FORWARD

Question: Is the purpose of music education to beget more musicians, musicologists, and music educators i.e. "Music for the Sake of Music?" Or is it the imperative as educator to help students apply and adapt skills learned in the pursuit of music education to other disciplines and facets of life?

There is sometimes the attitude which arises from students, "teach me only what I need to know in order to pass the test/win the competition." This of course is not a satisfactory philosophy for education. It does nothing to stimulate active learning, inspire independent investigation, or motivate students to engage their intellectual curiosity. Rather the "teach me only what I need…" statement is suited only to those who desire nothing further than to be a "cog in the machine." It is the former attitude which cultivates leaders in a dynamic, diverse team environment - be it for musician, engineer, physician, laborer, or diplomat.

For this reason I have adopted the motto Enriching the Active Mind Through Music.

If students are exposed only to what they want to learn, they will ultimately learn nothing and lose valuable exercise on how to deal with unfamiliar circumstances. Not to get all Franz Boas here, but 21st century students are exposed to more global cultures than any other generation in history. Therefore, an important element of the study guide AND the tests is to expose students to the new, unfamiliar and unexpected. These are important lessons which are taught in the safe environment of the MLC contest. It may be that how students deal with the materials in the study guide itself will provide learning experiences on how they might deal with new situations in team environments, board rooms and the global marketplace.
Awareness of diversity in music and performance practice will hopefully aid the student into recognizing that a type of music and musical language is perfectly valid despite the student's own personal taste. Exercise in this can be readily adapted to diversity in other fields not only in the broader terms of culture, perceived race, gender, etc., but diversity on a personal level - interests, learning and working styles, compositional strategies, etc.
These are necessary skills in interpersonal relations and dialog.

DUTIES OF THE MUSICOLOGIST

Salary: $4,000 + $2,500 incentives per annum

The musicologist conceives, writes, and produces the Study Guide for the contest, produces three (3) CDs for the audio selections, writes the test questions for the Regional, State and College Bowl competitions and produces those CDs for those tests.
+ Production of the study guide also includes securing copyright / licensing permissions, layout, gathering sponsor ads, contracting the editor, and finalizing the layout before sending off to the Program Coordinator for printing.
+ Production of the CDs involves recording and editing audio tracks and voice commentary, rendering a timing chart for voice over synchronization, normalizing final audio tracks before producing and quality checking master CDs. CDs are then delivered to Program Coordinator for duplication.
+ Production of the test CDs include:

Regional Tests: Round One examples (10); Round Two examples (6); Round Three examples (20); Round Five mystery examples (10); Tie breaker mystery examples (10)

State Tests: Round One examples (10); Round Two examples (6); Round Three examples (20); Round Five mystery examples (20); Tie breaker mystery examples (10)

College Bowl: Round One (4) examples; Round Two (5) examples College Bowl (10) tie breakers.

GENERAL GUIDELINES
The guide is written in conversational (i.e. non-academic style) with awareness of the current trends of music history research methodologies and education to keep in line with what the students will likely encounter in their coursework when entering college. There must also be awareness of the limited resources available to the average student.

An important goal of the study guide (one which will carry students through their college years and future careers (music or otherwise) is to promote active listening. That is thinking about the music and unique culture which creates it; Helping students understand that there is more than one way of interpreting what they hear; that many issues are always open to debate.

This active listening is necessary for them to have any success in the listening portion (i.e. the main portion) of the contest. For students must apply the "fingerprints" they have read about in the guide as well as audibly recognize other compositional strategies not explicitly named but conveyed through the listening itself. Simple regurgitation of perceived "facts" on the limited number of multiple choice questions is not enough.

Each study guide contains about 40 selections. While certain composers and genres are mainstays, individual works cannot be included if they have been used within the last 4 years. As it is impossible to construct the test as a pure "survey" of music history - especially in this age when what is considered "standard repertoire" continues to change, it is good to begin with the Featured Composer, Genre, and Ethno-music chapters. Allow the selection of these works to influence the inclusion in other chapters. For instance, one might include a work by a "teacher" of the featured composer, or with genre it might be good to include contrasting pieces to that genre in the other core chapters. Secondly, a strategy of weaving at least 3 common threads through the many genres and stylistic periods is recommended. This provides a sense of cohesion throughout the guide. In the past I have used the Mass, theme and variations, strophic vs. through-composed. This encourages each student to use the whole guide as certain listening and knowledge based elements found in one chapter are often necessary for students to fully comprehend the discussion in later chapters. It necessarily follows that teams which take the strategy of dividing up the CDs 1 per student, will generally have a more difficult time succeeding in the contest. (* Due to the variety in the length of most compositions per era - the CDs usually break up quite nicely with Early Music/Baroque/Classical on CD1; 19th Century/20th/21st Century/Featured Composer on CD2; Featured Genre/Featured Ethnomusic on CD3)

