correct to say that it was inevitable, because it did happen. All the other alternatives didn’t, even if we believe they could have.
Really, nobody actually studies history going forward. We don't for example study random people's backgrounds on the off chance they might have an impact. Rather we pick important figures based on what they did and then go back and take a look at their backgrounds.
So the trap in teaching history going forward is you hide why things are being studied. The most critical part is filtering and thus ignoring 99.99999% of what happened. Further by focusing on only important things people start to associate importance with what is being focused on right now.
I don’t believe that to be correct, actual history studies seem to be a lot of back-and-forth on topics surrounding, let’s say, a particular event that we know happened or believe to happened. Then in this back-and-forth you will have the spotlight on some specific characters who seem to be related to the event (and then, as you said, a huge part of the actual details are filtered out, I don’t see how that could be otherwise). So of course you have to go in the past to focus on an event.
> So the trap in teaching history going forward is you hide why things are being studied.
Aren’t topics studied because they are believed to be true, or because researchers think that there is some interesting knowledge to find? What are those reasons that we hide?
> Further by focusing on only important things people start to associate importance with what is being focused on right now.
Sorry, I don’t understand what you mean by that.
Research is not the same as education. History education has frequently been used as indoctrination for example. This plays into why the focus is on rulers more often than say low level economic details.
Which is what I am getting at. We have a vast quantity of solid information about the past, teaching is mostly about picking what to present not how accurate something is. First grade history texts are full of inaccurate information, but that's not really relevant to their purpose.
Sure, research can get into nitty gritty details like the tradeoff in knot designs used on ships. It can be interesting, but it's impact on society is basically nonexistent.
Disagreeing with this:
> History is about what happened, not what could have happened.
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.
Now, let’s say that you have an actual toss of coin at one point in history that results in a missile being launched. The missile has been launched, that cannot be changed. The fact that tossing the coin n times more results in differents results doesn’t change the fact that the missile has been launched. Sure you can speculate what would happen if the result would have been different the first time, and your educated speculation may even be pretty good and based on strong facts, that doesn’t change the fact that you’re now in a fictional scenario.
That seems to be a rational point of view to defend, I would be interested to know what flaws you see.
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.
That’s a very reductionist summary of what I wrote that I wouldn’t consider accurate.
I disagree that there is nothing to learn from what happened, even without considering alternative reality (by the way, I’m not arguing against that, as I said that’s just closer to fiction than history, but that’s still an interesting tool). You can see patterns and systems, name and describe them, try to see if we can find similarities with other events. But you cannot change their output, because it already happened.
Randomness is defined by the lack of patterns and predictability, in practice a system chaotic enough will be considered random (see your toss of coin, in fact it’s just a physic problem with a very high number of parameters).
I believe that you give way too much credit to the concept of pure chance (that you don’t define). I personally believe that human history is mainly the result of high level systems interacting with each other (thus can be described and analyzed), studying them backward seems to be prone to a lot of bias as we are trying to make them reach what we consider to be the contemporary state.
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 "seed for post events").
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 do both, of course, and for some very important historical figures it's important to list their descendants; but for you personally, what approach feels more logical?
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).
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 interventions, helped create a state of permanent war in the Middle east. Each time you hear of war or violence in the Middle East, or some kid being blown up by a drone or burned alive with white phosphorus, you can blame the British for that.
However, they're not seen as the villains of history, we speak their language and some idiots wear t-shirts with their flag. Go figure.
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.
The term to describe what happened in North America is settler colonialism (where settlers seek to replace population with their own rather than assimilating it).
Also by teaching from the beginning you tend to learn the same things over and over. I probably learned about Paul Revere in 3-4 different US history classes growing up, but the Cuban Missile Crisis only once.
"Leucippus (/luːˈsɪpəs/; Greek: Λεύκιππος, Leúkippos; fl. 5th cent. BCE) is reported in some ancient sources to have been a philosopher who was the earliest Greek to develop the theory of atomism—the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atoms."
The LHC is about looking for more "indivisible elements" by smashing stuff harder.
And so on.
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.
