Music 344
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PAPERS—by Dr. David Fuller, State University of New York at Buffalo |
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There is no point in writing a paper unless you have something to say. That something can be new information, something you have discovered through your own study of primary source material, or it can be a reinterpretation of the significance of source material that has already been studied by someone else or a critical review of such study. It can even be a critical survey of the writings of several persons on some subject, so long as you have a way of checking up on the veracity of such writings. What it cannot be is a compilation or précis of other writings unless such writings are your own discovery or [in specially approved cases] written in a foreign language. Anyway, in such cases the writings you are compiling or summarizing become primary sources in themselves and the value of your paper lies in the fact that it transmits otherwise inaccessible information. In music, primary sources are first of all the scores—scores as nearly as possible in the form that the composer left them. In a study of performance, records [or any recordings] are also primary sources. Other kinds of primary sources are letters of a composer; an autobiography or a biography written from personal acquaintance and not from other writings; articles in newspapers and magazines from the time of the events reported— also criticism, programs, advertisements, etc. (In some cases, notably Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Schubert, such materials have been assembled and gathered into “documentary biographies”—this does not take away from their value as source material.) In organological studies, instruments in museum collections are source material. In theoretical studies, theoretical treatises are primary source material—this includes all kinds of pedagogical books, even those for children. For a paper on lexicography, dictionaries and encyclopaedias are source material. For a bibliographical study, everything in print is source material. In other words, the definition of “primary source material” depends on the subject of the paper. Other kinds of source material are pictures (iconographical studies, but also many other kinds), Performance tutors, newspaper criticism, music boxes, warm bodies, even student papers, if you are writing about student papers. Secondary source material is what comes in between you and the primary source material, and so its definition also depends on the subject. Even scores may be secondary source material—for example, reductions or arrangements where the arranger has interposed his personality and ideas between you and the composer. If your subject is X, any existing study of X is secondary source material. In writing a paper, you usually choose your subject and your primary source material at the same time: your interest determines the area of the subject, but the exact focus must depend on what is available. You then achieve CBC: Complete Bibliographic Control. That is, you search out all the secondary source material: everything that other scholars have written about your subject. When a well-trained musicologist is discovered to have overlooked a secondary source, he reddens, hides his face, and may go into a suicidal depression. He need not actually have read the secondary material, but he must know of its existence. A more practical reason for CBC is that without it, one is apt to find oneself wasting hours or weeks doing work that has already been done and is lying on the shelf in the library. A third reason is that your reader, who probably knows something about your subject, will suspect you of plagiarism. Language must not be considered an obstacle to CBC: American musicologists know all necessary languages—or at least they know how to pretend that they do. You must never use anyone’s words but your own—even parts of sentences—unless they are set off by quotation marks or indentation and spacing. Quotations are used to illustrate or document points, or to give a change of pace and color to your writing; they are never used to pursue the argument of a paper or to present information. Information that a reasonably well-informed reader might be expected to know need not be documented—even though you did not know it yourself. “Mozart was born in 1692.” No need to footnote, even if you had to look it up. But “Mozart was the most prolific composer of the 18th century” is not something you could be expected to know unless you knew how many works all 18th-century composers had written. Therefore it must be documented. Any statement you make that is contrary to what a reasonably well-informed reader might believe must be defended and supported with evidence. Generalization about music or a piece of it must be illustrated with examples, preferably music examples inserted in the text. It should be immediately obvious how the illustration bears on the argument. The reader must not have to search through a long example to discover what you are driving at. If necessary, use arrows or some other indication. Use tables or lists where these are clearer and more efficient than prose. In the case of musical analysis, diagrams are useful for orientation and illustration, but they do not take the place of argument and explanation. In a paper, the conclusions are those of the author; the reader must not be expected to draw his own from the material presented. Be sure you understand the difference between a précis and an analysis of a piece of music. A précis follows a piece through from beginning to end and describes it, event by event. It duplicates in prose the experience of reading the score or listening to the piece, and it usually tells you nothing that you would not find out simply by reading or listening to the piece yourself. It requires skill, but no though or insight. If the events are discussed critically or historically as they go by, that is a different matter, and the exercise can be valuable and interesting to read. An analysis is quite different: it tries to take the work apart and discover how it is made. An analysis is usually selective: one analyzes the form or the harmony or the counterpoint or the melody or the textures or the orchestration—perhaps a combination of some of these or other aspects, but rarely all, since the result would be tedious to read and most studies are concerned with only one or two phases of a composer’s technique. Analysis is a whole branch of music study; there are many established methods for each aspect and one must choose the method to fit the style of the piece and the results sought. Do not write introductions or conclusions unless they are really necessary to the treatment of your subject. Start at the beginning and stop when you are finished. The paper should be about what the title says it is about; do not add “background information” unless it is necessary to clarify the argument. If you are writing about the orchestration in Mozart’s piano concertos, do not produce a paper consisting of:
Many papers compare one thing with another, and such papers can be very illuminating. But in choosing two things (or works), make sure that they are as similar as possible. Most aspects must resemble one another in order for the differences to be significant or worth discussing. Remember apples and oranges. The form of the documentation depends on the level of the paper. Musicologists should conform to some stylesheet or to the practice of a recognized journal. Undergraduates should provide the necessary information in a way that is clear and consistent. For example, there should always be a list of books and editions which were used in the preparation of the paper, and the information should be sufficient to permit the reader to locate each one precisely. Footnotes may give simply the author’s name and a page number, or an abbreviated title if more than one work by the same author was used. References to scores should be precise: edition, page, and bar number. All work must be typed, double-spaced. When proof-reading, all spelling errors must be eliminated and all mistakes in grammer [sic!]. |