Montana Kearns, WRIT2, Fall 2015

WP2: What Music 11 Will Do for You

Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Ti-Do music sometimes sounds like a foreign language! Like
language, many learn the basics, but never continue as they see the process as either too difficult
or pointless. Sure, going further with music is not necessary to survive, but it can alter the course
of someones life, and taking Music 11 is your opportunity! Music knowledge can open doors to
meeting new people, obtaining jobs, broadening your horizons, and impressing others with your
unique skill. This skillset is admirable to have but as you will learn in Music 11, it is also rather
difficult and time consuming to attain. As you take the time to gain this music knowledge, there
is a certain group that you will be joining, called a discourse community. According to linguist
John Swales a man who researched and broke down this term this is a group that has goals
or purposes and uses communication to achieve these goals (Swales). In short, a discourse
community is a group of people with a common interest that communicate about it. This
community is tough to enter; however, with practice, patience, and following the guidelines
expected by the music community, it can be done. Like most discourse communities, one is
either included or excluded; the first step to being included is initiation. The initiation begins
with learning the material taking Music 11, for example. For this essay, I will use UCSBs
Music 11: Fundamentals of Music class syllabus, class observations, the textbook, and the UCSB
Music Departments website homepage. Through these, I will argue that music fluency, which is
the most important thing for someone taking Music 11 to know in order to be successful in the
subject, is crucial for entering the music discourse community and is most effectively taught
through the following rhetorical practices or, ways of persuading students that the material is
right and has value: memorization, repetition, visual representation, and aural or listening
practice.

In order to be successful in the music discourse community and achieve music fluency,
memorization is key. Memorization is necessary because looking up how to do every action is
not possible, especially during a test or in a time crunch keeping in mind that fluency means
easily and accurately. Memorization is accomplished through repetition in Music 11 through
weekly reading, online tests and fluency drills, [and] various smaller assignments such as class
participation fill-in-the-blanks, where the same core concepts are introduced, taught, displayed,
repeated, and encouraged to be practiced at least twice before the test (Short). The most
important concepts that build off of each other and that must be memorized are: note names,
interval sizes and sounds, rhythms (1 & 2 & vs. 1 la li 2 la li), accidentals (sharps and
flats), and time signatures (4/4 or C) (Clendinning, Marvin Phillips). Everything leads up to
correctly notating music as the final project, a large part of your grade, is composing a piece of
your own.
Notating music is a large part of the class and is similar to the process and importance of
learning letters in the English language. Think of the notes as letters that make up words which
lead to sentences and then to paragraphs, but instead notes to melodies to songs. Notation is
everything, as it would be difficult to write an essay without knowing how the alphabet works.
Tried and tested, notation is most effectively taught through visuals, so teachers utilize them for
success. Learning notation through visual representations is necessary to understand what
everything should look like; a model to follow is crucial for correctness. The class textbook does
a great job at modeling topics and drawing out concepts, as it is full of pictures and interactive
try-it exercises with workbooks assignments for students to both practice and test their
knowledge (Clendinning, Marvin, Phillips). The textbook uses proven musical knowledge, and
then supports it by visually and textually breaking down the steps to help walk students through

the process. With these processes, the topic is introduced and explained further. Then, half of the
concept is demonstrated, and the student is required to finish it. Then, students will use the skills
theyve learned from the visual representations and practices for their final composition project
(Short).
Creating a composition will be incredibly difficult without knowing what consonant
music sounds like, as opposed to dissonant (Clendinning, Marvin, Phillips). Learning to hear
the difference and knowing what to compose is mastered through aural practices (Short). Aural
practices help develop a third important skill in music knowledge having a trained ear to break
down musical pieces. This is accomplished in Music 11 through daily aural practice. Students
practice musicianship skills in M-W-F class and in piano lab (Short). In class, the instructor
often plays pieces then asks questions about it while describing it. In lab, students learn to play
simple scales and chords. There are also online quizzes, tests, and practice websites available to
students to pick up the textbooks slack in this area so that the UCSB Music Departments
expectations can be satisfied.
The UCSB Music Department describes itself as having courses designed to serve as
background for professional careers in music (Department of Music). With that, Music 11 aims
to give students the foundation to build upon the departments expectations. Following those
expectations, the class syllabus states that the class intends to teach students to recognize,
describe, analyze, and perform the basic building blocks of music notation (Short). This is
accomplished through a go with the flow approach, allowing for open discussion and
modifying the schedule as the class and instructor see needed. This schedule includes the
instructor using the piano, slides, and various types of music to demonstrate concepts shes

explaining. To effectively explain concepts, she uses logos, or an appeal to logic, with her
didactic and conversational tone to persuade students that the material she is teaching is correct.
The whole point of rhetoric is to persuade, and Music 11 persuades students through
memorization and repetition with constant fluency drills and quizzes, visual representation
through Powerpoint slides and textbook diagrams, and aural practice by exposing students to
different sounds and musical examples and having them describing what they should hear. Music
is a language of its own, with unique expectations of itself, certain ways of writing, and
rhetorical devices that it uses to persuade people of its truths. The Music Department at UCSB
aims to prepare students for a career related to music, starting with its beginners class, Music 11,
a class determined to teach students the basics they will need to build in later music classes.
In order to succeed in later music classes, the end result of Music 11 is music fluency as
it is crucial for entering the discourse community. In teaching the skills necessary to achieve
music fluency and enter the discourse community, the instructor uses the most effective
approaches, which are memorization and repetition, visual representation, and aural practice.
Then, as more people learn this knowledge, they add to the growing discourse community that
will exclude anyone lacking skill in their language because of the lack of communication.
Considering the amount of people that are knowledgeable about music and can communicate in
this way, the discourse community, which includes Music 11, does an excellent job of persuading
the ideals of its discipline.

Works Cited
Clendinning, Jane, Elizabeth Marvin, and Joel Phillips. "Sign In." Login or Create New Account.
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2012. Web. 20 Oct. 2015.
<http://wwnorton.com/college/music/fundamentals2/ch/01/ebook.aspx>.
"Department of Music - UC Santa Barbara." About the Music Department. Web. 16 Oct. 2015.
<http://www.music.ucsb.edu/about>.
Short, Rachel. "The New GauchoSpace." : Log in to the Site. Web. 16 Oct. 2015.
<https://gauchospace.ucsb.edu/courses/mod/lesson/view.php?id=420647&pageid=8775m>.
Swales, John. The Concept of Discourse Community. Genre Analysis: English in Academic
and Research Settings. Boston: Cambridge UP, 1990. 21-3. Print.