Contemporary events are often thought to be outside the scope of "history":
History depends on perspective: We don't know the consequences and thus the significance of many events; what will happen with climate change? The consequences of the Iraq War and 9/11? And also we are emotionally lost in the trees and can't see the forest, so to speak.
Also, history depends on having lots of information, much of which isn't available for a long time (declassified info, memoirs, archives, other things later revealed, etc.).
Finally, arguably history is studied so we can learn from it, not act on it.
I think the topics the parent brings up are very important, but arguably they belong in another class.
And let me ask you this, do think the way literature at present is taught in elementary and secondary schools is effective in getting students involved, such that they voluntarily read high-quality works for the rest of their lives?
If we turn students off reading entirely, because we made them slog through the whole Bible (the ulitmate all-time most-alluded-to-by-English-literature champion) before letting them read something that might actually interest them, then what does it matter if they "get" the allusions?
By the way, not a slag on the Bible. I thought it was a pretty good read actually with exception of a few boring chunks in the old testament. But my humble opinion is that it will bore the shit out of the majority of high school students. I also wouldn't recommend Thomas Pynchon or James Joyce's Ulysses to high school students. They're great books if you come to them at the right time, but probably not the best tools for teaching literature.
I think the article's idea is that people engaged by the current book will be motivated to look up the references.
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.
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".
Many times it's just luck. The existence of life at all, the death of the dinosaurs, the ice ages, droughts, famines, epidemics (e.g., the Black Plague) ... all luck. From an entire society's perspective, one or a few people who discover something big is luck. And when a set of actions together have large consequences, sometimes it's just (un)fortunate coincidence.
Do we have cases of that in history at all? All the important scientific, technological and social breakthroughs I can think of are clear, incremental extensions of contemporary state of knowledge and societies. Individuals who were at the right place and with right skills are attributed the discoveries, but the truth is, if they didn't "make" those discoveries, short time later their colleagues would.
You are talking about science, which if course is one narrow domain; and even in science, I tend to agree with you but if there were no paradigm shifters (using Kuhn's model) such as Newton, Darwin, or Einstein, would we have made those discoveries? Would the whole course of research in those fields have changed? Changed to where we are now? Soon after those people? At all? If it's inevitable, why weren't those things discovered outside Europe? Was the Enlightenment, the foundation of the scientific revolution, inevitable? Again, if so, why not elsewhere? Why not 1,000 years earlier?
In geopolitical matters, would the world be the same without Napoleon, the founders of the U.S., Lenin, or Hitler? What about Admiral Nelson? What if someone else was U.S. President on 9/11? Clinton? Trump? Would the world be the same without Moses, Jesus or Mohammad?
My point is not that I know the answers, but that it's not so clear cut that outcomes are due to structural reasons.
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0...
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.
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 agricultural jackpot (there's a reason why potatoes became a staple crop in much of the world). And the European conquest of the Americas was anything but preordained: the Spanish only conquered Tenochtitlan (which was a larger city, it should be noted, than likely any of the Spanish had ever seen before) with the help of their 20,000 Tlaxcala allies.
[1] The astute will notice that there's a related question that Diamond 100% completely ignores... why didn't China dominate?
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
Why is this considered an issue? Is there a good discussion of this that you could recommend?
I argue that although Diamond makes interesting points,
his work from Guns Germs and Steel to Collapse is a
distorting disservice to the real historical record.
Diamond claims that the differential success of the
world’s nations is due to the accidents of agriculture,
except when societies “choose to fail.” This claim does
not withstand scrutiny. [...] Unfortunately his
story-telling abilities are so compelling that he has
seduced a generation of college-educated readers.Have you even read the book? It's mentioned and he gives possible reasons for it, even though it isn't the focus of the book.
European culture, on the other hand, was not homogenous and the in-fighting between "white" nations forced each one to find advantage anywhere they could find it, including overseas, and the valuable raw-materials a globe-spanning empire can give the homeland. The technical difficulties of running large navies, building ships, lead to lots of engineering advances.
So, I guess if China hadn't been unified, and had been more vulnerable, parts of it would also have been forced to seek advantage in trade, and history would have been a very different story.
China's just big and resourceful enough to provide. Once it collapsed into one big polity, something made necessary by lack of natural barriers like in Europe preventing individual nations from being able to protect themselves, everybody could work together to build China.
