An Approach to Introducing Ambient Music :: Graduate Admissions Essays

An Approach to Introducing Ambient Music   John Cage (1912-1992) presents an pleasant challenge to a music GSI teaching a class of non-majors. As much an idea man as a pen-on-paper composer, Cage proposed through his belles-lettres and artistic approach that all sound, whether deliberate or accidental, whether inside or outside of the concert hall, is in fact a macro-series of musical events. In effect, harmonize to this way of thinking, all ambient sound is music. Considering the way most of us have been brought up to think about music, this is a significant imaginative outflow as well as an important door to open for those who might not come across the idea elsewhere.   It began on a whim during unity particular session while the students were busily at work on an unrelated quiz, I took dictation from the auditory environment in the classroom. That is, I wrote follow up (as single might write down music) the inadvertent sounds made by the students as they wrote the t est. This is a sound world familiar to all teachers the students, suddenly resolute, ar anxiously scribbling away and producing involuntary sounds sighs, grunts, low moans, inhalations, ruffling, pencil-clicks and chair-squeaks. Incorporating the low hum of the ventilation system, I compiled the sounds into a neat musical score by drawing the sounds as they occurred over a twenty-second time span. I then titled my piece Twenty Seconds of Music 20A Taking a Quiz.   The following week, at a strategic point in a discussion on Cages works and ideas, we listened as a class to the ambient sounds surrounding us in the room. As always, the variety and richness of these sounds was surprising. I asked them Is this music? Most said no. I then handed out photocopies of my score discussed above and posed my inquiry again. At this point, there was some discussion now that there was musical intent in my creating a piece, about one third of the room snarl that these sounds were in fact music . Finally, we recreated the ambient sounds I recorded by performing the piece as a class. Dividing the parts up as one would for a choir, we assigned some students as the chair-squeakers, some as the sighers, some as the inhalers, and one (who had been the student who had clicked his mechanical pencil during the actual dictation) as the pencil-clicker.

Pornography †Government Censorship Will Never Promote Equality :: Argumentative Persuasive Argument Essays

Pornography Government Censorship Will Never Promote EqualityCatharine Mackinnon seeks to be the Galileo of sexual inequality the philosopher free of preconceptions who reveals a new structure, incorporating all known facts, radically different from anything previously understood. The structure Galileo overthrew was the Earth-centered universe. The structure Mackinnon must overthrow, in order to make the law do what she thinks it must, is the setoff Amendment- centered universe (though Mackinnon would probably say it was the pimp-centered universe pimp is a favorite term of hers).If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail Mackinnon is a lawyer, so the law looks like the best way, or the only way, to solve the problem of vulgarism. If you divorce Mackinnons conclusions from her prescriptions, you would have a valuable feminist scholar, calling watchfulness to contexts and subtexts in our society previously ignored. But, as an attorney and law professor, Mackinnon must, to accomplish her goals, place herself squarely in confrontation with free speech. This is doubly sad, because the idea she presents us with is so valuable. Mackinnons central idea is that pornography is the oppression of women it is not simply talk about or advocacy of oppression. Thus, she argues, contrary to most Constitutional scholars, that pornography is not speech, but action. In Mackinnons opinion, pornography acts against women twice, when it is made, and when it is viewed. First, women are degraded, appald and (in her belief) even killed in the making of pornographic pictures and films. Then, the pictures and films further participate in the degradation, rape and finish up of women by the users of pornography. To cite just one example from Mackinnons Only Words, Linda Marchiano, then known as Linda Lovelace, was beaten and threatened at gunpoint by her married man during the filming of Deep Throat. The movie then caused men to force women to try acts which Marchiano had onl y been able to perform under hypnosis. According to Mackinnon, numerous women were hospitalized directly as a result of the film some were raped by strangers, others were coerced or raped by boyfriends. (Mackinnon and her colleague, Andrea Dworkin, do not really distinguish between rape and psychological coercion in fact, to Dworkin, all heterosexual sex seems tantamount to rape.) While Mackinnons world view, thus summarized, may sound extreme, a thought taste is all that is really necessary to see the validity of her ideas.