To accomodate both audio and visual learning preferences, the voice-overs on the CDs should contain the same material (not new material) as found in the study guide. For time constraints allow a maximum of 1 minute per introduction commentary prior to each selection (if and when found necessary). Each audio track MUST have voice-over to ensure that the they can only be used for educational purposes in a not-for-profit organization and not replicated for private commercial use (which would of course be illegal).

Every composer is included for a reason, but the reason will not always be spelled out on the surface as an examination of the complete guide is required to make these relationships evident. Because of this, a casual glance at a few artists or the table of contents only might give the impression that the unforgiveable error of "tokenism" is being comitted. This of course is an anathema to the good sense of any anthropologically inclined educator.

SPECIFICS:
Writing about each selection is the equivalent of a double spaced 3-5 page research paper with a cited bibliography in the Turabian style. Bear in mind that some of the material is used for the audio script which appears as the commentary before each selection as well as over-dubbed onto the recording in key areas. The final guide becomes the equivalent of a 200+ page double spaced paper with 3 full CDs of supplemental recorded material.

Each selection should include approximately 250 words (i.e. 3-4 paragraphs) on each totaling 1,000 words:
1) Composer biography
2) Historical background
3) Cultural background
4) Score analysis

There are nine chapters to the study guide which are divided into 3 distinct sections: 1) Concepts in Music 2) Historical Periods, and 3) Features.
The concepts in music section
Each section contains a chapter heading with relevant historical and stylistic information. (approx 500-1000 words)

HISTORICAL PERIODS:
3-5 Examples each totalling (15-20)
+Early Music (whenever through 1600)
+Baroque (1600-1750)
+Classical (1750-1820)
+19th Century (1820-1900)
+20th 21st Century (1900-present)

FEATURES:
5-8 examples each totalling (15-24)
+Featured Composer
+Featured Genre
+Featured Ethno-music

HOURS:
+ Each Selection (times 40): 8 hours per selection
(which includes conception, research, writing, image placement, transcribing relevent samples, revising, editing, audio recording and engineering audio quality control)
+ Table of Contents: 2 hours
+ Revising and/or creating new Chapter Headings: 6 hours
+ Gathering and placing ads in layout: 2 hours each
+ Final layout and page numbering including a minimum of 2 practice prints of entire guide and final editing checks: 8 hours
+ Final Quality Control of CDs: 8 hours
+ Testing Materials including written format, printing, Audio production, QC, editing of Testing Materials: 40 hours

Total: 380 hours

DESIGNING THE TEST and Explanation of Scoring:

Designing the test is probably the most difficult task. As author, one can try to point to necessary knowledge as well as spur on their intellectual curiosity to seek out more information and suggested listenings (outside of the guide) which stand a good chance of being used as mystery round examples. The key is trying to write a challenging test that does not discourage students from wanting to learn more. It is very important that the nature of the contest does not permit one to write it as a diagnostic ACT, SAT, GRE type exam where it is hoped everyone gets a perfect score. There needs to be some means of balance

There are 5 rounds worth 20 points each. In the interest of producing a competitive contest and narrowing the top finishing teams, questions in each round are proportionally designed with a level of difficulty ranging from 1 (very easy - what everyone must know) to 3 (medium - what everyone should know) to 5 (extremely difficult - what very few people are likely to know). In other words each round contains 4 questions from each level of difficulty.

Difficulty levels:

1 Very Easy = 4/20 = 20%

2 Easy = 8/20 = 40%

3 Medium = 12/20 = 60%

4 Difficult = 16/20 = 80%

5 Extremely Difficult = 20 / 20 = 100%

Any score over 60% is a good indication that the students are WELL prepared for College study.

Sincerely,

Christian McGuire