Europe's geography just wasn't as good. Good enough to get to colonization, but not good enough to avoid the need to.
You see this happening now in the US, which boasts the second best geography in the world after China. We had a few colonies, but really, our landmass provides us with everything we need. It just wasn't good enough without European horses.
I Don't think so. The trouble with America was that the people wiped most big fauna before doing any serious domestication attempts. America always lacked force-power for agriculture by lacking suitable animals. Deer and antelopes are un-trainable and intractable, specially when in heat; big cats pose a lot of problems; bears are too solitary and individualistic and pronghorn were skittish, designed to run fast and go away, not easy to confine in small spaces. And Lamas, almost the only big animals available suitable to domestication, are still too small and lack power to help with a plow. Maybe glyptodonts would made marvelous and valuable domestic animals. We'll never know.
The old world instead had the horse and the bull, that made an huge success in agriculture. Small details like egyptians having a small friendly carnivore around made a huge difference in an economy based on grain. And the carp recycling agriculture debris and the chicken where a blessing for China also.
An alternative way to look at it could be Yanis Varoufakis passage:
"Debt, money, faith and state all go hand in hand. Without debt there is no easy way to manage agricultural surplus. As debt appeared, money flourished. But for money to have value, an institution, the state, had to make it trustworthy. When we talk about the economy, this is what we are talking about: the complex relations that emerge in a society with a surplus."
I don't think this works as an explanation. Could not all countries in what we now call Europe have sustained themselves if they so chose?
And anyway, assuming we all agree on what is meant by aboriginal peoples, aren't there plenty of examples of aboriginal peoples carrying on extended wars and raids?
He's one of the authors, like Gavin Menzies and Ayn Rand, that make me automatically disqualify my interlocutor from knowing what they're talking about.
Instead history is best understood in the context available to the people at the time.
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.
No, that's completely wrong.
For one thing, any good history book will include numerous accidents that could well have happened differently, and sent history off on an entirely different direction. I am surprised you were unaware that is how good history books are written.
As to an infinite number of possible futures, there are a far larger number one might imagine that are in fact impossible, like humans decided a thousand years ago to walk to Mars, and doing it. They are impossible because of basic realities, and history is a key way you discover and teach them. And that is important because many of these basic realities are of the greatest importance for intelligent decision making today.
While history forwards is..."here's some stuff, it'll all make sense in a few years if you keep studying".
Understanding how we've arrived here, and all the connections going backwards can be profoundly enlightening, allowing you to try to project events forwards, because cause and effect are laid out for you.
Memorizing books full of facts just turns you into an encyclopedia and don't really let you try to understand how to break the present down to get at what the driving forces are behind the now.
In more general history, it leads you to founding myths and connecting largely unconnected things like modern France to Charlemagne's Frankish empire.
Since then I was learning about the history the other way round: I kind of know what happened during my lifetime, I have an vague idea of what followed from what. What people thought, what people did etc.
I can get further back by asking my parents or reading press from. say, sixties. Books written by folks at the time help as well.
I can get as far back as WWII by remembering what my grandparents said.
Going even further back is hard as there's not a lot of survivors anymore, but you still have contemporary press and books.
Even further back... I've moved to Switzerland few years ago and I've started to understand how European culture worked before WWI. Switzerland, not taking part in the wars of XX. century preserved that past to some extent.
Going even further back is hard. The documents are starting to get scarce. Also, the world is getting more alien in XIX. century. There was an article discussed on HN about a message from 1880. The world there is strange on not one you can easily relate to: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-44265475
But with enough trying, I think I can cover at least second half of XIX. century in next few decades, meaning that I will be able to think about it as if I was living at the time.
Being old and curmudgeonly is fun, too.
[disclaimer: I'm an independent community teacher/tutor who somehow avoided for-better-or-worse getting into the normal classroom teaching role, and I'm writing from an outsider perspective, albeit on things I think about a lot.]
