Our eleventh grade just finished the class, History through Music with Mr. Olson at the end of January. Along with a new appreciation for music as an art form, the students gained a new perspective on how music has influenced and grown alongside the human species.
Here is one student’s reflection on the class.
Mr. Olson started week one with a crash course in World Music. We studied African and Asian music and focused on the unique aspects of each. We created a list of musical terms to help us listen more actively and critically; this brainstormed list included terms such as syncopation, form, timbre ensemble, harmonic structure,
and melodic motion.In our second week, we moved into the history of European music- including the Classical and Baroque periods. We filled out reflections on the pieces we listened to both in class and for homework. This was a wonderful way to analyze the music and to organize our thoughts.
Each student presented an independent final project in the third week of the class. Presentation topics included the history of hip hop and the influence of the moon in Chinese culture and music.A very popular highlight of this class was our daily “guess whose song” that started off each class. We all sent Mr. Olson a song we thought represented us well as individuals, and he created a playlist with them. Each morning we listened to a song and voted on whose we thought it was. Then the person told us a little bit about their history with that song and why they chose it, using the terms we had generated in class.
History Through Music was a very interesting and engaging class. The takeaway for us as students is a new perspective on how music has influenced and grown alongside the human species. The eleventh grade walks away from History Through Music with a new appreciation of music both as an art form and purely for enjoyment, as well as a way of understanding human development and its parallels in the development of civilization.