OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this project is to allow you to demonstrate your ability to investigate on your own some topic in the history of music in the United States in the 20th Century.
GENERAL METHOD: In broad outline, you will:
LIMITS: Your topic must deal with some aspect of serious art music in the United States in the era from about 1920 to 1980. Specifically, it must be concerned in some way with one or more of the three major figures studied in this seminar, i.e., Gershwin, Copland, or Bernstein. Note, however, that you may not base a paper on a topic covered in any substantial way during seminar meetings. You may also not choose any topics in purely popular or vernacular musics, except as they relate to the composers central to this seminar.
PROPOSAL AND APPROVAL OF THE TOPIC: Your topic must be approved by me, and you may therefore want to communicate with me before you prepare your proposal. The proposal will specify (1) what you intend to study, (2) how you intend to limit your topic, and (3) any questions you hope to answer in your paper. The typed proposal should be at least a half page in length, but no more than a full page (about 150-300 words). The proposal is due by 5:00 pm on Friday, 25 January 2019 and counts for 10% of the project grade. Any proposal that does not show genuine effort toward defining a suitable topic will be assessed a 25-point penalty and returned to you for revision. If the revised proposal is not returned within two additional days (48 hours), the grade will be reduced by an additional 25 points per day, i.e., you have two days in which to result an acceptable proposal (marked against 75 points), and three additional days beyond that before losing all points for the proposal. After those five days, similar reductions will continue against the rest of the project's value. Grading of the proposal will be based primarily on the coherence and viability of the proposal as an advanced graduate research topic, i.e., how well have you defined the parameters of what you intend to investigate and how feasible is that topic for an advanced graduate-level paper in the time allotted.
RESEARCH & BIBLIOGRAPHY: After your topic has been approved, you should begin to assemble a suitable bibliography on that topic, using the skills, techniques, and resources mastered in MUH 6916. Remember to expand your search to the items beyond those on hand at UCF, but do be aware of the time limitations for acquiring ILL items.
As a record of your research and a way for me to suggest additional items, (1) you should keep a journal of your research work, and (2) you must prepare a bibliography with a single essay that describes the entire collecction of items, the authors cited, the relative values of items, etc. Use the journal to keep track of your work, noting such things as the various bibliographic searches that you make. Journal entries might list the specific terms that you searched, how you searched (e.g., subject, title, author, keyword, etc.), and where (which collections and databases) you searched. Be sure also to include unsuccessful searches, in order to save yourself the trouble of retracing your steps later.
Your bibliography will be an alphabetical list of at least twenty (20) quality items that relate to your topic. Each item must be listed in a proper bibliographic format (author, title, publication information, etc.), using the Chicago style of citation. In addition to the bibliographic entries, you must include a brief essay that describes the general nature of the bibliography available for your topic. In short, do not annotate each item, but rather, give an overview of the major resources, authors, etc., that appear to be most useful to your work.
Finally, you are not required to use all of these bibliography items in your paper, and you may later decide to add more items to your bibliography and to drop others from it. The purpose of this stage of the research is to demonstrate that you have begun to accumulate and evaluate the literature on your subject.
The annotated bibliography is due by 5:00 pm on Sunday, 24 February 2019 [NB. Revised date]. The bibliography counts for 20% of the project grade. Grading of the annotated bibliography will be split 25/25/50 between (1) the correctness of the citations themselves, i.e., proper bibliographic format, spelling, punctuation, etc., (2) relevance of the citations to your work, and (3) the clarity and quality of the brief essay describing the bibliography and why these particular items are included in it.
THE FINAL DOCUMENT: This paper must:
The final draft of the paper is due electronically as a single file attached to an email sent to me by 5:00 pm on Wednesday, 1 May 2019. The final paper itself counts for 70% of the project grade, with the value split equally between writing and content.
Electronic submission of any part of this assignment--proposal, bibliography, or paper--by means of email attachment is expected.