Well, what ought to happen in a class of 30 kids? There ought to be at least 2 teachers (1 main, 1 assistant maybe) for a class that size, and they should do a mix of multimedia, field trips, reading, open discussion, group activities, and some amount of inviting each student to explore their own questions and have them help each other research those questions while you work to guide them and go around the class discussing fascinating insights of interest to each of them. They can share with each other what they've learned and not have to all be doing the same things. The focus should be not on learning facts about history but on understanding how one goes about critically researching history so that they have good critical thinking and research skills going forward in their lives and interest in history as a topic.
That reveals a problem with learning backwards-- rampant epicism in which students would rarely choose to learn about, say, dead ideas like sonata form.
Rather than requiring the student to learn linearly through time, the professor ought to select a handful of musical periods and/or case studies and then randomize the order in which they are taught. Make a big spectacle of picking numbered ping pong balls from a bingo machine in the lecture hall. In the U.S. these are usually elective classes so they are essentially an institutional form of entertainment, anyway.
In other words-- it shouldn't matter how you pick a period/style/composer. What should matter is that students improve their ability to use their ears and their growing knowledge to investigate any music, no matter its origin or time period.
Publicly using randomness to select from possible periods/cases would show good faith that the professor is skilled enough to leave the chosen topic up to fate. That would make it harder for profs who aren't fully comfortable with all the material, which is probably why nobody teaches this way. :)
Edit: clarification
I get that someone who loves Tarantino can't sit thru a Peckinpah movie. But imagine if Tarantino had been one of those people.
I think there's currently a tremendous, almost unbelievably large, over-emphasis on music that has a written score in most music programs, which leaves out literally everything that is popular and contemporary. One has to specifically pursue those subjects in elective classes (there are jazz programs that make it up through the 70s as part of the primary coursework, but popular modern music is practically absent from most college music programs). Even when modern music is covered, it tends to be those pieces written by composers using traditional methods, which includes a written score...which is not what is popular.
This is a new phenomenon (though, I guess, studying music in college is also a new phenomenon, when speaking on the time scale of music history). Bach was popular in his time, and he paid attention to other popular composers of his time. What we think of as the "repertoire" that is sort of widely regarded as what someone ought to study as a music major is also pretty new-fangled. There was much less awareness of music from even different parts of the same continent during Bach or Beethoven's time than we have today (I mean, we likely know more about contemporaries of Beethoven from across Europe than he did in his day, and we certainly have better access to history on both sides of his life than he did), and yet we pretend this is how it's always been and that it's the way it should be.
There's a good argument to be made about a common language among musicians...and that historically has been the western repertoire that is generally taught in universities, but there are other common music languages that have similar depth and rigorous analysis (jazz being one of them, perhaps surprisingly, given its origins as popular dance and party music). A music education is supposed to prepare someone to make and/or play music (hopefully music that they like) often with others, and always for others. The musical language they use to speak to those other people doesn't have to be deeply informed by Bach to be valuable.
Of course, if that is the music someone loves and the music someone wants to make, it's great that it's available to them. But, I think it's Eurocentric and extremely limiting when imposed as a requirement.
If you dont like that build a time machine and change history.
Bach is to music as Shakespeare is to literature - if you don't nod your head in agreement like a brainwashed zombie when either of these men are stated to be the best in their respective fields, you're automatically dismissed by the crowd of "elitist snobs", for lack of a better redundant phrasing.
I don't side with contemporary works either. The current era (90s+) is so disgustingly cookie-cutter, superficially manufactured by record labels to shovel down our throats in bulk. The 50s through the 80s fared somewhat better; the studios still heavily controlled every aspect of the artists they signed, again following an (as-of-yet unperfected) recipe. At least back then, _some_ of the music managed to weave a story capable of evoking emotion and meaningful thought. I would agree that something has largely been lost over the past century: music no longer being composed, instead being "arranged"(?) to fit specific molds.
tldr; I suppose: a) Fuck record labels; and b) Stop with the "Bach is best" culture.
Have you actually spent more than 5 seconds looking for music? Contemporary music is the most diverse it's ever been, you just have to look for it.
Even just sorting rateyourmusic by rating will give you an acceptable overview of what's out there.
I don't think you're entirely accurate on why Bach is such a big name when it comes to classical music. It's not because he is viewed as some objective "best" as you seem to be so convinced of.
Western classical music as we know it today didn't really begin until Bach came around (the only exception that comes to mind immediately is Corelli who came a few decades prior). Music historians today recognize that Bach laid out the technical foundations on what Western music is itself. His development of the counterpoint is a major distinction between medieval music and the classical period that followed. As well, his Partitas for Solo Violin and Well Tempered Clavier for Piano have became and remain to this day, foundational parts of learning and improving violin/piano because they train and benchmark almost every technical ability of their instruments (at least in Western music) to such precision. To analogize to programming, it would be like a set of problems that ranged from basic recursion to debugging memory leaks and everything in between and beyond. There are of course other resources such as Kreutzer's etudes for violin but Bach is one of the first and one of the only to do so to such detail. There are numerous of other music elements such as figured bass and dance forms that Bach contributed heavily to, but I think you get my point.
So to summarize, no, I don't think most music historians "nod their head in agreement like a brainwashed zombie". It's not that they hail Bach as some "objective best", it's because they can recognize and respect the formative effects his work had Western Classical music. He is a father of his field much like Turing of Knuth are and that deserves his praise.
One meter of Chaconne in D minor has more aesthetic value and beauty than the entirity of Kanyes work. The author is essentially suggesting we just cut out raw organic food and eat processed food all the time
Eating McDonalds teaches me exactly 0 about fine french cuisine
> 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...
Music history is an elective required for music majors in US liberal arts colleges. For example, at Colorado College[0]: MU150 Music in Western Culture, MU212 Mozart and his Age, MU284 Beethoven, MU285 Music of the Baroque & Classical Eras, MU286 Romantic and Early Modernist Eras. [0] https://www.coloradocollege.edu/academics/curriculum/catalog...
> 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 learning of the rest of Music History, which will be what I just experienced for most of the author's text: An endless litany of names, names, names, names, names, some arrows drawn between them, some dates and places attached.
It doesn't matter which order you teach me all the rest of Music History. It doesn't get better that way, although it probably doesn't get worse, either.
I enjoy blues. I started with curiosity about current sound tracks on popular movies and TV shows. Then I followed it back to it's roots in rudemantry instruments played by African Americans in the Deep South. That, in turn, can be traced back to the music of Africa mixed with American Folk.
I feel like I have a stronger appreciation when I learn it in reverse.
Of course, I am not learning it in order to get a full knowledge of it, rather, I am enjoying it in reverse.
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 back from present. I started listening to The Who because my dad had a CD of theirs in his car, which led to other classic rock. It had nothing to do with a backward time travel from whatever contemporary music I was hearing at the time. I think a lot of music learning happens more serendipitously like that, through friends, random encounters, etc. The historical research is definitely a part of it but this article way overstates it.
Going backwards from a natural point of interest sounds like it would be the best method to learn history.
If you didn't ever go back further than the Who, btw, I'm not sure you 'learned history' in the usual sense of the phrase, and I'm not sure you can teach a history class based on random encounters.
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.
I think that personally I do a lot of back-and-forth in-between forward and backward reading to construct the program logic in my working memory.
Edit: maybe, could you describe what you mean by reading backward? I read it originally as “reading from the first expression to be evaluated to the last one”, but I see now that you are talking about statements. If that’s the case I see a lot of issues related to the context/scope of a statement. Do you read, let’s say, from the last statement before closing a function, then up?
float_num = float(input("Enter float num: "))
The way I read it is: I need to enter a number, the number is input, it's a float, that number will be assigned to the variable float_num.
It's not the best example but for me at certain times it's far clearer. Most times it seems like I am reading the equivalent of a person writing backwards then it dawned on me to read it backwards.
I ran across an interesting essay on Medium recently on this topic, advocating a new approach to roadmaps focused on the problems: the problem roadmap. Instead of saying what new features the team will be working on in the future, map out what problems they’ll be working on.
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.
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?
Don't take it too literally. E.g. don't assume you'd start at a single leaf and trace a graph only backwards, but looking at "here is this set of music trends that are common now. Why do this subset over here have X in common? Lets backtrack... " and then don't be afraid to take steps to the side as well.
The point of the article I took was that when we're exploring music (and other art forts) we tend to be exposed to current trends, and then we tend to explore backwards to something similar but not quite the same.
But we don't go strictly backwards. We may very well e.g. trace an influence back to a wider genre and start exploring to the sides, and even then forwards again. started with.
I think the more important point is to aim to start with something that students are likely to be immersed in and follow threads that hopefully retain their interest because it retains their connection to something they enjoy, rather than e.g. jumping 500 years back in time and taking ages tracing things forwards before you've reconnected it to something they care about.
To take a very contrived example: If you like German electronic artist Zombie Nation, what's the odds you'll find starting with 40's easy listening interesting?
But go backwards: In 1999 they sampled Lazy Jones for Kernkraft 400 [1]. Lazy Jones was a 1984 game with a very memorable main track [2].
If you start poking around in mid 80's chip tunes, you'll pretty much have to cover Monty on The Run [3] - one of the big things that MOTR brought, was a much more ambitious orchestral inspired score with heavy use of rapid transitions and vibrato to get closer to simulate real instruments despite only having three voices to play with. Compare Lazy Jones and MOTR with Kernkraft 400 - while Kernkraft 400 copies the tune, MOTR is at places surprisingly close to having a sound you might expect in modern electronic music.
As it happens, among many other references to earlier styles of music, the immediate influence on MOTR was the Dick Barton theme tune [4] from the late 40's.
If you dig deeper, you'll find many additional influences and threads to unravel in between.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraft_400
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWxlYYA8yrg
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.
All of this to say, I'd rather not use chronological time as the axis of any musical study. We love music for its beauty and power, which is not a function of time but of the intricate neurological systems devoted to hearing and musical thought.
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.
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.
I guess you could recommend a list. Start with medieval madrigals and then work your way to Stax records anthology? Haha
Same cautionary tale with the use of recursion.
There is a certain way that history progressed (the motivic force, so to speak) and it would make no sense to reverse the order. And given the stack issue, better not be faddish and just pick a time and go forward from there.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Backwards-Forwards-Technical-Manual...
As a little kid I was allowed to play those records any time I wanted to. And I listened a lot. Listening to that early music helped me, right away, to pick out what was good pop music on the radio, and what was bad. Cuz, I mean, the music on those records had stood the test of time for two centuries.
Happy father's day, pop. Thanks for the memories.
200 years ago, the symphonic form was already highly developed, which most would argue is the most advanced form of Western classical music.
I don't think music from this period necessarily gives you any pointers for gauging the quality of modern pop music, but it might influence your tastes in a positive way. Just keep in mind that very advanced music is still being written, and it mostly doesn't sound anything like what was written 200 years ago.
Of course, teaching some things in order might be important or useful, and students have some decent degree of attention too. And sometimes you need to explain boring things. Ok, but people learn the most when they want to learn. Curiosity can be induced.
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?
This idea reminds me of how artificial intelligence might conceptualize a subject, but doesn't make sense for the corpus of history.
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.
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.
Judging by your username you want to see the world burn.
An effective ad hominum!
Starting with developing an intuition like 3B1B and then deriving a formula would be "backwards" to how I've been taught in the past.
Unfortunately, OCW seems to be having some kind of copyright issue with YouTube, but here's a link to the video anyway. https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra...
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.
In school, it's good for someone who doesn't know or care about epidemiology to get a slice of what would be useful to an epidemiologist. Likewise in reverse.
The reason Macs have always had nice topography is because Steve Jobs happened to audit a calligraphy class taught by a monk (who stopped being a monk because he met a nice girl).
I'm not banging the interdisciplinary drum- we all already know learning outside our interests is good. I'm saying it's probably a good educational tool to force students to look at problems based on their utility to someone else.
Sometimes the further a problem is away from being directly useful to you, the wider your horizons will be once you understand how to solve it, and (more importantly) why to bother.
Make up symbols for various words. This gets cumbersome when you have words like peace, happy, glad, joyful, nice, etc.
To solve for that, make up symbols for each sound. Then start writing new words by assembling the custom symbols you made. The problem you run into is that books/articles/internet aren't printed in your symbols, and no one you know can read them.
Solve for that by introducing the (English/Spanish/Korean/etc) alphabet and the sounds it makes. Write simple words together. Then read simple words together. Then expand.
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?